Road Rage Culture

The other day, in my 9/11 post, I made the rather mundane contention that there is at least a significant level of correlation, if not outright causation, between the continued dumbing down of American culture -- indeed, a nearly pornographic, snuff-film dumbassification -- and how intellectually equipped the majority of us might be to handle future challenges.

This Jon Carroll column prompts me to expand on that a bit more.

The idea I'm promoting today is "conservation of outrage." In these troubled times, outrage is a limited commodity. There are only so many hours in the day. Outrage is also physically fatiguing, and people who overindulge are likely to stop altogether for weeks or months. And yet outrage is necessary, because it gives us the strength to fight back.

So we need triage. We need risk assessment. We need to remember that just because the herd is running some place doesn't mean that we have to run that way too. Even if it's our herd.

There was, for instance, the recent "9/11" movie that appeared on ABC. It was apparently riddled with errors, mostly having to do with the Clinton administration (lazy and bad) and the current administration (tough and committed). I say "apparently" because I didn't watch it. Did you watch it? Some people did, but not nearly as many people as watched professional football.

It is of course scandalous that docudramas should contain errors, because ... wait, no it isn't. They're fictionalized accounts of real events. Therefore they contain fiction. Plus, it's five years later: Hasn't everyone already made up their minds about what happened on 9/11, and who did it, and why? Do you suppose a lot of people care about the precise role of, forgodsakes, Sandy Berger?

I am all for the notion of choosing our battles in a more focused manner. I do not think that pointing out the inherent political bent and lies by omission and commission was an exercise in futility. The whole selling point of the thing was its supposed veracity, that it had been based on the official 9/11 Commission Report and had been vetted as historically accurate by none other than Tom Kean, who apparently sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver and some choice Mouse swag.

So when you have a major media conglomerate sinking $40 mil of its own money -- and recall that production on this turd started just months after Disney refused to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 precisely because of the political content of that movie -- into what can most charitably be characterized as reckless historical revisionism of a very recent politically-charged event that has literally changed the direction of human history, it is incredibly irresponsible to even allow the fig leaf of "docudrama" to enter the picture.

Perhaps more people watched football because even if they ignored the pitched battles on both sides of the fence, they at least intuited that football had more reality to it than Path to 9/11. Hell, professional wrestling is more real.

So not only do I think that this crappy crockumentary was a worthwhile windmill to tilt at, I suggest that if there weren't what seems to be an unwritten contract between the networks not to embarrass each other, we'd know more. We'd understand that maybe Disney has conflicts of interest, that their enormous amusement park in Florida (perhaps you've heard of it) can be directly affected by whether Jeb Bush (perhaps you've heard of him; his older brother is the figurehead of the American federal government) views them favorably or not. They have always cultivated relationships with people who can legislatively make or cost them money. It's never been a secret; they're just usually a tad more circumspect about it. The project had more upside in the tide of '04 triumphalism.

The only difference between this government and the Sun King's palace at Versailles is the costumery and the powdered wigs -- excepting, as always, Dennis Hastert. That Disney chose to dance with those that brung them is not terribly earth-shattering, nor, sadly, is the fact that the "responsible" media saw fit to chase their own tail and play up the sensationalism of the story. Again, this may just be professional courtesy; with one network owned by The Cult Of The Mouse, and the other two by defense contractors, they all have vested interests in looking past each others' cemeteries.

Still, Carroll's essential point is correct -- we have become so steeped, so conditioned and predisposed to dyspeptic ignorance, that the whole dynamic has been rendered counterproductive. Focused anger can be quite revelatory and productive; a bunch of scattershot boobs diluting a more practical message with their "Free Mumia" and "No to Veal" signs, not so much.

Carroll touches on another example that alerts me to the meta-implications, and thus the main point here.

So the headline is "Television Producers Exploit Hot-Button Topics." That may be outrageous, but it's not unusual. I mean, Nancy Grace killed a woman last week -- that might be worth a letter of concern. (OK, she didn't kill anyone; she may have just driven someone to suicide. But she got a decent ratings spike.)

Grace's victim, if you haven't heard, was a 21-year-old single mother named Melinda Duckett. Duckett was accused -- and, let's be honest, appears thus far to be guilty as hell -- of the disappearance and likely murder of her two-year-old son, Trenton. Duckett apparently had a bad breakup with her boyfriend, compounded by emotional problems. This may have precipitated an emotional collapse where she concocted a scheme to make it appear that her son was kidnapped, apparently at random, while she was watching a movie with friends.

The alibi didn't really hold water, and Duckett naïvely agreed to allow herself to be grilled by Grace, who took her usual glee at skewering the weak defenses of a confused young woman. The kicker is that mere hours after Grace's interrogation, Duckett went home, sat in a closet, took her grandfather's shotgun, and blew her brains out.

Not only has Grace refused to admit any wrongdoing in the matter, she doesn't even seem to care. Apparently any complicity she may have in driving Melinda Duckett to kill herself is mitigated by the preponderance of evidence that indicates that Duckett probably killed her son and faked his kidnapping.

The first meta-issue here is obvious: Grace, supposedly a lawyer, should know better, that especially in a highly-charged case like this, it is tremendously counterproductive (again, that word) to be harassing the prime suspect on her stupid teevee show. There is something called due process, letting the law enforcement professionals do their job, take care of the investigative process, nail (as we say in the semi-informed lingo) the perp.

There was nothing to be had by baiting Duckett on national TV, even a crappy basic cable net like Headline News. No matter what Grace may insist otherwise, she adds nothing to the legal discussion of the case at hand. She has merely clogged the wheels of justice with blood now, however inadvertently. The only way Grace will ever face any consequences for any of this is if Trenton Duckett suddenly turns up alive and well.

Which brings me to the other meta-issue in this case, which taps into the still larger meta-issue of the commodification of outrage, and how we have gladly played into it. Why, exactly, does Nancy Grace have a show on the (at this point) euphemistically named "Headline News Network"? Why does radio loon Glenn Beck also have a show on that network? One might as well ask why supposed fellow "news" network MSNBC lards its late-night programming with profiles of maximum-security prisons, without ever mentioning that some of them are actually staffed by private corporations, thus diluting the principles of accountability, even to incarcerated felons. (Not to mention that Wackenhut also provides security services for nuclear power plants, so chances are that there's at least some crossover between them and General Electric at some point.)

So not only has the line of what is "news" been hopelessly blurred, perhaps irretrievably, but we have allowed the providers of News Product™ to continue to define it as they see fit, with nary a peep. Talk-show screamers like Grace and Beck simply have no place on a network that truly cares about responsible, legitimate news programming. They're simply the electronic equivalents of circus geeks, and now that image of a decapitated chicken hanging from the ravenous bloody maw of Nancy Grace is perhaps a bit more literal if one superimposes Melinda Duckett's head -- or what was left of it -- in Grace's piehole.

I'm not sure if it's an indication of what we've become that enough people continue to watch this shit to keep it on the air, or if technology and niche marketing are simply enabling humans to indulge their basest impulses. But it's disturbing enough that a teeth-gnashing anger pimp like Grace is on the air in the first place; that the Melinda Duckett "controversy" actually caused a spike in the ratings is abysmal.

I honestly cannot think of a single -- not one -- actual news network. Even charitably defining such a media entity as one that dedicates at least twelve hours per day to actual serious original news programming, there simply isn't one. The closest you get are the regurgitated "headline" shows, which just package the day's events in a half-hour box, and recycle them all day, with occasional updates of actual breaking news.

Even these half-hour segments are put together more or less like a traditional network newscast -- some "hard-hitting" headline story, surface gloss about a serious, complex world event; a health care or finance story meant to scare the shit out of you, so that you can lay awake nights praying to whatever sky fairy you prefer that the masters of the universe don't decide to outsource your job to Bangalore; feel-good kitten-in-a-tree story to wrap things up with at least a frisson of human decency.

At the end of the day though, precious little of that is useful news. Everything else is peppered with "personality" shows not-too-cleverly disguised as actual news shows. When Anderson Cooper and Paula Zahn are the stars, above the facts they read from a teleprompter, there is a systemic problem.

And the most recent egregious example of the circus mentality behind the news is the accession of Katie Couric to the chair once held by Walter Cronkite. That, in and of itself, would bear scrutiny in a serious nation -- Cronkite was and is a serious, learned man, who brooked no nonsense, and carefully considered his opinion before offering it. Despite his status in the news industry of that era as a "star", Cronkite understood that such a paradigm was unconscionable to true journalism. This is anathema in modern American culture, where opinions are merely currency, the more outrageous, the higher the value.

