Lance Mannion

It's not serious foreign policy if it doesn't kill people

The McEwan asks why the Los Angeles Times thinks Hillary Clinton's experience as first lady meeting with world leaders doesn't count for much because she was focusing on "women's and children's issues."

The McEwan has a good guess why.  But there's another reason too:

Because, as every serious pundit knows, serious foreign policy is all about blowing shit up.

If Clinton had wanted to be serious, instead of trying to solve those women and children's unserious issues, she'd have devoted her time to turning those women and children into collateral damage.

That's how the Maverick and Commander's going to handle it.

"Kristen"

Updated.

Finally, the Media's getting down to the most important details of the Spitzer scandal.

What "Kristen" has posted on her MySpace page.

And this just in!  A twenty-two year old woman who can get away with charging several thousand dollars a day for her company looks good in a bikini.

Who'd have thunk it?

I learned all this from the New York Times too.  I didn't even have to stand in the check-out line at the supermarket to find it out.  I don't know why anybody thinks we need a better press corps.

Updated to ask who needs a better press corps when we have novelists like John D. MacDonald?:  Nance quotes Travis McGee on pros like Kristen and the operations they work for.

The war that will never be lost as long as we stay there until the sun dies

Updated.

Michael O'Hanlon championing his own brilliance in supporting the War Without End:

The Democratic position — embraced particularly by Sen. Barack Obama but also by Sen. Hillary Clinton — is that we need to make haste for the exits. Obama rigidly calls for pulling nearly all combat forces out of Iraq within about a year of Inauguration Day. Clinton’s position leaves room for some flexibility, though her words on the campaign trail are generally similar to Obama’s. But neither candidate’s approach would be supported by most leaders — American or Iraqi — on the ground in Iraq.

Ahem.

That's because there are no American commanders on the ground who don't know that their commands are contingent upon saying what President Bush wants to hear.  He's fired and replaced everybody who didn't get that memo.

Oh, and the Iraqi commanders?

Puppets.

O'Hanlon goes on:

Only those who have concluded that the war is already lost tend to back such a position. And that latter viewpoint is far less common today than it was a year ago, or even months ago.

Far less common?  Ain't what the polls show, is it?  Let me clarify.  O'Hanlon is refering to the only people who matter to him, thumbsucking war hawks like himself for whom the War Without End is only an intellectual exercise in proving to themselves and each other how smart and tough they are.

Hat tip to Spencer Ackerman by way of Yglesias.

Updating to note that the War Without End may yet expand:  Got the heads up from Ken Muldrew. Admiral Wiliam Fallon is "resigning."  Fallon was our top military commander in the Middle East and he apparently thought expanding the Wat Without End to Iran might not be such a hot idea right now.  Bye-bye, Admiral.  Sean-Paul has more here.

Imperial update:  In case you didn't know it already, Fallon is no dove.  In fact, he's the kind of military man the Bush Leaguers ought to love.

It's not about the sex

This blog is officially a No Defending Spitzer Zone.

Because it's not about the sex.

It's about headlines like this:

Headlines that were entirely predictable the first time he thought about shelling out a couple of grand to hire a pro, when he should have been asking himself the question most people about to do what he was about to do would ask themselves, What if I get caught?

In Spitzer's case the answer should have been, A lot worse things than just my wife yelling at me.

But it appears his answer to himself was along the lines of, I won't get caught.

It's not about the sex.

It's about the stupidity.

And the arrogance.

And the recklessness.

And it's about making chumps of everyone who voted for him and undermining the cause of reform here in New York.  It's about headlines like that one in the Wall Street Journal and the stories that go with them.

As Sean-Paul Kelley says:

The reason these Spitzer allegations hurt so much is he was one of the very few people in the country willing to take on the corruption of Wall Street. And I am not tlaking the kind of penny-ante corruption of the mob and their ilk. I am talking about corruption on a systemic level that we can now all see affects everyone in this country. Few had the guts to take on Wall Street and the insurance industry. But Spitzer did. Any subsequent calls for, or attempts to, reform Wall street will be that much more difficult in light of what happened today. This is not a blow for good government, but for sensible finance and regulation..

I don't care if prostitution shouldn't be a crime.

Do I think there might have been some political motivation behind the leaking of his name? Of course, but that was also as predictable as the headline.

