Enablers

So first thing this morning, I hear about how Dear Cheerleader's poll woes are finally over. Apparently WaPo and NBC conjured up a frabjous 47% rating for Mister Man. Problem solved! Now it's safe for Republican pundit whores to nod sagely in unison about the inherent wisdom of the people. Funny how that wasn't on the table just two weeks -- and ten percentage points -- ago.

Except, not so fast. CNN has a contemporaneous poll showing Bush down at 41%, still an increase, but clearly not the miracle comeback the narrative seemed to demand. More like the proverbial "dead cat bounce".

President Bush's approval ratings do not appear to have changed significantly, despite a number of recent speeches he's given to shore up public support for the war in Iraq and its historic elections on Thursday.

A CNN/USA Today Gallup poll conducted over the weekend found his approval rating stood at 41 percent, while more than half, or 56 percent, disapprove of how the president is handling his job. A majority, or 52 percent, say it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq, and 61 percent say they disapprove of how he is handling Iraq specifically. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The poll interviews were conducted before President Bush's Oval Office address, which was broadcast on primetime television Sunday. (Read what he said.)

Although half of those surveyed considered Iraq's first full-term parliamentary election since the ouster of Saddam Hussein either a major or key step toward the U.S. achieving its goals in Iraq, only 40 percent felt the U.S. was winning the war. Half said that neither side was winning. (View poll results)

The poll was nearly split, 49 percent to 47 percent, between those who thought the U.S. will either "definitely" or "probably" win, and those who said the U.S. will lose. That said, 69 percent of those polled expressed optimism that the U.S. can win the war. The margin of error for how respondents assessed the war was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Wow. Only half think that we can win in Iraq (however that is being defined today), and only 40% think we're winning. Keep in mind that these polls were meant to be current with the most recent Iraqi election, which has already been rife with accusations of vote tampering and intimidation. (Plus the results, as expected, are accruing to the Iranian-backed fundamentalist loons.) Perhaps international monitoring would have helped -- except they had to impose strict martial law just to carry this thing off in the first place. Sound like we're winning?

Anyway, just another case where certain portions of major media choose to abdicate their roles and irresponsibly wax rhapsodic about pendulum swings and event bounces. Chances are that the ongoing revelations of Bush's illegal little eavesdropping program (and the lying about it, which is what we're all supposed to get inflamed over, remember) are going to shake those numbers back on down. Then you have Bush's butt-boy Tom DeLay going on trial soon, and Rove's impending indictment, and the growing Abramoff scandal, and the eventual resurgence in gasoline prices, and you can see some shit about to hit the fan.

But back to the domestic spying program, and the hollow pronunciamentos who want to meet these animals on everyfuckingthing, no matter how debased or flatly unconstitutional. The first example is Marshall Wittman, aka the Bull Moose, a blogger whom I occasionally enjoy for his centrist views and quirky writing. The Moose has been a bit too conciliatory as of late, with those who do not desire conciliation, but rather crave annihiliation. The Moose seems to think that if the Democrats just play nice with Republicans, that all will be well. How's that been working for them so far?

Now he hits rock bottom with a craven defense of Bush's bullshit.

However, as of yet, there is no clear evidence that they broke the law. Lawyers will endlessly debate the legitimacy of the Administration's citing of the Al Quaeda force resolution for authorization. Moreover, there was a legitimate concern that an open debate about modifications in the FISA law could have alerted our enemies that their calls were detected. And does anyone seriously believe that the targets of these calls were anyone else than potential security threats? There is absolutely no evidence that this was a "Nixonian" enemies list witch hunt.

For one, Bush has already been caught lying about all this several times, in a matter of just a few short days. First the denial of the program on Friday, then the defiant 180º admission the next day. Then the assertion that Congress had been briefed on all this, when in fact only a few key senators had -- and even then, were not allowed to discuss it with anyone else, which boils down to a simple edict: This is what we're doing. Don't tell anyone.

Now it turns out that Bush, in a speech last April, insisted that all surveillance was being done through the FISA court system, that it was all warranted. The current spin on that is that Bush was specifically referring to surveillances under the Patriot Act.

Anyone else wistful for the simple days, when we just had to parse "is" and "alone"?

The second problem with the Moose's paragraph above is his blanket assertion that this was only done on "potential security threats". Well, already it turns out that groups like PETA, Catholic anti-war protest groups, and collegiate gay legal rights groups were all targeted by this program.

Now, obviously the Moose did not know this when he put hoof to keyboard and intoned solemnly. But a brief recap of the history of this administration and its players shows a clear pattern of bad faith, compounded by sheer incompetence. What the fuck made him seriously think these guys wouldn't abuse whatever privilege they had unilaterally decreed for themselves? Give me a fucking break here.

Now that the controversy is out in the open, Democrats and Republicans should work together to improve and clarify the law rather than seeking retribution for past misunderstandings. The bottom line should be strengthening our national security while maintaining our liberties to the fullest extent possible.

What we do know is that we have not suffered another attack on the Homeland since 9/11. That is a miraculous fact. And President Bush should be applauded for protecting the country rather than excoriated, to say nothing of impeachment which is on the lips of some Democrats.

Yes, rather than raise that pesky matter of the Constitution, the opposition party should just applaud Dear Leader for his beneficent protection, regardless of how many people get disappeared to Gitmo, spied on, or harassed for checking out Mao's Little Red Book. Really, why not just join the Republican Party and have done with it. Maybe a two-party state really is only one party better than a one-party state.

The Moose forgets the most axiomatic Trumanism of all -- that when faced with the choice of a fake Republican and a real one, usually people will vote for the real one.

On the political front, in the past month, there has been a systematic effort at self-branding by the Democratic Party, and it is not good. From the defeatist Iraq talk to the obstruction on the Patriot Act, the donkey is effectively "rebranding" and "framing" itself as weak on national security. George Lakoff should be proud! Rather than the 2006 election being about the GOP's weak ethics, it may be about the Democrat's anemic defense credentials.

We live in a period that is similar to the Cold War in that there is an over-riding national security threat. The fundamental political and policy question is which party will the American people trust to defend the country and their families?

Apparently they're supposed to trust the ones who have persistently lied about everything, spent and tax-cut the country into record deficits, and subverted the law of the land every chance they've gotten -- and refused to take accountability for any of it. Right now, Bush is in the "abusive spouse" mode of response to it all. The next press conference will no doubt feature him in a wife-beater shirt, telling us, his bitch, that he wouldn't hit us if we weren't so mouthy. It's really our fault.

Saddest of all, Wittman might actually be right about his estimates of the political culture out there. Bush and his gang have not been brought to bear for any of this. Growing murmurs of discontent are not making any sort real dent in all this. And the Democrats, even with their pale attempts at "branding", can't even get that right.

Matt Stoller has some choice words for Barack Obama:

Powerful actors, like the top-down media, will not attack the President unless they think he's weak. But to make the case that he is weak, he must be treated with contempt, and that cannot happen when party leaders like Barack Obama simply refuse to act creatively and risk driving up their disapproval ratings.

....

What in the world is the difference between Tweety saying that "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs" and Senator Obama saying that Bush isn't a bad man and loves his country? They are both echoes of the same conventional wisdom line that those who dislike the President are bitter angry vicious crazy partisans consumed by hatred, instead of Nobel prize winning scientists and professionals fed up with the systematic looting of the country by a gang of right-wing white collar criminals. Politics is about character, and George W. Bush and the right-wingers who support him simply don't have much. It's that, and not policy differences, that separates the two parties.

Exactly. The Democrats need to revive that sort of debate because for one, it's true, but more importantly, they need to set their sights higher and think about the big picture. They seem to think that if they let the scandals implode the administration, they can take '06 and even '08 on the strength of that. They forget they they had the White House, with a boom economy and a popular president, and the Republican slime machine still got him impeached at twenty points higher approval than Bush has now. Having the leadership roles is not all there is to wielding the reins of power, and while fighting fire with fire is extremely unpleasant, it is also unfortunately crucial to their survival as a viable opposition. This measured disagreement by degrees just gives the Bushies time to get their next swagger strategy ready for rollout, and make the Democrats look like capitulating pussies all over again.