As Matt Taibbi points out, in a media environment practically brimming with truly important, momentous stories that can and will affect all of our lives, the "big scoop" little Katie brought with her to occupy the great man's chair was a bunch of Vanity Fair photos of the world's most famous infant (other than the preznit).

What a joke American journalism is. Our entire Army is on its knees before a few thousand gun-toting religious fanatics in the Arabian desert, and here's our government, taking food out of the mouths of foster kids and single moms to go binge-shopping with our tax money in the Sharper Image catalog of the industrial world. And what's on TV? Fucking Suri Cruise? Are you kidding me?

It's not Suri Cruise's fault that Couric is conditioned by decades of morning-show nonsense, and it's not even TomKat's fault that they've been made to feel like they have to do stupid stunts like this to preserve their sanity from baying hounds of paparazzi. At the end of the day, it may not even be the paparazzi's fault. They do what they do because inexplicably there's a market for it. Maybe it's our fault for letting it get this far, for letting it sink so low. Maybe we're the problem, for allowing this sort of corporate conditioning to go on, for giving up books and thought for video games and bright shiny objects.

And the conditioning continues, as I said before, in the heartless nihilism and induced backstabbing that's part and parcel of "game shows" and "entertainment", and the increasingly blurred line between those things and "news". Balanced with something else, that's one thing, but it appears more and more that people are not getting back to their Proust after Fear Factor is over. They're turning to whatever drug is handy, whether it's caffeine, alcohol, illegal drugs, porn, or canned rage. It's a toxic feedback loop, and it's starting to literally affect our collective decision-making process. We can either start regaining some semblance of balance in our culture, or we can continue amusing ourselves to death.

The Torture Never Stops

Knives and spikes, and guns and the likes of every tool of pain.
And a sinister midget, with a bucket and a mop, where the blood goes down the drain....
And it stinks so bad, his bones been chokin', and weepin' greenish drops.
In the night of the iron sausage, where the torture never stops. -- Frank Zappa

There will come a point in time, not too distant in the future I believe, when we will look back at Bush's righteous petulance over the peons daring to question his divinely-gifted wisdom, and perhaps mark a turning point when the idea of the American government torturing prisoners and spying on its citizens lost some of the Jack Bauer bad-boy frisson. The transcript doesn't quite give the full flavor of the seething anger and emanating from the (literally) bully pulpit, as an increasingly impotent unitary executive starts to feel all that accumulated power slipping, and he squirms under the questioning of David Gregory, of all people:

QUESTION: Thank you very much.

Mr. President, critics of your proposed bill on interrogation rules say there's another important test. These critics include John McCain, who you've mentioned several times this morning.

And that test is this: If a CIA officer, paramilitary or special operations soldier from the United States were captured in Iran or North Korea and they were roughed up and those governments said, "Well, they were interrogated in accordance with our interpretation of the Geneva Conventions," and then they were put on trial and they were convicted based on secret evidence that they were not able to see, how would you react to that as commander in chief?

BUSH: My reaction is, is that if the nations such as those you name adopted the standards within the Detainee Detention Act, the world would be better. That's my reaction.

We're trying to clarify law. We're trying to set high standards, not ambiguous standards.

And let me just repeat: We can debate this issue all we want, but the practical matter is, if our professionals don't have clear standards in the law, the program is not going to go forward.

You cannot ask a young intelligence officer to violate the law. And they're not going to. They -- let me finish please -- they will not violate the law.

You can ask this question all you want, but the bottom line is -- and the American people have got to understand this -- that this program won't go forward if there's vague standards applied like those in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. It's just not going to go forward.

You can't ask a young professional on the front line of protecting this country to violate law.

Now, I know they say they're not going to prosecute them. Think about that, you know. "Go ahead and violate it, we won't prosecute you." These people aren't going to do that.

Now, we can justify anything you want and bring up this example or that example. I'm just telling you the bottom line. And that's why this debate is important and it's a vital debate.

Now, perhaps, some in Congress don't think the program is important. That's fine. I don't know if they do or don't.

I think it's vital and I have the obligation to make sure that our professionals who I would ask to go conduct interrogations to find out what might be happening or who might be coming to this country -- I got to give them the tools they need, and that is clear law.

QUESTION: This is an important point, and I think it...

BUSH: The point I just made is the most important point, and that is the program is not going forward.

You can give a hypothetical about North Korea or any other country. The point is that the program is not going to go forward if our professionals do not have clarity in the law.

And the best way to provide clarity in the law is to make sure the Detainee Treatment Act is the crux of the law. That's how we define Common Article 3. And it sets a good standard for the countries that you just talked about.

Next man?

QUESTION: But wait a second. I think this is an important point.

BUSH: I know you think it's an important point.

QUESTION: But, sir, with respect, if other countries interpret the Geneva Conventions as they see fit, as they see fit, you're saying that you'd be OK with that?

BUSH: I am saying that I would hope that they would adopt the same standards we adopt; and that by clarifying Article 3 we make it stronger, we make it clearer, we make it definite.

And I will tell you again, you can ask every hypothetical you want, but the American people have got to know the facts.

And the bottom line is simple: If Congress passes a law that does not clarify the rules -- if they do not do that, the program's not going forward.

QUESTION: This will not endanger U.S. troops in your...

BUSH: Next man?

QUESTION: This will not endanger...

BUSH: David, next man please. Thank you.

Took you a long time to unravel, and it took you a long time to ask your question.

Actually, the bottom line here is that this is all just a bunch of ex post facto ass-covering for what's been going on for several years, and Bush can't handle that some of his heretofore favorite sock puppets are at least appearing to stray off the reservation.

This is actually an interesting dilemma, for a hardwired skeptic such as myself. On the one hand, it smells like a group head-fake to convince fence-sitters down the homestretch that Republicans are just as squeamish about torture as you are, but gosh, there's just no other possible options available in the universe, and we don't need no stinking FISA oversight on our wiretaps either. On the other hand, Bush has been getting pummeled for the last year straight, and even in good times, he'd always rather throw a minion under the bus than take a political hit himself. You wanna talk about character, that's very clearly his character.

So I guess I'm cautiously "optimistic" about this, that there's a slightly better chance that McCain et al are sincere in their public dissent, than that they're all in cahoots to set Junior up for some magnanimous October gesture where he takes the idea and assumes ownership of it.

And hey, kudos to the Democrats for sitting back and allowing the renegade Republicans take the lead on this issue. Way to step up on issues of principle.

Bush has made Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the reputed operations planner of the 9/11 attacks, his central argument in being able to utilize extreme coercive efforts. But as Jeff Wells points out, there's a story behind that as well [emphases in original, and there are many more links in this excerpt and throughout Jeff's post, so check it out]:

There remains the mystery of his arrest, which even today can only be called an alleged arrest, not least because he was confidently reported killed in a shootout on 9/11's first anniversary. ("Now it has emerged that Kuwaiti national Khalid Shaikh Mohammed did indeed perish in the raid," said Asia Times.)

A witness present in the house when Khalid was said to have finally been seized was adament that "the only people in the house were my brother, his wife and their kids.... I have absolutely no idea why the police came here." For The Guardian, Isobel Hilton wrote that in Pakistan, the story of his arrest "appears to be almost entirely fictional." And there's the famous photo of Khalid, fat and unshaven against a wall of peeling paint. But according to The Sunday Times a "thorough search of the house shows there is no such wall."

To allay doubts of Khalid's capture, Pakistan's ISI held a first-ever press briefing and screened a laughable eight minutes of footage purportedly taken during the raid. "Broken doors, blood-stained walls and wrists in handcuffs were all shown but curiously, no face shots...not even the well publicized 'arrest' photo of Mohammed that has been widely circulated and questioned. When one CNN reporter, Tom Minter asked why, the ISI said the tape had been edited but that the actual footage did record his face but had been edited out for the presentation." Pakistani intelligence had its own good reasons to attempt deception as, like 9/11 paymaster Omar Saeed Sheikh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not only an al Qaeda commander but also an ISI operative. Which is why both men wanted Daniel Pearl dead.

If Khalid actually is in custody, he has remained out-of-sight from all but his CIA minders. The Kean Commission relied heavily upon Khalid's account of 9/11 to construct their own story - he's mentioned in 272 paragraphs of the report - but no commission representative was permitted to meet him or take his testimony: there is no corroboration that the account given was actually his own. The commission supplied questions to his captors, and his captors returned transcripts of interrogations that allegedly contained Khalid's answers. Its claim of authenticity rests solely upon the goodwill of the Agency.