And is it weird that the feds were targeting a local prostitution ring?  Possibly only as weird as the Onondaga County District Attorney's office targeting a prostitution ring in Syracuse.  It's their jurisdiction, folks.

This is from the US Attorney for the District of Columbia's website:

The Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia is unique among the 94 United States Attorney Offices across the nation by virtue of its size and its varied responsibilities. It is the largest United States Attorney's Office with over 350 Assistant United States Attorneys and over 350 support personnel. The size of this Office is the result of the breadth of our responsibility for criminal law enforcement and our location in the nation's capital. We are responsible not only for the prosecution of all federal crimes, but also for the prosecution of all serious local crime committed by adults in the District of Columbia.

My italics.

You may not consider prostitution a serious local crime, but you don't think like an ambitious prosecutor on the make.  Very high priced call girls have rich and powerful clients.  That makes for headlines, kids.  If it hadn't been Spitzer it would have been somebody else just as high-profile and just as dumb.

Updated:  At any rate, it doesn't appear the Feds were targeting the prostitution ring.  They were "targeting" Spitzer, but only in the way they would target anyone moving large sums of money around like that because that's how drug dealers, money launderers, terrorists, and politicians on the take handle money, and this is how the Feds have been going after bad guys since the days of the real Eliot Ness and Al Capone, by following the money, as Spitzer well knew.  Client 9 could have been any dope who thought he could sneak one past the IRS.  That the dope turned out to be the reform-minded Democratic governor of Hillary Clinton's home state was just gravy to the Bush Leaguers.  But see the note below.

As for Jane's wondering about the timing of Michael Bloomberg's public musings about the possibility he'll run for governor---well, now that he's come to his senses and stopped daydreaming about a third party run for President, the governorship is the next obvious step for him, and considering the erratic and arrogant and self-destructive behavior Spitzer's demonstrated as governor---and this doesn't include the latest news.  The man's made people feel sorry for Joe Bruno, for crying out loud!---the possibility that he'd have been a one-termer was very real.  It's just become a lot more real.

So in addition to the stupidity, the arrogance, the recklessness, and the irresponsibility, it's also about this.

Spitzer's just made the governorship Bloomberg's for the asking.

NY Times website still running slow?  Lots of stories here from the Times Herald-Record.

____________________________________

This is below, here is the note:  Scott Horton is right.  Given the way the Bush Leaguers have corrupted the Department of Justice and the Federal Prosecutor's Office, there's a good reason to smell a whole colony of rats here.  But Eliot Spitzer is no Dan Siegelman.   Nobody had to set out to get Spitzer.  He wrapped himself up with a bow and delivered himself as a gift.

This is a way in which it is, somewhat, about the sex.  The House Judiciary Committee is finally getting serious about investigating the corruption of the US Attorneys Office.  Bringing "Client 9" and "Kristin" into the story makes it very hard to keep the focus on what Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rove have done.

Another note, trying to look on the bright side:  Now I've got a reason to be glad if Hillary Clinton loses the nomination to Barack Obama.  She'll be free to run for governor against Bloomberg in 2010.

One more note, a hypocritical, self-righteous, and sanctimonious one hypocritically, self-righteously, and sanctimoniously defending myself pre-emptively against charges of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and sanctimony:  Yeah, I remember.  Yesterday I said I wasn't going to congratulate myself on my superior virtue.  But I was talking about the sex.  This isn't about the sex.  It's not about who Spitzer was screwing down in DC.  It's about how he was screwing the rest of us back home in New York.

Let the one among you who can afford the sin cast the first stone

Great.  My governor, Eliot Spitzer, has gone and reminded the world that it's not just Republicans who know how to embarrass themselves and their families in stupid and sleazy ways.

I'd like to feel all sanctimonious and self-righteous about this and demand to know how the man could do this to his wife, but I always try to keep in mind what Jesus said about casting stones and that I am a first class jerk and heel myself, I just don't have the opportunities to sin that rich, powerful men like Spitzer have.

AP reports that some of the prostitutes who work for the outfit that may have counted Spitzer as a customer charge $5,500 an hour!

Fifty-five hundred an hour????????

I can't boast of any superior virtue, knowing that this is a temptation I will never experience.

There are times, especially towards the end of the month, when I couldn't even gather enough quarters to keep the blinds on the booth open for an hour.