It doesn't have to be that way. Even honest-to-god sigint agents (signal intel -- wiretapping and monitoring) are pissed about the notion of their secret tech being turned on fellow citizens:

A few current and former signals intelligence guys have been checking in since this NSA domestic spying story broke. Their reactions range between midly creeped out and completely pissed off.

All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.

"It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen," one source says. "You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don't fuck with your own people."

Doesn't get much simpler than that, does it? The main thing is to responsibly point out that this wasn't just a matter of listening in on a few dozen Saudi immigrants out in the woods starting a supposed paintball camp. This is monitoring and infiltrating domestic groups who had no terror agenda, but who had actively opposed administration policy. It's against federal law in and of itself, and Bush has compounded the situation by repeatedly lying and misrepresenting the situation. It is not treason to expect him to obey existing laws, and it is a path to ruin to just allow Bush to grant himself superpowers when he sees fit.

Two simple questions for intellectually honest conservatives:

1. By Bush's own statements, the war on terror is ongoing, and presumably will outlast this administration. How would you feel about President Hillary Clinton having these awesome superpowers Bush has granted himself?



2. Just where do you plan on drawing the line, as far as civil liberties you feel you can abrogate to executive fiat, and do you seriously think that your line will be exactly where their line will end up, if they even have one?

Help A Brutha Out

Digby is one of the good guys. He kicks ass and takes names, and he does what every good blogger must do (and almost no corporate media entity does) -- be both informative and entertaining. (Indeed, your average kajillion-dollar network news production is neither of those things.)

He's fighting the good fight, and we're all in this together, and so forth, so head on over, and give him a sawbuck or several if you can, or give him some click-through love on his ads if you're tapped. It's a worthwhile cause, like saving a puppy -- except this puppy has his incisors buried deep in the flanks of this festering sore of a government.

Left Behind: The Rapture Of Power

Seems that the Asian Century is being started without us.

Today, in Kuala Lumpur, a milestone is being set in Asia, one that will have a profound impact on the future of the region.

Leaders of 16 Asia Pacific countries are meeting in the first ever East Asia Summit (EAS) to define and chart the region’s role during the 21st century. Asia’s great economic and military powers -- China, Japan and India are present, so are the ten member nations of the Asean. The United States, which has always claimed to be a Pacific power and has deployed tremendous military firepower in the region to back that claim, is not. It was not invited.

But two of America’s lackeys or allies, Australia and New Zealand will be around.

Nice cheap shot at our imperialist running dog ANZAC allies, but the gist is the same -- the beginning of the tectonic political shift is under way, and we are conspicuous by our absence. Thanks to our presence in the Phillippines, Korea, and Okinawa, we have been able to keep East Asian ascendancy somewhat in check. But they're on the rise, they want to flex their growing muscle, and the sooner we're out of their faces, the sooner they can start going after each other.

For example, say Korea reunites, and they decide they no longer need our military presence there, as both they and Japan are growing in concurrence on. Now, a reunified Korea would, in subsuming the Yongbyon program in the north, be a bona-fide nuclear power. How do you think that will sit with Japan? They will certainly want in the club, if only for self-defense. Either way, you have a proliferation problem.

Or they can all just line up at A.Q. Khan's House O' Annihilation and throw him some benjamins. The end result is the same.

Then you the growing technological ability of India and Korea, the manufacturing ability of China, and the cultivation of lucrative trade markets other than the US. It's not a problem now, not yet, but look down the road toward the latter half of the next decade, and factor in the ever-decreasing quantity of accessible oil -- and the ever-increasing consumption in that part of the world that has far greater proximity to where most of the remaining oil is. They are going to be flush with cash, where we are stuck with Prince Numbnuts' sack of magic beans.

The US economy may have grown nicely on paper in the last two quarters, but doesn't seem to have gained any ground on our spending deficit or our trade/current accounts deficits with China, which put them in a rather advantageous spot over us.

Nor have we made any progress toward weaning ourselves from the petro tit, which will require squandering more and more resources maintaining a garrison in the Middle East. You think all the troops are coming home just in time for midterms? Fat chance. There'll be a small drawdown, and then rotating maintenance levels in Kuwait and Qatar for at least the next 10-12 years. Whatever your feelings on the morals of the war, that's a huge expense, and we're all still driving, aren't we?

Then we have the nascent South American bloc of nations with left-leaning presidents who have decided to get out from under the IMF, and stop taking orders from us. Worst of all, they're banding together.

Morales tried to reassure investors Monday, saying that while Bolivia will assert ownership rights over its natural resources, "that does not mean confiscating or expropriating property of the multinationals."
He could get guidance from Chavez, who has countered the wave of privatizations that swept Latin America in past decades by asserting more state control over joint energy ventures in Venezuela.
Flush with petrodollars from the world's fifth-largest oil reserves, Chavez also has announced deal after deal with his South American neighbors. Just last week, he and Silva laid the cornerstone for a $2.5 billion refinery in Brazil, and both leaders are talking about developing the region's infrastructure.
"We'll spend $10 billion, $20 billion, but we're going to integrate South America," Silva said.

And what are our brilliant leaders doing about all this to at least protect our position (hopefully without doing it at the expense of others for a change)? They're keeping Cuba out of the World Baseball Classic, out of sheer spite:

U.S. Olympic Committee Chairman Peter Ueberroth called on the Bush administration to reverse its decision to keep Cuba out of next year's World Baseball Classic.

Ueberroth, a former baseball commissioner and head of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, said last week's decision by the Treasury Department to deny Cuba a permit to play in the 16-team event will damage American efforts to host the Olympics in the future. Olympic host countries must guarantee all nations can participate.

"It is important to any future bid city from the United States that this be reversed," Ueberroth said.

To the credit of Major League Baseball, they are doing everything they can to ensure that Cuba is included, as they should be. After all, how many Cubans are going to be on the American team? Not only that, but note who else is on the list of participants -- not only do you have those darned Venezuelan troublemakers, but noted repressive commie regime China. Funny how we ride our high horse like it's the fucking Kentucky Derby when Cuba comes up, but we don't say shit about our vaunted principles to China. Guess everything has its price.

The Skidmark Amendment

The proposed constitutional amendment, in full:

The law is what we say it is, when we say it is.

In acknowledging the message was true, President Bush took aim at the messenger Saturday, saying that a newspaper jeopardized national security by revealing that he authorized wiretaps on U.S. citizens after September 11.

After The New York Times reported, and CNN confirmed, a claim that Bush gave the National Security Agency license to eavesdrop on Americans communicating with people overseas, the president said that his actions were permissible, but that leaking the revelation to the media was illegal.

Uh-huh. Except the Times sat on the story for over a year, supposedly to "investigate further". Someone should call a panel on blogger ethics. Once again, it would have been handy to know this stuff last fucking year, when we could have done something about it.

But it is rather comical to listen to Mister Man smack his wittle sppon against the high chair and excoriate the leakers. We know how you feel about leakers, Chief, at least when they leak stuff that supposed to benefit you.

Such a fine, moral, forthright straight-shooter. Why, I'd like to have a beer with him.

Bush added: "Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."

He acknowledged during the address that he allowed the NSA "to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."

Heh. Interesting how they go from the usual "nobody here but us chickens" mode to "yeah, we did it, and fuck you if you have a problem with it" in less than 24 hours. Verily and forsooth, the adults are in charge. Listen, why don't you guys take the weekend and see if you can get your stories straight, then send Fluffer McClellan out to disassemble to the press corps for the millionth time, treat us all like we're in third grade, and then you can go back to your power naps and pretzels. Sound like a deal?

After hearing Bush's response, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, said there was no law allowing the president's actions and that "it's a sad day."

"He's trying to claim somehow that the authorization for the Afghanistan attack after 9/11 permitted this, and that's just absurd," Feingold said. "There's not a single senator or member of Congress who thought we were authorizing wiretaps."