Remember all the intel info we kept hearing in the aftermath of 9/11, how interagency squabbles, a lack of agents and contacts in the field, and an abundance of leads yet a serious shortage of qualified analysis to sort them all led to the massive failure of our $40+bn/year intelligence apparatus? Well, it seems another part of the puzzle is that we were relying on the ISI for some of our intel as well, and they have been playing both sides the whole time. They were enabling the Taliban to gain prominence in Afghanistan, and are still probably at least aware of bin Laden's whereabouts, and it was criminally underreported in the American media that ISI General Mahmoud Ahmad, who was later found to have wired $100K to Mohammed Atta, breakfasted with Porter Goss (you know, the guy who later appointed DCI to clean house) and Bob Graham on the morning of September 11, 2001.

And as Jeff mentions, the account of Khalid's arrest was rife with suspicious inconsistencies.

I'm sure this sounds like Conspiracy Guy boilerplate, but too bad. The immense secrecy and lack of oversight this administration has deliberately and systematically engendered just fuels the fires of reasonable speculation.

The fact is, Bush is the one that keeps bringing up Khalid as of late. And I humbly suggest a very simple way to put an end as to whether this reasonable speculation is just unfair conspiracy-mongering, or if there's more to it. The next time Bush brings him up -- and he will, he's Pavlovian in his utter predictability -- just ask him, "So where's Khalid now?". It can't be any huge state secret if he's warming a cot at Gitmo, waiting for his military tribunal and charges that may never come. But who knows, he may also have been beaten with a flashlight and chained to a ceiling in some dank Afghan dungeon, left to die like a dog and used as some sort of cheap intel totem. It's not like it hasn't happened before, and it's not like these people ever voluntarily admit that they might be wrong about something.

Too-clever-by-half false equivalencies just won't fly anymore. This is not about whether the Nazis or Imperial Japan openly flouted the Geneva Conventions. One expects such behavior from the brutal regimes that brought us concentration camps and Unit 731. The fact is that it's never been about them, but about us, and all the cheap elisions won't change that. I understand the impulse, but even if one were to give in to such things, at this point, knowing what we know about the people running this country, how could we ever trust such enormous power to them without any oversight whatsoever. There's no reason for them to insist on evading FISA, yet they do. And despite their protests and vague allusions to the utility of torturing prisoners who still have never even been charged, all the academic data militates otherwise. It doesn't work, and it brings us slowly, inexorably down to the level of the people we keep insisting we're better than.

And the more Bush flails and froths at being challenged, the more clear it becomes that he should not be trusted with much of anything, but especially not life-or-death powers with no oversight and no accountability. It would be something if the self-proclaimed Party O' Personal Responsibility would grow a pair and address that question at long last. Because this is really the last best chance for a heretofore shamelessly complaisant Congress to reassert itself, and reiterate proper separation of powers. Overall, this is really just another attempt to establish a unitary executive branch, a president with practically monarchic powers, and it's long past time for the people's representatives, the legislative branch, to get off their knees and start fighting back.

Swamp Song

This bog is thick and easy to get lost in
'cause you're a stupid, belligerent fucker.
I hope it sucks you down. -- Tool

If you haven't yet seen Spike Lee's epic Katrina documentary on HBO, definitely check it out. The usual detractors will (and have, I'm sure) declaim what they perceive to be Lee's selective retelling of a national tragedy. But it's impossible to look at the sheer devastation and be unmoved, unless you're Jonah Goldberg and picture it as ripe opportunity for a cheap post-apocalyptic Waterworld riff.

Beyond the physical devastation, what really comes through is the human emotion. You have the seething anger and frustration of many of New Orleans' citizens who stayed or returned, and the hopelessness and despair of the diaspora, many of whom had never been out of their city and are now stuck indefinitely in places like New York or Oakland. Post-traumatic stress disorder and crime are rampant in New Orleans, as is a palpable sense of betrayal. The opportunism and cupidity, the sheer mendacity and incompetence of the people who were supposed to step in and help in a timely fashion, is manifestly evident.

There is an abiding attitude of contempt, crystallized for all time by Barbara Bush in her infamous "this has worked out very nicely for them" chuckle at people who had been repeatedly referred to as refugees in their own country. More than most scenes in this touching movie, that one has perhaps affected my perception of the tragedy -- and of the path of this country -- very deeply. It is difficult to fathom the ugly sense of privilege and excess, of condescending noblesse oblige, and yes again of sheer contempt for one's fellow human beings in their most dire time, that she conveys with her dismissive tone.

As with 9/11, I think it's important to step away from the neatly compartmentalized paradigm of commemorative grievances, which is why I didn't bring this up a couple weeks ago. Staying within the officially-sanctioned timeline only serves to discourage critically thinking about these events throughout the rest of the year -- how they come to pass, how they are reacted to, and how they are discussed in the aftermath. It is damn near impossible to watch this movie without bearing witness to the fact that, on a lot of levels, hundreds of thousands of American citizens were let down by their country for no good reason at all, and just because the media have moved on, doesn't mean it's not still happening.

Yer Blues

The eagle he picks my eye, the worm he licks my bone. -- The Beatles

Prior to the latest passing in the calendar of September 11th, I naturally assumed that I would concoct some profound elegy for the latest commemoration, made more deeply felt by the astounding coincidence that it has been five years and most of us have that exact same number of fingers per hand. (What are the odds of that?)

And yet, the date came and went, and any urgent thoughts I'd had on the subject were instantly quelled by catching clips of the bells-and-bagpipes ceremonies on this past Monday morning. I knew right then I had little connection with what most of the people who were "remembrancing" (as opposed to actually remembering) and thus had no will nor right to ventriloquize what they were feeling. Nor, strangely, did I have my usual urge to wax snarky about their invocations. It all just left me a bit perplexed. Suffice to say that they forgot to load me with the "candlelight vigil" chip before I left the factory. I sort of understand the sentiment; I have no idea whatsoever the point of it all is. But whatever. People have to get their cathartic moments in this life when they can.

So it made more sense to stand back, let the day pass, and take in the bigger picture. Because that's one thing we have simply not done as a people. We have allowed the debate to be hijacked by speculative demographic theories like "security milfs" and "NASCAR dads", thus personalizing the emotions of hand-wringing hysteria and ignorant fury into two handy cultural packages. This has proven to be remarkably useless, as far as dealing with the actual problem at hand, which is not to say that the true radical Islamic death-cultists -- and they are out there, mind you, they're just not lurking under every damned rock like Chimpco needs you to believe -- didn't need to be dealt with, just that we never really dealt with them in any lasting fashion.

Even if the Bushies had been honest about their little generational PNAC destabilization scheme up front, and even if we had all agreed on that rationale post-9/11, there's still simply no way to accomplish all that by ourselves on the margin, which is where this country and 90% of its inhabitants live financially. That is not snark; that is axiomatic. It is essentially irrefutable. A concerted effort by us and the rest of the world might have been able to find a way to get corrupt petrocracies peopled by hostile tribalists to start unfucking themselves, but it was never going to happen at the business end of a cluster bomb. It requires no selective parsing of "the Arab mind" to ascertain this; it's human nature.

So what Chimpco cynically provided to the people who thought they needed it (the way they think bells and invocations will do them any tangible good) was really just Reassurance Product™. "Buy our super new and improved Reassurance Product™, and not only will your whites be whiter, your colors brighter, and your cock larger, but you won't have to actually do or change anything about you or your lifestyle! Drive what you want to drive! Consume, my child! All will be well, just as soon as we set this Freedom Fire™ over in this here tinder box!"

Well, it turns out that while Reassurance Product™ provides hundreds of hours of mindless amusement, it doesn't really work all that well, because all along it was really nothing more than a cheap emotional balm. Matt Taibbi, whose weekly Rolling Stone column has truly been a must-read, gets it in spades:

For the most part, America looks pretty much like it looked before 9/11. We spend most of our time pounding Ding-Dongs and Sonic burgers, watching ESPN and surfing porn sites, while transnational corporations -- the silent allies of drug cartels and warlords in the dismantling of the traditional nation-state -- install turnstiles in Congress and steadily move our entire manufacturing economy overseas. Our culture is a parade of idiot reality shows where ordinary citizens eat caterpillars for money and Southern jocks drive moving billboards in a circle at 200 mph in front of euphoric crowds of a hundred thousand. In the intellectual north, our braver political dissidents dress in T-shirts with the face of George Bush morphed onto a pig's body and watch documentaries in which other intellectuals brag about being tricked by the Republicans into voting to invade the wrong country.

