|
|
| No More Mister Nice Blog |
|
|
Monday, March 31, 2003 Does it get dumber than this? Saddam Hussein has committed some of the biggest environmental crimes of all time. He may still commit even bigger ones. So environmentalists are leading — or at least supporting — the charge to oust Saddam, right? Wrong. Most environmental groups have gone absent-without-leave when it comes to removing Saddam — even without the use of force. A few are protesting the war. Incredibly, some are even portraying the U.S. as the real threat to the environment. During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam’s troops set 600 Kuwaiti oil wells ablaze "creating a toxic smoke that choked the atmosphere and blocked the sun," according to news reports. The smoke was so thick for a time that the temperature in Kuwait was 10 degrees below normal. Iraqi troops dumped an estimated 50 million barrels of oil into the Kuwaiti desert, forming huge oil lakes and contaminating aquifers. Another 4 million barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf — an act of eco-sabotage some 25 times larger than the accidental Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska. The environmentalists almost gleefully have persecuted Exxon. Saddam, though, gets a free pass.... --Fox News When has Saddam done these things? When his country has been invaded. Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. Is Saddam a green guy? Absolutely not. But would he be setting oil fires if there were no frigging war? No, he wouldn't. Right-wingers think they have an inalienable right to whack a hornets' nest with a stick any time they want -- and if you suggest that they're responsible when someone gets stung, they say you're "pro-hornet." posted by Steve M. | 5:58 PM | Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? makes the extended New York Times bestseller list. (Yeah, there's a lot of crap above it, including three Regnery books, but still....) posted by Steve M. | 5:23 PM | SANCTIMONIOUS TRITENESS DEBUNKED, PART 4 Among supporters of the war in Iraq I doubt there's a single one who's "pro-war." No one wants war, no one likes war.... --right-wing academic David Gelertner at a Yale pro-war rally, 3/26/03 *** As for peace, [Moore] quotes an operative known only as "Jack" -- because he is still deeply involved in the search for Osama bin Laden, his full identity is withheld -- as he sits in as Kabul hotel bar: "'God, I hate it when a war ends,' Jack said quietly as he stared at his drink. His teary eyes glassed over from the booze." --review of Robin Moore's new book The Hunt for bin Laden in the New York Daily News, 3/23/03 (no longer available free online; abstract available here) posted by Steve M. | 3:04 PM | SANCTIMONIOUS TRITENESS DEBUNKED, PART 3 Among supporters of the war in Iraq I doubt there's a single one who's "pro-war." No one wants war, no one likes war.... --right-wing academic David Gelertner at a Yale pro-war rally, 3/26/03 Yeah, right. This guy clearly hated war -- he was just putting on a brave face. posted by Steve M. | 1:42 PM | Some interesting poll results: While the American public has rallied behind President Bush on the Iraq war, two-thirds say the United States should not feel free to use military force in the future without U.N. support, says a new poll. Three-fourths said they support the president's decision to go to war with Iraq, says the survey. But almost that many, 66 percent, said they don't think the United States should feel free to use force without the backing of the United Nations.... The poll, by the Program for International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, was taken March 22-25 by Knowledge Networks of 795 respondents. It has an error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.... Three in 10 said the United States should govern Iraq after the war, while half said the United Nations should assume that role. A solid majority, 72 percent, says the United Nations should take the lead in dealing with North Korea. And six in 10 want the international organization to take the lead in monitoring Iran, which contends that its nuclear program is strictly for energy production.... --San Francisco Chronicle A majority of those who responded to the new [NBC News/Wall Street Journal] poll want the U.S. military to avoid civilian casualties: 56 percent said the military should do all it can to minimize Iraqi civilian casualties, even if it means taking longer to accomplish its objectives. Thirty-eight percent said the military should use whatever force was required to do the job. More than a quarter of those polled — 28 percent — said that regardless of the force used, the war’s outcome would yield no clear winner. Statistically, it was about the same percentage of Americans that responded to the same question in 1991 — before the end of the first Gulf War, which left Saddam in power. Perhaps independent of war concerns, Americans concerned about the economic downturn had low marks for Bush’s proposed tax-cut plan: 52 percent said Congress should not pass the plan, compared with 38 percent who said it should be approved. --MSNBC posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM | A Russian telecoms company is offering free phone calls to the White House for anyone who wants to rant at George Bush. Excom in the west Russian city of Yekaterinburg said almost 1,000 people have taken advantage of the offer. Calls have ranged from two to 20 minutes and the tempers of some people have boiled over. Phone operator Irina Natakhina said: "Mostly men call almost every 10 minutes and demand to be put through to the White House. When they have to wait they even begin swearing at me." Excom general director Konstantin Ivanov found the number on the internet and said the offer will continue indefinitely. --Ananova posted by Steve M. | 1:19 PM | The "Rally for America" photo shown here is cropped. In the print edition of today's New York Times it includes, at left, a woman holding a sign that reads "PROTESTER = TERRORIST." No one confronts her; no one seems put off by her presence; no one seems worried that her equation of dissent with political murder is un-American. Self-righteous right-wingers picked apart the little-read position papers of A.N.S.W.E.R and condemned anti-war protesters for attending A.N.S.W.E.R.-organized rallies. These self-righteous people need to explain why their side tolerates haters of the fundamental values of America. posted by Steve M. | 9:39 AM | Sunday, March 30, 2003 This is what whoop-ass looks like. (Not for the squeamish, as those of you who've already seen the picture know.) posted by Steve M. | 11:51 PM | Middle East fundamentalists are really, really bad: Perhaps the sharpest debate is over the role of Islamic law in the [forthcoming Afghanistan] constitution. All agree that Islam should form the basis for Afghanistan's legal system, but dispute how rigid a standard it will provide.... Fazul Ahmed Shirinagna Manawi, a deputy chief justice, said that those who proposed only 20 percent Islamic law "do not have any understanding of Islam." He warned Westernized Afghans, who he said were a "little estranged" from Afghan society, that "what they propose should not oppose the basics of our culture, or the holy affairs of Islam." --Amy Waldman in the 3/30/03 New York Times U.S. fundamentalists, on the other hand, are great patriots, despite suffering the contempt of effete America-haters who write for The New York Times: Rod Dreher, a senior writer at National Review, says that clergymen who oppose the war are spiritually disarming us and that military chaplains supporting the war should be heeded, not ''bishops in well-appointed chanceries and pastors sitting in suburban middle-class comfort.'' Dreher, a Catholic convert, must think the pope is one of those cushy bishops, as opposed to the hard-bitten military chaplains who know what God and the devil are up to. We should learn from the ''moral realism'' of soldier-priests, who are ''warriors for justice,'' and not heed ''the effete sentimentality you find among so many clergymen today.'' The priests who do not bow to the War God are, in a chaplain's words that Dreher quotes with approval, reinforcers of the notion that ''religion is for wimps, for prissy-pants, for frilly-suited morons.'' This is what used to be called ''muscular Christianity,'' and Dreher thinks it is the only authentic form of his faith. --Garry Wills in The New York Times Magazine, 3/30/03 Hey, good thing it's so easy to tell them apart, huh? posted by Steve M. | 11:11 PM | ...65 percent of the public favors the Senate-passed plan to reduce Bush's $726 billion tax cut by more than half in order to pay for the war, shore up Social Security and reduce the deficit - a view shared equally by Republicans as well as by Democrats and political independents. Nearly three in 10 would eliminate the tax cut entirely, the poll found. Most Americans also want the United Nations to play a leading role in postwar Iraq. By nearly 2 to 1, the public believes that the United Nations and not the United States should have primary responsibility for rebuilding Iraq and help setting up a new Iraqi government, a move opposed by the Bush administration but supported by six in 10 Democrats, independents and members of the president's own Republican Party... --Washington Post A small ray of hope. posted by Steve M. | 7:04 PM | You know who doesn't "support our troops"? Donald Rumsfeld. Isn't failing to "support our troops" literally what Donald Rumsfeld did in the planning of this war? Current and former U.S. military officers are blaming Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his aides for the inadequate troop strength on the ground in Iraq, saying the civilian leaders "micromanaged" the deployment plan out of mistrust of the generals and an attempt to prove their own theory that a light, maneuverable force could handily defeat Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. More than a dozen officers interviewed, including a senior officer in Iraq, said Rumsfeld took significant risks by leaving key units in the United States and Germany at the start of the war. That resulted in an invasion force that is too small, strung out, underprotected, undersupplied and awaiting tens of thousands of reinforcements who will not get there for weeks. (Washington Post) You want to get all self-righteous and denounce someone while waving a "Support Our Troops" sign? Wave it at that sonofabitch. posted by Steve M. | 6:28 PM | How bad are things in the war? A former intelligence official quoted by Seymour Hersh in an article in the next issue of The New Yorker doesn't sound cheery, according to this Reuters story: Hersh, however, quoted the former intelligence official as saying the war was now a stalemate. Much of the supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles has been expended, aircraft carriers were going to run out of precision guided bombs and there were serious maintenance problems with tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, the article said. "The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive," the former official said. Yikes. The official blames Rumsfeld's "underwhelming force" war plan. (At this point, who doesn't?) posted by Steve M. | 12:21 AM | I may not have the wording exactly right, but here's a headline I saw within the past hour on the Headline News crawl: Pentagon on finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: "It will take time." Oh, really? You bastards. We said precisely that before the war -- and the Boy King sneered, and his minions sneered, and Dennis "21st-Century Georgie Jessel" Miller sneered, calling Blix "Inspector Clouseau." Well, thanks a bit fat frigging lot for admittting in the most backhanded way possible that we were right all along -- that finding outlawed weapons takes time. posted by Steve M. | 12:12 AM | Saturday, March 29, 2003 SANCTIMONIOUS TRITENESS DEBUNKED, PART 2 Among supporters of the war in Iraq I doubt there's a single one who's 'pro-war.' No one wants war, no one likes war.... --right-wing academic David Gelertner at a Yale pro-war rally, 3/26/03 American pilots who bombed Baghdad on Friday spoke of the thrill of a successful attack in the teeth of fierce anti-aircraft fire. "It was exhilarating," Commander Jeff Penfield said after landing his F/A-18E Super Hornet back on the Abraham Lincoln, which is supporting the U.S.-led invasion force from the Gulf. "It was all nice and calm in the city," he said. "Once those bombs hit all hell broke loose. I bet we saw 15 SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), about three or four up our way so we had to defend a couple of times. "What I felt more than anything was exhilaration."... --Reuters, 3/28/03 posted by Steve M. | 9:13 AM | Oh, lovely -- we're nickel-and-diming the Centers for Disease Control: Bush's proposed budget would give the CDC $6.5 billion ...it is about $700 million less than what Congress actually approved, and Bush signed into law, for the current year. Some of the proposed cuts are sizable. Next year's budget calls for a 26 percent cut for improvements at local public health centers. It also would cut funding for environmental health programs by 18 percent and reduce money for occupational safety and health by 10 percent.... William Gimson, the CDC's chief operating officer, said the agency's plans for administrative savings do not include employee layoffs, although it may not fill some positions after people leave them. Gerberding said the agency could also save money by reducing some of its internal technology costs. "The intent is that scientific program areas would not be affected," Gimson said. --Atlanta Journal-Constitution Got SARS? Have a tax cut! posted by Steve M. | 9:04 AM | Friday, March 28, 2003 We've heard a lot of high-minded speeches about the moral purpose of this war and read a lot of high-minded words. Oliver Willis finds that one pro-war blogger is not with the program. Kill them, kill them all. Just fucking carpet bomb the whole miserable fucking country now. The Iraqis have shown by their actions that they are just as evil as their leader and they are guilty either by action or inaction of maintaining the regime. They are all guilty. They have no claim on our pity on our help on our blood or our mercy. We didn't come here to free the Iraqi people, if they want to be free let them fucking earn for themselves like the rest of us did. We all live in countries where every town small and large has a monument in it to our fallen who bought and kept our freedom for us. The Iraqis have statues of a maniac. There's no free ride in this world.... There's more at the link, if you're a glutton for punishment. posted by Steve M. | 5:55 PM | Among supporters of the war in Iraq I doubt there's a single one who's 'pro-war.' No one wants war, no one likes war.... --right-wing academic David Gelertner at a Yale pro-war rally, 3/26/03 ******************** We're about to open a can of high-grade whoop ass! I vote for one MOAB on each of his palaces. :) **** Tune in ppl..... It's on.. it is SO on! **** SADDAM'S MAIN PALACE IS ON FIRE... BURN BITCH BURN!! **** I see an awful lot of fire and explosions ... muahahaahha!!! ;) **** I'm going through overload right now. Got two TVs going (Fox/NBC) now I'm diggin Reuters. **** I'm at work so I have to watch Reuters with the sound off. Oh, how I wish I could hear those explosions ... *sigh* A girl can dream, can't she? **** Those are some satisfying mushroom clouds over what was once Saddam's palace... HOO-rah!! **** Tremendous ass whoopage. Tremendous ass whoopage, indeed. **** The News would be much cooler if they played Pantera music while shits blowing up. --comments at the blog Right-Thinking from the Left Coast, 3/21/03, as "Shock and Awe" began posted by Steve M. | 4:32 PM | DEAR PRESIDENT BUSH: THANKS FOR THAT FOG OF WAR! SINCERELY, R. MUGABE In the days after a crippling strike by opponents of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the government there has struck back with a wave of violence and intimidation that has brought condemnation from governments and human rights groups around the world. Human rights workers and diplomats say that with the world's attention focused on war in Iraq, Mr. Mugabe has unleashed Zimbabwe's armed forces and militia against his own people, even as the country prepares for two important parliamentary elections on Sunday. Advertisement Internet reports from Harare describe hospital wards full of people suffering from severe burns and broken fingers and toes. Photographs show men and women with swollen lash marks across their backs and chests. Opposition leaders report that more than 1,000 people have fled their homes and that more than 500 people have been arrested.... --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 2:30 PM | Then there is French's Mustard. A news release this week proclaimed, "The only thing French about French's Mustard is the name! Robert T. French's All-American Dream Lives On." The release waved the United States flag as vigorously as it could, proclaiming that since 1915 French's pennant emblem has symbolized "French's affiliation with baseball and American celebration." Advertisement The news release said French's was produced by "New Jersey-based Reckitt Benckiser Inc."... The news release also praised French's "Napa Valley style Dijon" mustard. On French's Web site, that mustard is just called Dijon. The name was changed last year, Ms. Small said, but the company has not gotten around to updating the Web site. --Floyd Norris in today's New York Times I don't think this will work -- the freedom-fry-eating yahoos think everyone in Napa Valley's a pinko peacenik. posted by Steve M. | 2:19 PM | 1979 (The Remix)? Demonstrators pelted the British Embassy in Tehran with stones, breaking windows and shouting "the British Embassy must be closed!" Police fired into the air to disperse the crowd, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.... The cleric who delivered the Friday prayers sermon that was broadcast on Iranian television, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, said: "Will bombs and the use of force bring democracy and freedom? It definitely will not." The worshippers responded with shouts of "Death to America!" and "Death to Britain!" --AP posted by Steve M. | 2:06 PM | This blog post from Joshua Micah Marshall is a bit more rambling than usual, but read it to the end for a jaw-dropping list of ugly-American blunders we're already making in Iraq. I weep for my country. And if you haven't read Marshall's "Practice to Deceive," read it. Here's the neocon hawks' plan for a U.S. boot in the Arab/Muslim face, forever. posted by Steve M. | 1:01 PM | Saddam look becomes fashionable in India A new craze for sporting Saddam Hussein's hairstyle has been reported by barbers in northern India. Youngsters in Jalandhar, a city with a fashion-conscious reputation, are asking hairdressers to make their moustaches and hair like that of the Iraqi dictator.... --Ananova Hey, we're doing really, really well at this hearts-and-minds thing, aren't we? posted by Steve M. | 9:53 AM | Here's an interesting story from yesterday's New York Times -- nationwide polls say that opposition to the war is far greater among blacks than among whites, and the Times found deep skepticism about the war in interviews with blacks in New York City. For years right-wingers have sneeringly said that blacks are stuck on the "Democratic plantation." But if that's the case, how does it jibe with the fact that New York's top Democrats, Senators Schumer and Clinton, support the war? The blacks quoted in the Times article simply don't trust Bush -- for all the right reasons: "You got a president who stole his way into the place, who went into it with this on his mind," said Willie Roper, 65, at the Bay View Houses public housing project in Canarsie, Brooklyn, referring to Mr. Bush's election. "That's why we have this war."... "Oh, they tried to kill my Daddy," Julias Dukes said in a mocking singsong. Mr. Dukes, a 47-year-old former marine who was sitting on a stoop along Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, added, "It's a personal thing."... "You know who I see as a threat?" asked Bashir Sultan, 39, a former computer technician, finishing a slice of pizza in Harlem with a friend, Dolores Jackson. "I see North Korea. Or China. I don't see Saddam as a threat." Pretty astute. Maybe there really is a racial "bell curve" -- maybe Charles Murray just had it upside down. posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Thursday, March 27, 2003 What? There's torture in other countries besides Iraq? Rush never told me that! Human rights groups have accused the Egyptian authorities of detaining hundreds of people in a brutal crackdown on people protesting the war in Iraq.... Human rights groups in Cairo and the United States, citing what they said were witness accounts and statements by detainees, said security forces had used electric shocks, sticks and belts to beat prisoners in police stations and in prisons.... --from today's New York Times But hey -- it turnbs out that torture in Egyptian prisons builds character: Many members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad fled to Afghanistan in the late 1990s....Foremost among them was Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon who became Osama bin Laden's deputy. Dr Zawahiri had been imprisoned and, according to friends, beaten frequently after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. The humiliations - including, reportedly, the betrayal under torture of a fellow Islamist - marked him for life. He left prison with renewed commitment to the Islamist cause, and began making regular trips to Afghanistan to support the mojahedin fighting the Soviets. Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer who was imprisoned with Dr Zawahiri and wrote a damning biography of him, described how traumatic experiences during three years in prison transformed Dr Zawahiri from a relative moderate in the Islamist underground into a violent extremist. Others also remarked on the change. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist at the American University who met Dr Zawahiri after his release, told the New Yorker magazine recently: "Many who turn fanatic have suffered harsh treatment in prison. It makes them extremely suspicious." It was Dr Zawahari who formally merged Islamic Jihad with al-Qaida in June 2001, providing Bin Laden's organisation with an influx of Egyptian recruits and reinforcing its hatred of secular, pro-western Arab governments. Of the nine-member leadership council, six were Egyptians. Al-Qaida recognises the significance of torture. A handbook, Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, seized by police in Manchester several years ago, was accepted as evidence in the New York trial of those who bombed America's east African embassies. The manual lists gruesome tortures, and then notes: "Let no one think the techniques are fabrications of our imagination, or that we copied them from spy stories. These are factual incidents in the prisons of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and all other Arab countries." --Guardian, 1/24/03 posted by Steve M. | 11:09 PM | I understand that you might support the war if you sincerely believe that it will result in a net decrease in the suffering of innocent people. But if you believe that, and you also believe that many of Iraq's soldiers in effect have guns pointed at their heads and are fighting unwillingly, it seems to me that you have to include their deaths and injuries in the toll of suffering by the innocent. Obviously, in a war each side is going to try to kill or incapacitate as many soldiers on the other side as possible -- but if you're trying to do moral calculus about the rightness of this war for the U.S., your equation is incomplete unless you count among its victims the soldiers who might have lived through containment but will die or be injured in this war. posted by Steve M. | 6:00 PM | He's going to get his damn tax cut. That's the conclusion of Liberal Oasis, and the logic is, alas, persuasive: First, the House-Senate conference committee will be packed with Bush loyalists. Then, as reported in yesterday's New York Times, two nonconservative but spineless Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich, say they'll vote for whatever comes out of this ideologue-packed conference. Heedless of consequences overseas, heedless of consequences at home. That's our president. posted by Steve M. | 5:27 PM | It's not a quagmire, but it is a mess: * Iraqi militias have U.S. led forces pinned down -- and Iraqis in the war zone hate us. ("'We live in fear at night,' said Om Talal, 40, her youngest child at her feet in the southern town of Al-Zubayr. 