He added that the law clearly lays out how to obtain permission for wiretaps.

"If he needs a wiretap, the authority is already there -- the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act," Feingold said. "They can ask for a warrant to do that, and even if there's an emergency situation, they can go for 72 hours as long as they give notice at the end of 72 hours."

Feingold lays it out right there. They can file for a warrant under FISA quite easily; the mechanism is there for just that purpose. As I've already pointed out, there's a reason they've chosen this path to do things, the same reason they've chosen to outsource torture to former Iron Curtain gulags, the same reason they've "accidentally" kidnapped German and Canadian citizens and sent them to Egypt and Syria to get their fingernails yanked out for a year or so.

They don't think they should be held accountable for anything they do. They don't want to leave a paper trail. When they assured us post-9/11 that they had flirted with and discarded the notion of a shadow government to take care of covert domestic surveillance, it was an obvious head-fake, and sure enough, the truth is finally starting to trickle out.

Bush defended signing the order by saying that two of the September 11 hijackers who flew the plane into the Pentagon -- Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- "communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas, but we didn't know they were here until it was too late."

He said the authorizations have made it "more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time, and the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad."

Sure, except all we heard after the initial cries of intelligence failure was the opposite -- that if anything, we had a veritable firehose of intelligence, but lacked the proper mechanisms and interdepartmental coordination to process all of it. That was why the Homeland Security boondoggle was set up. That's why Slam Dunk Tenet got his golden handshake, and Porter Goss, who unwittingly met with Mahmoud Ahmad (a Pakistani ISI general who had contributed $100K to al Qaeda) on the morning of September 11, 2001, to be DCI.

Has Bush forgotten about the August 6, 2001 PDB (handed to him by none other than Harriet Miers) entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In The US"? Probably he has; that was pretty early into his vacation season that summer. Well, it doesn't all just go down the memory hole, Harvard -- some of us can recall all this shit pretty well.

And lest you just assume that all this covert muscle is being deployed exclusively at the swarthy types, this [via Kos] may disabuse us of that notion:

NEW BEDFORD -- A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

....

The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung.
In the 1950s and '60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.
The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a "watch list." They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.

So are we fighting terrorism or retro communism? Why exactly did the agents not only put the arm on this kid, but not let him have the book, once they apparently realized that he was just working on a research paper? What is the fucking deal with these people?

Are we feeling safer yet?

Electile Dysfunction: Burqa Becomes "Freedom Jacket"

Not to piss on the justifiable parade of celebrating Iraq's lurching steps away from despotism, but the continued pretense that the lurch is toward something even remotely resembling a true democracy seems to be at a tragic clash with reality.

Basra, Iraq -- Just after the polls opened at 7 a.m. Thursday, Majid al-Sari sat on his living room couch dressed in a natty dark suit and red tie, looking out anxiously at the early sunlight.

"I feel tense," he said. "For myself and for Iraq."

Though a candidate from one of Iraq's smaller parties, Sari, 42, was only slightly nervous about his own electoral fate. He is first on his party's slate of candidates in Basra and expects to win a seat in Iraq's first full-term parliament.

But as a secular Shiite, his political career is fraught with risks. He says he faces threats from both Sunni insurgents and the shadowy Shiite militias that wield influence in Basra's police force. He travels freely, but only because he works at the Defense Ministry and has a retinue of 20 black-masked soldiers with guns and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.

Above all, Sari says, he worries about Iraq's future and the bullying by religious parties, especially in the southern Shiite heartland.

"I was shocked to see the way religion has increased in Iraq," said Sari, a blunt, square-jawed man who lived in Sweden for more than a decade before the fall of Saddam Hussein. "I expected that once Iraq got its freedom, the effects of religion would fade."

Later in the day, as Sari drove through his native city, checking on polling sites in a white Land Cruiser, police illegally preached to voters through loudspeakers on top of their patrol cars, urging them to vote 555, the number of the main Shiite alliance. Despite his brace of guards and his official role, Sari said, he could do nothing to stop them.

"Eighty percent of them belong to militias for the religious parties," Sari said of the police. The numbers are in their favor, he added: There are 3,500 Iraqi soldiers in Basra but 14,500 police officers. "If there were to be clashes, there is no contest," he said.

Already Iraq has essentially subdivided itself, in the absence of its strongmen. The theocrats in the south, encouraged by overt Iranian influence, have emerged as a new Taliban. Here's a helpful photo attesting to that:



Pretty sweet, eh? That's the smell of Freedomocracy™, my friend.

Then you have the Kurds in the north, who have already struck their own deals with Norwegian oil companies to do some drilling and extracting. The Kurds are exercising their longstanding desire for autonomy, which is a wonderful thing, except that Turkey and (again) Iran also have sizable Kurdish populations, and they won't put up with rebellious incitement from Kirkuk. And how does a federalized Baghdad keep such a potential secession from occurring? The Kurds are not only essential to having any hope of balancing out the lunatic Shiites in the government, but their independence would seriously destabilize the entire region even further. So we are going to find ourselves working at cross purposes with our stated principles of fulfilling the yearnings of freedom.

Has any mainstream media agency tackled such an analysis of these likely scenarios? Of course not. They're too busy schmoozing and sucking up to the administration for access. They still do not seem to get that they are being played, that the Bushies need them to be useful idiots to get their message out for them. It does not occur to the media weasels that if they stood up en masse and walked away from Scott "Fluffer" McClellan the next time he lies and evades the questions, they will have to regroup and reconsider their tactics of lying and hypocrisy. Don't even play Fluffer's game any more; just get up, walk out, and leave him at the mercy of that dipshit weirdo Les Kinsolving. Maybe they can get Jeff Gannon™ back in, whatever. Quit giving them the satisfaction. Fucking grow a pair already. Do your damned jobs with some pride, people.

And while the large turnout earned some well-deserved huzzahs all around, we need to keep in mind that Iraqis have their own motives for this:

In Samarra, a rebellious city of 200,000 in the Sunni heartland, Mayor Mahmoud Ahmed said many residents were voting "because they think it is another way of getting the Americans out of the city."

More than 93,000 votes were cast in Samarra on Thursday, compared with barely 2,000 in the parliamentary election in January. "We believe that control for security in Samarra should be transferred from American soldiers to Iraqi soldiers and police. People believe if they vote, they will have representatives in parliament who will push the government to do that and make the Americans leave," the mayor said.

U.S. commanders in the area agreed with the assessment. "What motivates them is they think voting is part of a process to get us out of Samarra," said Lt. Col. Mark Wald, head of the 69th Armored Regiment in the 3rd Infantry Division. "There is a feeling here of a 'legitimate resistance' that only fights us because we are here. It follows if they have a legitimate government that they feel represents them, they can pressure the Americans to leave," he said.

And in some respects, it may just be the same as it ever was:

Though the election generally went smoothly, some voters complained of fraud and voter intimidation.

In Fallujah, the former Sunni insurgent bastion that was attacked by U.S. forces last year, 11 of the city's 35 polling stations did not receive ballot boxes, and some sites ran out of ballots in the morning, said Mayor Dhari al-Arsan. He said some voters thought it was done on purpose, but he attributed the shortage of ballot boxes to the large turnout.

In Mukshifa, near Tikrit, voters and police officials said Sheikh Shalon al-Boyisa, a leader running for parliament against 45 other candidates, used force to coerce people to vote for him. "I was coming here to vote. Democracy, you know," Ayad Rashid al-Boyisa, a retired Iraqi army major, said. "Sheikh Shalon showed up at the polling station and said to everybody: 'You are going to vote for me, Sheikh Shalon.' "

When he refused, the sheikh's bodyguards held him while the sheikh and his brother beat him on the head with a piece of brick, al-Boyisa said, displaying a scarred, bandaged head under a red-and-white kaffiyeh scarf.

Iraqi police confirmed al-Boyisa's allegations, but the sheikh's brother, Ali, denied that he or the sheikh had intimidated voters.