He's absolutely right, and I am becoming more and more convinced that the abject shallowness of our mainstream cultural artifacts are slowly but surely having an aggregate effect on our national psyche. When for several years running our most-viewed shows are interchangeable, disposable "reality" shows, karaoke competitions, D-list "celebrities" dancing, for fuck's sake, and forensic porn, this is a pattern. Even shows with actual skill and quality (Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood), ghettoized to HBO but critically lauded nonetheless, have such caustic nihilism at their core that they bespeak a darker quantum mentality in play, despite their wildly divergent milieu. At worst, I might be chicken/egging the pattern here, but there is surely a connection or correlation, and I hate to think how a huge nation of nihilistic dim-bulbs hardwired to instant gratification are supposed to make sensible decisions for themselves, their children, and their communities and country.

The war on terror is frequently and cynically likened to World War Two, but obviously that's a tremendous misnomer, not only in terms of scope, objectives, tactics, and strategies, but even the citizens' approach is completely opposite of that war. We are alternately polarized and distracted to an unprecedented degree. There is no sense of national unity or purpose. Half the country feels that the current group veers crazily between corruption and incompetence, while the other half insists that the accession of Nancy Pelosi to Speaker of the House would hark the commencement of Taliban paratroopers storming the Mall of America. Neither side can even reason with the other, much less persuade or convince them of much of anything. That's the way it is -- and should be -- when one side is so profoundly, abjectly wrong, and refuse to even see it, much less admit it.

But in the meantime, as a nation we have said and done shockingly little in the way of correcting the disastrous paradigm. The vaunted necessity of "Homeland Security" has already devolved into a cynical pork farm, where earmarks for protecting popcorn facilities in Indiana take precedence over even a modest cenotaph at the World Trade Center. People still insist on driving gas-guzzling behemoths everywhere, though as the American auto manufacturers continue their precipitous health-care fueled collapse, that will change by necessity rather than choice or common sense.

This is a theme I've been barking about for some time, and it becomes more and more true, right on schedule. There is no getting around it; we have to rethink the paradigm. We would have had to anyway, even if 9/11 had never happened, even if every Taliban wanted to buy every American a Coke and vice versa. The realities of peak oil militate towards that scenario; the ancillary effects of using the Chinese for comparative advantage speed up the process, as the urbanized Chinese look across the Pacific and want all the same toys we enjoy.

The demographic, economic, and cultural trends of the countries possessing the majority of the precious just seal the deal. You basically have an area that doesn't produce anything but oil, with high birth rates and unemployment, thus a lot of bored, easy-to-radicalize teenagers. Ironically, Iran could be the exception to this rule (though they do have a relatively young population), if we ever get an adult back in the White House, who understands the nature of the game and puts an end to this unproductive pas de deux.

One thing that recently-deceased journalist-provocateur Oriana Fallaci actually had a point about was how this demographic trend was taking shape, both in the native countries and in the emigration patterns. But she, like most nativists, generally had the wrong end of the stick in the "they don't assimilate" rants. There are many benign ways to encourage assimilation, without trampling cultural and ethnic mores, without provocative schtick and useless inflammatory rhetoric.

Consider the oft-derided concept of "checkbook diplomacy", in the context of the Middle East. We spend roughly $5bn per year to keep Israel and Egypt from each others' throats, when you get right down to it. Skeptics, isolationists, and self-styled "taxpayer advocates" insist that this is five billion dollars that could be better spent building a wall adjacent to the Rio Grande or whatever. But we spend two billion dollars per week refereeing a civil war in Iraq, and have for quite some time now. And, contrary to the snide assertions of the heedless proponents in the initial marketing rollout, not only will it never pay for itself, but we'll never see so much as a fraction of return on investment. Oh sure, it will eventually stabilize somehow because it has to, because equilibrium -- even a false one -- is necessary for some business to resume. But cui bono from such stability, which oil company? It certainly won't be recouped by the people who actually bankrolled this mess -- that is to say, the U.S. taxpayer. And being bamboozled into doubling down in Iran or even Syria is not going to help.

So when you think about the money, never to be truly recouped, that's been flushed down that hole, you also have to consider (vis-à-vis the aforementioned demographic/economic/cultural trends) where all (or even some) of that money might have been better spent in alleviating those potentially dangerous trends. If we can spend $5bn/year on Israel and Egypt and count relative stability between the two as a tangible ROI, then we can perhaps stipulate that checkbook diplomacy, like it or not, has at least some practical application. The carrot is not cheap, but compared to the incredibly expensive, bloody stick that we can't figure out how to drop, it's a bargain.

We also know empirically that there is practically an inverse relationship between the empowerment of women and birth-rate associated quality-of-life metrics. That is, the more that women are educated and are granted civil and economic rights, the fewer children they have, the healthier those children are (far lower infant mortality rates), and the happier and more productive the communities are (lower crime rates). The grameen (microloan) programs in India and Bangladesh have borne this theory out; by providing women in villages with loans as small as five or ten dollars, a majority of them have been able to start small businesses, employ a few other people from the village, and bring their communities up incrementally.

Much of what constitutes the dreadful "reality" show ethos, when you distill it to its very essence, is the childish "what would you do for a million dallars" question, frequently accompanied by a nice round of truth-or-dare or some such. That's really all it is -- what would you do on camera for money? Eat bugs, roll around in horse manure, suck a filthy hobo's cock? Here's a suitcase full of money -- or rather, the chance of such. I've always said that Survivor and Fear Factor are for people who just don't have the guts for porn or Faces of Death, and I've never heard or read anything to dissuade me from that perception.

But let's utilize that particular "what would you do" dynamic for this "checkbook diplomacy" argument. Let us discuss the moral calculus for perhaps improving the world at large, even at the cost of alleviating the economic disparity between regional spheres. We have studiously avoided such a discussion, perhaps because even if we don't know all the numbers and history behind the paradigm, we intuitively understand the truth of it. When 5% of the world's population consumes 25% of the resources and generates 25% of the waste, and half the world's population lives on a dollar a day, something's gotta give. We may blindly hope to escape the consequences, perhaps simply by shuffling off the mortal coil before the long unwinding road -- and we may even inadvertently prove correct about such an assumption -- but at some point our children or grandchildren will be stuck with the bill.

So we need to seriously talk about driving smaller vehicles, about consuming and wasting less, about the moral and ethical vacuity of covetousness and jonesmanship. We need to at least discuss the ramifications of chronic boobism, of huge swaths of people leading the intellectual lives of farm animals, as Taibbi once brilliantly put it. We need to re-marginalize the marginal, instead of giving every dipshit with a crackpot idea equal time. Even if we never experience the horrors of 9/11 again -- and every one of us, liberal or conservative, religious or secular, obviously hopes that that is the case -- we have a responsibility as Americans to discuss how to return and maintain real prominence in the world, and we have a responsibility to the world (as they have to us and to one another) to try to bring along the people who want to be brought along, while being mindful of the consequences.

The real tragedy of the post-9/11 mentality is that we have never really had that national discussion, and as long as we continue to distract ourselves with bells and whistles and talk-show screamers, we won't.

When I'm Wrong

Regular readers -- both of them -- may recall that last month I had the temerity to smackdown Olbermann for what I felt was a developing second-half devotion to sensationalized nonsense and celebrity-watching, however snark-laden. Not that a few Oddball segments aren't a nice palate cleanser, but it was just becoming a bit much, and it seemed to hit its nadir with coverage of John Mark Karr (remember him?).

But here's the thing: on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann seemed really positioned for a while to be grooming a true flagship political show, with informative scoops, knowledgeable guests, and uncompromising commentary. Lately though, it's had a real dead-fish whiff about it, and the second half of each show has essentially dumbassified to a starfucking feedback loop. Olbermann looks like every mention of Tom Cruise or American Idol or now John Mark Karr brings him one step closer to sticking a gun in his mouth. And who could blame him? He didn't get into the business to shovel that kind of shit. Nobody in their right mind would.