'Already two of our houses have been destroyed. Why must they fire on our houses and kill civilians?'") * Iraqi opposition groups are planning a provisional government ("The opposition's apparent defiance of the United States illustrated the poor state of relations between them, despite the opposition's complete dependence on U.S. military might.") * British soldiers are scavenging Iraqi soldiers' boots because the Brit boots are melting. posted by Steve M. | 4:15 PM | "Freedom toast" = French toast? On Air Force One, not exactly: Air Force One is now French-free. Before each flight, the stewards aboard the presidential airplane post a card, embossed with the presidential seal and bearing the menu for the meal they will be serving, in the plane's cabins. Today, the breakfast entree was "freedom toast topped with strawberries," a concoction in which cream cheese is stuffed into what is known elsewhere as French toast. --Los Angeles Times French toast stuffed with cream cheese? Who's the chef on Air Force One -- Elvis? (Link from The Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 3:07 PM | Yesterday, a military blogger posted a photo of the coffins of six members of the Air Force who died trying to transport Afghani children to a U.S. hospital. The blogger wrote, Six brave airmen died trying to make life better for children and their families who were brutalized under a tyrannical theocratic regime. Show me any other nation that does this as a matter of routine, 99% of the time without any press or media attention. InstaPundit linked this and commented, with a sneer, It ain't the French. I guess something like this doesn’t count for InstaPundit: July 6 [2002] [AP]: Two French peacekeepers were seriously injured when a mine exploded while they were trying to deactivate it. The two suffered injuries to their heads and hands and were evacuated to France a day later. The mine and ordinance clean-up operations near the Kabul airport has cleared more than 800 mines since April. --Alex Vassar, “Current Casualties from the Operation Enduring Freedom,” 2002 And I guess this doesn't count as aid to people brutalized by tyrants: French police serving as peacekeepers in Kosovo on Monday notified the families of 26 men missing from this town for five months that the men had been killed by Serbs and dumped in a mass grave and that four suspects have been arrested. The case is the first time in Kosovo that foreigners have completed a war crimes investigation, working from the first reports of missing people to finding the graves and making arrests. Their speed demonstrates a greater commitment than was the case in the former Yugoslavia to catch those responsible for war crimes. --St. Petersburg Times, 9/28/99 And I guess none of the following counts as evidence that dangerous peacekeeping and nation-building work is done regularly around the world by ordinary French service personnel: Hundreds of U.S. Marines and French peacekeepers were killed in almost simultaneous terror truck bomb assaults on their headquarters in Beirut in 1983. --National Review, 9/11/01 September 9, 1992... Heavy machine gun fire blasted a UN convoy arriving from Serbia late Tuesday, killing two French peacekeepers and wounding two others. --testimony before the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1/25/93 The peace process in the Ivory Coast was in tatters yesterday after 30 rebel soldiers were killed and nine French peacekeepers wounded in the bloodiest clash of a four-month armed uprising. --Daily Telegraph (U.K.), 1/8/03 And on the subject of hard, dangerous work being done “without any press or media attention”: [Thomas] Friedman [of The New York Times] contrasts the very different responses of the French and the Americans to losses of recent years. The French press and public reacted rather calmly and matter-of-factly to the tragic loss of French peacekeepers to snipers in Bosnia; the story was buried in the back pages of the newspapers and did not create much of a political storm, thereby allowing that peacekeeping mission to continue. American experience has been quite different. Losses in Somalia and the celebration of the return of a downed American pilot after his escape from Bosnia highlight the different operating principles of the French and American publics, as well as of their presses and political establishments. --Joel Rosenthal in Naval War College Review, 1997 posted by Steve M. | 1:31 PM | In an e-mail, MoveOn.org says its members have donated more than half a million dollars to Oxfam's Iraqi refugee campaign. Here's the MoveOn site's link to Oxfam's contributions page. All those right-wingers who think lefties "don't care about the people of Iraq" -- do you have a problem with this? UPDATE: Media Whores Online also has an Oxfam link. posted by Steve M. | 12:29 PM | Soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment found about a hundred chemical weapons protection suits and respirators in an Iraqi command post, said Adm. Michael Boyce, chief of the defense staff.... "We already know from Iraqi prisoners of war that protective equipment was issued to southern Iraqi divisions," Hoon added. The discovery of the chemical suits was not conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein planned to use such weapons, he said. "But it is indicative of an intention, otherwise why equip his own forces to deal with a threat which he knows we do not have? So it must only be to protect his forces from his own use of those weapons which we know he has," Hoon said. --AP Uh, maybe Iraq is screwing with our heads? I don't want to be naive. I think it's quite possible that Iraq has usable chemical and/or biological weapons, and that they may be used eventually in this war. I'm just wonder why this couldn't also just be psyops. posted by Steve M. | 12:11 PM | Bush's approval rating for handling the situation with Iraq has inched up to 71 percent — for the first time exceeding his overall job approval rating, 68 percent. Both, though, remain well below his father's ratings in the early days of the 1991 conflict. --ABC News, reporting an ABC/Washington Post poll posted by Steve M. | 7:40 AM | Wednesday, March 26, 2003 There may be antiwar civil disobedience at Rockefeller Center tomorrow morning, as The Village Voice reports, but I'll be surprised if the demonstrators are even remotely as disruptive as the crowds at the annual Christmas tree lighting. I speak from experience: I worked in Rock Center for years, and leaving the office on tree-lighting day was as close as I think I'll ever get to experiencing the fall of Saigon (or at least that Great White show in Rhode Island). Still, I feel a bit sorry for the people I know who are still working over there. I'm pleased that people are still demonstrating their outrage at the war, but I'm not a huge fan of street blockages -- they piss people off, they don't piss the right people off (the people who run everything are rarely inconvenienced), and, because they happen outside while all the work is done indoors, they don't exactly bring the wheels of The System to a halt (one ex-coworker who learned of the demo said she might get to work early to try to beat it -- if she does this, she's going to do more work tomorrow than she would have otherwise). And I don't like anything that gives the freedom-fries crowd a smug sense of moral superiority -- although anyone who claims that an act of civil disobedience in Midtown Manhattan held up an ambulance needs to know that no ambulance, or any vehicle other than a presidential motorcade, ever moves faster than a crawl in Midtown on a workday. Sorry, I prefer huge legal demonstrations. Feel free to call me a wimp. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM | This is very nasty: "Pictures of Liberated Iraqis Dancing in the Streets" (Link courtesy of the Mahablog.) posted by Steve M. | 5:35 PM | If the White House wants to stop "frivolous lawsuits," it should start with this one: Miami relatives of young Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez cannot sue former Attorney General Janet Reno and other federal officials for allegedly using excessive force when agents seized the boy from the family's home, an appellate court has ruled. Yes, folks, the Miami relatives are still litigating this. With the help, unsurprisingly, of the fine folks at Judicial Watch. posted by Steve M. | 5:09 PM | Does it get funnier than this? And how 'bout this? Photo 1: Tom Daschle is short! Ha ha ha! Isn't that funny? Photos 2through 6: The Wizard of Oz! Get it? Get it? (Actually, I don't get it. Do you get it?) These links are from probush.com -- where you can also find the Ari Fleischer fan club page that was recently cited in the U.K.'s Guardian and The Washington Post (as TBOGG notes). Not amused? Guess you're just a traitor. posted by Steve M. | 3:43 PM | Worried about how things are going in Iraq? Well, you should know that India and Pakistan just test-fired nuclear-capable missiles, while North Korea broke off long-standing regular talks with the U.N. Command in South Korea and is threatening to test-fire a long-range ballistic missile. There. I bet you forgot all about Iraq, didn't you? posted by Steve M. | 1:15 PM | Hey, now we're threatening Canada... The U.S. ambassador to Canada took the unusual step on Tuesday of openly criticizing Ottawa for not backing the war on Iraq and urged Prime Minister Jean Chretien to muzzle anti-U.S. sentiment in his government. ...What will have been most disconcerting for the audience was Cellucci's statement that the United States gave a higher priority to security than to the booming trade relationship between the two countries. ..."Security will trump trade, there is no doubt about that," Cellucci told reporters, saying there could be unspecified "short term" strains in the relationship given U.S. unhappiness with Canada. --Reuters I think these guys are just going to have to do a bumper sticker that says "First Iraq, Then Everyone Else on the Planet (Except Republicans and Tony Blair)." posted by Steve M. | 12:04 PM | All one need remember from their sorry show [the Oscars] is that there are 250,000 men and women volunteers who have offered to die for you and what you believe in. Susan Sarandon isn't one of them. --from Lucianne Goldberg's Lucianne.com today Yeah, Lucianne, and funny thing -- your son isn't one of them either. Sure, he's in his thirties now, but that's not really too old to fight, is it? And where was he in '91, during Gulf War I, when he was of prime fighting age? Says here he was at Goucher College, sitting on his duff reading books like a damn peacenik. Susan Sarandon? She's 56 years old. Pretty close to your age, Lucianne. So why aren't you ducking sandstorms now? posted by Steve M. | 10:11 AM | Royal Marines were deployed to Iraq's border with Iran yesterday in a move that will unnerve Teheran's regime, which fears encirclement by American-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence said the Royal Marines were merely "securing their area of operations" after seizing at the Faw peninsula.... Tensions were illustrated by a succession of border incidents. A rocket struck an Iranian oil refinery depot in Abadan, just across from Basra, on Friday injuring two people while there were reports on Monday that Iranian forces had fired on British troops on the Faw peninsula.... --Daily Telegraph (U.K.) I'm starting to worry that "Iraq" is Arabic for "Cambodia." posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM | More sniping at U.S. companies: A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a boycott list of American firms that was making the rounds in Brazil. Now my Brazilian correspondent has written to point out that the boycott list is up on the Web. Here, from the site, is a list of U.S. companies to avoid and non-American alternatives. I boycott you, you boycott me. One more little war in George Bush’s world of war. posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Tuesday, March 25, 2003 Heh heh heh. No more Coca-Cola or Budweiser, no Marlboro, no American whiskey or even American Express cards -- a growing number of restaurants in Germany are taking everything American off their menus to protest the war in Iraq. Although the protests are mainly symbolic, waiters in dozens of bars and restaurants in Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Bonn and other German cities are telling patrons, "Sorry, Coca-Cola is not available any more due to the current political situation."... In Indonesia, Iraq war opponents have pasted signs on McDonald's and other American food outlets, trying to force them shut by "sealing them" and urging Indonesians to avoid them. In the Swiss city of Basel, 50 students recently staged a sit-down strike in front of a McDonald's to block customers' entry, waved peace signs and urged people to eat pretzels instead of hamburgers. Anti-American sentiment has even reached provinces in Russia, where some rural eateries put up signs telling Americans they were unwelcome, according to an Izvestia newspaper report. A German bicycle manufacturer, Riese und Mueller GmbH, canceled all business deals with its American suppliers.... --ABC News The article goes on to quote one German bartender who is no longer serving Budweiser. Left unexplained is how the hell anyone in Germany could stand to drink Budweiser in the first place. posted by Steve M. | 11:14 PM | This basically came true. This is also basically true. So I wonder how soon this will come true. posted by Steve M. | 6:17 PM | As Thomas McLaughlin tells it, the trouble began when his eighth-grade science teacher overheard him refusing to deny to another boy that he was gay. It got worse that afternoon, when his guidance counselor called his mother at work to tell her he was homosexual. "The assistant principal called me out of seventh period, asked if my parents knew I was gay, and when I said no, she said I had till 3:40 to tell them or the school would," said Thomas, a 14-year old student at Jacksonville Junior High School in Arkansas. "I was too upset to sit through eighth period, so I went to the guidance counselor, and she made the call. Later, the science teacher wrote me a four-page handwritten letter about the Bible's teachings on homosexuality, telling me I would be condemned to hell. I threw it out." That was a more than a year ago. Since then, the McLaughlin family says, the school has continued to harass Thomas because of his homosexuality. The teachers and administrators who outed Thomas last year now want to silence him, the McLaughlins say, by telling him not to discuss homosexuality in school and disciplining him for doing so. They also say that a different assistant principal called Thomas to his office this year and made him read aloud a Bible passage condemning homosexuality. --New York Times What??? You mean this happened even though the Christian-hating liberal thought police have silenced and intimidated all the people in America who have traditional values? posted by Steve M. | 5:56 PM | What a silly peacenik I am -- I thought civilian carnage was a bad thing. I didn't realize that I was supposed to be happy that Saddam's troops are firing on noncombatants in Basra. posted by Steve M. | 5:47 PM | Some more unintended consequences: India on Tuesday countered the renewed call by the US for resumption of talks with Pakistan, asking why military action was resorted to against Iraq and Afghanistan instead of dialogue to resolve the crisis confronting the two countries. "If dialogue per se is more critical than combating international terrorism with all necessary means, then one can legitimately ask why both in Afghanistan and Iraq military action instead of dialogue has been resorted to," External Affairs Ministry spokesman told reporters.... --Express India (India is responding to the massacre of 24 Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir, for which India blames Pakistan.) posted by Steve M. | 5:34 PM | On eBay, the highest bid wins -- unless the item on sale is a laser printer from CompAtlanta and the bidder happens to be Canadian. That's what a tax consultant discovered last week when he tried to buy a printer on eBay, but was refused by the vendor when it was discovered he lived in Vancouver. David Ingram received notification that his winning bid of $24.50 had been canceled, along with this message: "At the present time, we do not ship to, or accept bids from, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or any other country that does not support the United States in our efforts to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. If you are not with us, you are against us." Ingram's .ca address sparked the notice from CompAtlanta, based in Lawrenceville, Georgia.... --Wired News Wow -- unable to buy from one guy selling on eBay! That ought to bring those damn surrender monkeys to their knees. posted by Steve M. | 5:22 PM | More unintended war consequences: The Iraqi war has convinced the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership that some form of confrontation with the U.S. could come earlier than expected. Beijing has also begun to fine-tune its domestic and security policies to counter the perceived threat of U.S. "neo-imperialism." As more emphasis is being put on boosting national strength and cohesiveness, a big blow could be dealt to both economic and political reform.... As People's Daily commentator Huang Peizhao pointed out last Saturday, U.S. moves in the Middle East "have served the goal of seeking world-wide domination." State Council think-tank member Tong Gang saw the conflict as the first salvo in Washington's bid to "build a new world order under U.S. domination." ... "Now, many cadres and think-tank members think Beijing should adopt a more pro-active if not aggressive policy to thwart U.S. aggression," said a Chinese source close to the diplomatic establishment. He added hard-line elements in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had advocated providing weapons to North Korea to help Pyongyang defend itself against a possible U.S. missile strike at its nuclear facilities.... On the military front, the Iraqi conflict will kick start another season of accelerated modernization of weaponry.... --CNN Lovely. (Thanks to Susan M. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 3:53 PM | Kanan Makiya is giddy at the U.S. bombing (read the opening paragraphs of the link) but apprehensive about what the U.S. will do to Iraq after the war: There is enough chatter out of Washington to make me apprehensive. Last Wednesday, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Marc Grossman, managed to deliver a long briefing to foreign reporters on "Assisting Iraqis With Their Future, Planning For Democracy" without any specifics on the issue. While Grossman summarized U.S. plans and offered statistical details on economic reconstruction, dealing with weapons of mass destruction, humanitarian assistance, and the role of the United Nations in all these things, all he could say about the central political question was that the Bush administration "seek[s] an Iraq that is democratic." Unlike its experience in Afghanistan, the administration has had months, if not years, to think about what democracy in Iraq would look like. And yet when the journalists asked Grossman to elaborate on the subject, he could add almost nothing. Why? Does the United States have any ideas on this pivotal subject? Will the administration push for those ideas in the establishment of the still-ambiguous Iraqi interim authority that Grossman mentioned in his briefing? And what is the role of the leadership of the Iraqi opposition elected in Salahuddin last month? These are the questions I am left here to argue about with American officials while the war's progress provides a more pleasant soundtrack. Are all the soothing words being whispered in the ears of Makiya and other Iraqi dissidents just part of a big geopolitical con game? I guess we'll find out, won't we? posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM | Dr. John Collins, a retired Army colonel and former chief researcher for the Library of Congress, said ... every military commander since Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, has hated urban warfare. "Military casualties normally soar on both sides; innocent civilians lose lives and suffer severe privation; reconstruction costs skyrocket," Collins said... --Philadelphia Inquirer Skyrocketing reconstruction costs? You say that like it's a bad thing: The first contracts for rebuilding post-war Iraq have been awarded, and Vice President Dick Cheney's old employer, Halliburton Co., says it is one of the early winners.... --CNNmoney And please note the terms of these contracts: Confidential contract documents indicate that companies will be paid under an arrangement known as "cost plus fixed fee." Once the cost of a project is established, the contractor is entitled to recover those costs plus a fee that is a fixed percentage of those costs. That percentage is generally 8 to 10 percent, although the security precautions required under the Iraq contracts might justify a higher fee in some cases, construction industry analysts said. --from an article on Iraqi reconstruction in Sunday's New York Times So the higher the cost, the larger the profit (the "plus") in raw dollars. posted by Steve M. | 12:52 PM | If you suspect that Donald Rumsfeld sent an inadequate force into Iraq, and would have sent an even smaller force if he'd completely had his way, remember: it could have been worse: If a few hundred men and a few dozen planes could overthrow the Taliban, what might ten thousand men and a few hundred planes do in Iraq? --David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, p. 195 posted by Steve M. | 12:49 PM | ADD Lizzie Grubman to the list of Oscar boycotters. Grubman says she was supposed to go to the Academy Awards with her father, Allen Grubman, a prominent lawyer who reps many celebs, but decided against it. "We canceled because there's a war on," Grubman tells PAGE SIX. "The Oscars should have been canceled. There are prisoners of war and American soldiers are dying - to go out and party is disrepectful and not appropriate." Grubman says she didn't even bother to watch the show on TV. --from the New York Post's gossip page Or perhaps it's just that crossing state lines is a violation of Lizzie's parole. (Thanks to Benjamin for the Post link and the punch line.) posted by Steve M. | 10:12 AM | Let me see if I understand this correctly: In America we think Saddam Hussein is a potential Hitler; we think he was involved in the September 11 attacks; we think that if we hadn't attacked him he was planning any day to arm terrorists who would bring a nuclear, chemical, or biological 9/11 to U.S. soil; we think he was a threat to the entire civilized world -- but we're surprised that the war is going on longer than a Bruce Willis movie? We sold all our stocks yesterday because the war isn't over yet? We really need to grow up. I think Saddam's threat to the rest of the world has been drastically overestimated by a lot of people, starting with the president of the United States (at least in his public pronouncements) -- but this was never going to be a four-hour miniseries. If the war had ended last week with Saddam's head on a pike it would have been a shorter war than Panama, for chrissakes. (I'll admit I wished for an insta-war last week, but that was an atheist's version of a prayer for a miracle.) Even if you thought this damn thing could end in days, how could you be surprised when it didn't? This is war. War is ugly and bloody. War creates long periods of suffering. Good people die or suffer gruesome injuries. Survivors have horrific memories and lingering hatreds. This is why we were against it, idiots. posted by Steve M. | 7:47 AM | Monday, March 24, 2003 Have you noticed? Class warfare is hip. Sneering at class warfare is so ten weeks ago: The Democrats couldn't even persuade people to oppose the repeal of the estate tax, which is explicitly for the mega-upper class....Why don't more Americans want to distribute more wealth down to people like themselves?... Income resentment is not a strong emotion in much of America. ....Many Americans admire the rich. They don't see society as a conflict zone between the rich and poor. It's taboo to say in a democratic culture, but do you think a nation that watches Katie Couric in the morning, Tom Hanks in the evening and Michael Jordan on weekends harbors deep animosity toward the affluent?... --right-wing pundit David Brooks in The New York Times, 1/12/03 After watching the actor Martin Sheen, star of "The West Wing," denounce an invasion of Iraq on television last December, Lori Bardsley, 38, a homemaker in Summerfield, N.C., started an online petition, Citizens Against Celebrity "Pundits" at ipetitions.com. The petition now has more than 100,000 signatures. "That evening I was very angry and I knew I wasn't the only one in the country who would be," Ms. Bardsley said. "Many Americans have felt this for a long time."