"We don't tell people how to vote -- it's democracy," Ali al-Boyisa said as the sheikh's servants carried dishes of rice and lamb to feed voters, election workers and police officers guarding the polling site.

It's impossible to unring the bell, unshit the bed, unstep on our dicks, etc. But we need to get serious about having a national conversation about the moral and practical issues surrounding troop withdrawal. Bush has been successful in keeping the timetable to his own designs, so that he can proclaim "victory" (as he chooses to define it, of course) and make a big show of a small drawdown by midterms.

But the thing is this -- regardless of the outcome, these people need to be made accountable for what they've done and how they've done it. Only a fool still really believes the PNAC delusion of a shining example of democracy for the rest of the region to follow, while we magnanimously recoup our soon-to-be $400 billion investment. Everyone sees us with our pants down, and the Iranians are going to run herd on Iraq the second we turn our backs and trudge back home.

This was a monumental fuck-up, based on a pack of lies, and even if we can get out of there with some face intact, the feckless morons who got us into this clusterfuck in the first place must account for their errors in principle and judgment. If you lose $400 billion for your company by cockily refusing to listen to people who know more about what you're doing than you yourself do, you deserve to lose your fucking job, at the very least.

And really, how much democracy can you read into Iraq's modest efforts, when our own little experiment has pretty much devolved into the Chimperor wiping his ass with the Constitution by imperial fiat? People seem to be taken with the odd notion that, since they have nothing to hide, they'd probably let themselves be strip-searched at random in the supermarket, if "freedom" required it of them. What they (and that preening fool Tom Brokaw, who really just needs to take his faux-avuncular harrumphing back to East Dakota or wherever) need to understand is that surveillance warrants are not difficult to get, that the Bushies deliberately avoided even bothering with that simple process for a reason. What is that reason? Well, if we had an investigative media, we might have an idea. Offhand, I assume they did it for the same reason Karl Rove licks his balls -- because they can. They want to see just how much they can get away with, where the limits are. They showed this propensity right from the start, when Bush's very first executive order was to seal off presidential archives from, you know, the public. Then 9/11 came along and provided them with all the cover they could dream of.

Perhaps that is the "democracy" they wish to export to the benighted slums of Iraq, by theocrat death squad, if necessary. We shall see. In the meantime, the purple finger gimmick is nice, but I'll take my platitudes with a big block of salt, thanks very much.

Myth America 2: Religion Boogaloo

James Wolcott helpfully steers us toward another brick in our mythic wall, a fantastic declamation of the cynicism exhibited by ivory-tower conservatards, when it comes to matters of faith, and specifically the deliberate promulgation of "intelligent design" mythos, couched in the greater monotheistic mythos.

As a matter of historical curiosity, this new turning of neocon eyes toward heaven comes just as Pope John Paul II has officially recognized that "the theory of evolution is more than an hypothesis." Indeed, it comes as evolutionary thinking itself is shedding considerable light on an array of questions and problems, from brain growth to the development of immune systems, from sociobiology to economics, from ecology to software design. Such research is yielding anti-designer results. F.A. Hayek long ago recognized the phenomenon of "spontaneous order" and described how it arose in markets, families, and other social institutions. Now, ingenious computer models are confirming Hayek's insights. It is increasingly obvious that social systems, from commerce to language, evolve and adapt without the need for top-down planning and organization. Order in markets is generated through processes analogous to Darwinian natural selection in biology. In other words, we can indeed have apparent design without a designer; the world is demonstrably brimming with just such phenomena.

Notice the libertarian trope of reflexively dismissing even the need for "top-down planning and organization". Still, his base premise is observably correct -- systems in both the natural kingdom and in the realm of human societal relationships can be observed to have an organically evolving quality unto themselves. The sentient qualities of the individuals will seek out the most advantageous situations for themselves in either type of case. It's just common sense.

But the neocon assault on Darwinism may not be based on either science or spirituality so much as on politics and political philosophy. That is the view of Paul Gross, a biologist and self-described conservative. Gross is much concerned with the interplay of science and politics--he is the co-author of the 1994 book, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science--and is puzzled by the attacks on evolutionary biology by people whose political views he largely shares. Regarding Commentary's anti-Darwin article, he says he is mystified that the magazine "would publish the damned thing without at least passing it by a few scientists first."

Gross believes that the conservative attack on Darwin may be a case of tactical politics. Some conservative intellectuals think religious fundamentalists are "essential to the political program of the right," says Gross. As a gesture of solidarity, he says, these intellectuals are publicly embracing arguments that appear to "keep God in the picture."

It's that sort of thing that confirms my assumption that "American intellectualism" is essentially an oxymoron on the level of "jumbo shrimp". American intellectuals are frequently compromised somewhere along the line, usually as rent-boys for a "think tank" funded by some whackjob Mr. Burns-type gazillionaire. Not only that, Americans themselves typically aren't politically aware enough to have even read any genuine intellectuals. Rush Limbaugh is not an intellectual. Dipshit hagiographers like Peggy Noonan and George Fwill, also not intellectuals. Court stenographers like Woodward and Miller -- not real reporters. (At least Woodward probably didn't fuck Mark Felt, where apparently Judy Miller would suck cock to get the inside scoop on a sack race.)

The end of the Cold War may also be a factor. Marx fell with the Soviet Union; Freud has been discredited by modern psychology and neuroscience. The last standing member of the 19th century's unholy materialist trinity is Darwin. Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial, makes the connection clear: "Darwinism is the most important of the materialist ideologies--Marxism, Freudianism, and behaviorism are others--which have done so much damage to science and society in the 20th century." Kristol agrees. "All I want to do," he told his AEI audience, "is break the bonds of Darwinian materialism which at the moment restrict our imagination. For the moment that's enough."

This is so ridiculous, on multiple levels. First, merely lumping Darwinism in with other "materialist ideologies" does not mitigate its inherent scientific probity. Second, it's a bit ironic that these fields are pejoratively dubbed as "materialist" by filthy-rich pelf-grubbing pseudo-intellectual twaddle-merchants renting themselves out to whoever will have them. Third, which is more "restricting" to "our" imagination -- the adventure of continuous scientific progress, or a collection of metaphorical fables written by Bronze Age Levantine tribesmen, said by its faithful to be absolutely immutable? It is disingenuous to even allow such lies to go unchallenged.

But something deeper seems to be going on, and the key to it can be found in Bork's assertion in his book that religious "belief is probably essential to a civilized future." These otherwise largely secular intellectuals may well have turned on Darwin because they have concluded that his theory of evolution undermines religious faith in society at large. Of course, this is not a novel thought. Many others have arrived at the same conclusion. Conservative activist Beverly LaHaye, a biblical literalist who is president of Concerned Women for America, puts the matter directly: "If the biblical account of creation in Genesis isn't true, how can we trust the rest of the Bible?"

Kristol and his colleagues may worry that once this one thread is pulled from the fabric of religious belief, perhaps the whole will become unraveled, with grave social consequences. Without the strictures and traditions imposed by a religion that promises to punish sinners, the moral controls that moderate our base desires will lose their validity, leading ultimately to moral chaos. Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is "the opium of the people"; they add a heartfelt, "Thank God!"

It is no secret that many neocons are in a deep funk over the state of American society. (For an especially glum assessment, dip into Bork's best-seller.) In the 1960s, many of them advocated federal programs to ameliorate such social ills as poverty, crime, racial discrimination, illegitimacy, and drug abuse. But as one social welfare program after another succumbed to its unintended consequences, they recognized the limits of governmental intervention. Having suffered a crisis of faith in the efficacy of social science, they now believe that only the restoration of religious belief among the masses can re-establish order in American society. As David Brooks recently wrote in the conservative journal The Weekly Standard, policy intellectuals used to sound like economists; now they sound like ministers. He's right. At conservative confabs today, the longing for yet one more Great Awakening of religious fervor is palpable.

Kristol has been quite candid about his belief that religion is essential for inculcating and sustaining morality in culture. He wrote in a 1991 essay, "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded--or even if it suspects--that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."