Yeah, that's the bit. Well, if I'm gonna kick the guy when he's down, I should also give praise where it's due, and Olbermann has been nothing short of a force of nature since returning from the August doldrums. He must have watched Good Night and Good Luck or something, because his commentary has been profoundly impassioned and informed in a Murrow-esque sensibility. He has clearly made it his mission to spread the word and lay the talking points that the people who run this country are corrupt and mendacious, unprincipled to the core, and that we really don't have to take their shit.

Because the opposition party is still timidly approaching that necessary tenor, it is critical that someone steps up and brings it. Forget "truth to power"; what this country needs is to be motivated out its stupor, and that seems to be what Olbermann is really reaching for. Good luck to him with that, it's good to know that at least someone out there still gives enough of a shit to try.

Diddy Doodly

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The Hunt For Bin Laden

The usual smart set of neo-clowns who authored and continued to annotate the ongoings in Clusterfuckistan have staked their political fortunes on Americans' continued ignorance of facts such as this:

Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

....

The guy who was actually in charge of logistics has now directly confirmed that Rumsfeld not only didn't intend to rebuild Iraq in any serious way, but threatened to fire anyone who wasted time on the idea. Needless to say, he wouldn't have done this unless it reflected the wishes of the president.

And this also means that all of Bush's talk about democracy was nothing but hot air. If you're serious about planting democracy after a war, you don't plan to simply topple a government and then leave.

So: the lack of postwar planning wasn't merely the result of incompetence. It was deliberate policy. There was never any intention of rebuilding Iraq and there was never any intention of wasting time on democracy promotion. That was merely a post hoc explanation after we failed to find the promised WMD. Either that or BG Scheid is lying.

Well of course it must be B. We all know that the deluge of disaffected policy operatives who have made their displeasure public are doing so solely out of partisan political motivation -- unlike the Rovians, whose every move is spun from the purest motives.

Warporn enthusiasts do their little dance around the maypole of moral acuity, and squaring that cost with supposedly benign objectives, when they talk about war at all. But they have the wrong end of the stick, naturally. Truly serious students of war, and the art thereof, know the cliché that amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics. Indeed, this was one of the very real concerns of the initial success of the Iraq invasion -- that the troops had gotten to Baghdad so quickly that the supply lines might then get stretched thin. And that could still happen; if the southern Shi'a coordinated with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and, with Iranian help, started approaching it from a targeted systempunkt standpoint, we'd be in awful deep shit pretty quickly. You can't airlift every single thing into Baghdad in perpetuity. Fortunately they have not done this, but like everything else about this war and occupation, you could affix "yet" to just about every conceivable scenario at this point.

Anyway, the point is that sound logistics are key to having a proper plan in place, which has been borne out quite consistently by the results. These people had no plan, and it was clearly a tragic combination of willful blindness to facts, reckless arrogance, hostility to reasoned dissent, and a predisposition to lie to the American people to get the war they wanted. These things are beyond all serious dispute at this point.

And the most tragic aspect of this perhaps is that the war for which there actually was a just cause for retaliation and liberation has completely fallen by the wayside. As a result, Osama bin Laden at this point is merely an Emmanuel Goldstein figure trotted out at convenient pre-election times, and mostly forgotten the rest of the time.

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.

....

The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities.

I think we should trust the ISI about as far as we can throw them, but at the same time, there's not much upside for them to lie about something like that. So he's still alive, still an asset for what money he still has, and the reputation he enjoys in the dark realm of radical fundamentalist Islam. Meanwhile Afghanistan continues to slowly return to its previous state of disintegration and violent chaos, while idiots like Bush and Rumsfeld continue to dither and plot a politically viable course for their counterproductive nonsense.

Put more simply -- anyone who still doesn't realize that they got sold a bill of goods with the remarkably inept Rummy as SecDef, this is what you got, folks:



Think about that as we commemorate 9/11. We keep hearing about how these are serious people taking serious measures to protect us in serious times. There is a very clear paper trail attesting to the opposite pattern.

The Mouse That Roved

I'm still marveling at the whats and whys of Disney's rationale for sinking $40 mil into a crockumentary hole that was sure to cause a ruckus. Perhaps they thought they'd get away with it unnoticed, as if half the internets aren't keeping an eye out for exactly this sort of contrived nonsense. Perhaps, since the project began in the wake of the last reiteration of Republican dominance -- a political lifetime ago, it seems -- they assumed that no tremendous reversal of fortune would take place, that fall 2006 would continue to see the accrual of Rovian hegemony.

It makes sense that Disney wants to curry favor with whoever's in charge; as Matt Stoller points out, Disney's ongoing desire to consolidate market share and preserve intellectual property rights for its hundred-year-old cartoon characters far beyond normal copyright law give it a seriously invested interest in keeping the "right" people happy.

Given what I know about how big corporations think, I bet the political slant to the movie wasn't strictly intentional on Disney's part. I bet that Disney's ABC division used a set of PR firms and flacks that decided that 9/11 belonged to conservatives, and so hired conservative movement players to produce, market, and distribute this film. They got Tom Kean, so there was adult supervision. What a perfect event setup, to make ABC the place for the country to turn on 9/11. In this fragmented universe, wouldn't it be great to have a time when the country came together, on one place, to really understand this event through the medium of television. And how wonderful if this were on ABC. It would be AN EVENT.

Disney can, one supposes, be forgiven to a certain extent for not anticipating huge intervening events and paradigms that would cast Chimpco's manifold incompetencies in sublime relief. The only people left are the brain-dead die-hards who just keep telling themselves that Nancy Pelosi would somehow be even worse, while two-thirds of the country continues to see malign incompetence for exactly what it is. Disney understands that red and blue don't matter nearly as much as green; the other two colors are just useful tools to manipulate in pursuit of the third.

And of course it's pure coincidence that the director of this thing just happens to hail from an evangelical institution that quite publicly avows to "take Hollywood back" from within. It's coincidence that only right-wing goofballs got preview copies. It's coincidence that supposed elder statesman and serious person Tom Kean, only a few degrees removed from Osama bin Laden to begin with, and certainly cognizant enough of the facts of his own report to know which scenes in the movie were real and which were pulled completely from Cyrus Nowrasteh's sphincter, vetted said invention as "reasonably accurate".

I think Disney's about to find out the hard way just how badly they misjudged this one. In the meantime, I guess I'll grudgingly have to boycott According to Jim. That'll show 'em.

Crapaganda

There is the small matter of an English pseudodocumentary (as opposed, I guess, to the Chris Guest-style mockumentary -- welcome to the era of the meta) which presumes as one of its plot points the assassination of a sitting American president.

The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.

That is the arresting beginning of “Death of a President,” a 90-minute film to be broadcast here in October on More4, a British digital television station. And while depicting the assassination of a sitting president is provocative in itself, this film is doubly so because it has been made to look like a documentary.

Using archival film as well as computer-generated imagery that, for instance, attaches the president’s face to the body of the actor playing him, the film leaves no doubt that the victim is Mr. Bush rather than some generic president.

The local news channel here jumped on it with their daily "fool in the mall" segment, and gleaned a predictable level of erudition on the subject. Most people agree straight away that it's "out of line". Even I, as much as I detest Bush, think it's pretty bad form, to say the very least. But what do you want to do about it? From the thumbnail sketch of the film, it does not sound like an inciteful effort. It's an alternate history excursion of sorts; it's not shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. It may turn out to be somewhat problematic to draw and quarter the film makers for sedition; the usual offended parties may just have to go back to screening TV Land for oblique sexual references.

Mr. Dale said that the focus of the film was on the assassination’s aftermath, as the news media rush to judgment and investigators plumb America’s fear and anger, particularly in communities with most cause to be angry at Mr. Bush. Suspicion soon focuses on Jamal Abu Zikri, a Syrian-born man.

The movie, Mr. Dale said, is “a very powerful examination of what changes are taking place in America” as a result of its foreign policy.

“I believe that the effects of the wars that are being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “are being felt in many ways in the multiracial communities in America and Britain in the number of soldiers who don’t come home, and that people are beginning to ask: ‘When will these body bags stop coming back? Why are we there? When will it stop?’ ”

I have no editorial commentary regarding any of this; unlike the kulturkampfers of the right, I see little utility in pretending to review movies I haven't seen yet. Commenting on orthogonal promotional points and the like are one thing (more on that shortly), but it's impossible to sensibly comment on content at this point.