... "Entertainers symbolize something about American life that many Americans resent," [author Neal Gabler] said. "They have so much money and they're so conspicuous about it. The idea is that all celebrities are spoiled and naïve and fundamentally not serious. They're dabblers." Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, a conservative journal, echoed this view. "Subliminally it bothers people that these are famous, rich, celebrated people who America has treated extremely well," he said. --New York Times, 3/23/03 posted by Steve M. | 10:57 PM | Things can go wrong very fast, even and perhaps especially for an over-reaching great power. Like the German planners of 1914, today's Washington strategists are obsessed with challenges, timetables, windows of opportunity—and the eschatological urge to tear down a frustrating international order and remake it in their image. They, too, have exaggerated the threats and underestimated the risks. That is as far as the analogy goes—Imperial Germany and Republican America have little else in common. But hubris is not a shortcoming peculiar to any one constitutional form; and the inability to envisage nemesis is modern America's distinctive failing. --Tony Judt in the current New York Review of Books posted by Steve M. | 10:33 PM | For the first few days it seemed as if people weren’t paying much attention to the war. Now it’s a real story -- merciless bombing, the long march, terrified-looking POWs-- but I’m still not sure it’s more than just better-than-average reality TV for much of America. At my office late Friday, we heard thunder and, being post-9/11 New Yorkers, we joked nervously about “Shock and Awe” arriving Stateside. Later, at an Italian restaurant, I heard tables of young men making what were meant to be Lettermanesque jokes using the war as a jumping-off point. That was war in NYC on Friday -- we were riffing on it. Over the weekend I was in upstate New York, where I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently. I didn’t see what I expected to see there -- a lot of newly mounted flags. And I didn’t see a single ribbon around a tree. Last week a caller to an MTV show on the war said her town was full of yellow ribbons. The caller was in a military town -- but during Gulf War I, yellow ribbons were everywhere. I guess we’re all paying attention now, but are we really emotionally invested? I think a lot of us aren’t. I think this is Bush’s war and Saddam’s war and Tony Blair’s war. It’s the troops’ war and the troops’ families’ war. It’s certainly the liberal-haters’ war. I don’t think the rest of the country’s war. It’s just the most interesting thing on. posted by Steve M. | 10:31 PM | Saturday, March 22, 2003 I won't be blogging for a couple of days -- not until Monday night or Tuesday, in all likelihood. Meanwhile, check out some of my links, if you don't already. posted by Steve M. | 9:14 AM | Civilians mostly unscathed from Shock and Awe, according to The Guardian? That would be good. Many government ministers also unscathed? Maybe not so good. But Saddam is claiming civilian casualties, as the Voice of America reports. And there's this from the Bush administration: President Bush met with his war council Saturday and told Americans the only way to limit the length and scope of combat in Iraq was to use decisive force. After U.S. and British aircraft unleashed the devastating firepower of missiles and bombs the Pentagon calls "shock and awe," Bush warned the Iraqi government, "This will not be a campaign of half measures." Three days into war, Bush also cautioned against overconfidence given the apparent success of the mission and lack of serious resistance so far. "A campaign on harsh terrain in a vast country could be longer and more difficult than some have predicted," Bush said in his weekly radio address broadcast from Camp David where he is spending the first weekend of the war. .."Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force," he said. Translation: We are going to kill people. There is going to be collateral damage. This is going to get ugly. posted by Steve M. | 9:06 AM | Friday, March 21, 2003 First we bomb the crap out of a major city in order to kill one guy (and a couple of his friends and relatives) ... then we let the guy we're trying to kill escape unharmed? American officials have told ABCNEWS that even with today's bombing, secret talks have continued behind the scenes about a Saddam Hussein surrender and exile to, among other places, the country of Mauritania in west Africa. Secretary of State Colin Powell hinted at the possibility of ongoing talks, saying: "There are a number of channels open to Baghdad. There are a number of individuals in countries around the world who have been conveying the message to the Iraqi regime that it is now inevitable that there will be a change." Oh, and here's the best part -- guess the nationality of the person doing the shuttle diplomacy to try to make this happen: One of the back channels goes through France, according to American officials aware of the negotiations. Since December, ABCNEWS has learned, an emissary from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been in the middle of the secret offer of exile. American officials say the French go-between, Pierre Delval, an expert on counterfeiting, has repeatedly traveled to Baghdad to persuade Saddam to accept exile in Mauritania. (Source.) posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | I swear they do this just to piss us off: Q ...have you heard [the president] talk about this other responsibility which may weigh on him heavily today, and that is for the death of innocents, for Iraqi moms and dads and children who may, despite our best efforts, be killed? MR. FLEISCHER: ... I think the President worries about it from two points of view -- one, in terms of the present mission. This is why the President and the Department of Defense work so carefully, and we have such a modern military that is capable of engaging in precision strikes, so that the targets are indeed the military targets. As always in war, there is risk, there will be innocents who are lost. And the President deeply regrets that Saddam Hussein has put innocents in a place where their lives will be lost. The other portion of what the President remembers when he thinks about the innocents are the 3,000 innocents who lost their lives on September 11th in the United States.... --Today's White House press briefing Saddam = Osama. Again and again and again. (Thanks to Susan M. for pointing this out.) posted by Steve M. | 7:14 PM | A lot of you have already seen this via Atrios, but for those who didn't... Minutes before the speech [Wednesday night], an internal television monitor at the White House showed the President pumping his fist. "Feels good," he said. --Philadelphia Inquirer Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. posted by Steve M. | 7:09 PM | After we finish bombing Iraq, Colin Powell's State Department has a plan to help win the hearts and minds of the populace in 22 Arab nations. It plans to start publishing a lifestyle magazine for Arabs in the 18- to 35-year-old bracket that will showcase America - minus its politics and religion. "Basically, it's a magazine that will reflect American lifestyle and culture," said Raphael Calis, project manager for the International Information Program at the State Department. The name of the magazine is not yet finalized, but Janet Ottenberg and Richard Creighton - principals of Washington D.C.-based custom publisher The Magazine Group, which is handling the edit and design - said that the working title is simply "Hi." "The idea came to us from our Arab staff," said Creighton. "The name's tested well; we should know for sure in the next two weeks." --New York Post "Hi." I guess "Convert or Die" didn't do very well in the focus groups. posted by Steve M. | 4:28 PM | Is it possible that the beginning of the war hasn't really been a cakewalk? The Daily Kos collects some news reports that poke holes in the conventional wisdom. posted by Steve M. | 1:59 PM | And please note: The violent demonstrations in Muslim nations I listed below took place before "shock and awe" began. And now it's begun. posted by Steve M. | 1:32 PM | The Arab street will erupt. ...This is often predicted but rarely happens. --Fred Barnes, "The Peacenik Top 10: A Look at the Ten Most Popular Objections to War and Some Common-Sense Responses to Them," Weekly Standard, 3/6/03 Four people were shot dead and dozens more were injured Friday as police clashed with demonstrators trying to storm the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, witnesses told CNN, on a second day of worldwide protests against the war in Iraq.... Meanwhile in Cairo, Egypt, Muslims hurled rocks and furniture at riot police from the roof of the historic al-Azhar mosque after Friday prayers.... In Amman, Jordan, police used tear gas against more than 10,000 people demonstrating against the war in a rally led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Thousands of Palestinians also demonstrated across the West Bank and Gaza in support of Iraq, waving Iraqi flags, holding pictures of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat and calling on the Iraqi president to "burn Tel Aviv." ... In Srinagar, the summer capital of India's northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, protesters shouted anti-U.S. slogans and pelted stones at passing cars. Police were forced to use batons and tear gas to disperse crowds. Thousands of Muslims in eastern Malaysia burned American and British flags and effigies of the two countries' leaders. In Bangladesh, thousands marched through the streets of Dhaka, shouting slogans like: "Bush is a war criminal." In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, demonstrators threw eggs and vegetables at the British Embassy in the capital, Jakarta.... --CNN today posted by Steve M. | 1:27 PM | We're using napalm. Hey, don't worry -- we're not using it in civilian areas, so it's OK. We just fried some Iraqi soldiers at Safwan Hill with it. And besides, we never signed on to the convention that restricts its use. Marine Cobra helicopter gunships firing Hellfire missiles swept in low from the south. Then the marine howitzers, with a range of 30 kilometres, opened a sustained barrage over the next eight hours. They were supported by US Navy aircraft which dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives and napalm, a US officer told the Herald. A legal expert at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said the use of napalm or fuel air bombs was not illegal "per se" because the US was not a signatory to the 1980 weapons convention which prohibits and restricts certain weapons. "But the US has to apply the basic principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and take all precautions to protect civilians. In the case of napalm and fuel air bombs, these are special precautions because these are area weapons, not specific weapons," said Dominique Loye, the committee's adviser on weapons and IHL. --Sydney Morning Herald; link from BuzzFlash posted by Steve M. | 12:56 PM | Cursor links to a good LA Weekly article (by John R. McArthur of Harper's) about propaganda in the run-up to war. The point of the article is that governments lie to you when they want war -- but what's I find interesting is the nature of the propaganda McArthur describes. Nearly all of it has been about scary things, rather than the suffering of flesh-and-blood human beings as a result of scary things. Yes, we heard one (factually accurate) paragraph about torture in Iraq in the State of the Union address, and we've heard "he gassed his own people" over and over. But the bulk of the propaganda has been about aluminum tubes, airborne drones, and warheads that can be fitted with chemical weapons. We heard a lot more about "weapons of mass destruction" than we did about actual destruction (in, say, Halabja). The current Bushies never got us to the tie-a-yellow-ribbon level of fervor for war we reached in January '91. Were they just too cold-blooded and impersonal to manage this? posted by Steve M. | 12:07 PM | Last night at one point I switched to MTV. I'm always amused by MTV's attempts at earnestness in times like these -- you know, éminence grise Kurt Loder attempting to rearrange his features in a look of concern for our youth, even though his facial muscles probably contain more botulinum toxin than can be found in Saddam Hussein's bioweapons stockpiles. What I saw on MTV was a series of interviews of young people in and around Grand Central Station. They were asked about the war -- and they weren't rah-rah or outraged. They mostly didn't give a damn one way or the other. I don't know how typical these kids are. But if they're at all representative of America, or at least of their generation, then George W. Bush has really accomplished something: on a psychological level, he has partially privatized this war. What I mean is that by failing to rally us around a principle, or around a compelling rationale, he's made the war something many people might not even care about if they don't have a direct stake in it. (On MTV, the interview segment was followed by two young callers from military towns who were, understandably, very focused on the war.) So maybe there are people directly or indirectly involved; people like me who aren't involved but have strong opinions pro or con -- and then everyone else, for many of whom this war is as meaningless as the price of pork-belly futures is to people who go to a check-cashing store to cash their paychecks. Maybe young people have figured out that we just do this every few years, and when it's over there's still evil and slaughter and brutality in the world, much of it in places the U.S. will never invade. *********** Here's Digby, from Wednesday night: The war show is, so far, very disappointing. When Bernie and Peter were hiding under their beds back in '91 at the Baghdad Hilton, and a handsome gas masked Bibi spoke calmly from Tel Aviv in his mellifluous American accent, it was new and exciting. The Patriot missiles were faster than a speeding scud and could pluck that baby right out of the sky. Cool fireworks. (Of course, we later found out they couldn't hit water if they were pushed over the side of a boat.) Still, it all was new and so post-pac man. I'm not seeing it now, no matter how they rhapsodise about the technology. I wonder if people are still watching. Especially since there's nothing to watch. We just turned on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." He was being somewhat sarcastic -- he went on to point out that, oh, by the way, innocent people will be soon be dying in Baghdad. But I think he captured some of the sense of ennui that's out there as we pursue Bush War IV. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | I'm not a big admirer of NPR theme music, but was it absolutely necessary to rearrange the Morning Edition theme in that phony-somber Aaron-Copland-goes-to-war style that's used by every TV network for its war theme music, with its cliché for-whom-the-bell-tolls chime undertones? posted by Steve M. | 9:10 AM | Thursday, March 20, 2003 I didn’t hear anyone talking about the war at the office today. One reason may be the war’s muted start, but another reason, I think, is that we’ve been through this so many times before. We’ve had one or the other George Bush as president for a little more than six years, and this is already our fourth war. And they’re all the same, aren’t they? They’re all quick routs that seem to change absolutely nothing in our lives. Even the last war, the one that avenged 9/11 and actually did a fair amount of harm to some of the perpetrators, didn’t make us feel safer from terrorism. Four wars, three antichrists -- and so far all three of those antichrists are still alive: Noriega, Saddam, and Osama. It’s almost certain that George W. will be president for six more years. Do we have four more of these damn things to look forward to? posted by Steve M. | 10:12 PM | Environmental experts warned this week that war in Iraq will cause "massive and possibly irreversible" damage to the Persian Gulf region and significantly add to global warming. The environmental leaders said the ensuing damage to Iraq's ecosystem and food and water supplies may eclipse the destruction during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "I think it will be comprehensive damage, and I don't think it will be localized to the area of Iraq, regardless of how precise and surgical our bombing campaign will be," said Ross Mirkarimi, a San Francisco-based environmental analyst who made two trips to Iraq shortly after U.S.-led forces drove the Iraqis from Kuwait. --Washington Post Oh, and putting out burning oil fields is not particularly easy: Most of the teams [that fought oil fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War] used seawater pumped through Kuwait’s empty oil pipelines to battle the fires.... It took Kuwait more than two years and $50 billion to restore its oil output to prewar levels. If Iraq sabotaged its oil fields, any cleanup could take far longer and cost much more. Iraq’s fields and pipelines are badly run down after 12 years of U.N. economic sanctions. Its fields are also much farther from the sea than those in Kuwait, meaning a ready source of water might not be so easily available. Destruction could be especially bad if Iraqis set off explosives underground, deep within the well shafts themselves. If that happened, firefighters would have to drill a new “relief well” and pump a mixture of sand, gel and mud into each damaged shaft to try to plug it up and stop the blowout. “It’s a long, arduous process,” Badick said. Whereas he and his crews put out as many as five fires a day in Kuwait, cleaning up after a single underground explosion can take two months. --NBC News posted by Steve M. | 6:10 PM | More subtle wit from the right. posted by Steve M. | 1:21 PM | When I heard President George Bush deliver his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on Monday, I could not help but puzzle over one crucial omission: the word "democracy." Why, I kept on asking myself, did he choose not to use it? Please don't snicker. That's Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident, writing in his new war diary at The New Republic Online. Makiya felt betrayed by the U.S. a month ago; Bush administration officials have now made him many promises and he’s guardedly optimistic. His optimism seems premised on the notion that administration officials are men of their word. I have to remember to read Makiya's diary. I suspect it will be a diary of disillusionment with the Bush administration. posted by Steve M. | 12:49 PM | Uh-oh ... last night, the only picture in the "War with Iraq" box on the Yahoo title screen was of President Bush. Now there are pictures of Bush and Saddam. DISLOYALTY! DISLOYALTY! OBJECTIVELY PRO-SADDAM! posted by Steve M. | 10:23 AM | Top White House anti-terror boss resigns The top National Security Council official in the war on terror resigned this week for what a NSC spokesman said were personal reasons, but intelligence sources say the move reflects concern that the looming war with Iraq is hurting the fight against terrorism. Rand Beers would not comment for this article, but he and several sources close to him are emphatic that the resignation was not a protest against an invasion of Iraq. But the same sources, and other current and former intelligence officials, described a broad consensus in the anti-terrorism and intelligence community that an invasion of Iraq would divert critical resources from the war on terror. Beers has served as the NSC's senior director for counter-terrorism only since August. The White House said Wednesday that he officially remains on the job and has yet to set a departure date. "Hardly a surprise," said one former intelligence official. "We have sacrificed a war on terror for a war with Iraq. I don't blame Randy at all. This just reflects the widespread thought that the war on terror is being set aside for the war with Iraq at the expense of our military and intel resources and the relationships with our allies."... The article goes on to quote James Bamford, author of two books about the National Security agency, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets: "This is a very intriguing decision (by Beers). There is a predominant belief in the intelligence community that an invasion of Iraq will cause more terrorism than it will prevent. There is also a tremendous amount of embarrassment by intelligence professionals that there have been so many lies out of the administration -- by the president, (Vice President Dick) Cheney and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell -- over Iraq." And there's this: "If it was your job to prevent terror attacks, would you be happy about an action that many see as unnecessary, that is almost guaranteed to cause more terror in the short-term?" said one official. "I know I'm not (happy)." posted by Steve M. | 9:35 AM | “When I take action,” he said, “I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.” --President George W. Bush in September 2001, quoted by Howard Fineman in Newsweek posted by Steve M. | 9:23 AM | Wednesday, March 19, 2003 Words I'm already sick of, even though the war is only about an hour old: * Target of opportunity * Actionable I'm sure this list will lengthen as the war progresses, unless I pull an Elvis and shoot my TV. posted by Steve M. | 10:45 PM | Now that this war is actually going to happen, I want the U.S. to win in a rout. I don’t care if I look foolish for having predicted dire consequences. I want minimal casualties -- and minimal glory. On the radio this morning, someone said this war might look the Panama invasion. That’s not insubstantial enough. I want Grenada. I want unharmed Iraqi civilians to cheer unharmed American troops almost immediately. I want this war to be so brief, so painless and bloodless, that it’s a dim memory by Memorial Day. If that happens, this war will never really become part of our national myth. That’s good, because war has sex appeal for far too many people. And if it happens, war will have been a prologue -- and nation-building will be the main act. I don’t believe the aftermath of this war will in any way live up to its promise, as articulated by Bush and his subordinates -- but as long as that aftermath, Iraq as America’s 51st state, is inevitable, it would be good to get to it now. I hope we have as little as possible of Warlord Bush, so we can soon see the real Bush again, the one who’s never done anything successfully in his adult life. And then I hope we do to him what we did to his father. posted by Steve M. | 8:01 PM | Here's more ham-fisted, humorless conservative "wit." (And it's got the InstaPundit Seal of Approval!) posted by Steve M. | 6:50 PM | Here's the president's three-paragraph letter, from whitehouse.gov. He invokes the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), then goes on to say, acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. In other words, Iraq = 9/11. More and more, I suspect that belief in that fairy tale is the principal reason Bush has been craving war. I keep going back to something in Peggy Noonan's January 27 column: Four months ago a friend who had recently met with the president on other business reported to me that in conversation the president had said that he has been having some trouble sleeping, and that when he awakes in the morning the first thing he often thinks is: I wonder if this is the day Saddam will do it. "Do what exactly?" I asked my friend. He told me he understood the president to be saying that he wonders if this will be the day Saddam launches a terror attack here, on American soil. When I wrote about the column in January, I speculated that Bush might have this fear because people have been whispering "Saddam = Osama" in his ear. Well, maybe. But