How about just leaving people the hell alone, and letting them figure it out for themselves? Nah, that'd be too easy -- plus, everyone would be doing their own thing, which would be bad for business.

Can it really be that simple? Can it really be all about a means of controlling the bewildered herd?

Another prominent neoconservative, Leon Kass, author of Toward a More Natural Science (1985), and a member of the University of Chicago's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, also believes that evolutionary theory poses a threat to social order: "[T]he creationists and their fundamentalist patrons...sense that orthodox evolutionary theory cannot support any notions we might have regarding human dignity or man's special place in the whole. And they see that Western moral teaching, so closely tied to Scripture, is also in peril if any major part of Scripture can be shown to be false."

Was it Chesterton or Burke who said that if men didn't believe in something, they'd believe anything? This is a more politicized iteration of that old saw. It would be nice if these assholes put their money where their mouths always are, but there's more to "regarding human dignity" than grudgingly accepting soup kitchens and holding toy drives once a year. How about the next corporation that guts its employees' pension fund after profiting $4 billion in six months, we make sure that upper management takes it in the shorts with equal force? Or does more money equal more dignity?

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that `the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences."

Kristol agrees with this view. "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he says in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

In crude terms, some critics of Strauss argue that he interpreted the ancient philosophers as offering two different teachings, an esoteric one which is available only to those who read the ancient texts closely, and an exoteric one accessible to naive readers. The exoteric interpretations were aimed at the mass of people, the vulgar, while the esoteric teachings--the hidden meanings--were vouchsafed to the few, the philosophers. Philosophers know the truth, but must keep it hidden from the vulgar, lest it upset them. What is the hidden truth known to philosophers? That there is no God and there is no ultimate foundation for morality. As Kristol suggests, it is necessary to keep this truth from the vulgar because such knowledge would only engender despair in them and lead to social breakdown. In his book, On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon's Hiero, Strauss asserts with unusual clarity that Socratic dialogues are "based on the premise that there is a disproportion between the intransigent quest for truth and the requirements of society, or that not all truths are always harmless."

....

Thus, to preserve society, wise people must publicly support the traditions and myths that sustain the political order and that encourage ordinary people to obey the laws and live justly. People will do so only if they believe that moral rules are divinely decreed or were set up by men who were inspired by the Divine.

Kristol restated this insight nearly five decades ago in an essay in Commentary dealing with Freud: "If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without...let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine--for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish."

Oh, well good thing we have Strauss and Kristol and the rest of the enlightened ones -- who don't really believe it themselves -- to decide for us what "truths" we vulgar proles can and cannot handle. That is repulsive. As much as I beat on people for being suckers -- and most of them are -- the problem is not one of native intelligence. It is a problem of being conditioned to be suckers, by a crappy school system, an indifferent government, and a sensationalist media. People are just stuck on this hamster wheel of sorts, living on road rage and manufactured conflict, repeatedly trying to sate themselves with more useless shit. It's the only way to forget that their real wages stagnate while their cost of living keeps soaring; that they're just a paycheck or two from the streets; that if there's a medical emergency in the family, they're going to be left destitute, whether or not the treatment is successful.

The system has always been broken, because the systems have always revolved (and evolved) around the class who set up the system in the first place. Whether despotism, monarchy, republic, or democracy, there have always been inherent inequities in the system, and thus various mechanisms for dealing with the social fallout. Nationalist and religious mythos -- frequently intertwined -- are what these self-appointed keepers of the flame use to keep the flock docile. They believe they're lying for the Lord, because they genuinely believe that the majority of people need other people (like Kristol and Strauss, coincidentally enough) to look after them. What it boils down to is that they don't think we can take care of ourselves.

The glorious flip side to all that is this -- it's because they're scared shitless of what would happen if people got wise.

(still more to come)

Witless For The Persecution

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Redemption

As a longtime proponent of capital punishment, I find myself a tad conflicted these days, not that that's a new feeling. The execution of Stanley Williams this week was a grim reminder of that conflict.

If there is a subject about which one is to be conflicted, pro or con, I can think of worse ones than this. And the recent exonerations of death row inmates have certainly mitigated my feelings about the most permanent of sentences, in procedure anyway, if not in principle. Regardless, even when faced with an undeniable monster like, say, John Wayne Gacy, I see no upside to the traditional sanctimonious moralizing, almost gleeful in its eagerness to get on with it. I simply never saw the point in warehousing a piece of shit like John Wayne Gacy. I do not see why taxpayers should subsidize creepy clown paintings and masturbatory correspondence with the legion of ghouls that wrote to him.

But whatever Stanley Williams was, he was not John Wayne Gacy. I do not buy into the boutique Nobel Peace Prize nominations (indeed, I'm sure some yahoo nominates George W. Bush every year, too) for Williams. It's nice that he made the effort to do books and speaking engagements to alert the kids about the dangers of gangs. I submit that people do not join gangs for the fun and excitement of it; I assume that they have merely run out of viable alternatives in a largely indifferent, job-free environment. And Williams did himself no favors by refusing to provide vital inside information in helping law enforcement break the gangs. (Not that it would have done as much good as The Man thinks it would have; the very nature of the organization of these enterprises, as with insurgent/terrorist cells, makes the effect not unlike that of hitting mercury with a hammer.)

People who are honest about their support for the death penalty will readily acknowledge that there is a large component of revenge inherent in the meting of punishment. This is not necessarily such an awful thing, except one gets the feeling that the people who crow the loudest for revenge are the least psychologically equipped to handle it when it's actually carried out. Case in point: the wife of one of Williams' victims had publicly proclaimed her willingness to accept that Williams had made an honest effort to change the course of his life, that while he knew he could not repay the debt he had incurred, he would do the best he could and hope for God's grace when his time came. Fair enough, though I find it passing curious that in the age of letting (no, encouraging) the families of victims natter and rant throughout the penalty phase, that this particular opinion didn't seem to count as much. The stepmother of this same victim, however, took the exact opposite tack, and insisted that only Williams' death could set everything aright.

The key here is that the wife had already made her peace long ago, and whether Williams' sentence had gotten commuted or not, she would have dealt with things. The stepmother, on the other hand, had invested herself quite heavily into the demise of Williams, and thus not only could not be sated any other way, but would be apt to find herself somewhat emotionally bereft once getting what she wished for so fervently.

The thing about being a death penalty proponent is to understand that, whatever its revenge-based motives, it is something that must be undertaken with a bit of sang-froid. Emotional hotheadedness does no one any good; this is an undertaking of serious, solemn gravity. There are human imperfections, and inexplicably some people in law enforcement have proven to be so craven as to either fudge lab results or use high-profile cases as political stepping stones. There should be serious accountability for those things as well.

What the execution of Stanley Williams really has me thinking about, though, is how little we think about what purpose we want our prisons to serve. Especially in California, which has an enormous (and growing) prison system. We have given up on even the pretense of rehabilitation; we have decided that they're all animals and simply must be warehoused. The problem with that is that eventually their time is done and they get unleashed on the public once again, now stupider and meaner (which may describe the public as well, now that I think of it).

Being a godless amoral hedonistic sybarite, I sometimes find myself wondering if Christians believe more in the God of spiteful retribution, or the Jesus who always offered the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Obviously it varies from person to person, maybe even day to day and situation to situation, but in the aggregate, people seem to be content with the smiting, and then going through the rituals and totems of affirming their godliness to one another, if not themselves.

One perfect case is none other than former Texas governor George W. Bush, who once famously mocked Karla Faye Tucker shortly before her execution, much to the horror of none other than Tucker Carlson, who was probably wearing his bow tie and nothing else when interviewing the brilliant, charismatic governor. Whatever one's sentiments about an eye for an eye or whatnot, that is simply unchristian behavior, pure and simple. It's despicable. But it's a fine glimpse into the mind of an unreconstructed troglodyte.