I will say this, though: the above description sort of elides the matter of who actually commits the fictional regicide, talking about whom "suspicion soon focuses on". And I have no idea if this is the actual case in the movie, obviously, but just as a general observation, were such a thing to occur (and let me be clear about this, just so I don't get a visit from the Secret Service -- I am certainly not viewing even the fictional representation of such a thing the least bit favorably), it wouldn't be the stereotypical crazed Arab. It's the Yigal Amirs and the Timothy McVeighs who do such things, more often than not. That's not to say that it couldn't happen, just that there are certain groups in this country who seem predisposed to resort to violence when they don't get their way, and most of them are neither Arab nor leftist.

If the relatively new meta-art of "pseudodocumentary" making strikes your fancy, then perhaps you'll like the new revisionist doc about to be floated by ABC, which distorts facts and concocts scenarios in order to point the finger of blame for 9/11 at -- who else? -- The Clenis.

ThinkProgress has obtained a response to this scene from Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar for Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and now counterterrorism adviser to ABC:

1. Contrary to the movie, no US military or CIA personnel were on the ground in Afghanistan and saw bin Laden.

2. Contrary to the movie, the head of the Northern Alliance, Masood, was no where near the alleged bin Laden camp and did not see UBL.

3. Contrary to the movie, the CIA Director actually said that he could not recommend a strike on the camp because the information was single sourced and we would have no way to know if bin Laden was in the target area by the time a cruise missile hit it.

In short, this scene — which makes the incendiary claim that the Clinton administration passed on a surefire chance to kill or catch bin Laden — never happened. It was completely made up by Nowrasteh.

The actual history is quite different. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (pg. 199), then-CIA Director George Tenet had the authority from President Clinton to kill Bin Laden. Roger Cressy, former NSC director for counterterrorism, has written, “Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al-Qaeda.”

So Nowrasteh invents an extremely contentious plot point out of whole cloth. Now why would he do something like that? Does he have an axe to grind?

FP: Share some of the details about the development of the project. How important would you say it is?

Nowrasteh: This miniseries is not just about the tragedy and events of 9/11, it dramatizes "how we got there" going back 8 years to the first attack on the WTC and dealing with the Al Qaeda strikes against U.S. embassies and forces in the 90s, the political lead-up, the hatching of the terrorist plots, etc. We see the heroes on the ground, like FBI agent John O'Neill and others, who after the '93 attack felt sure that the terrorists would strike the WTC again. It also dramatizes the frequent opportunities the Administration had in the 90s to stop Bin Laden in his tracks -- but lacked the will to do so. We also reveal the day-by-day lead-up of clues and opportunities in 2001 right up to the day of the 9/11 attacks. This is a terror thriller as well as a history lesson. I think people will be engaged and enlightened.

FP: When you refer to the failed effort to stop Bin Laden in the 1990s, this was obviously the time of Bill Clinton. How much do you think his administration made us vulnerable to 9/11?

Nowrasteh: The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests. The worst example is the response to the October, 2000 attack on the U.S.S. COLE in Yemen where 17 American sailors were killed. There simply was no response. Nothing.

FP: So could 9/11 have been stopped?

Nowrasteh: Difficult question. Many experts believe it could not have been stopped.[emphasis in original] Maybe if the FBI had been allowed to look into Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop when he was arrested in mid-August, 2001, or if the terrorists on the watch list living in San Diego under their real names had been picked up. No one can say for sure.

In the miniseries we focus on weaknesses and mistakes so that we can learn from them. So that we can be safer, stronger, wiser. We do, though, highlight the heroes on the ground and the small victories (the break-up of the millennium plot) in the lead up to 9/11. Our harshest criticism in the show is for our enemies.

Note the conflation of events and assumptions there in Nowrasteh's responses, and the selective maximizing and downplaying of politically volatile events. You'd think that nothing at all was done after the '93 WTC attacks, though as pointed out earlier, when the Clenis administration went looking for counter-terrorism superpowers from the Republican Congress in '96, they got turned down. Clenis also lobbed missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan in response to the embassy bombings in '97. Whether Nowrasteh means to imply that perhaps we should have sent ground troops in and/or sent in bombing sorties and the like, killing many innocent people while chasing shadows (kinda like we are now), he doesn't really say.

But the breakup of the potentially devastating millennium plot was merely a small victory; the outgoing administration should have initiated a post-Cole op to immediately hand off to the incoming administration (which worked out just super in Somalia); and if his movie mentions the infamous telltale vacation PDB cryptically titled Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S., he doesn't say so here.

So. We have a contentious movie that is demonstrably revisionist. But irony of ironies, this movie is being broadcast and aggressively promoted, even to schoolchildren, as historical fact (which it is clearly not in at least some parts) by the same corporation that refused flat-out to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11.

ABC is planning a massive free distribution of its planned docudrama The Path to 9/11, including sending letters to 100,000 high school teachers encouraging them to have their students watch the series.

Disney passed on what was sure to be a hit movie -- and turned out to be the highest-grossing documentary ever -- but it's giving this thing away. I still assume that Hollywood is at least mostly about money more than anything else, and perhaps they figure that this sort of viral marketing will translate into fat DVD profits on the back end. They may even be right about that. But they need to be more responsible about what sort of mindless contentious finger-pointing they're pushing They couldn't run fast enough from the former, but they can't hump our legs hard enough with the latter. This is curious, to say the least, especially from librul Hollyweird, who sip their frog Chardonnays from the skulls of people from red states.

Maybe it's good in a back-handed way, as it illustrates just how completely bereft of any cognition the movementarians behind this project are. Clenis-baiting was the sport of the '90s, and I certainly enjoyed my fair share of cheap shots at the guy. But bringing him up now just reminds everyone that we used to have a guy who could speak and think extemporaneously, and didn't talk to his citizens like a fourth-grader who just crammed for a pop quiz.

Super Friends

We've discussed how Chimpco's illegal superpowers (wiretapping; circumventing FISA; imprisoning people for years without trial or even charges; torture and extraordinary rendition) would likely never be allowed to pass on to a Democratic administration.

Here's a blast from the past that retroactively confirms just that:

So Bill Clinton, rather than just breaking the law as Bush did (then again, perhaps this is why Bush broke the law - he knew from history that the Republicans controlling the congress would oppose his efforts to expand wiretapping), decided to go to the Republican congress in 1996 and ask them for increased authority to do more eavesdropping in order to stop the terrorists - stop September 11. Senior Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, one of the GOP's top picks for the Supreme Court and a GOP committee chair, objected.

No doubt Hatch, weasel that he is, will just say that if only he knew then what he knows now. But that's nonsense. The threat was known; the World Trade Center had been attacked just three years prior. Oklahoma City, with its initial suspicions of swarthy foreigners before it turned out to be a psychotic veteran, was still fresh in everyone's mind. Countering terror -- domestic and foreign -- was very much a priority for sensible people. The question was where to draw the line, and Hatch -- and I'll wager virtually every Republican of note on the record -- drew that line much closer then than now.

John points out that perhaps this is why Bush and Cheney just went ahead and got their program going without any consultation with those pesky peoples' representatives. It's possible, but I'm a bit skeptical. Until very recently, this Congress has been a Politburo-grade rubber-stamp for everything on Chimpco's laundry list. I don't think they would have balked at this at all.

The problem for them would come after the presumably secret approval and enactment, because then they would have to go about finding a way to undo it in the event the Diebold machines fail or the gay marriage lunatics forget to vote, and a Democrat manages to squeak back into office. This way they can just drag their feet and demagogue the issue the entire time, and if the Dems take over in the midterms and make them shut it down, you can bet the next attack will instantly be made the fault of feckless Democrats.

It's a very dangerous game they're playing, like the fractured Risk tournament they've got going in the Middle East. And like that game, this extrajudicial one may simply be a by-product of their own hubris. They couldn't see how they could possibly fail in Iraq; similarly, they assumed that Karl Rove was the second coming of Mark Hanna, and would start this benighted new century off with a generation of Republican domination.

Pending midterm results, of course, I would put the safe money on victorious Democrats making some sort of trade-off -- investigate this, but not that, and we'll shut this other thing down. One would hope that the Democrats would be just as sore winners as the Republicans have been (but at least in the right direction). But there are too many Ben Nelson types in the party, who will always consider glad-handing capitulation and gutless compromise first, and fighting for principle somewhere down the list. And that's just not going to happen; even a Democratic takeover of both houses will be by a narrow margin, and unlike the Rovians, they will not have the balls to pretend that they have a large-margin mandate.