now I wonder if this is a case of a fervent Christian expressing his belief that there are many important forces in life for which there's little or no earthly empirical evidence. If that's what's going on, the lack of empirical evidence linking Saddam and al-Qaeda may mean as little to Bush as the lack of empirical evidence that Christ rose from the dead on the third day. And of course, there are no shades of gray in Bush's world. Evil = evil. posted by Steve M. | 6:31 PM | Bush met with his war council and the White House sent Congress formal notification of justification for war. The three-paragraph document says diplomacy has failed to protect America's security, and it links Saddam's regime with the al-Qaida network, implicated in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. --Washington Post Unbelievable -- the SOBs can't produce three paragraphs of copy without throwing in the Saddam/al-Qaeda fairy tale. posted by Steve M. | 3:17 PM | Radio airplay for the Dixie Chicks declined 20% just after one of the Chicks made anti-Bush remarks, but apparently the backlash is abating, although the Chicks have been dropped from the playlists of a number of stations owned by Clear Channel, which has sponsored many flag-waving rallies across the country. And meanwhile, for the people at the gossip column of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, the Dixie Chicks are just the tip of the boycott iceberg; the Posties, of course, are acting in the proud tradition of the gossip columnists who helped drive Charlie Chaplin out of America. I'm sorry if I seem fixated on the Dixie Chicks. I'm not a fan of their music. The point is that Natalie Maines wasn't disclosing military secrets to Saddam's forces -- she doesn't like Bush, and that's not treason. There are now a good number of entertainers who support Bush and the war. I don't want those people boycotted. I'm not a fan of Charlie Daniels, who regularly uses his Web site to denounce people like me and just about everything we stand for, but if I had tickets to see Bob Dylan and I learned that Charlie Daniels would show up to play fiddle, as he did for Bob thirty years ago, I would still go, gladly. I used to find Dennis Miller funny, and I may find him funny again, even though I'm tired of his current neocon schtick. Boycotting him seems pointless. I believe in boycotting people whose message runs consistently to hate -- people who wish all gay people dead or who regularly describe this or that ethnic group as less than human. But this is different. posted by Steve M. | 1:49 PM | "At last -- a conservative alternative to Ben & Jerry's": Star Spangled Ice Cream! Flavors include I Hate the French Vanilla, Nutty Environmentalist, and Iraqi Road. More flavors listed here. I have two words for these people: Billy Beer. Oh, and remind me again: Which Ben & Jerry's flavors have overtly political names? Because I can't think of any. (Thanks again to Dreamweasel for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 12:22 PM | This is supposed to reassure you: In a lengthy interview with the Voice last week, a high-ranking Defense Department political official did concede that preparation for Iraq after a war is seriously lacking. "The planning should have started much sooner," the official said. "That's hard to deny." But, the official added by way of spin, that's really nothing to be concerned about, because compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is really much easier to handle, and won't require a protracted military presence, in keeping with Donald Rumsfeld's view that the military should not be a tool for "nation building." "It's not like there's a bunch of roving warlords and ethnic or religious differences on the same scale as Afghanistan," the official contended. That's from a good story by Jason Vest in this week's Village Voice about the U.S. government's inadequate postwar plans. I'm sure the lack of religious differences in Iraq will be news to the ruling Sunnis, southern Shi'ites, and non-Arab Kurds in the north. Citing an Army War College paper on reconstruction, Vest writes: While the administration has often tried to describe a post-Saddam Iraq as something akin to post-war Germany and Japan, the paper notes that an entire army staff was dedicated to planning for post-war occupation two years before the end of World War II. In the case of Iraq, similar foresight has not been exercised. Ah, but back then the U.S. government was run by adults. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM | Electronic bugging devices have been found at offices used by French and German delegations at a European Union building in Brussels, officials have confirmed. Devices were also discovered at offices used by other delegations, said EU spokesman Dominique-Georges Marro.... The discovery of the telephone tapping systems was first reported on Wednesday by France's Le Figaro newspaper, which blamed the US. But Mr Marro said it was "impossible at this stage" to determine who had planted the devices.... --BBC I'm starting to suspect that you're allowed to violate the coat-and-tie dress code at the Bush White House if you show up wearing one of these T-shirts. posted by Steve M. | 9:28 AM | Tuesday, March 18, 2003 Most worrying of all is the fact that the Democrats have scheduled the South Carolina primary immediately after Iowa and New Hampshire. At least 40 percent of South Carolina's Democratic primary voters are black. All the ingredients are therefore there for an early Sharpton break-out.... --Andrew Sullivan, Sunday Times (London), 2/24/03 Latest presidential preference poll of South Carolina Democrats (Zogby poll, 3/4 - 3/6): Lieberman 12% Gephardt 10% Edwards 6% Kerry 5% Sharpton 4% Undecided 46% (Results courtesy Daily Kos.) What? Could it possibly be that blacks aren't pod people mindlessly programmed to follow the dictates of their own pigmentation? Could it possibly be that blacks are pretty much like whites, and therefore a lot of them haven't made up their minds about their favorite candidate for '04? posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | These people may be pulling our leg -- but it doesn't look that way.... Give the Statue of Liberty back to the French! Located in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was a gift of international friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and is one of the most universal symbols of political freedom and democracy... Now it is time to give it back! They can have their damn Statue! (Thanks -- if that's the right word -- to Phil F. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 5:35 PM | From President Bush's speech last night: ...some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it. Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace.... From AP today: "We now have a coalition of the willing that includes some 30 nations who publicly said they could be included in such a listing," Powell said, "and there are 15 other nations, for one reason or another, who do not wish to be publicly named but will be supporting the coalition." ... The State Department released the list of 30 countries, one of which, Japan, was identified as only a post-conflict member of the coalition. Spokesman Richard Boucher said some of them "may put troops on the ground," while others would take on other roles, such as assisting in a defense against the use of chemical or biological weapons or permitting allied combat planes to fly over their territory.... No Arab country was listed by the State Department. But Boucher declined to say none supported the United States against Iraq.... Turkey was included on the list, and Powell said even as the Turkish parliament debates a U.S. proposal to use Turkish territory for an invasion of northern Iraq he was confident of Turkish cooperation in one form or another.... I guess it all depends on what the definition of "resolve and fortitude" is. (Oh, here's the dream team: "part of the coalition" -- Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy and Japan, which isisted as "post-conflict"; "others" -- South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.) posted by Steve M. | 3:08 PM | NOT IN OUR NAME (local edition) The city [of New York] says Amadou Diallo "caused or contributed" to his own death by refusing to obey police commands, assuming "a combat position" and brandishing what appeared to be a gun. In legal papers filed in response to an $81 million negligence suit brought by Diallo's parents, the city maintains there was "a legal basis" for police to use deadly force in the 1999 Bronx shooting of the unarmed African immigrant. The wording of the document was criticized yesterday by lawyer Anthony Gair, who is representing Diallo's parents. "This is very offensive to the family," Gair said. "One would think that at this late date [the city] would finally publicly say: 'Yes, we were responsible. Yes, we had inadequately trained officers on the street.'"... --Daily News I know this is just the city staking out a contrary position in an adversarial proceeding. I know this is how civil suits work. Still, it's offensive. It opens racial wounds that have been healing. posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | President Bush flashed on the giant screen between the second and third periods of the New Jersey Devils game with the Philadelphia Flyers. He had a captive audience. Most fans sat in their seats in the Continental Arena and listened. And cheered - five times. The loudest eruption came when Bush announced that Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to leave Iraq. When the President was done, chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A" echoed through the building. --New York Daily News If Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schröder, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Jean Chrétien, the Pope, and two-thirds of the world's population are on one side in a geopolitical crisis and a bunch of hockey fans juiced on cheap draft beer are on the other side, well, the hockey fans must be right, right? Every real American knows that. posted by Steve M. | 1:16 PM | Here's an interesting result from this quickie Gallup poll. Although the public is rallying around Bush and approving the war ultimatum, most Americans still aren't convinced that it's actually the right thing to do: For months, President Bush has been trying to persuade the American public that a war against Saddam Hussein might be necessary to disarm Iraq and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The poll suggests that 44% of Americans have been convinced by the president's arguments, and thus support his decision. Another 21% of Americans are unsure if war is the right thing, but support Bush anyway because he is the president. Thirty percent take an opposing point of view.... Which comes closer to your view [ROTATED: you support going to war because you think it is the best thing for the U.S. to do (or) you are not sure if going to war is the best thing to do, but you support Bush's decision because he is president]? COMBINED RESULTS 2003 Mar 17 % Approve 66 (Right thing to do) (44) (Not sure if right thing, but supporting president) (21) (Unsure) (1) Disapprove 30 No opinion 4 Chances are someone who's told you that "all politicians are liars" now thinks a war must be a good idea because, well, "we have to trust the president." posted by Steve M. | 12:42 PM | If you haven't read it or heard it, here's the full text of the speech with which Robin Cook resigned from the British government. Some excerpts: Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.... For four years as Foreign Secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes. Iraq's military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralized and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors? ... posted by Steve M. | 10:03 AM | Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? is in the Top 40 at Amazon. A small ray of sunshine. posted by Steve M. | 9:48 AM | A total of 510 randomly selected adults were interviewed Monday night after Bush's speech.... Nearly two in three -- 64 percent -- said they approve of the way Bush is handling the confrontation with Saddam Hussein, up from 55 percent in an ABC News survey conducted last week. Overall support for a war with Iraq also surged from 59 percent two weeks ago to 71 percent today. And the poll found equally broad support for beginning the war immediately after Bush's 48-hour deadline expires on Wednesday.... --Washington Post Americans like to say they think all politicians are liars, but most don't really believe that -- a president who wraps himself in manliness and the flag is always believed. (Bill Clinton never seemed to grasp that, even when he used military power. He never equated differing opinions with evil; he never suggested that agreeing with him put you on the side of good, on the side of God. I voted for Al Gore and I'd do it again, but I'm not sure he would have been able to grasp that, either.) posted by Steve M. | 9:28 AM | Monday, March 17, 2003 Did we really all rush home to hear it? Were we that naive? Did we not realize that all we would hear was “he has attacked his neighbors” and “twelve years of defiance” and “the world’s most dangerous weapons” all over again? Actually, it was “the most lethal weapons ever devised” this time; “world’s most dangerous weapons” was from the State of the Union address. I had a pointless stray thought about that line: do you think Bush’s speechwriters are deliberately trying to remind us of The World Scariest Police Chases and other staples of late-1990s reality TV, or do you think this White House hires writers whose minds have been colonized by the Fox network? Oh, well, war this week. It’s been inevitable from the day the Bushies raised the possibility. Now, at least, we more or less know when it's going to start. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM | G. Beato gets snarky about Dixie Chicks denouncers here. America is a hands-on place: we're not content to let our troops do all the work. We want to get involved, make sacrifices, achieve tangible results. Hating France is not merely an intellectual exercise; we're also renaming our food. Forsaking the Dixie Chicks means we have to spend that much more time listening to Shania Twain. posted by Steve M. | 5:49 PM | Drudge is linking this story: Automotive supply chain Pep Boys fired a Tucson store manager because his military Reserve duties took him away from work, according to a federal lawsuit filed here. It may not be an isolated case. Several other reservists fired from Pep Boys in Tucson and Pennsylvania have contacted a military advocacy group with similar complaints.... In the Tucson case, Erik Balodis, then a store manager at the 7227 E. 22nd St. Pep Boys, was fired after being called to a U.S. Naval Reserve exercise in June 2002. Balodis, a father of two young children, was unable to find work for five months.... Under the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act and Arizona state law, an employer may not terminate an employee who is called to active duty.... You know what folks? The Dixie Chicks don't hate America. Barbra Streisand doesn't hate America. Pep Boys, if what's being alleged here is true, hates America. There's a detail in the story that I find shocking. I really want to believe this is a typo: The suit cites a letter sent to the Naval Reserve by Pep Boys, dated Sept. 11, 2001, requesting Balodis "be exempted from any impending call to active duty as a result of the tragic and senseless acts of terrorism. ... While I recognize Mr. Balodis' commitment to protect and serve the nation, I must also make you aware that he holds a critical position in the Corporate Structure of Pep Boys." Is this accurate? Did Pep Boys actually have the gall to send a letter on September 11, 2001, demanding exemption from the requirement to protect the job of a reservist? If Ben & Jerry's had done something like that, you'd never hear the end of it. I'm opposed to the war, but I am not opposed to the people who might have to fight it. This is wrong. (A footnote: The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act became law in October 1994. Yes, this happened when we had a Democratic president, House, and Senate.) posted by Steve M. | 5:24 PM | Brawl erupts after song played at rodeo Talk of war with Iraq has sparked an atmosphere of tension and anxiety. And it may be to blame for a brawl that broke out at the rodeo Thursday night. With some 15,000 to 20,000 folks at the rodeo drinking beer and having fun, things can get a little out of hand at times. It happened when a tape of Lee Greenwood's song Proud To Be An American was playing. Some rodeo fans were standing and others were sitting down. Felix Fanaselle and his buddies chose to remain seated. "This guy behind us starts yelling at us (because) we're not standing up," said Fanaselle. "He starts cussing at us, telling us to go back to Iraq." The 16-year-old said the man seated behind him started spitting at him and spilling his beer on him and his friends. "By the end of the song, he pulled my ear. I got up. He pushed me. I pushed him," said Felix. "He punched me in my face. I got him off me." ... Fasanelle has a lawyer now, though. I like this: Fanaselle's lawyer says you don't have to stand for a country and western song. "I guess next time, he'll think maybe we need to stand for the Okie From Muscogee," said attorney Clayton Rawlings. (Link from Ted Barlow, who saw the rodeo and actually had an OK time.) posted by Steve M. | 5:08 PM | "Apology from Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks." No, it's not real. But it's brilliant. (It's from The Specious Report. Thanks to Dreamweasel for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 5:02 PM | Hey ... remember these guys -- the Afghanis? During his recent [fund-raising] trip to Tokyo, [Hamid] Karzai was promised $51 million [by world leaders] for the ["New Beginnings"] program, which aims to provide commanders with micro-credits to transition to new livelihoods in exchange for their weapons. But Afghan officials say that the funds pledged in Tokyo are three times short of what it would take to make such a plan a reality. Aside from demobilization, the formation of the Afghan National Army is also proving to be a challenge. Only 3,000 of the promised 70,000 soldiers have so far been trained by the U.S. and coalition forces. Defense Minister Marshall Fahim told NBC that many soldiers have not been paid for months as the Afghan government doesn’t have the budget for it and the donations have not provided for it. At the same time, there are reportedly fresh flows of money to fund operations of al-Qaida and Taliban groups as well as the forces of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.... Karzai told reporters last week it will take between $15 and $20 billion over five years rather than the $4.5 billion pledged by international donors more than a year ago in Tokyo.... But with the costs of an Iraqi war and post-war recovery program expected to cost billions of dollars — mostly out of the U.S. Treasury — it will be doubly hard for Karzai to persuade the United States and the rest of the international community to cough up another $15 billion for to help Afghanistan get back on its feet. --NBC News But, of course, this is in no way a harbinger of what's to come in Iraq, right? posted by Steve M. | 12:41 PM | It should have been obvious that something like this would happen eventually: Anger against France leads to vandalism towards local woman For Francoise Thomas, the anger against France for its continuing opposition to military action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein hadn't hit home until she read about it on one of her doors. When Thomas took out the garbage Saturday morning, she saw red letters spray-painted on the garage door of her townhouse. "Scum go back to France," it read.... I hope this is the worst we see. And I'm happy to see that her neighbors are on her side. (Thanks to Atrios for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 12:05 PM | Rush Limbaugh says, in words and a picture, that the Dixie Chicks are now "Saddam's Angels." Blacklist? What blacklist? posted by Steve M. | 10:46 AM | Bush Has Audacious Plan to Rebuild Iraq Within Year The Bush administration's audacious plan to rebuild Iraq envisions a sweeping overhaul of Iraqi society within a year of a war's end, but leaves much of the work to private U.S. companies, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported. The Bush plan, as detailed in more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents, would sideline United Nations development agencies and other multilateral organizations that have long directed reconstruction efforts in places such as Afghanistan and Kosovo. The plan also would leave big nongovernmental organizations largely in the lurch: With more than $1.5 billion in Iraq work being offered to private U.S. companies under the plan, just $50 million is so far earmarked for a small number of groups such as CARE and Save the Children. --Dow Jones Business News, via Yahoo News It's almost as if he's doing this just to piss us off, isn't it? It's as if he looked at the list of what his critics want -- long-term thinking, significant UN involvement, significant NGO involvement, avoidance of the appearance that the war is being fought to create business opportunities for his pals -- and said, "Whatever it is they want, I'm against it." posted by Steve M. | 10:00 AM | Earlier this morning I heard an antiwar protester on the radio say that he’s afraid “nobody’s listening.” I assume he meant that no one with the power to stop this war is listening, which is true. But when the war starts this week, that qualification will no longer apply: no one -- certainly no one in America -- will be paying attention to what we’re saying. We'll have nothing but pro-war, rally-round-the-flag news coverage, and most Americans -- even most people who now have anxieties about war -- will find that appropriate. The very things we’ve said could happen if there’s a war rather than continued containment and deterrence -- a chem or bio attack on U.S. troops that may also catch Iraqi civilians in its net, a widening of the war to Israel, destruction of oil fields -- will be described not as reasons war was a bad idea but as proof that Saddam was evil and war was necessary. Increased al-Qaeda terrorism or an escalation of saber-rattling by a back-burnered North Korea will be seen as a sign that the world is a dangerous place and it’s a good thing we’re getting rid of one evildoer, at least, before he can threaten Main Street. In the course of the war, no one will notice any chem or bio weapons that slip out of Iraq to augment arsenals elsewhere in the world. And the American press will consider any discussion of civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing of Iraq, or destruction of infrastructure there, unpatriotic and a turnoff to American audiences. After the war, of course, the American press will turn its attention elsewhere very quickly; if conditions in Iraq deteriorate in a year or two, most Americans simply won’t notice. Any destabilization elsewhere in the Arab/Muslim world will be regarded as confirmation of the Bush administration’s worldview, not of ours. What I’m saying is that, in this debate we’ve been having, there aren’t just two possible outcomes -- the facts vindicate us or the facts vindicate the pro-war side. There’s a third possibility, one that seems much more likely to me: that perceptions will seem to vindicate the pro-war side, at least in the eyes of the vast majority of Americans, while reality, more or less unnoticed, tends to vindicate us. posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM | Sunday, March 16, 2003 Haven't your ambassadors informed you? Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. --aging racist Oriana Fallaci, from The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, 3/13/03 In San Diego, skateboarders and homeless people said the three walked miles and miles each day, the women always silently behind the man and covered in robes and veils. Once, when Mr. Mitchell [alleged kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart] got in an argument with four people on bicycles, he was heard hollering, "Jesus Christ is Lord!" "We asked him if he was Muslim, and he'd say, `No, I'm not Muslim, I'm God, above Muslims,' " said Mike Cortez, a skateboarder. --New York Times, 3/16/03 Hate to break this to you, Oriana, but there are dangerous, misogynistic religious fanatics who don't have olive skin and don't read the Koran, and some of them even put women in veils. posted by Steve M. | 11:50 PM | The article on rape at the Air Force Academy in Sunday's New York Times was fine, infuriating work -- read it and you'll realize that true justice in this situation, as in the Catholic Church's pedophile scandal, would demand nothing less that the building of a supermax prison in the lowest circle of hell for an awful lot of perpetrators and enablers, far more than will ever really be punished. I have one criticism of the Times article, however: Why the reluctance to explain "LCWB," the designation for the all-male Academy class of 1979 that brings such cheer to Academy misogynists? As explained here, "LCWB" stands for "last class with balls." Why couldn't the Times say that? The Times published the Starr Report, didn't it? posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | Ken Pollack, also of the Brookings Institution, thinks such a “rolling start” would be perilous. Better, he thinks, to amass an imposing force, which will increase the chances that Iraq capitulates without a fight, and allow General Franks to respond to any contingencies or counter-attacks. --Economist, January 30, 2003 The American-led coalition that is preparing to topple Saddam Hussein's government is planning for a complex invasion of Iraq to begin even as allied troops are still arriving in the region, senior commanders say.... But there are military experts — including experienced commanders — who are worried by this plan, which has come to be called a "rolling start" to the impending war. --New York Times, March 16, 2003 One more way in which the war isn't going the way the best-known liberal hawk hoped it would. posted by Steve M. | 11:14 PM | Anger on Iraq Seen as New Qaeda Recruiting Tool On three continents, Al Qaeda and other terror organizations have intensified their efforts to recruit young Muslim men, tapping into rising anger about the American campaign for war in Iraq, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials. There it is, war fans. You happy now? Among the countries where the recruiting is going really well? Britain, Spain, and Italy. posted by Steve M. | 11:03 PM | Saturday, March 15, 2003 Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism--pacifism synonymous with anti-Americanism--they feel protected....Mr. Blair too leads a country which is invaded by the Moors. A country that hides that resentment. "Invaded by the Moors"?? That's Oriani Fallaci; the words can be found at OpinionJournal.com, the Web version of the allegedly respectable Wall Street Journal editorial page. Do I have to say the obvious -- that this is essentially what American bigots said about the immigrant generation of my great-grandparents -- my Italian great-grandparents, Oriana? That they couldn't be assimilated by "civilized" America? That the Italians were anarchists and the Jews were communists and they posed a danger to the Republic? And here I am, Oriana -- an American, an Italian-American. Here a lot of us are. And the quote above is merely the lite version of Fallaci's message these days -- for a stronger dose, read this January New York Observer interview of Fallaci (by George Gurley, who also interviewed Ann Coulter for the paper and thus apparently has its bigot beat): "It is a tyranny, a dictatorship -- the only religion on earth that has never committed a work of self-criticism .... It is immovable. It becomes worse and worse .... It is 1,400 years and these people never review themselves, and now they want to come impose it on me, on us?..." There's yet more of this in her current book, The Rage and the Pride. I haven't read it -- if you want to, be my guest. (By the way, I wonder what Fallaci would say in response tothis article from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine about a young Jordanian whose two dreams are jihad against the West and being a programmer at Microsoft. No, it's obvious -- she'd think it proves her point. She'd dismiss the fact that the young man's father thinks his son could get a job if he'd just shave the beard that makes him look too religious. Could the urge to jihad just be generational -- and if it varies from generation to generation, doesn't that demonstrate that it's not immutable?) posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | Friday, March 14, 2003 Know who showed up on The O'Reilly Factor a couple of nights ago bashing the French? David Bossie. Yup, that David Bossie -- the guy who worked with Floyd Brown when Brown produced the Willie Horton ad in 1988; the guy who put Gennifer Flowers in an anti-Clinton ad in 1992; the guy who worked for Congressman Dan Burton when Burton was calling Clinton a "scumbag" until the two of them released tapes of Webster Hubbell that were blatantly doctored and Bossie got fired. Bossie's operating under the Citizens United banner again, and CU is jumping on the French-bashing bandwagon. You've got to put a wooden stake into some of these guys to get rid of them. posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | Free Republic's Dixie Chicks boycott coordination thread. Their career is over. This is not going to go away. posted by Steve M. | 4:49 PM | Oh -- I forgot to link your summer movie guide. posted by Steve M. | 4:21 PM | Here's a shopping list. It's courtesy of the grown-ups at FrogWeenies.com. These are tough times ... and when the going gets tough, the tough make anti-French pee-pee jokes in PhotoShop. These people really are les nincompoops. (Thanks to Andrea for the link to the list.) posted by Steve M. | 4:00 PM | Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the NRA volunteered to fight Saddam? Gun fans love to quote the second part of the Second Amendment -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" -- but regularly gloss over the first part: The full text of the amendment is, of course, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Curiously, this text, though it's revered by gun fans, doesn't seem to imbue them with the sense that they have an obligation to defend the security of this nation. And this war is about defending the security of this nation, isn't it? After all, the President has said so over and over again, most recently at his March 7 press conference ("But in the name of peace and the security of our people, if [Saddam] won't do so voluntarily, we will disarm him...."). So, NRA members, please head down to the local recruiting center and volunteer to fight Saddam. You do revere the Second Amendment, don't you? posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | Why do we have to turn to a blogger/cartoonist (Barry at Alas, a Blog) for a detailed analysis of precisely what's banned by the abortion bill just passed by the Senate (potentially a lot of pre-viability abortions, Barry says), while The New York Times contents itself with this geez-I-dunno paragraph? Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the description of the procedure used in the measure was vague and "could be construed to impact virtually any abortion." Officials at the Center for Reproductive Rights made a similar argument, saying the measure could prohibit the "safest and most common" procedures. posted by Steve M. | 1:52 PM | Well, I saw this coming: San Antonio DJ Pulls The Plug On The Dixie Chicks A popular country music group has some San Antonians turning off their radios. A KJ 97 DJ pulled the plug on the trio's songs after lead singer Natalie Maines made a negative comment about President Bush. The trio is on tour overseas, but they're causing quite a stir back here at home. "Natalie Maines before a concert audience in London, England said, and I quote, ‘Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,’" said Keith Montgomery with KJ 97. The comments prompted Montgomery to pull the Chicks music off the air Thursday "I would say the reaction is 99 percent in favor of what I have done," said Montgomery.... Over at Lucianne.com, they're calling the band "the Blix Chix." One Lucianne.com poster says, "Who do the DC's think back Bush? The people who listen to country music." Wonder how they'd feel knowing that, according to his daughter Rosanne, Johnny Cash "opposes this war more passionately than just about anyone I know." posted by Steve M. | 10:20 AM | The Bias Against Guns by John Lott: #9 at Amazon #405,455 at Barnes & Noble Did the right-wing foundations forget to do one bulk buy? posted by Steve M. | 9:58 AM | HOW (SOME) AMERICANS THINK A college professor I know was talking last night about a student she had in the 1980s. The student had been to France and had found the French unfriendly to Americans. Here's how the student put it: "They're so unpatriotic!" This reminds me of something that happened when my wife and I were in Germany a few years ago. Many of the menus we saw at restaurants there were bilingual or multilingual, but at one restaurant in the Bavarian Alps the menu was (understandably) in German only. As we struggled with the menu and I sneaked furtive looks at my pocket German-English dictionary and German phrasebook, we heard an American-accented voice voice from another table: "Do you have a regular menu?" posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | OK, I'll be unserious and ask this question: Now that right-thinking, freedom-fry-eating Americans have concluded that the Pope is a scummy appeasenik, do you think maybe Sinead O'Connor could have her career back? posted by Steve M. | 7:46 AM | Thursday, March 13, 2003 From ABC News: U.S. officials fear that once President Bush signals the U.S. is headed to war, Saddam Hussein will strike pre-emptively, administration sources told ABCNEWS. But if the United States takes action to stop an Iraqi first strike, especially if they try to seize and protect the oil fields, U.S. officials admit they may end up starting the war itself.... Specific new evidence indicates that Iraqi activity in the Western desert shows the strong likelihood Scud missiles are hidden there... Detailed new intelligence from the southern Iraqi oil fields shows that many of the 700 wells have now been wired with explosives.... Near the border with Kuwait, where 135,000 U.S. troops are now stationed, recent surveillance indicates Iraqi artillery batteries have been moved dangerously close.... The United States is now considering moving against all three of these targets before any war begins in an effort to prevent Saddam from acting first, sources told ABCNEWS. So we may attack preemptively to stop Saddam from attacking preemptively in response to our decision to go to war preemptively. This is becoming rather Strangelovian. Oh, and we're afraid if we attack preemptively, we may start the war early. Excuse me: may? If we attack, isn't that, essentially, the start of the war? posted by Steve M. | 11:06 PM | Earlier I mentioned that TBOGG has a link to a site advertising a "Golf and Prayer Walk." The site is for something called the "Presidential Prayer Team." Here's some copy from the elsewhere on the PPT site: Pray for the President and his advisors as they consider which course of action to take regarding Iraq. Pray that God's hand will continue to move in the timing of any decision to be made. "Timing"? Hey, maybe the delays we in the anti-war movement are causing are part of God's plan! Maybe God wants the war to be delayed -- or even prevented. Maybe we're instruments of God. Maybe you don't have to be a rich Texas Republican to be an instrument of God. Ever consider that possibility, smart guys? posted by Steve M. | 6:50 PM | Below I have a post about Representative Ginny Brown-Waite (R - Fla.), who wants to spend your tax money to dig up the corpses of U.S. soldiers buried in France. I now see that MWO was already on this story, and has more information. Go here and scroll down -- but, on the way, be sure to read the story of a Washington Post reporter who let himself be a press agent for the White House -- and admits it. posted by Steve M. | 5:47 PM | This could get ugly.... One of the Dixie Chicks is clarifying remarks she made about President George W. Bush during a concert in London earlier this week. Reporting on a Chicks' concert, the Web site for the United Kingdom paper The Guardian said singer Natalie Maines told the crowd, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The singer's barb got the audience cheering, the Guardian said.... "I feel the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world," Maines said in the statement. "My comments were made in frustration and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view." ... Hey, they're women -- and they play their own instruments! We shoulda known they were commies! Seriously, wasn't k. d. lang basically driven out of country music for saying she didn't eat meat? It makes me wonder what the hell they're going to do to the Chicks. posted by Steve M. | 5:01 PM | More unseriousness, beamingly posted by Andrew Sullivan on his letters page: We are headed back to a state of nature with nukes. Where, I ask myself, has this situation been thoroughly thought through? Why, in The Road Warrior and other Mel movies. Forget the Bush Doctrine: The United States must cultivate the virtues of Mad Max! I would submit to you that a world that admires the statesmanship of Arafat, the steely determination of Saddam, and the sociopath's flare of Kim Jong Il is ripe for a righteous throat slitter like Max. He did not call meetings or wait for approval. He would just act and let others slip stream behind him, and they did. Is it just me, or does the use of the phrase "thoroughly thought through" in this letter make your jaw drop, too? posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM | They're falling all over themselves trying to out-moron one another.... WASHINGTON - In another swipe at the French, a Florida congresswoman has proposed that the government pay for families who might want to bring home from France the remains of Americans who fought and died in the world wars. "I, along with many other Americans, do not feel that the French government appreciates the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made to defend the freedom that the French enjoy today," Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite said in introducing legislation providing financial help for the reburial of veterans from the two world wars... --AP This won't surprise you: President Bush campaigned for Brown-Waite at a rally days before the election, and appeared in ads for her.... "It was very much a party-line vote," [political scientist Susan] MacManus said. "The president's endorsement probably put Ginny Brown-Waite over the top...." What was it that Peggy Noonan said to the Democrats last week? Ah, yes, here it is... You have grown profoundly unserious. The pot calling the refrigerator black. posted by Steve M. | 4:08 PM | Nice one, from TBOGG. Not for the kiddies, but spot-on nonetheless. (Lots of good stuff if you keep scrolling, too -- "Golf and Prayer Walk"?? -- although T and I part ways on Everclear.) posted by Steve M. | 2:04 PM | YIKES! It is time for a truly ethical foreign policy, based on true moral superiority. Of course, a half-century of war in Europe, followed by a half-century of peace in Europe, have entirely drained Britain’s own capacity for this sort of project. The responsibility rests with our imperial offspring, the United States. But she can take the earlier empire, which she once so rudely resiled from, as her guide. The British empire, said Queen Victoria, existed ‘to protect the poor natives and advance civilisation’. On one level this was a practical project — the irrigation of Egypt and the Indus, the laying of railways and founding of schools. But at a deeper level the empire was a moral project. Lurid tales of imperial savagery — the dumdum bullet and the Maxim gun, and the fate of the Indian mutineers, lashed to the muzzles of fieldpieces and blown to bits to the beat of drums — rather understandably obscure the fact that the empire was essentially a humanitarian undertaking. --Daniel Kruger in The Spectator posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM | I like these lines from Barry Crimmins: I am tired of people who set themselves up as the heroic opponents of the vague adversary that is 'political correctness.' Anyone beyond one block of the Smith College campus is in no real danger of running afoul of those prone to adding a few too many qualifying terms to descriptions.... When reactionaries want to alter public discourse they say they are fighting for community standards. But if I don't want some Klansman barking the 'n' word on the street corner, I'm with the politically correct mind police. OK, maybe that's unfair -- the righties do seem to have figured out that overt expressions of anti-black bigotry are bad. Overt anti-Muslim bigotry? Apparently, for some of them, that's a different story. Check out the ad for this book. The book says Islam is utterly vile in all ways -- and National Review's book club sells it proudly. Are the folks at National Review selling bigotry? Oh, no. The book isn't bigoted. The book is, as the ad says, "politically incorrect." posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM | More from that damn Frist article: Dr. Frist, who has represented Tennessee in the Senate since 1995, is also enjoying something of a honeymoon among moderate Republicans, the result of assiduous efforts not to isolate a group of senators who will play a vital role in shaping compromises on taxes and Medicare. Even as the leader steers the Senate's agenda rightward, moderate Republican senators say he meets far more often with them, soliciting their views and making them feel valued, than did Mr. Lott. "Last week, he met with several of us for an hour and let us raise questions about the size and the content of the administration's economic stimulus bill," said Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine and a centrist leader. "If senators feel they're consulted, even if they don't prevail in the end, it makes for a better feeling in the conference." Haven't we seen this movie before? Remember that really, really nice guy George W. Bush assiduously courting Democrats and moderate Republicans in his first few months in office -- while refusing to give an inch on any significant aspect of his extremely conservative agenda? But even some top Democrats find it hard not to like the 43rd president. He's courteous, hospitable and his words reflect unusual humility for one whose job makes him the most powerful man in the world. He has said one of his top goals is to change the tone of discourse in Washington. And he thinks he's succeeding. "There is a culture of respect that's beginning to emerge in Washington," he said Wednesday in Arkansas. "I'm beginning to notice that the rhetoric is toning down just a little bit." In pursuit of that goal, the president on Monday will mark his first 100 days in office by inviting all 535 members of Congress to lunch at the White House. In another stab at humility, a spokesman says Mr. Bush wants Congress to know he regards this period as "our" first hundred days and not "his" first hundred days.... That's Mark Knoller of CBS News on April 27, 2001. And remember Bush and dyed-in-the-wool-liberal Alexandra Pelosi, maker of the documentary Journeys with George? He found the loudmouthed girl and her camera amusing, and though he never forgot she was The Enemy, he charmed her back.... [Pelosi said,] "...The relationship I had with Bush was like the great … he was seducing me and I was luring him in, and he was trying to seduce me, and it was this beautiful dance...." Why do people fall for this crap? posted by Steve M. | 12:35 PM | Ten weeks into his term, Senator Bill Frist has adopted a vastly different approach as majority leader, preferring the broad themes and political gestures favored by the White House and conservatives to the pragmatic, back-room tasks favored by his Republican predecessors. ... Dr. Frist is charting a different path as a committed conservative who says he does not intend to compromise his party's principles for momentum. ...His legislative agenda, disclosed last month, after a slow beginning, is packed with conservative or business-oriented medical proposals, like a ban on the type of late-term abortion that critics call partial-birth abortion, a limit on medical malpractice jury awards, and assistance to vaccine manufacturers — all issues that senators say he has moved to the top of the priority list. --New York Times, 3/13/03 OK, folks, it's flashback time.... "...I think Bill has a kind of a more moderate record and a more moderate approach toward things, and I think that it's going to be very difficult to criticize him." --Senator Orrin Hatch, quoted in WorldNetDaily, 12/23/02 "Bill Frist is not somebody conservatives would be comfortable with. He's a moderate Republican who's not really pro-life." --Paul Weyrich, to Family News in Focus, 12/20/02 "...the Tennessee moderate..." --CBS News, 12/23/02 "A wealthy moderate from a Southern state..." --Joe Johns, NBC News, 12/20/02 "We think he's a real pragmatist, that he understands that the party needs to get back on track of becoming Lincoln's party once again. We're hopeful we'll have a seat at the table to talk about everything from judgeships to legislation." --Jennifer Stockman, co-chairwoman of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition, quoted in Salon, 12/21/02 "But Frist is also a pragmatist and a vote counter, and he knows that 50 senators, even adding the vice president's vote, don't add up to the 60 votes he would need to stop a filibuster." --Orlando Sentinel, 1/5/03 posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Wednesday, March 12, 2003 A federal judge in Manhattan refused yesterday to reverse a ruling that Jose Padilla, who has been held for nine months in military custody, be allowed to meet with lawyers challenging his detention as an enemy combatant. --New York Times That judge must be a bleeding-heart, America-hating wimp, right? Well, it seems unlikely -- Judge Michael Mukasey is a longtime friend of Rudolph Giuliani who swore him in as mayor in 1998. Mukasey also presided over the trial in which Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine co-defendants were convicted. (Thanks to Janet for pointing this out to me. She says, by the way, that Giuliani asked Mukasey to swear him in at both of his inaugurals.) posted by Steve M. | 10:41 PM | Accused of terrorism? Our terrorism defense lawyers will protect your rights. (800) 841-1881 This is an ad that's currently in the banner at the top of my blog -- on my browser, at least. This disturbs me. posted by Steve M. | 4:15 PM | "...Speaking of champagne, there was some serious talk -- in 1918, I think it was, the second centenary of the first use of the name to designate the sparkling wines of Hautvillers -- some talk, as I say, of seeking canonisation for Dom Pérignon, champagne's inventor. Nothing came of it, and yet men have been canonised for less." "Very much less," said Hillier. "I would sooner seek intercession from Saint Pérignon than from Saint Paul." --Anthony Burgess, Tremor of Intent (1966) posted by Steve M. | 4:07 PM | A senior intelligence analyst in Australia just resigned, expressing doubts about the wisdom of war with Iraq. ''I'm convinced a war against Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to the U.S., or to the U.K. or Australia, or to any other country, at this point in time," former Office of National Assessments intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie said, announcing his resignation late on Wednesday evening.... A critical factor behind Wilkie's resignation was claims made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council purporting that a link exists between al-Qaeda and Iraq. ''As far as I'm aware there was no hard evidence and there is still no hard evidence that there is any active cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda,'' Wilkie told Australia Broadcasting Corp (ABC) television.... Wilkie believes that a war on Iraq may well turn out to be counter-productive. ''In fact, a war is the exact course of action most likely to cause Saddam to do exactly what we're trying to prevent. I believe it's the course of action that is most likely to cause him to lash out recklessly, to use weapons of mass destruction and to possibly play a terrorism card,'' he said. Damn, and all those right-wingers just stocked up on Australian wines to replace the French stuff they flushed down the toilet.... posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | Take