I think Arnold Schwarzenegger missed a real opportunity, by passing up the commutation of Williams' sentence. Politically, it is seen as the astute move to make. But the GOP's fortunes are on the wane, W's dead-cat bounce of last week notwithstanding, and the California GOP is so desperate they're trying to draft Mel Gibson. Arnold could have followed the instincts of his "Austrian brain", shown the ability to be reflective, and given the finger to a party that is looking for a way to kick him to the curb anyway. The problem is that he still he thinks he can be president. He (and the rest of us) would be better off if he just made another crappy movie, this time about him being president.

One thing death penalty opponents bring up as rationale is that it's wrong to allow the state so much power over life and death. I think it is strange to insist on shutting this particular door so long after the horse had fled the barn. The state and federal governments already exert impossible amounts of influence, direct and indirect, on our lives and the quality thereof. Percentage point diddlers make the difference between living in a house and living in a cardboard box for a lot of people, every time they fuck with the interest rates to "fight inflation". Congress fucks the middle class every time it throws another tax cut to a useless, unproductive sack of shit like Paris Hilton. This isn't all that much different, not in terms of the irresponsible exercise of raw power.

Another DP opponent trope I want to hit before closing this out, just as food for thought, is this -- it is often said that a life sentence is just as effective a way to protect the public. Sounds reasonable, except it's not the guarantee they think it is. The very next inmate scheduled to be executed at San Quentin next month, Clarence Ray Allen, debunks exactly that notion.

Allen, who ran a security company in Fresno, was linked by prosecutors to a series of armed robberies in the Central Valley. He was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the murder in 1974 of his son's girlfriend. From behind bars at Folsom Prison, prosecutors said, he masterminded the murders in 1980 of three witnesses from his previous trial and conspired to kill four other witnesses.

A parolee, Billy Ray Hamilton, was convicted and sentenced to death for carrying out the three murders with a sawed-off shotgun.

The tone of the article actually revolves around the fact that Allen is 76 years old, blind, diabetic, and mostly invalid, and near death anyway. I couldn't possibly care less, nor do I care about his attorneys' assertion that Allen had a heart attack because the prison guards refused to give him his medication. I don't get off on it, like some, but I don't fucking care, either. Three more innocent people died after this cocksucker got his life sentence.

I do not have a one-size-fits-all answer here; I merely suggest that it's a more complex subject than either side wishes to acknowledge. For every Stanley Williams that reaches for redemption, there's a Clarence Ray Allen, a Richard Ramirez, a Richard Allen Davis. If you've ever directly known someone who's been viciously and senselessly murdered, you know it's not so cut-and-dried.

Myth America

Recently I got a chain e-mail, from an acquaintance whom I haven't seen in some twenty years. (Because it was our class reunion this year, I have heard from quite a few people I hadn't seen for twenty years. It's actually a nice surprise -- counter to the usual lurid portrayals of the perils of high school cliquery and such, I genuinely liked the people I went to school with.)

This e-mail, claiming in the header to be a "cool chain", started off innocuously enough. A tale of a nameless delayed flight, a grouchy passenger mulling over the mundanities of his life being held up by a mysterious problem, et voilà! It turns out that the plane has been held in dry-dock lo these countless minutes to allow Marines returning home from Iraq to board. Huzzahs all around.

So now the passenger in the e-mail ruminates on his own selfishness, and their sacrifices. Keep in mind that this is all in roughly 328-point Comic Sans font, and the e-mail is festooned with requisite hyper-patriotic photos of rhinestone-studded flags and steroided eagles and such, practically every paragraph. Still, I thought, it may not be exactly my æsthetic preference, but I can certainly agree with the sentiment, apocryphal or not. I respect and appreciate the efforts of the troops, and I want them to come back home safe, as soon as possible. Unlike the patrioticer-than-thou crowd, I just automatically assume that we're all on the same side of that particular subject, whatever our other disagreements.

So then the end of this thing finally appears. First, a photo of a toddler praying. Then an illustration of two dutiful toddlers praying, on the background of a flag, framed by the words "One Nation Under God". Then a third image, this time of an eagle carrying a flag in its talons, high above the earth -- but of course only the US is visible on the earth below. Above the eagle is a bright, presumably celestial, light. (I tried experimenting with Picasa to get the images to upload; needless to say it didn't work out.)

Then one last breathless burst of text:

Pass it on to everyone and pray.
Something good will happen to you tonight at 9:11 PM.
This is not a joke
Someone will either call you or will talk to you online and say that they love you.
Do not break this chain. Send this to as many people as you can in the next
15 minutes.
>>> GO

There are several levels of willful delusion in those few sentences, punctuated by the braying certitude that one normally finds in an obstinate second-grader. First is the basic principle of the chain letter. Chain letters are a very efficient way to find the suckers in any given crowd. It's amazing that even morons are still willing to be involved with even supposedly benign chain letters.

And this is certainly not a benign chain letter, though it pretends to be. It casts its "with Bush or with the terrists" fog over the whole proceedings, both with the shamelessly manipulative narrative of the story, and the various pseudo-patriotic gewgaws dotting the virtual landscape amidst the mawkish prose.

The real calling card of this travesty, obviously, lies in the "something good will happen to you at 9:11 PM" bit. It is of no use to try to parse this craziness from the viewpoint of mere rationality. There is a dizzy, irresponsible conflation of common lies in this little beauty of a sentence. The obvious one is the fraudulent association of 9/11 with Iraq, but the deeper lie surrounds that associative cow chip, as if to shield it from the bitter truth. Yes, pass this bullshit story on to your hapless friends, mach schnell, and someone will call or e-mail to tell you they love you at the precise moment of 9:11 tonight. What could any of these elements have to do with each other? Why would an acknowledgement of the sacrifice of service personnel result in a phone call from a loved one? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

This chain mail, and the countless others like it, are a warped synthesis of misplaced exceptionalism, misguided faith, and sheer misinformation and lack of common sense. I don't care that it was meant to be a "nice" thing; it is not a "nice" thing at all. It's a mishmash of jingoistic impulse, irrational religiosity, and the pervasive subtext that, once again, Jeebus likes us more than the other 95% of the humans His father created in His own image.

Of course, we're not meant to deconstruct these stupid things, or even critically think about them, for that matter. We're just supposed to automatically, reflexively genuflect to the approved signs and symbols -- eagles, flags, yellow ribbons, doe-eyed apple-cheeked younguns, etc. It's all part of the nationalist myth-making.

But you know who else had so much emotionally invested in all the trappings and symbols, without worrying about the, uh, substance and factuality all that much? Fascists. Stalinists. Modern students of fascism and Stalinism, like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. We snicker at all the silly murals of the Great Uncle, watching mercilessly, tirelessly over the multitudes of Pyongyang or Baghdad, while we fret that perhaps our cheap Chinese-made magnetic ribbon is not positioned just so on the ol' Grocery Schooner.

Investing in mythos first requires a dedicated break from rationality, a persistent cognitive dissonance.

(to be cont'd)

Bark At The Moon

From the incredible-yet-true file: Neil Bush, the one Bush brother who may actually be even more useless than W, is travelling around Asia with frequent Bush benefactor (and megalomanical distributor of thick envelopes) Sun Myung Moon. You'll never guess why:

John Gorenfeld at Alternet reports that the president's kid brother Neil has been traveling through Asia in the company of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah and sole proprietor of the loyal Republican Washington Times, promoting (ready for this?) a $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel"--51 underwater miles joining Alaska to Russia, perhaps to enable brother George to look more closely into the soul of Vladimir Putin.

Huh? A $200 billion tunnel to connect an uninhabitable part of Alaska with an uninhabitable part of Russia? Please. Either Moon is even crazier than previously thought, or this is the most retarded money-laundering scheme ever.

The Alternet article has more.

"Those who stray from the heavenly way," the owner of the flagship Republican newspaper the Washington Times admonished an audience in Taipei on Friday, "will be punished."

This "heavenly way," the Rev. Sun Myung Moon explained, demands a 51-mile underwater highway spanning Alaska and Russia. Sitting in the front row: Neil Bush, the brother of the president of the United States.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel" dream. As he describes it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God's plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.