Now, chances are that they'll still have to hand the John Conyerses some busywork, and if that turns up something definitively earth-shattering, then of course all bets are off. But it would have to be something big -- that magical spirit of Fitzmas from last year seems to have faded without enough truly momentous revelations. People have been burnt already by credulous morons like Jason Leopold, and the glacial pace and limited blowback of the Libby case. They are understandably leery of the ultimate efficacy of future "scoops".

I dunno. I wish I had more confidence in the Democrats to really get in there and fight the good fight, and perhaps there'll be some pleasant surprises in that regard. I hope so. But even in midterm victory, their stars will be devoting much energy to polishing their own presidential aspirations, and start trying to big-tent as many issues as possible, rather than risk signing on to what could turn out to be a tiresome and ultimately fruitless fishing expedition.

There may be a sacrificial lamb here and there -- Bush has never shied away from throwing underlings under the bus rather than taking a hit himself, as Scooter Libby knows too well -- but I don't think that the Democrats even have a clue about the things they don't even know, when it comes to what this obsessively secretive administration is up to. And without real focus, commitment, and an aggressive stance on finding out, they'll never get to the bottom of it all.

I think the warrantless sigint controversy is just the tip of the iceberg, and now that Chimpco sees its heady dreams of political domination already foundering, their minions are desperately booga-boogaing the "appeaser" imagery, while they frantically try to figure out how to not hand off their self-granted superpowers -- and all their dirty little secrets -- to the opposition party.

Death By Chichi

I can't help but wonder where armchair warriors such as Mark Steyn bulk-purchase their off-the-rack bravery. Ordinarily you'd just attribute such drunken bravado to liquid courage, but Steyn has always trucked this stuff in with a tractor-trailer. Danger is his middle name, unless it's actually Percy.

But Steyn bristles with contempt at the two Fox journalists who, kidnapped and threatened with their lives in the Gaza Strip, were able to achieve release with what one assumes were rote gunpoint conversions to Islam.

In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions -- that these men are easier to force into the car than that 16-year-old girl in Sydney was. It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

Yes, we're all on board with the "if people don't believe in something, they'll believe anything" cliché to a certain extent, and Steyn is probably correct in his assertion of what that video will mean to a jihadist. But it's not as if they don't find any number of other things to hate us for, and Steyn's only alternative for Centanni and Wiig is apparently his thoughtless imputation -- via Arthur Conan Doyle, no less -- that they should have just martyred themselves rather than pretend to convert. That was the choice they were given -- death or conversion. Period. No walkbacks, no changing your mind or second thoughts, you've literally got a gun at your head and this is the choice you're offered.

Who knows? Perhaps Steyn really would, were he to place himself in danger (remember, it is his middle name), refuse even the pretense of conversion and allow himself to be killed. After all, he sees himself as manning the rhetorical battlements of 1683 Vienna, defending Western glory from the Ottoman barbarians with his mighty oratorical flourishes. Every event is another Walter Mitty die-with-your-boots-on opportunity for a man who may as well not ever make it out of his slipper socks.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, there are plenty of Republican congressmen who are more than happy to find other ways to carve up the Constitution in the throes of hysteria. There is more than one brand of cowardice.

HUB
Are you people insane --?

DEVEREAUX
The time has come for one man to
suffer in order to save the lives of
hundreds.

HUB
How about two men? How about three?
How about public executions, that
might work.

DEVEREAUX
You're welcome to wait outside.

HUB
General... you've lost men, I've
lost men... but what you're doing...
It doesn't work in Belfast. It doesn't
work in Gaza. And it won't work here.

What if... they don't want their
leader back at all? You said yourself,
we don't even have him. Maybe what
they really want -- is that we herd
our children into stadiums. Put
soldiers into our streets. Radicalize
people who want to think of themselves
as Americans. Bend the law, shred
the constitution.

Because if we torture him -- and
let's call it what it is... You...
and I... then the country men like
us have sworn to defend. And bled to
defend. And died to defend... is
gone.

And they've won.

Gen. Devereaux stares hard at Hub. And then:

DEVEREAUX
(to Col. Hardwick)
I think we have to soundproof the
room before we begin.

-- The Siege, 1998.

Some of us have already decided that we prefer dying on our feet, if need be, than living on our knees. People like Steyn, who have no real skin in the game but are still very proud of their camo kneepads, are still thinking this is all just a big game of Risk. And other peoples' lives depend on a roll of the dice.

The House That Karl Built

Hopefully the reports of the wingers' impending demise are not exaggerated.

Now, though, as the congressional election season kicks off in earnest this Labor Day weekend, nobody is talking about realignment. Rather, Republicans concede they are struggling to cling to power.

Numerous political analysts are forecasting that a tidal wave of voter dissatisfaction will wash incumbent Republicans out of office on Nov. 7 and possibly hand control of the House back to Democrats, who also are poised to make gains in the Senate and win back governorships.

"The Republicans had a great run for a while, and it's over," said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan analyst and founder of the Cook Political Report.

Rove's thinking was based on the 1896 presidential campaign of William McKinley. McKinley tried to revamp the GOP's image, appealing to immigrants and workers. More than a century later, Rove has sought to reach out to African-American and Latino voters, as well as socially conservative Democrats and independents.

I have compared this administration to that of McKinley's more than a few times over the past couple years. It's not all that reassuring to see that validated by the "serious" media. One thing that is reassuring, however, is that this time around, the cynical overtures don't seem to be playing nearly as well as they did in the Gilded Age (not that such efforts succeeded all that well then, either).

Republican leaders acknowledge they will lose seats this year, noting that the party that controls the White House almost always loses seats in the sixth year of a two-term presidency.

"There's no question that this will be a tough cycle," said White House political director Sara Taylor. Still, she added, "I'm confident we'll retain our majorities."

When it comes to handling the war on terrorism and guiding the economy, Taylor insisted, Americans are more likely to trust the GOP. "I think Americans have confidence in the Republican Party and the president to keep them safe," she said.

Way to slap lipstick on that there pig, Sara. You're certainly earning your keep. There must be a pony in there somewhere, right dear?

But never fear, the usual doubting Thomases will show up and tell Democrats what they really need to do.

Some Democrats, however, warn that simply capitalizing on the Republicans' woes in November will not be enough for the party to regain dominance.

"Democrats can't be complacent, because it's not clear that we have sold disenchanted voters on our agenda," said Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. "That's the real test of this election. Can we start making inroads with voters, particularly in rural areas that over the last decade have tended to vote social issues as opposed to their pocketbook issues?"

Obama seems to be getting mighty handy at pulling on his Helpy Helperton outfit and making these broad suggestions, without ever offering much in the way of specifics. If by "inroads" he means making a concerted effort to help these people re-prioritize their concerns, that maybe there are more important things on America's table right now than gay marriage and shredding Roe v. Wade, fine.

But if he means just another tiresome series of cynical genuflections to try to reel in the jesusier/patrioticer-than-thou buffoons, no thanks. There's no need for that -- they were wrong about Chimpco, we were right. Doesn't mean we have to rub their noses in it (although, you know, it'd be fun) but it sure as hell does mean you don't really need to go hat-in-hand to them.

If the disaffected Dobson wing want to get off their high horses, keep their "social concerns" to themselves, and roll up their sleeves and start figuring out ways to really set this country back on track, great. Otherwise, why would the Democrats want anything to do with 'em? Find a new niche to motivate, brand them, and leave the goofball wing in the wreckage of the big tent.

Wage Slaves

Here's a fun little map showing the drop in median incomes over the past six years. Compared to Michigan and North Carolina, I actually feel lunky that California's median only dropped 3.6 percent.

Happy Labor Day, folks.

The Church Of Pantloadology

Eager as ever to give sensible people fodder as he continues to prosecute his war on common sense, The Pillsbury Pundit floats yet another rhetorical air biscuit. Aside from the usual noteworthy fact that someone still pays him for this nonsense, this column features some extra special metaphors. One wonders how long Pantload's been saving up this slice of greatness:

Lord knows I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study.

As TBogg points out, don't the conservatarderati have some sort of unwritten pact to not use the words "Bush", "monkey", and "cocaine" in the same article, much less the same sentence? That sound you just heard was the reverberation of the headslap Pantload just got from Father Cliffy, and the subsequent sloshing of Jonah's man-boobs. (I couldn't swear off Goldberg/man-boob jokes if I tried. Twelve steps just ain't enough, folks.)

Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.