the recommendation of TAPPED and read this Washington Post article by Vernon Loeb and Thomas Ricks on likely problems in an occupation of postwar Iraq. For starters, Loeb and Ricks write, An occupation force of 45,000 to 60,000 Army troops -- the range under consideration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- could force an end to peace-time training and rotation cycles in a service already deployed in Germany, Korea, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Sinai. And that range might drastically underestimate the real need: Retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash[, who] commanded the first Army peacekeeping operation in the Balkans in 1995...said he believes 200,000 U.S. and allied forces will be necessary to stabilize Iraq.... Nash says that up to two divisions alone -- 25,000 to 50,000 troops -- could be required just to guard any chemical or biological weapons sites that are discovered until the weapons are disposed of properly. The Joint Chiefs want to use barely more troops than that for the entire occupation. Loeb and Ricks don't speculate on what might happen if the occupation force is too small, but what do you think's going to happen if we short-staff the job of guarding chem/bio sites? Think it's possible that some anthrax might go missing here and there? "There's going to be a power vacuum," said one senior defense official sympathetic to the Army. "How will that be filled? I'm not an expert in the region, but if you use the Balkans as a model, we may be getting into the middle of a civil war." If that happens, will we care? Or, with Iraq probably gone from the front pages, will essentially we blow it off? posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM | By the way, if the words "weapon," "mass," and "destruction" still mean what I think they mean, don't we logically have to include, on the list of "weapons of mass destruction," the MOAB? posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM | This was posted recently on a Web board by someone who works on surveys for a media-affiliated polling outfit: ... I have to say that what I found most interesting about the actual polling this time was the extraordinary increase in naked hostility I got from pro-war people, both the ones who consented to do the poll (sometimes while expressing disgust with the "obvious liberal slant" of such questions as "Do you approve or disapprove of using military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power?") and those--and they were legion--who called me a motherfucker or worse after I told them who I was working for and slammed down the phone. Perhaps surprisingly, I really haven't been getting that much of this sort of thing since 9/11, which perhaps reflects the mellow mood that finding themselves at one with the zeitgeist had put many arch-conservatives in. At the risk of reading too much into one (very big) change, I suspect that the Angry White Men have been seeing enough TV coverage of anti-war protesters and lily-livered UN'ers and reading enough squishy editorials to start to feel beleaguered again. I'm not sure whether this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither. I think it's a bad thing -- you have an honest debate in a free society and these guys think it's a personal attack on them. posted by Steve M. | 11:51 AM | A blistering editorial in this week's New York Observer: Somehow, the Bush administration’s cowboys have done the unthinkable. They have alienated friends, ruined international relationships, squandered the good will and sympathy that the Sept. 11 atrocities inspired, and turned America into a global villain. All of this, while Saddam Hussein smiles and watches the world turn in his favor, inheriting the gusts of international opinion that Mr. Bush has mind-bogglingly forfeited. Rarely in modern times has such a blundering swap taken place. ... With its Reagan-era bluster and frat-house machismo, the Bush administration has played into the hands of terrorists, breaking apart NATO and fracturing half-century-old relations with Europe that have persevered through all the roilings of post–World War II history. And the administration did it at just the very moment when the West has been targeted—not by that wretched despot Saddam, but by the murderous followers of Osama bin Laden.... Osama bin Laden did not create this sad state of affairs. George W. Bush did. Rarely in the face of war has the leadership in this country—both the executive and the opposition—served it so badly. The opposition has cynically acquiesced; they have not challenged this intellectually challenged President.... Oh, just read it. posted by Steve M. | 9:19 AM | Tuesday, March 11, 2003 You know, of course, that they're now calling french fries "freedom fries" in the cafeterias at the House of Representatives. What do the French think? From The Boston Globe: ''We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes,'' said Nathalie Loisau, an embassy spokeswoman. Sometimes a sneer like that is exactly what's called for. posted by Steve M. | 10:56 PM | You realize, of course, that they’re going to try to blame us for everything from now on. It doesn’t matter whether the war has been prevented or merely delayed. It doesn’t even matter that it may take place and be an easy rout. Afterward they’ll blame our resistance to the war for anything that goes wrong in America or the world. Another terrorist attack? More and scarier saber-rattling from North Korea, or possibly Iran? Difficulties in an Iraq war? They’ll say it’s because the administration had to deal with us, the naysayers, instead of focusing completely on terror or rogue states or war planning. (They’ll say we distracted them even though they’re saying now that Iraq isn’t distracting them from al-Qaeda.) More trouble between Israel and the Palestinians? They’ll say we encouraged it, with our “pro-terror” demonstrations, or that we delayed the peaceful resolution of the crisis that was simply inevitable after an Iraq war. A worsening economy? They’ll say the war cost more because we forced them to delay it. They’ll say oil prices stayed high for too long because they had to wait to fight. This won’t just be the same old right-wing line, that everything bad is the fault of liberals. This will essentially be an accusation of treason. Our “disloyalty,” not foolhardy tax cuts, will be blamed for hard times. Our “disloyalty,” not diplomatic ineptitude and the reckless “axis of evil” insult, will be blamed for a worsening Korean crisis. Our “disloyalty” will be blamed if too many GIs die in friendly fire in an Iraq war, if there are excessive civilian casualties, if Saddam uses chemical or biological weapons (they’ll say we gave him time to perfect his nefarious schemes). A lot of Americans really might buy this argument. And if they don’t do so spontaneously, they’ll certainly be encouraged to do so in 2004. Unless life is suddenly very, very good, the election that year will almost certainly be an “angry white male” election, and we’re going to be the targets of that anger. Damn, I hope I’m wrong about this. posted by Steve M. | 10:48 PM | Andrew Sullivan, ex-wunderkind New Republic editor and alleged Really Smart Guy, writes this today: here's the economic expert, Krugman, on the looming deficit: "[R]ight now the deficit, while huge in absolute terms, is only 2 — make that 3, O.K., maybe 4 — percent of G.D.P." I take Krugman's broader point about the deficit, and agree with it. But why such contemptuous sloppiness? There's a critical difference between 2 and 4 percent of GNP. Isn't there? Um, Andrew? That's not sloppiness -- it's a joke. It's a wry joke about the fact that every few days the administration says, in effect, "Whoops, sorry -- it looks as if the deficit is going to be even bigger than we said it would be a few days ago." Get it, Andrew? (UPDATE: TBOGG beat me to the punch on this one.) posted by Steve M. | 3:36 PM | Over the weekend, Bill Keller reported in The New York Times that Michael Drosnin, who believes that prophecies can be found in the Hebrew Bible if you lay its text out like a word-search puzzle, has apparently given a briefing on his nutball theory to officials of the Defense Department. Today, in a letter to the Times, Drosnin says, yes, he has briefed U.S. officials. If, even in a tiny corner of your brain, you wonder whether there might possibly be something to this Bible Code stuff, please go here immediately and let Brendan McKay, an Australian mathematician, reassure you that what Drosnin's trying to palm off is absolute bollocks. Drosnin insists that there's something magical and mystical about the Bible -- only there, he says, can so many references and allusions be found. McKay disproves this, with gusto. From the links on his page you can learn, for instance, that references to Chanukkah candles are secretly encoded in War and Peace, and that many assassinations are predicted by Moby Dick, as is the death of Princess Diana. (Others have also had at the Bible Code theory -- this gentleman, for instance; alas, the fellow who, according to this page, found prophecies in the Microsoft Access Developers Toolkit 2.0 license agreement seems not to have posted his results.) If you have a chance, go to a bookstore and look at Drosnin's book -- not the current book, The Bible Code II, which (conveniently) predicts recent cataclysms, but the first book, The Bible Code, published in 1997. You'll probably find it in the Religion section. Look for Osama bin Laden's name in the index -- not there. Look for a prediction of the 9/11 attacks -- not there either. A nuclear attack by Islamic terrorists is predicted, but its instigator is supposed to be Muammar Khaddafi (and, of course, no such thing has happened yet). Benjamin Netanyahu, elected prime minister of Israel shortly before Drosnin published his first book, figures prominently in its prophecies. Alas, he's no longer prime minister and he's not even foreign minister anymore; as Israel's new finance minister, maybe he'll bring about the Apocalypse by devaluing the shekel, but somehow I doubt it. posted by Steve M. | 1:59 PM | Did I include Japan among the countries opposed to Bush's war last week? My bad. Japan is, in fact, part of the C.O.W. (coalition of the willing). posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | Iraq: United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq recently discovered a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas, United States officials say. The U.S.: U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf may be armed with radioactive bombs and missiles hundreds of times more potent than similar weapons used during the Gulf War and the U.N. military campaign in Bosnia. Iraq: The reconfigured rocket warheads appear to be cobbled together from Iraq's stockpiles of imported or home-built weapons, some [of] which Iraq had used with both conventional and chemical warheads. The U.S.: [British researcher Dai] Williams and others also claim that patents covering conversion or modification of earlier generation bombs for use as bunker-busters indicate that depleted uranium is being used in these weapons. Iraq: At first, [an American official] said, Iraq told the inspectors that it was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon. A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded that some might have been configured as chemical weapons. The U.S.: The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of uranium or depleted uranium in the bunker-busters, and it has refused to identify the composition of the dense-metal warheads that enable the missiles to penetrate structures deeply buried under earth, steel and reinforced concrete. Iraq: The distinctive appearance of the rockets' cluster munitions, heavy metal balls with holes in them, suggested their use as a way to disperse chemical or biological weapons, said the official. "If you take the kinds of fuses we know they have, and you screw them in there, when these things come out from the main frame and they explode inward, chemical agents come out," [the American official] said. "These can be used for biological weapons, too," he said. The U.S.: ...critics such as British researcher Dai Williams contend that only uranium -- in one form or another -- possesses the density and other characteristics necessary to achieve the penetration levels attributed to such weapons as the 2,000-pound AGM 130C air-to-ground cruise missile, and the guided bomb unit, or GBU, series of laser-guided hard-target penetrators intended to pierce bunkers and other reinforced structures. Iraq: "... they found Iraq could manufacture these indigenously, so who knows how many they have?" The U.S.: Depleted uranium ... is dirt cheap. Tons of it, over 500 million pounds the last time anyone counted, is lying around in various states of nuclear "decay" at government repositories throughout the country. Iraq: "When you look at page after page of what the Iraqis have done over the years to hide, to deceive, to cheat, to keep information away from the inspectors, to change facts to fit the latest issue, and once they put that set of facts before you, when you find you those facts are false, they come up with a new set of facts — it's a constant pattern," [Secretary of State Colin Powell] said on "Fox News Sunday." The U.S.: The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of uranium or depleted uranium in the bunker-busters, and it has refused to identify the composition of the dense-metal warheads that enable the missiles to penetrate structures deeply buried under earth, steel and reinforced concrete. ...the patent application for a narrow-profile version of the BLU-109B bomb (which is delivered by a GBU-24) specifically refers to penetrating bodies made of tungsten or depleted uranium. "If they're really using tungsten, why keep it classified?" Williams said. (Iraq rocket story: New York Times, 3/10/03. U.S. bomb story: Wired, 3/10/03. Thanks to BuzzFlash for the Wired link.) posted by Steve M. | 9:33 AM | GOP GRATITUDE ALBANY — [Republican] Gov. Pataki [of New York] has set up a $1,000-a-member “Governor’s Trust” to help deliver his message of fiscal austerity “without distortion from the liberal media.” Announcement of the new organization was contained in a fund-raising letter sent earlier this month to former Pataki donors. A copy of the letter was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.... “With your financial support, I will be able to get my message out to New Yorkers directly — without distortion from the elite liberal media — and to fight on a level playing field with our opponents,” Pataki wrote.... --New York Daily News, 3/10/03 NEW YORK (AP) — The editorial board of the New York Times has endorsed Gov. George Pataki for a third term, calling him the most qualified candidate to lead the state during its ongoing financial troubles.... --USA Today, 10/27/02 posted by Steve M. | 7:36 AM | Monday, March 10, 2003 Why does Andrew Sullivan think Al Sharpton will be a major factor in the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination when Sharpton doesn't even crack double digits in his home state? posted by Steve M. | 6:12 PM | Oh, and by the way, George W.'s job approval rating is down to 54%, according to Zogby. posted by Steve M. | 6:08 PM | Let me make the obvious point about the kidnapping of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad's children (emphasis mine): Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member. The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father. CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address. "We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. The interrogators are handling them with kid gloves, in America. But what about the six months when they weren't in America? Were they handled with kid gloves, do you think? In Pakistan? posted by Steve M. | 5:16 PM | Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft on the seizure of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kids: Isn't this kidnapping? How about a human rights violation? What kind of precedent does this set? Seven and nine years old -- has this Administration lost its mind? We didn't realize that enemy combatant status was hereditary. posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM | This was in last Saturday's Daily Mirror. Can this possibly be true? Can the leadership of this country possibly have degenerated this much? George Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs [members of the European Parliament] wouldn't guarantee a standing ovation. Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome. A source close to negotiations said last night: "President Bush agreed to a speech but insisted he get a standing ovation like at the State of the Union address. "His people also insisted there were no protests, or heckling. "I believe it would be a crucial speech for Mr Bush to make in light of the opposition here to war. But unless he only gets adulation and praise, then it will never happen."... (Thanks to Susan M. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 2:56 PM | Your pro-war acquaintances think Hans Blix is a bumbling idiot (Dennis Miller calls him "Inspector Clouseau"). They think Blix is blind -- or willfully blind -- to evidence of Saddam's perfidy. Do they understand that this is simply not true? Do they understand that he seeks more time for inspections knowing that there is probably a lot of nasty stuff to be found? Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, delivered the report Friday to the U.N. Security Council. It has not been released to the public, but the Los Angeles Times has obtained a copy. The U.N. report increases the estimate for Saddam's presumed stockpile of anthrax, for example, from 8,500 liters to 10,000. "Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 liters of anthrax may still exist" and could still be viable, it said. U.N. inspectors also warned that they may have underestimated the danger of Saddam's aging supply of mustard gas, a systemic poison that blisters the skin and is lethal if inhaled. Recent tests confirmed the "high purity" of sulfur mustard stored in artillery shells for 12 years. In addition, previous U.N. reports stated that Iraq had not accounted for as many as 550 artillery shells and 450 aerial bombs filled with mustard gas. "However, based on a document recently received from Iraq, this quantity could be substantially higher," the report notes. Iraqi officials blame the discrepancy on faulty accounting. --Los Angeles Times, via the Newark Star-Ledger The UN report, according to the Times, says that Saddam planned to launch a chem/bio attack in the '91 war if Baghdad was nuked. Could the pro-war side, whether they agree or not, please at least make an effort to follow the logic of the pro-inspections argument -- that war may mean a chem-bio attack and continued inspections could well be a way to prevent one? posted by Steve M. | 1:42 PM | Two young sons of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk. Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member. The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father. CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address. "We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. "But we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care." ... --Sydney Morning Herald Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kids, Elián González -- I guess the U.S. is where all children really belong, regardless of where their so-called "homes" are, if it suits America's geostrategic interests. posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM | This was a joke: BUSH ON NORTH KOREA: "WE MUST INVADE IRAQ" WASHINGTON, DC - With concern over North Korea's nuclear capabilities growing, President Bush reassured the American people Monday that "extreme force" will be used to remove Saddam Hussein from power if the Iraqi president fails to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction. "For years, Kim Jong Il has acted in blatant disregard of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons, and last week, he rejected it outright," Bush told reporters after a National Security Council meeting on North Korea. "We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to remain in the hands of volatile, unpredictable leaders. Which is exactly why we must act quickly and decisively against Saddam Hussein." --The Onion, January 15, 2003 This is a real news story: Rice, Powell Say Reports of Iranian Nuclear Program Bolster Iraq Policy WASHINGTON (AP) - Top U.S. officials said Sunday that Iran had advanced its nuclear weapons program beyond what authorities had previously believed, and they used the reports to bolster the American case that Iraq must be disarmed. Time magazine reported Sunday that a nuclear power facility at Natanz in Iran is closer to enriching uranium than previously thought. The magazine reported that the plant has hundreds of gas centrifuges ready to produce enriched uranium that could be used in advanced nuclear weapons. "We have seen this week Iran has got a more aggressive nuclear program than the (International Atomic Energy Agency) thought it had," Secretary of State Colin Powell said on CNN. "Here we suddenly discover that Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program than anyone said it had," Powell said. "It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders, if they really are determined to do it, and we know that Saddam Hussein has not lost his intent." --AP, March 9, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | In the process of doing an unrelated search, I just stumbled on this. Excuse me while I pull my jaw back up off the floor. If you can bear it, here's the full catalog. posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM | Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch....If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. --State of the Union address, 2003 Mr. [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed's two sons, 7 and 9, are reported to be in custody in Pakistan; threats against them, serious or not, might be far more persuasive than threats against Mr. Mohammed himself. --New York Times, 3/9/03 Why are these children in custody? What's going to be done to them? This is being done by our allies. We are the good guys, aren't we? posted by Steve M. | 7:34 AM | Sunday, March 09, 2003 Good cartoon. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | SERENITY As war with Iraq draws inexorably closer, President Bush is described by friends as not just determined, but surprisingly serene about the most profound decision he will likely ever make. --New York Daily News People who have met with Mr. Bush have been struck by his tranquillity. "You would never have known that he was sitting on a powder keg," said Don Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," who recently spent 15 minutes with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "He was amazingly calm and wanted to talk about Harry Truman and not Saddam Hussein." --New York Times "You may find this curious." Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing. His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue." --Thomas Harris, from Red Dragon, the first novel about Hannibal Lecter posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | The Central Intelligence Agency has warned that terrorists based in Iraq are planning attacks against American and allied forces inside the country after any invasion, government counterterrorism officials say. The agency's previously undisclosed assessment has circulated among senior Bush administration officials. It describes both the risks of terror attacks on American forces inside Iraq if an invasion occurs and the danger of similar attacks on troops already massing in the region. --Yahoo News, via The New York Times Two thoughts: (1) The sons of bitches found another way to get that "Saddam = al-Qaeda" nonsense back into print, disguised as fact. (2) Excuse me, but if the people being attacked are soldiers, it's not terrorism. It may be sneaky, it may be in violation of the rules of war, but it's guerrilla warfare, not terrorism. People who don't want you to think clearly keep blurring the distinction between "terrorism" and other forms of nastiness -- thus helping to blur the distinction between heads of state like Saddam and stateless terrorists like Osama. The same people use words like "democratic" and "free" when they merely mean "pro-Western," or now, perhaps, "pro-First World" (or "pro-American," or "pro-Bush-and-his-friends"). Don't get sucked in. posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Saturday, March 08, 2003 You may have read in today's New York Times (or via Atrios) that people who are paid out of your tax dollars to keep you safe from harm are listening to presentations made by certifiable loons -- and claim to have no idea beforehand what those loons are going to say: Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. This is strikingly similar to what we heard last year when the ex-Larouchenik Laurent Murawiec made that scarily imperialistic presentation to the Defense Policy Board, the one that said, "Iraq is the tactical pivot / Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot / Egypt the prize." According to Slate's second article on the Murawiec presentation, [Richard] Perle, who had invited Murawiec to speak to the Defense Policy Board, told Time magazine he didn't know what Murawiec was going to say before the talk. So which is it? Is the Bush defense establishment deliberately turning to nutjobs for enlightenment? Or is it running foreign policy, in part, by conducting a series of open-mike nights? posted by Steve M. | 3:07 PM | Here's Tony Judt, writing in the current New York Review of Books: In World War I, which the French fought from start to finish, France lost three times as many fighting men as America has lost in all its wars combined. In World War II, the French armies holding off the Germans in May–June 1940 suffered 124,000 dead and 200,000 wounded in six weeks, more than America did in Korea and Vietnam combined. Until Hitler brought the US into the war against him in December 1941, Washington maintained correct diplomatic relations with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile the Einsatzgruppen had been at work for six months slaughtering Jews on the Eastern Front, and the Resistance was active in occupied France. Judt then makes a rather chilling point: Fortunately we shall never know how middle America would have responded if instructed by an occupying power to persecute racial minorities in its midst. Read Judt's article for its defense of an internationalism bratty neocons want to destroy, as well as for a devastating statistical debunking of the neocons' notion that America and the "new Europe" have now cornered the market on enlightenment (surely you didn't believe that the French are more anti-Semitic than the Poles -- did you?). posted by Steve M. | 2:27 PM | This is from a review by Nixon biographer Richard Reeves of a new book by Henry Kissinger: But Mr. Kissinger does not really believe in democracy. Neither did Nixon. Their fatal flaw was the contempt they had for American institutions—and Americans. The real enemies in their many books are, routinely, not the totalitarians they publicly and militarily opposed, but the Congress, the press and that misguided electorate.... I worked on the Nixon Presidency for the better part of 10 years, and found some of what I just said difficult to understand, at least at first. If one thing brought that together for me—and it was what I thought of while reading this book—it was something told me by Winston Lord, who was Mr. Kissinger’s principal assistant at the National Security Council and was often part of conversations between the President and his National Security Advisor. "They deliberately mirrored adversaries who were secretive," said Lord. "In China, only two or three people were involved in decision-making." Not an exact parallel to the present day, but... posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM | Friday, March 07, 2003 The most clear-eyed account of the Bush press conference is, naturally, written by a TV critic -- someone who doesn't give a damn about access, about that exclusive sit-down with 43 on Air Force One or Cheney in The Bunker. Read it, it's fun. I'll quote just one passage: There were brief interludes during the news conference -- especially the long languid pauses -- when some viewers might have flashed back to the presidency of Richard Nixon. That is, the Nixon Years at their most tumultuous and Twilight Zoney, when the old Trickster would come on TV and you'd sit there not just fascinated but a trifle terrified of what he might say, who he'd accuse of persecuting him, and whether he might come completely unglued or just melt into a hideous puddle right before your horrified eyes. He's right. I'm old enough to remember Nixon, and Bush absolutely shares Nixon's sneakiness, his paranoia, his free-floating resentment, his utter inability to relax as long as he knows that even one person, anywhere in the world, could possibly impede one of his goals in any way. They say we became more cynical as a nation after Watergate, but there was never a time in Nixon's presidency when his weirdness wasn't frankly discussed. Now, by contrast, if we talk about Bush's psyche at all we ascribe to him a praiseworthy Marlboro Man clarity of thought, utterly devoid of shadows and grays. This is utter nonsense. posted by Steve M. | 5:52 PM | This gives me the creeps: Teenage sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo faced a disciplinary hearing in jail for allegedly scrawling the word "Muhammad" on the floor of his cell and writing on his shoes.... After Malvo was taken to a hearing Monday at the Fairfax courthouse, deputies searched his cell and saw the word scrawled on the floor with a blue felt-tip pen that had been issued to Malvo, Barry told The Washington Post. Muhammad is the last name of the second sniper suspect.... When I started this blog, I wrote a few times about my belief that Malvo, after effectively becoming an orphan in his mid-teens, was the victim of grievous psychological harm at John Muhammad's hands. Muhammad, I thought, took over Malvo's identity. Reports at the time said Malvo ate what Muhammad told him to eat, walked several paces behind Muhammad, and sat in cold cars shivering while waiting for Muhammad to finish odd jobs; Malvo also called himself John because that was Muhammad's first name. It seemed to me that Malvo's ego had somehow been destroyed and remade in Muhammad's image. Later, as I began to read more and more reports that said Malvo was the triggerman in the snipings, and also that Malvo bragged about the killings, I found it harder to feel sympathy for him. And the report today also mentions a casual death threat by Malvo. But graffiti-ing another man's name is weird. I still think Malvo underwent some sort of soul-murder at Muhammad's hands. I think on some level he was killed by the events of his life -- obviously not in the vicious way he's said to have killed others, but not in a nice way, either. We don't have to be bleeding hearts -- we don't have to hold him blameless. But we ought to want to know what happened to him, so we can prevent it from happening to others -- and for the sake of the people those others might harm. posted by Steve M. | 5:36 PM | Does Ms. magazine still have that "No Comment" section? Does Ms. magazine still exist? Well, as Ms. says/used to say, no comment. posted by Steve M. | 3:35 PM | A lot of people think France, Germany, and Russia are trying to prevent an Iraq war because they have oil deals with Iraq (France and Russia) or they're actually violating trade sanctions on Iraq (France and Germany). But surely these countries can see that war is all but inevitable. If they were afraid of postwar consequences (from a U.S. president who's obviously highly vindictive), wouldn't they want to cooperate with him as much as possible? Wouldn't lining up with him make it more likely that they'd get a piece of the postwar oil action, and that any shady deals would be swept under the rug? posted by Steve M. | 1:56 PM | As I think about Bush's press conference last night, it occurs to me that what we were watching was a weird hybrid: a cold, contemptuous dad crossbred with a sullen teenager. Bush's message to the world certainly was that of a tyrant dad: "Why? Because I said so, that's why." But that was mixed with the attitude of a fifteen-year-old boy slumped in the backseat of Mom's SUV, consumed with exasperation because he isn't allowed to drive and isn't allowed to get a tattoo until he’s eighteen and isn't allowed to do anything. Old Europe, and Turkey, and protestors, and reporters, and Americans and Brits who support war only if there's a second resolution -- they all get to be at the wheel, singing those gross embarrassing hippie songs from the sixties and being totally lame. And Bush is not talking back, he's not raising his voice -- he's deliberately not raising his voice. He's explained a million times why he's right. But we're not listening. You know, as soon as he can, he's going to do exactly what he wants, and nobody's going to stop him. But for now, he can't. It's so unfair. posted by Steve M. | 12:24 PM | Thousands of American soldiers are pouring into Saudi Arabia in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, independent sources say. --Daily Telegraph (U.K.) Oh, great -- isn't the fact that we based troops in Saudi Arabia for Gulf War I precisely what pissed al-Qaeda off in the first place? posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM | REPUBLICAN PUNDIT: APPEASEMENT IS OK In North Korea, that is. That's what Charles Krauthammer says here. That lack of sound you hear is fellow conservatives not rushing to their PCs to denounce Krauthammer as "objectively pro-Kim Jong Il." posted by Steve M. | 10:04 AM | The New York Times has an article today about how the war is being discussed in schools: In Maine, for instance, Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat, admonished teachers to maintain neutrality recently after the National Guard complained that teachers, in their classrooms, were calling the military "unethical." Yes, we knew that -- it was reported in the Times and elsewhere. In an Omaha district, students said in interviews that a teacher had been playing Rush Limbaugh tapes in class. Oh, really? We didn't know that. Your liberal media in action. Now, I think it makes sense to have war talk in classrooms. And at the risk of sounding hokey, I'll add that I also think balance and mutual respect are necessary in these discussions. Here's what some right-wingers think about the right to disagree with the president: A teacher in Colorado who wore a "Not My President, Not My War" button on her coat during a school field trip has had her name, e-mail address, and phone number published at Free Republic (scroll down to post #2), after a Colorado radio host revealed her name. Nice, huh? I want to give the Freepers their due: In the discussion, some of them acknowledge feeling the same way about Clinton for eight years, and some of them think no political opinions should be expressed in classrooms on either side (or that pro-Bush students should respond by wearing buttons and T-shirts of their own). In other words, rather than licking their lips at the thought of harassing this teacher, they're looking for a fair single standard on this issue. But that doesn't excuse the posting of the number and e-mail address. posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Thursday, March 06, 2003 I gave up on the Bush press conference about halfway through. "As far as I can tell, it's all about war, war, war," Kos says. "And God tells him war is okay. And he's using a yoga voice -- perhaps to counter the 'foaming-at-the-mouth war-crazed' persona he's cultivated. But he sounds sedated." That basically sums it up. Instead, I decided to fisk Fred Barnes. I don't usually do this sort of thing, but Fred just made it so damn easy. He published a list of ten "peacenik" objections to Bush's war. He thinks he's got them well and truly debunked. I don't think so.... (1) Rush to war. ...President Bush has taken all the steps asked of him before going to war: getting the approval of Congress, getting another U.N. resolution (with perhaps yet another on the way), and building a coalition of supporters. He's hardly rushing. “All the steps asked of him”? Did he actually obtain that second UN resolution finding Saddam in material breach while I wasn’t looking? (2) It's a war for oil. The United States could buy all the oil it wants from Iraq by lifting the sanctions and helping to reconstruct the Iraqi oilfields. It's the French and Russians who have oil deals with Saddam and thus are fixated on that issue. They don't want a war that would upset those deals. Right -- obtaining oil from a country run by your own puppet regime is just as difficult as buying it from a megalomaniac dictator whose country you’ve bombed for a dozen years. (3) War with Iraq will bring more terrorism. This is a hardy perennial. It was claimed before the Gulf war and the Afghanistan campaign--and when bombs fell on al Qaeda and the Taliban during Ramadan.... The first Gulf War was followed by the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on the Khobar Towers and Cole, the African embassy bombings, the second World Trade Center bombing.... Rather than more terrorism, removing Saddam will bring more respect for the United States. Terrorists will be increasingly fearful. Right -- just like after the Afghan war. That disco in Bali? It bombed itself. (4) The Arab street will erupt. Another perennial. This is often predicted but rarely happens. A swift, decisive victory over Saddam will quiet the Arab street.... Sure -- just the way every swift, decisive Israeli retaliation for suicide bombings brings peace and harmony to the Palestinian street. (5) Bush is doing it for his dad. ... consider the source of this charge: Martin Sheen. No, Fred, you consider the source: George W. Bush. (6) Attacking Iraq would be unprovoked aggression. No, it wouldn't. Andrew Sullivan has pointed out a significant fact: There was no peace treaty, only the truce, so the state of war resumes when the conditions are violated.... There was no peace treaty after the Korean War, either. So if North Korea nukes Seoul in the next few months, shall we assume you’ll say it wasn’t unprovoked aggression, Fred? (7) Containment is working. The problem is the right threat is not being contained: the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Sure, with U.S. troops and U.N. inspectors in the area, Saddam won't attack Jordan or Syria or other neighbors. But he could slip chemical or biological agents to terrorists without anyone knowing. And that's the threat. Anyone with chem, bio, or nuclear weapons, or the capacity to make them, could slip them to terrorists. But what evidence do we have that this is Saddam’s M.O.? Why would a guy who is sitting on a fixed plot of land -- unlike bin Laden -- do that and risk a massive, possibly nuclear, retaliation? And by the way, when did all the GOP dictionaries start to redefine “could” and “might” and “almost certainly will”? (8) America doesn't have enough allies. What? Forty or so isn't enough? Is the case for war weakened in the slightest by the absence of the French or the Angolans? ... That’s not the question. The question is: In the post-Cold War world, is the case for a war to uphold the international order weakened by the absence of the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Japanese -- for starters? (9) Win without war. That's a nice goal. Unfortunately, it's Saddam's goal. With no war, he wins and emerges as the new strongman in the Middle East, forcing people to come to terms with him. Ringed by troops, dogged by inspectors, reined in by sanctions, able to control only the half of his own country that’s outside the no-fly zones -- this would make him a “strongman”? (10) Bush is seeking a new American empire. ... I'll let Secretary of State Colin Powell answer this one. When hectored by a former archbishop of Canterbury on this subject recently, he said: "We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last 100 years . . . and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in." Well said. All that was before we had a president named George W. Bush. posted by Steve M. | 11:26 PM | Was the Churchill of our times outargued by a bunch of kids half his age? Prime Minister Tony Blair took the debate on Iraq Thursday to some of his youngest critics — a studio audience for MTV... Niklas Ergandt, 25, of Sweden set the tone early. "I'm able to produce anthrax in my bathroom," he said. "Why don't you bomb Sweden?" The audience accused Blair of showing "absolute disdain" for public opinion and the people of Iraq. He was also charged with potentially making terrorism worse by planning to attack Iraq and failing to provide sufficient evidence to support military action.... The encounter — due to air in Britain on Friday before it is broadcast in Europe, Australia, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and eventually the United States on Monday — won praise from some members of the audience, but most were not impressed. "I'm fairly pessimistic. I've heard it all before," said Juan Allos, 23, an Iraqi exile now living in London.... posted by Steve M. | 6:10 PM | Around ten thousand Russian citizens have applied for entry visas into Iraq to defend this country against the planned aggression by the warmongering USA and UK, according to the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow.... The requests come from young males, some with combat experience, who describe themselves as “volunteers” who are willing to defend Iraq against the illegal armed aggression of the USA and the United Kingdom, two countries which continue to follow a belligerent stance on crisis management, wholly outside the generally accepted concepts of a New World Order based upon multilateralist approaches to problem solving, based upon the United Nations Organisation, a position championed by president Putin’s Russian Federation.... --Pravda I'm less concerned with the content of the story than with the rhetoric. Is Pravda still essentially in sync with the Russian government? And haven't we been assuming for a decade or so that these guys are now our friends? This sounds exactly like the Soviet rhetoric of my Cold War youth. Is this kind of talk just an ingrained habit at Pravda -- or is George Bush truly alienating a somewhat more powerful global ally than France? (Thanks to Susan M. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 4:51 PM | It looks as if this was planned a long time ago, but surely true patriots would try to do something about it: The itinerary for a May cruise sponsored by National Review, scourge of the Euro-appeaseniks, requires participants to spend a couple of nights at a hotel in ... Munich. What -- there aren't any good hotels in the "new Europe"? Then again, maybe the participants are planning to trash the place. I hear Jonah Goldberg spray-paints a mean weasel. posted by Steve M. | 2:05 PM | Fred Kaplan in Slate reminds us that this isn't even going to be a preemptive war: ...the war that Bush II is pushing is a different sort of war, a war in which we launch an invasion, not in response to aggression and not even "pre-emptively" (to strike the first blow before the other country does) but "preventively" (to keep the other country from doing something that might let it pose an imminent threat someday). Then he makes what should be a thuddingly obvious point: There may be a case for preventive war, but if the aim of the war is protecting the international order, then that case should be acceptable to the agency that represents the international order. Specifically, if the war is supposed to enforce a U.N. resolution, then the case for war should be acceptable to the United Nations. A couple of paragraphs later, he makes another one: If the administration lacks the acumen or persuasive power to deal with such familiar institutions as the U.N. Security Council or the established governments of France, Germany, Turkey, Russia, China—even Canada—then how is it going to handle Iraq's feuding opposition groups, Kurdish separatists, and myriad ethno-religious factions, to say nothing of the turbulence throughout the region? posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM | I love this: Protest the Hollywood Left Elites Without Leaving Home "Sacrificing for the war effort? You bet I'm sacrificing for the war effort! I got carpal tunnel syndrome sending all those e-mails to CAA protesting the anti-war statements of Viggo Mortensen!" posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM | China closed ranks with France, Germany and Russia on Thursday, vowing to block a new UN resolution authorising war on Iraq as the pressure intensified on the United States. --news story Now China's part of the Axis of Weasels! Yet another soft, feminine country that became squeamish about the use of force in the latter half of the twentieth century? posted by Steve M. | 9:04 AM | Wednesday, March 05, 2003 It seems likely that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is has been undergoing torture. Does 9/11 justify torture? Does anything? The Economist addressed that question back in January and said this: Even if you allow, as many will not, that torture might be justified under the most extreme circumstances, it would be difficult to confine its use to those very rare cases. Any system that allowed torture in tightly controlled situations would risk eroding into wider use. To legalise is to encourage. Israel tried to limit use of physical coercion to extreme cases, but its security forces have ended up using such methods far more widely than was initially foreseen. If America were to sanction torture, to begin with in extremely rare cases, there might be some immediate gains in security. Much as one would like to believe that torture never succeeds in extracting vital information, history says otherwise. But, for the democratic West, any such gains would be outweighed by greater harm. The prohibition against torture expresses one of the West's most powerful taboos—and some taboos (like that against the use of nuclear weapons) are worth preserving even at heavy cost. Though many authoritarian regimes use torture, not one of even these openly admits it. A decision by the United States to employ some forms of torture, no matter how limited the circumstances, would shatter the taboo. The morale of the West in what may be a long war against terrorism would be gravely set back: to stay strong, the liberal democracies need to be certain that they are better than their enemies. George Bush has said that the fight against al-Qaeda is a battle for hearts and minds, not just a matter of military power. Though critics focus on his sabre-rattling, Mr Bush has been consistent in his claims to be defending human rights and democracy, and he has persisted in reaching out to Muslims, though he rarely gets credit for this. To keep the moral high ground, he needs to bolster public disavowals of torture by specifying the methods American interrogators can employ, by enforcing the limits, and by desisting from handing prisoners over to less scrupulous allies. I agree. It's clear that Bush has handed KSM over to nasty interrogators. It's also clear that the U.S. doesn't care who knows that. The Vietnam-era saying was "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." This seems to be the Bush administration's attitude toward everyone on the planet. (Thanks to Dock for pointing out the Economist editorial.) posted by Steve M. | 5:33 PM | ...the Turks do not propose to help guarantee [the Turkey-Iraq] border or to protect those who live within it. Rather, they propose to cross the frontier for no better reason than to aggrandize themselves and to prolong the subjection of their own Kurdish population. This doesn't just disgrace the regime-change strategy. It actually destabilizes it. And it's humiliating to see the president begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing and to see them in return reject his offer. --Christopher Hitchens in Slate Well, guess what, Hitchypoo? The process of begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing is clearly still going on. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hitch: You can't just support the war you wish Bush would fight. There's only one war -- his -- and either you have to support that war or you have to oppose it. There just isn't another choice. posted by Steve M. | 2:08 PM | Sometimes pointing out the hypocrisy and shamelessness is just too easy: Frist: Veterans May Have to Sacrifice Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pledged Tuesday to support veterans concerned about President Bush's health care proposals, but also said veterans and others will have to make sacrifices should the nation go to war with Iraq.... ...he later told reporters that the costs of the Iraq war would mean "we all have to sacrifice in various ways as we likely engage in military conflict, which we could not have anticipated a year ago, which is not fully budgeted and which ultimately will have to compete with what many of us want. "It applies to me in terms of domestic priorities and it applies to groups like the veterans today as they lobby," Frist said. ...Bush proposed a 7.7 percent increase, to $27.5 billion, for veterans' medical care in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. But the budget request also proposed fee increases and limits on access, which are unpopular with veterans and have been rejected by the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Bush's budget also proposed charging veterans who earn about $24,000 a year or more an annual enrollment fee of $250. And it proposed increasing copayments for higher-income patients, from $15 to $20 for outpatient primary care and $7 to $15 for prescription drugs.... --Newsday House Panel Enlists Military Bill In Cause of Business Tax Breaks Days before the House Ways and Means Committee took up an innocuous military bill last month, Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) made an offer to other Republican committee members at their weekly luncheon: prepare a wish list of tax breaks under $100 million each, and they could add them to the measure. "It was Mr. Thomas's idea," said panel member Jim McCrery (R-La.), adding that Democrats declined the same offer. "Everybody in the meeting agreed there were a lot of little tax items we had not [been able to enact] the last couple of years. This was something that was going to move." ...If the House accepts the committee's version, and it survives an eventual conference committee with senators, then racetrack owners and horse breeders would have an easier time enticing foreigners to bet on their races; an alternative type of diesel fuel would get a tax break, and U.S.-made bows and arrows would sell for less.... --Washington Post posted by Steve M. | 1:46 PM | Let's slam, punch, kick, pummel. gouge, and otherwise cause the maximum hurt on Saddam. LET'S ROLL!!!!!! --comment in a Lucianne.com discussion TERRORISTS BEWARE -- RUGBY PLAYER ONBOARD --bumper sticker approvingly noted by InstaPundit I'm sorry -- these people are children. Either they don't know what war is or they just don't care to think about it. Support the damn war if you want, but grow up -- acknowledge the true nature of what you're supporting: "People are going to die. As hard as we try to limit civilian casualties, it will occur. We need to condition people that that is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be." -- General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff posted by Steve M. | 12:18 PM | In a serious challenge to the Bush administration, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia said in a joint declaration today that they would not permit passage of a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of armed force against Iraq. -- New York Times Russia officially joins the Axis of Weasels! So does this mean that horny war boosters have to boycott t.A.T.u.? posted by Steve M. | 11:42 AM | "Pro-war"? Bite your tongue! No one is pro-war. All those people you think are pro-war are actually pro-liberation. It's one thing to learn that political pros -- Newt Gingrich, say, or his pollster, Frank Luntz -- are urging fellow Republicans to play Orwellian word games like this. But now the amateurs are doing it. And the creepy thing is, they're proud of it. posted by Steve M. | 10:19 AM | "This is all about the recognition that North Korea may decide that the next few weeks are their best shot at starting to build a nuclear arsenal and getting away with it," a senior official said today. "That's what we've got to stop — if we can figure out how." --New York Times "If we can figure out how." Well, that certainly inspires confidence, doesn't it? posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Boorish God-bothering American know-nothings with lapel flags? European denunciations of the new yokel hegemon? ’Twas ever thus. Read Simon Schama's history of European resentment of Americans in this week's New Yorker. Highly entertaining, and probably just what you need to confirm your nastiest stereotypes -- whether of sneering Euros or of overly self-satisfied Yanks. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.” -- Frances Trollope posted by Steve M. | 9:12 AM | Tuesday, March 04, 2003 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being tortured. According to Pakistani and U.S. officials, Mohammed is beginning to crack after three days of unspecified rough treatment by Pakistani interrogators. "If you are dealing with a terrorist you hardly go to them with a rose and a bowl of soup and say you come with good intentions," Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told ABCNEWS in Islamabad. "He is holding out, but I don't think he'll be able to hold out much longer," Hayat said. "There is always an end to human endurance." --ABC News Then again, maybe you don't have a problem with that. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 PM | Right-Thinking from the Left Coast may be the right-wing blog for people who think Crank Yankers is too erudite, but I appreciate the fact that Right-Thinking linked this story from the Korea Times: NK Missile Warhead Found in Alaska The warhead of a long-range missile test-fired by North Korea was found in the U.S. state of Alaska, a report to the National Assembly revealed yesterday. ``According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska,’’ former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. ``Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.’’... Lee at Right-Thinking asks, "Firstly, how did the United States not detect this missile as it entered US airspace, and wipe North Korea off the face of the earth? And secondly, why is the first we are hearing of this in the Korea Times?" Interesting questions. What exactly is our plan to (a) deter North Korea and (b) avert a cataclysm? And does our press think this story is not credible or just not, on the administration's terms, "on message"? posted by Steve M. | 5:44 PM | Janeane Garofalo is a smart anti-war entertainer; needless to say, this makes Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online nuts. Here's Goldberg trying to debunk one of Garofalo's arguments: So let us put aside the question of the messenger and take a look at Garofalo's message. On a recent edition of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow asked her about Saddam Hussein: "Has he been a mass murderer? She responded, "Yes, there's been a lot of people who have been mass murderers. And I think Turkey also, who we've been negotiating with, has one of the worst human-rights records in the world. Also, the sanctions, you could say, have been responsible for mass murder." He asked, "Do you think he is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction?" She responded, "Yes, I think lots of people are eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction." Sigh. This is the "Everybody does it" argument. According to this logic, we shouldn't stop any one serial killer if we aren't willing to stop all of them. I'm a bit confused. What's Goldberg saying here? Is he saying we don't try to stop all serial killers? Is he saying we are (to use his word) not willing to do so, as a matter of policy? Is he saying we practice police realpolitik and try to stop only the serial killers whose incarceration serves our criminologico-strategic ends, while sensibly letting others go on killing? posted by Steve M. | 3:19 PM | If you can't bear to read Peggy Noonan's current column, let me just sum it up: Apparently she doesn't vote Democratic now, in 2003, because of what Democrats -- or some Democrats, or some people she assumed were Democrats -- believed or said in the disco era. Apparently she thinks Democrats hate Republicans but Republicans feel for Democrats nothing but the highest respect, a belief she has presumably sustained by placing her fingers in her ears every time a Republican in the past decade has uttered a sentence with the name "Clinton" in it. Apparently she believes only the Democratic Party has a preferred position on abortion -- a belief I will second when she (or anyone else) provides me with a complete list of powerful elected Republican in D.C. over the past two decades who have been pro-choice. posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM | LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND (REALLY SIMPLE) STATISTICS You have had only one two-term Democratic president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak. --Peggy Noonan, addressing Democrats in her latest column Quick quiz: How many Republican presidents have served two terms in the last 35 years? Answer: One. Just Ronald Reagan. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | Michael Savage's Savage Nation was #1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list. It just got knocked off the top of the chart by .... ...Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. Heh heh heh. posted by Steve M. | 11:19 AM | UPDATE: I learn from Ted Barlow that the Drug Enforcement Administration's museum has a new exhibit: Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists & You. Um, guys, let's review that BBC story (based on a U.S. State Department report) once again: Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin last year, after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban which had banned cultivation of opium poppies. I'd like to state for the record that I find the DEA museum's simulated World Trade Center debris display utterly tasteless. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 AM | It's all about freedom ... it's all about doing right by the Iraqi people ... American forces will play the key role in the capture of Baghdad, with British troops being confined to the south of Iraq. “It won’t be the Union flag flying over Baghdad,” one British defence source said. ...if there has to be an assault on Baghdad to overcome resistance by Iraq’s Republican Guard, the mission will be carried out exclusively by American forces, the sources said. A senior British Army source said: “This decision is part political, part military, but the Americans have made it clear Baghdad is their prize.”... --Times of London posted by Steve M. | 9:44 AM | Expensive war in the offing? Obviously there's only one possible response: even more corporate tax cuts! Corporate Gain, Treasury's Loss in Bush Plan The Bush administration's tax proposal on dividends has become more friendly to investors and to some companies that pay no taxes. The effect of the latest changes, if enacted by Congress, would probably be to reduce the government's tax revenue by even more than under the original plan. The changes, included in the legislative language last week when the bill was introduced by Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, mean that a number of companies whose dividends would have been taxable under the president's original proposal would now be tax exempt.... One change will benefit companies that in the past have been forced to pay the corporate alternative minimum tax. Such payments can in some cases allow companies to avoid paying corporate income taxes, but under the latest version of the Bush plan, those companies may be able to pay tax-exempt dividends even as they avoid paying taxes. So we're replacing what the conservatives call "double taxation" with ... what? Double lack of taxation? ...The other principal change would make it easier for companies to obtain refunds of taxes paid in previous years, and would make it easier for cyclical companies — companies that may make money in some years and lose money in others — to make all their dividends tax-exempt. That would not have been possible under the original Bush proposal.... Drunk on tax cutting.... posted by Steve M. | 9:25 AM | From the BBC: Afghanistan retakes heroin crown Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin last year, after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban which had banned cultivation of opium poppies. The finding was made in a key drug report, distributed in Kabul on Sunday by the US State Department, which supports almost identical findings by the United Nations last week. Low-grade heroin is refined in Afghanistan from opium, which is manufactured from the extract of poppies. "The size of the opium harvest in 2002 makes Afghanistan the world's leading opium producer," the report said.... Well, that puts a whole new spin on this Washington Post headline from last week: Now, It's Business That Booms: With Bombs Mostly Silenced, Commerce and Confidence Are Growing in Kabul posted by Steve M. | 8:04 AM | Monday, March 03, 2003 It's said that people in the oil business shrug off losing huge amounts of money -- they simply expect that sometimes there'll be big gains and sometimes there'll be big losses. Supposedly rich kids don't worry much about what can go wrong in their lives because they figure someone will help them out if things get too bad. Alcoholics lose the ability to assess the harm they're doing to themselves and others. And fervent believers in God regularly assume that God will protect them from danger. George W. Bush has been all of these things. No wonder he has no ability to judge risk. We've heard that Bush's tax plan is bold. His Iraq war plan is bold, too. His North Korea policy? Well, that seems to be nonexistent. But what they all have in common is the notion that nothing can really go wrong. Deliberately creating massive deficits won't really hurt us. Ignoring North Korea won't open the door to calamitous acts of aggression. Attacking Saddam won't lead to desperate chem/bio attacks. Pissing off the Arab/Muslim world won't lead to more terrorism in years to come. Alienating allies from France to Turkey, from Russia to Mexico, won't have disastrous long-term consequences. Easy come, easy go. Dad, get me out of this. Screw it -- let's have another drink. The Lord will provide. posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM | "HILLARY HAWKS UP WAR TALK," the headline in the New York Post headline says. But read the lead: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "fully supports" President Bush's Iraq policy, her office said last night - on the eve of her visit today to an upstate arsenal that makes military hardware like mortars and howitzers for U.S. troops. "Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction," said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. Read it again carefully -- "Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken...." That's an endorsement of military pressure and UN diplomacy. It's not an endorsement of war. It's also not an objection to war fever. It's a non-stance disguised as a stance. This is the kind of statement Clinton-haters call "Clintonesque"; alas, when it comes to this kind of thing they have a point. posted by Steve M. | 3:35 PM | I said last night that The Sun was predicting a war this week. What The Sun is actually saying is that war my start as early as next week. My error. A disturbing prospect either way, of course. posted by Steve M. | 3:24 PM | Seen "BushBlair.mpg" yet? It's a little music video about the special relationship that dare not speak its name. Go here and click on the link, or just click on this link or this one (which seems to be faster). Or just wait -- someone's bound to e-mail it to you, if that hasn't happened already. (Am I months behind the curve on this?) (UPDATE: Yes, I am.) posted by Steve M. | 1:40 PM | What did Jesus think of people who boast of their piety the way George W. Bush does? Here's what the Man said: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 18:10-14, KJV) Now, here's Bush, as seen in Howard Fineman's Newsweek cover story "Bush and God": As he prepared to run, in 1999, Bush assembled leading pastors at the governor’s mansion for a “laying-on of hands,” and told them he’d been “called” to seek higher office. In the GOP primaries, he outmaneuvered the field by practicing what one rival, Gary Bauer, called “identity politics.” Others tried to woo evangelicals by pledging strict allegiance on issues such as abortion and gay rights. “Bush talked about his faith,” said Bauer, “and people just believed him—and believed in him.” You can't blame Bush, in a way -- even though Jesus urges humility and self-abnegation in Bible passage after Bible passage, an awful lot of American Bibles seem to be missing those passages. As a result, America is lousy with Pharisees, people who endlessly boast of their own godliness. Fineman's article makes clear that Bush and his döppelganger, Karl Rove, figured out how to appeal to these people many years ago. Of course, Fineman's article is part of that permanent campaign. posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM | An e-mailer from Brazil tells me that an e-mail is making the rounds urging people to buy European rather than American products. Yes, American right-wingers, it's true: people who don't agree with you can also express their political opinions at the checkout counter. Sorry to be the one to break this to you. The Brazilian correspondent says he's doing his bit to stand up for the right to disagree with the U.S. -- he spent quite a bit of money recently at Carrefour. Carrefour is a French supermarket chain with stores in many countries, including Brazil. Amazing, isn't it? French people actually work for a living. Some of them even run large, thriving businesses with global reach. They don't just sit around all day smoking Gauloises and sneering at Americans who aren't named Jerry Lewis. No one in the American media has ever reported such a thing. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM | WHAT WE OBTAIN TOO CHEAP WE ESTEEM TOO LIGHTLY --from a sign seen at a pro-war rally in Washington, D.C., March 1, 2003 "The price of gasoline has gone up very little compared to other consumer goods," said Bill Hickman, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based trade group [the American Petroleum Institute].... When historic prices are adjusted for inflation, however, it turns out the average price for a gallon of gasoline in the United States was well above $1.80 per gallon for most of the 20th century. For example, a gallon of gasoline cost just 25 cents in 1918. In 2002 dollars, that would be the equivalent of $3 a gallon, according to federal statistics cited by the American Petroleum Institute. Until 1970, when the actual price for a gallon was 36 cents, the inflation-adjusted price never fell below $1.70. As the gas crisis and rapid inflation both hit in the 1970s and early 1980s, prices at the pump took off. By 1981, a gallon of gasoline cost $1.35 -- or $2.69 in adjusted dollars before easing back below $2 in the mid-1980s. The last decade has seen some of the lowest gasoline prices in U.S. history, when adjusted for inflation. They bottomed out in 1998, when the average price per gallon was $1.12, or $1.23 in adjusted dollars.... --news article posted by Steve M. | 8:07 AM | Sunday, March 02, 2003 It appears the U.S. government is spying on the phone calls and e-mails of the U.N. delegations of Security Council nations, looking for ways to get them to vote America's way on the Iraq resolution. And it appears the government is stupid or arrogant enough to let knowledge of the spy plan leak to the press (Britain's Observer). Here's the text of the memo. Is it real? If so, and if this is not merely appalling but typical U.N practice, you have to wonder whether Nixon is calling in plays to this White House from hell. posted by Steve M. | 11:53 PM | Britain's Sun claims the war could start this week. Yikes! Wonder if The Sun will suspend publication of Page 3 girls for the duration. (Link from InstaPundit.) posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM | Cheering, chanting and waving flags, thousands jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into downtown Houston's Jones Plaza on Saturday to hear politicians, soldiers and entertainers praise God, America and President Bush's firm stand against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The ostensibly nonpartisan "Rally for America," sponsored by talk radio station KPRC, quickly turned into a spirited affirmation of Bush's policies. Speakers included House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.... DeLay told the crowd that President Bush is "fighting principle battles and he's not backing down. He's a Texan." --Houston Chronicle Statements like that are really going to help us win that Security Council vote, aren't they? posted by Steve M. | 4:32 PM | In the 11 years since the end of the gulf war, Kurds in northern Iraq have built their enclave into a surprisingly prosperous democracy.... the Kurds can argue that they have built the only democracy that has ever existed on Iraqi soil, one that could be a model for the rest of the country. --article in the New York Times Week in Review section. The Bush administration argues that a "liberated" Iraq will be a shining example to the Arab/Muslim world, a democratic city on a hill. But Iraq's Kurdish region already has democratic institutions, and is doing quite well. And Turkey is a real democracy. These cities-on-hills aren't inspiring the region to rise up and spontaneously throw off its shackles. Why should we believe that a post-Saddam Iraq will be any more inspirational? posted by Steve M. | 10:59 AM | On Friday night, CNN's Aaron Briwn interviewed John Ferrugia, a Colorado reporter who's been investigation the rash of sexual assault allegations at the Air Force Academy. Ferrugia said this: The culture of the Air Force Academy, according to the women we've been talking to, and even women who have been there and are now officers -- we've even talked to many who have called us, e-mailed us. And they talk about the culture where sexual assault is accepted. It's within the culture. It just happens there. We've been told that, from the second or third week that women are there, they have upper-class trainers, juniors and seniors. Some of those are women. Women tell them and warn them, in the time you're here, this is going to happen to you. It's going to happen to many of you. Don't report it, because, if you do, your career is over. And yet The New York Times now reports this: Early last year, a panel created in part to help address the problem of sexual assault within the military found itself under fire. Five former chairwomen of the panel urged Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resist pressure to disband it from conservative administration advisers, who said they thought the panel was fostering what one called "radical feminism" and was no longer needed because women had been fully integrated into the military. The former chairwomen of the embattled panel — which since 1951 had been weighing in on women's issues — emphasized the importance of its independent role in overseeing the military's handling of sex crimes.... The Pentagon responded by letting the panel's charter expire in February 2002, replacing its members and changing its agenda. Though still known as the Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, it no longer advises the military on sexual assault.... Just a little more compassionate conservatism from the Bush administration. posted by Steve M. | 12:44 AM | Now, It's Business That Booms: With Bombs Mostly Silenced, Commerce and Confidence Are Growing in Kabul --headline in The Washington Post, February 26, 2003 Abqel Khan, 2, smiles at his grandmother, but he cannot even crawl or walk because of severe malnutrition. In Kabul, the number of children suffering from malnutrition has increased to 11 percent in 2002 from 6 percent in 2001. --photo caption in the Week in Review section of the March 2 New York Times (print edition, page 2; online edition here). posted by Steve M. | 12:22 AM | On Friday I chided Daniel Skinner of The Weekly Standard, who garbled the expression "the die is cast" even as he criticized Fred Durst for apparently making up the word "agreeance" in an anti-war statement at the Grammy Awards. Well, now Matthew Yglesias has interrupted work on his senior thesis to top that: He went to the OED and discovered that "agreeance" is actually a word. Nice work, Matthew. I got a rejection letter from Harvard many years ago, and all of a sudden I feel I deserved it. posted by Steve M. | 12:12 AM | |
|
|