The name Peace King Tunnel would allude to the title of authority to which Moon, 86, lays claim, and to which U.S. congressmen paid respect on Capitol Hill in last year's controversial "Crown of Peace" coronation ritual.

Yeah, because the much more accurate name of "Crazy Motherfucker Who Needs To Do The World A Favor And Die Already Tunnel" just didn't have that same ring to it.

Moon is not a "peace king", and too bad those asshole congressmen who played a part in his creepy little coronation ritual -- in a federal building no less -- have not been kicked to the curb already. Funny how the liberal mainstream media just never manages to cover this stuff, as preoccupied with religious issues as they purport to be.

Message to Paula Zahn: if you ever get tired of covering the Weepin' Statue O' Sackamenna, or the worshipful coverage of the ginormous minaret in my pants, you may want to check into this one. A brother of the leader (heh) of the free world is playing footman to a lunatic who is going around shilling his lunatic idea. I fail to see how this is not news. I don't know how many times I saw footage of W's four-hour stay in Mongolia, drinking fermented mare's milk and riding his Big Wheel around the dirt road. Surely this other thing merits some attention from our journamalistic betters, no?

Finally, Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition brings the deep politics smackdown to this whole sordid mess:

Neil, we know, is following Poppy's lead: Moon led his father across South America in the mid-90s, stuffing a hundred grand in his pocket for his trouble, which naturally was no trouble at all for either man.

Also along for the latest ride is Washington Times President Joo Dong Moon, and that should remind us of the part the Moonie paper played in breaking, and then stifling, the Craig Spence White House call boy scandal that was linked to the office of Vice President Bush on this notorious front page. As I wrote last February, "did the Times initially play this story as big as it did in order to win influence? In other words, Look - we got the goods - what you gonna do about it? The Times said it had the names of Spence's clients, and that they included politicians, as well as military, media and business figures. Blackmail, it's called in impolite circles. This could explain why the scandal was made to go away virtually overnight, the names undisclosed. Because, they did something about it."

Given Neil's publicized appetites, it doesn't take a great leap of imagination, or even a particularly sordid imagination, to wonder what might remain hidden by a friendly publisher with his own intelligence apparatus and Asian power base. That is, assuming the Bush boy gives something in return.

The Moon junket isn't Neil's first unlikely foray into the politics of religion. He works Capitol Hill as a lobbyist for Scientology, and still needing clarity is the story that he co-founded a mysterious Swiss-based ecumenical foundation with the future Pope Benedict XVI in 1999. As I noted back in April Neil Bush is hardly regarded for his attention to religious causes, nor Ratzinger to ecumenism. (Also from the April post: "Curiously, the foundation is listed by Dun & Bradstreet as a 'management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research,' though an official claims the designation must be a mistranslation.")

There are several links in that excerpt, all well worth checking out, as is Jeff's blog itself. The main point here is the intersection between money, access to power, and the ability to stay under the radar of the intrepid news gatherin' folk. How Moon keeps on getting away with it -- a $200 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait commemorated to himself! -- is a complete fucking mystery to me.

Or not.

Fossil Fuel For Thought

The Great Darwinian Conspiracy continues apace.

A perfectly preserved fossil of a feathered creature that lived 150 million years ago has provided further evidence to show that modern birds originate from dinosaurs.

The fossil is a complete skeleton of an Archaeopteryx and shows that it had features common to birds and a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods.

Scientists said the feet of the fossilised Archaeopteryx were anatomically almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs, which pointed to a common ancestry for both groups.

Archaeopteryx had many bird-like features, such as feathered wings and a wishbone, but it also had distinctly reptilian traits, including jaws with teeth, a bony tail and claws on its fingers.

Lies, damned lies! How dare you besmirch legitimate theoscientific inquiry with your schmevolution? Bastards.

Several fossils excavated in China have shown that some dinosaurs also grew feathered wings, which led scientists to suggest that perhaps birds are a living group of specialised dinosaurs.

The latest work on Archaeopteryx, the first specimen of which was discovered just two years after Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859, lends further support to the dinosaur origin of birds. Gerald Mayr of the Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues describe details of their investigation into the 10th and best-preserved specimen of Archaeopteryx in the journal Science.

It will be interesting to see if ID and especially young-earth creationists use the eyes and brains and sense of reason that their God supposedly gave them, and think about this latest addition to the veritable mountain of evidence at hand.

Wait. Scratch that. It won't be interesting at all. We all know exactly what their response will be, starting with "LA LA LA" and ending with "I CAN'T HEEEAAR YOU!".

The foot is better preserved than any previous Archaeopteryx specimen. It shows a hyper-extendible second toe, rather like the killer claw of Velociraptor, the vicious theropod dinosaur depicted in the film Jurassic Park.

"These observations provide further evidence for the theropod ancestry of birds," the scientists say. The hyper-extendible second toe blurs the distinction between this ancient bird and the theropod dinosaurs, which brings both closer together as a group, they say.

The theropod dinosaurs ate meat and hunted on two legs, using the claws on their forelimbs to grasp and manipulate their prey.

One theory is that some theropods grew feathers for insulation, but these were useful for escaping from larger predators because flapping feathered forelimbs helped the animals to run and jump. This behaviour eventually resulted in gliding and powered flight.

There's that word again -- "theory". They don't know that it was or wasn't on Noah's ark. Perhaps it was there on the afternoon the Grand Canyon was carved by the Great Flood. Schmience is tricksy that way.

The Natural History Museum in London owns the first Archaeopteryx specimen to have been discovered, which it bought for £750 in 1862. Now, it is probably the most expensive fossil the museum possesses.

Twenty years ago, some scientists claimed that the fossil was a fraud made by sticking feathers into cement around a fossil reptile. But museum scientists soon proved the fossil genuine.

Heh. Faking a piece of evidence sounds exactly like what a dedicated young-earther would do to "prove" his point; in fact, Levantine hucksters are notorious for faking artifacts that were supposedly owned by Christ. You may remember the guy in Israel that got busted a few years back for claiming an ossuary to be that of Jesus' brother.

Maybe that's why the young-earthers are so quick to claim fakery of actual scientific evidence -- because they really would do such a thing to bamboozle the faithful. They've been doing it all along.

A Cry For Help

I am not in the habit of watching Paula Zahn's late-night show on CNN. Usually by that hour I am either sleeping soundly, drinking heavily, or masturbating with the fury of a rabid chimp. So it was by pure chance that I caught this little gem (about 3/4 the way down the page), involving a Catholic church whose "weeping statue" has attracted the usual gaggle of morons.

Let's take a quick peek at what passes for journamalistic objectivity. I have no idea whether Paula is always this obtuse, or if there's just such an insatiable need to play politically correct with all religious issues, even completely ridiculous ones like this. Whatever the case, it's nothing that a hastily-convened panel on blogger ethics can't cure.

Coming up next, a statue that is drawing crowds to a California church. Do you believe in miracles?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think curiosity, and I get choked up. I have that faith, and even if it isn't a true miracle, I've never seen a miracle.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It happens so often, as far as I know, that they don't even bother investigating it anymore.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: The question tonight is, what caused those tears? Coming up, we'll ask someone who investigates these kinds of things for a rational explanation.

And a little bit later on, two men, a cage and absolutely raw violence. There is no doubt that this is a bloody sport.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

Sorry, I couldn't resist that. There's something about reading the transcription of the teaser that neatly encapsulates what a tiresome, shameless clusterfuck the vaunted MSM really is. Even the reporters who aren't carrying water for the criminals in office are still trolling the streets of basic cable in their fuck-me pumps.

ZAHN: Now we want to tell you about a mystery that has crowds flocking to a small Catholic church in Sacramento, California. The faithful say the statue of the Virgin Mary is actually shedding tears. Skeptics, as you might expect, aren't so sure.