Aww, so it's "cruel", is it? Is it crueler than living in 130º heat with no electricity because some idiot halfway around the world had no clue what he was getting into? Crueler than being dragged out of your house by a death squad, to have your eyes gouged out and be tortured with a fucking power drill? Fucking asshole. You want to talk "cruelty", Jonah, I'd say "unfairness" to Dear Leader is quite a ways further down the list from the various manifestations of sheer brutality that he and he alone unleashed.

And forget the trope of "every major intel agency thought". Yes, they all thought. They did not initiate invasion and botch the occupation. They did not stovepipe and cherry-pick hortatory rumors. They did not arrogate certitude unto themselves, and pretend that they were so much fucking smarter than everyone else. You know who did all that? That poor Christian man we're all being so darned hard on. Poor him. Mean us.

And then there's Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don't call them tickle-parties.

The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, sees Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on Piñata Bush's "competence." The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans' levee failure was a unique problem - one the local leadership ignored for decades - the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here's a wacky idea: Maybe it's not all Bush's fault.

Heh-indeedy. This from the guy who infamously "joked" about the Mad Max/Waterworld post-apocalyptic scenario that people trapped in the Superdome had best prepare themselves for. And it is pretty fuckin' hilarious when you think about it, that while the whole world is watching a great American city go under, with bloated bodies floating through the streets, people trapped on their roofs, the less fortunate suffocating in their attics as the water inexorably rose past their necks, old people keeling over in their lawn chairs, some fat fuck in his Legacy Pundit Underoos cracks wise and evokes cheesy movies. God forbid he'd dare say a word about the overwhelming impression of indifference displayed by Bush, screwing around on the West Coast and taking his sweet time getting back to his command post.

It's not true, but let's just say for the sake of argument that the reflexive conservatard trope of "Katrina was made worse entirely because of state and local ineptitude" was true. Isn't it still the responsibility of the feds to be aware of this supposed ineptitude and unpreparedness, and be ready to step in and let The Decider work his decidin' magic? Or was it to send his discount ass out to San Diego to try once again to conflate Iraq with World War 2, and to crash John McCain's birthday party? Because that's exactly what Bush did, while the rest of us watched New Orleans clog with people trying to get the hell out, and others simply unable to leave, bracing themselves for nature's fury, and an indifferent response from a feckless little twit.

I would derisively ask if a picture needs to be drawn, but we all saw the video of Bush being briefed on this, sitting there unresponsive, looking like he wished he had the remote so he could flip it to the F Troop marathon over on TV Land. The picture was drawn quite clearly, over and over again. It is Pantload's problem that he refuses to see the obvious pattern of Bush's incompetence and indifference, not the fault of those mean ol' libruls who keep expecting Bush to do his fucking job.

As for Mississippi's level of recovery as compared to that of New Orleans, let's keep in mind that its far lower population density led to far less human damage, and far fewer of its citizens forced to move or rendered homeless. Oh yeah, and Mississippi not only has a Republican governor, but one who has been chair of the RNC, and is a major player in the workings of the party. I'm sure it's all just coincidence and gumption that have made the difference in Mississippi.

Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like freestanding complaints. That's how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.

That's why Bush's Democratic critics flit about like bilious butterflies, exploiting each superficial or transient problem just long enough to score some points in the polls, then moving on. Bush's Medicare plan was an egregious corporate giveaway, they cried, until seniors overwhelmingly reported that they like it. And the Patriot Act? Can anyone even remember what the Democrats were whining about? I think it had something to do with libraries that were never searched.

Look, things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too. John Kerry could be president.

What an idiot. There's just no other way to call this one. Let's take this poorly cobbled-together conflation and dispense with it right quick. First, the hate: the definition of a polarized country is that there's fury on both sides. Damned if I ever see anyone take a stab at the Dolchstosslegende loons who fester in the nether regions of talk radio, for starters. But then, since Pantload knows all about nourishment, he certainly knows where his bread gets buttered. Therefore, all the "hate" exists on the left, even though virtually every single notable instance of exhortation to even polemic violence has emanated from the sphincter of the right. QED, muthafuckas!

Next, Bush's Medicare boondoggle is neither superficial nor resolved, not by any means. And Pantload's off-handed dismissal of Chimpco's arrogation of power unto itself -- of which the Patriot Act is only one facet -- only illustrates why he is a profoundly moronic, destructive influence on serious discourse. Say that 9/11 had happened in 1997 instead of 2001 (or that Gore had been awarded the office he had actually won in 2000). Say that Clinton (or Gore) had decided to grant himself the exact same superpowers that Bush has done, with the exact same rationalizations. Would any real conservative put up with such a thing? Of course not. Nor should they.

But because they are cultists, and not actual thinkers, they do not grok that important distinction. For people whose default pretense is that of principle, they sure have a hard fucking time keeping their stories straight. If Hillary Clinton wins in 2008, would you or would you not have a problem with her keeping the superpowers previously arrogated to Chimpco? Yes or no? After all, these unprecedented levels of unaccountability and oversight are necessary to keep us all safe, and if that should happen to require a periodic Pantload Probe, well, such is the price of freedom, fatboy.

As for Kerry being president, I'm actually content to give him that one, though not for the reasons he supposes. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that, had Kerry won, he would have faced endless foot-dragging from this Congress, and no less volume of shameless finger-pointing from the usual professional goofbals, and their reliable media enablers. Even if Kerry had been able to implement a successful plan for Iraq -- unlike the current administration, because they clearly don't have a plan -- he never would have gotten credit for it. It would have been a no-win situation for him. It always is with these people, because again, they are cultists, always looking for someone else to do the thinking for them.

Finally, no fisking of any ClownHall column, much less one of Goldberg's, would be complete without at least a quick glance at the general level of erudition and cognition in the comments. There actually are some decent surprises, but the few cogent conservative dissentions of commenters such as TimF are drowned by the deluge of furious all-caps up-to-the-second-knuckle nose-picking emotionalism by repetitive, sub-literate halfwits such as blondieinpittsburgh and Kathy. Tall Chick actually makes a game attempt to lay some planks of thought, then launches this tired rhetorical scud:

President Bush's ability to mangle the English language should not be "misunderestimated." But I'm glad that no one follows me around with a microphone.

I've been hearing variations of this one for years, and it's never washed (much like Jonah Goldberg, hyulk hyulk). Look, no one follows you around with a microphone because no one cares what you think. But if they did care enough to do so, one would hope you'd have enough pride in yourself and your tremendous responsibilities to prepare yourself in every area, including even modest extemporaneous oratorical skills.

It's not that Bush can't read a speech; he can do that shit just fine, however disagreeable the content may be. And I'm sure he can read an executive summary or a briefing perfectly well. But there is a crystal-clear pattern of him being unable to think on his feet at even a moderate level, and that bespeaks unpreparedness at the intellectual and cognitive levels. He always, always answers unexpected questions with the same tired rhetorical boilerplate we waded through several years ago. Look, asshole, if you're not actually going to bother to learn anything useful in your tenure at the most important job in the world, at least get some new schtick.

Also, you know, people "follow him with microphones" to these things called "press conferences", which are arranged at a time and place of his own staff's choosing. This cliché of the media sandbagging poor ol' Lonesome Rhodes at his worst is worse than useless; it's a flat-out fucking lie.

But note the generally reverential tone which most of the commenters (especially the female ones, and the closet cases such as "Coach") have for Bush. They don't have the cognitive skills to get out of their own way, so they just put their faith in his (or His) Master Plan.

Well, here's your master plan. How do you like it?

WASHINGTON - A day after a Pentagon report described spreading sectarian violence and increasingly complex security problems in Iraq, President Bush painted a rosier picture. "Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country."

The president acknowledged "a bloody campaign of sectarian violence" and the "difficult and dangerous" work of trying to end it.

On Friday, the Pentagon reported that death squads increasingly targeting mainly Iraqi civilians heighten the risk of civil war. The report, the latest in a series required by Congress, also said the Sunni-led insurgency "remains potent and viable."

"Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, specifically in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi civilian population has increased in recent months," the report said.

Considering even handpicked interim Iraqi leader (and former CIA asset) Iyad Allawi was talking about civil war almost six months ago, you have to wonder what exactly it would take for Bush and his claque of morons to make the semiotic leap from "sectarian violence" to "civil war" -- and whether it would make much difference in their mindless approach to the reality on the ground, as they dutifully prepare for the next tragic clusterfuck in Iran.

And while we figure out more ways to lay waste to life, limb, and future, useful cephalopods like Pantload and his readers will waggle their tentacles in unison, patiently awaiting the next feeding.