Here's Rusty Dornin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): There are the curious ones, but mostly, they are the faithful. Answers are not necessarily what these pilgrims seek. Sometimes it's enough just to see for themselves.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I kind of think it's a miracle. And I told my class about it a little bit, and I think it's just fascinating.

DORNIN: The statue of the Virgin Mary at the Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs Church in Sacramento, California. At first glance you see only her cool white face. But a closer look at the left side reveals what resembled tears and some believe it's tears of blood.

They first appeared in early November, but were wiped away by the parish priest. Then parishioners here say they reappeared before mass on Sunday, November 20th.

Since then, hundreds have made the pilgrimage, even in the pouring rain, adding certainty for some.

We had a big rain and the tears are still there. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Once again, it just gives us hope and faith. Who knows if it's a miracle.

DORNIN: A miracle or just some odd event or prank. Miracles do happen, says Father James Murphy. But in this case, the church is not planning to check.

(on-camera): The church is not going to investigate this?

FATHER JAMES MURPHY, SACRAMENTO ARCHDIOCESE: No.

DORNIN: Why?

MURPHY: Because the vast majority of them end up having eventually a natural explanation emerges and then it just wanes.

DORNIN: But wouldn't it be better to quickly decide that rather than to let people go on believing?

MURPHY: No, the church thinks a century is not tomorrow's news and the position always has been wait and see what happens.

DORNIN (voice over): But some Catholics question that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It happens so often as far as I know that they don't even bother investigating it anymore. But I believe they should. It pays to see whether it's a hoax or not.

DORNIN: People watch and wait and for some, there is the hope the miracle they've been waiting for has arrived.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Not sure what Father Murphy's cryptic nonsense about "a century is not tomorrow's news" is supposed to mean exactly, or how it's relevant here, but observe how Dornin softsoaps the whole thing.

ZAHN: Rusty Dornin, thanks so much.

And joining me now is someone who has investigated a lot of phenomenon like this. Joe Nickell is editor of a magazine called "The Skeptical Inquirer" that investigates claims of paranormal and miraculous phenomenon.

Good of you to join us sir.

So what do you think has caused these tears on this statue?

JOE NICKELL, EDITOR, THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER: Hi, Paula.

Well, I have some good news and bad news. The bad news is I'm pretty sure it's a fake. The good news is that probably the faithful won't believe me.

ZAHN: And what evidence would you base the fact that you believe this is a fake on?

NICKELL: Well, common sense says that if it's weeping, it should be weeping in a natural way and that to see it coming only from one eye and seeing that one of the rivulets is coming not from the tear duct, not from the corner of the eye, but from actually outside the eye and above it, so it's really not only obviously a hoax, it's not a very good one.

You would have to see a picture of this thing to get what Nickell's referring to, but I don't feel like bothering with it, so let's just stipulate that he's right. There's one rivulet coming from the outside corner of the left eye, and one coming from the inside corner of the same eye. The one on the inside actually starts well above the corner where, erm, the tear duct would be.

I feel stupid even having to point this much out. Look at Zahn's last question in the excerpt above and think about it for a second. What evidence do you have that this is fake, Mr. Smart Guy? Um, gee, I dunno -- statues can't cry? That work well enough for ya, sweet cheeks?

ZAHN: Is there any other explanation for it?

NICKELL: Well, there are, of course, always the possibility in any given case that there could be some natural explanation.

For example, sometimes the statue that has glass eyes, that's a wooden statue or plaster statue might have condensation, something like that, and be just a natural explanation. And, of course, whether it's a miracle or not is always debatable by the faithful. But science has never found a single case that's authentic, and I think the church is equally skeptical of all these cases.

This actually somewhat interesting, to hear a plausible explanation of it being a naturally occurring phenomenon. It doesn't necessarily have to be a hoax. Northern California has had some odd weather as of late. The last two weeks of November were more like April, 75º and sunny. Then around the 25th, we got a storm in from Alaska. Last week was stormy and cold, and since Thursday it's been sunny and cold, around 40-50º or so (which is cold for this area; sorry, Fargo). The point is that such drastic, sudden changes in temperature and humidity do weird things, like build up condensation in unlikely places.

Whatever the case, this mealy-mouthed objectivity is eerily similar to how the MSM has completely botched the discussion of "intelligent design", and indeed any area where religious beliefs are in conflict with science. Look, it's simple -- either the statue is weeping blood, or it isn't. Now, unless we are hopelessly insane, we stipulate that it is impossible for statues to actually weep. Therefore it is either a hoax or a naturally occurring phenomenon.

The problem is that Zahn (and obviously she's not the only culprit, or even a main culprit) portrays this as if the cranky ol' skeptic is obstinately insisting that 2+2=4, while the sincere people of faith believe with all their hearts that 2+2=6. Perhaps 2+2=5? That would bring a balanced "objectivity" to our little nuanced discussion, would it not?

No. It would not. It is neither "balanced" nor "objective" to assert that 2+2 might equal 5 -- or even 6, simply because the faithful believe it sincerely enough. Statues do not cry; the fossil record does not lie; Noah did not have baby dinosaurs on the Ark; and the fundamental principles of evolutionary development can be quite easily observed in both the plant and animal kingdoms. And one can recognize all of these scientific facts as such, and still persist in their belief that out of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars in an impossibly enormous universe, it was all created just for them, by someone who looks just like them. Faith and science are not mutually exclusive; indeed, were they not constantly hijacked by political hucksters, they could be somewhat complementary.

But like all of these sad little events, it's really about people indulging themselves anyway.

ZAHN: So when you see these crowds show up, day after day, what would you tell them about what you think they are looking at. They do believe it's a miracle.

NICKELL: They do. They are working on faith rather than evidence. If they would look at the evidence, they would see that it's really not credible. We don't see a flowing.

And there are cases like this. You know, there have been statues that wept blood. That in Italy, for example, it turned out with a DNA test that the DNA matched that of the woman who owned the statue. So they are really bad news for most of these cases when they are investigated.

ZAHN: You just heard Rusty interviewing the, I believe it was the archbishop from the church there. Would you like to investigate this if given the chance?

NICKELL: Well, I think it's always good to investigate. One would look for a better case than this, where at least at face value looked more promising or looked more mysterious.

I find this really rather laughable at face value. But we always investigate cases when we're permitted, and I think we should neither foster belief nor suppress it but just investigate with a view toward solving it.

ZAHN: In the meantime, the crowds keep coming.

And that's really all that matters. Suckers show up, we cover it. They trample each other in Walmart on Black Friday to get some deal on another discounted doodad to assuage their failures in life, and it merits coverage. Same shit, different shovel.

As an added bonus, check out the subsequent segue, as Paula prepares to pass the torch to the inimitable Larry King, who is simply worth his weight in self-parody gold:

ZAHN: And at 12 minutes before the hour, we're moving up on the start of "Larry King Live." Let's check in with him right now and find out who will be joining him tonight.

Hi Larry.

LARRY KING, CNN ANCHOR: Hi, Paula.

We've got a good show tonight. Rick Warren is with us, the author of "The Purpose Driven Life," that book has been a phenomenal best seller. He's an extraordinary guy.

And then later in the show, Donald Trump joins with Alla Wartenberg, that's the girl who got kicked off his show last night. But she's a multi-millionaire to boot. It's unusual.

All that ahead following Paula Zahn.

ZAHN: We'll be watching, Larry. Tell the Donald I said hello.

KING: I will.

Yep. That's your intrepid news-gatherin' celebramajournamalists. Rick Warren humps one leg, Donald Trump humps another, and Paula briefly recalls that incident when The Donald grabbed her ass at a party and offered a million bucks worth of Trump Tower chips for 90 seconds of combover glory. (If the carpet matches the drapes, women must just run screaming from the room.)

Hey, Larry. Tell The Donald I also said hello, and that I wish he'd stop splattering his jism all over America. I don't want to watch his stupid show, I don't want to buy his stupid books, I don't want to lose my house at his casino while he comps me $15 rum & cokes, and I don't want to hear about his next mail-order bride. How's that for fuckin' news?