The Maverick and Commander never flips, never flops, never lies, never backs down...

It's good that local newspapers are pointing out the real ambitious weasel behind the Maverick and Commander's straight-talking bluster.

From an editorial in today's Times Herald-Record:

So much for John McCain as the maverick with integrity. Given a chance to put into the form of a vote the eloquent and personal stand he has taken about the use of torture, he failed the test.

Nuremberg?????

Nuremberg?  Nuremberg?

Weren't the torturers the ones on trial in that one?

The Bush administration has instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to defend its decision to seek the death penalty for six Guantanamo Bay detainees accused in the Sept. 11 terror attacks by recalling the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War II.

Oh, wait, I forgot.  We don't torture anyone.  Thanks to the Maverick and Commander when we want to extract confessions from prisoners we only degrade them and treat them cruelly and inhumanly.

Despite the confidence of military prosecutors, the case has been clouded by revelations that the key suspect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the attacks in which hijackers flew planes into buildings in New York and Washington, was subjected to interrogation tactics that critics call torture.

The cable refers specifically to this and instructs diplomats to advise foreign governments that the tribunal will not accept evidence obtained through torture and that the defendants can raise objections to any statements they argue they made under coercion. Those decisions will be up to the judge, it says.

But it notes a distinction between torture and "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" that was outlawed by legislation sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, now the leading Republican candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination and a former prisoner of war during Vietnam.

The cable informs diplomats that statements made by defendants under such conditions before the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 may be considered by the court.

No wonder we're a beacon of hope to all the world.

Call me a cynic but...

...somehow I don't think it's coincidental that it took just long enough to put the case against them together that their trial will have to take place during the Presidential election campaign.

Six years, going on seven, and suddenly we're ready to go to court?

Why do I think that this is happening now so that the video from 9/11 gets played over and over again on the news for the next eight months?

Why do I think this is happening just so that the question "Senator Clinton/Senator Obama, do you think the US should execute the 9/11 conspirators?" gets asked in a variety of ways during every Presidential debate?

Why do I think this is happening now just so that John McCain gets to tell us early and often that there's no way if he's elected President these guys won't hang?

Why do I think the Maverick and Commander will never be asked what he thinks about the fact that one of them was tortured into confessing?

I don't know.

Must be something wrong with me.

Cynically updated Tuesday morning:  Other jaded types chime in.

Will Bunch:  Bush lays a Guantanamo trap...

Hullabaloo:  Evidence from torture now admissible...

Rolling Stone:  Truth or Terrorism---The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts.

The Insiders think we are all either children or sheep

If women voted only for other women because they are women, we'd have had our first Madame President years ago.

If women voted only for other women because they are women, there would be 100 female United States Senators.

There would be 435 United States Congresswomen.

There would be 50 female governors.

There would be no need for a men's room off the chambers of any state legislature.

Every town and city would have a woman as mayor who would answer to nobody but councilwomen and alderwomen and selectwomen.

Not only are there more women in the country than men, they vote in a higher proportion.

If every race was boys against girls, the girls would always win.

But since women have had the right to vote (actually, women have always had the right to vote, it's one of those inalienable rights of democracy, all citizens get a say.  Since men finally admitted women had the right vote...) 14 men have served as President.  Odds are about even that come 2009 we'll make it 15.

There are 16 women in the Senate.

There are 73 women in the House of Representatives.

Off the top of my head I count 4 governors.  (Vadranor reminds me there are 8!)

List the five largest American cities.  How many of them have women serving as mayor?

Ok, obviously I'm playing games here for emphasis.  Every race for every office hasn't included a female candidate.  There are more and more women running for more and more offices, but men still dominate American politics from the bottom to the top and the result has been that a man is far more likely to be the candidate nominated by any Party for any given office.

Of course men never vote for a man just because he's a man.

But my point is valid.  If women voted only for other women there would be a lot more women holding public office right now.

Which is why it is sexist to the point of misogyny to suggest that Hillary Clinton is only the women's candidate or that women who are supporting her are only supporting her because she is a woman.

But there is nothing wrong with women supporting her and voting for her for reasons that include the fact that she is a woman.

There is nothing wrong with women voting for a woman because she is a woman.  Just as there is nothing wrong with African-Americans voting for a black man because he is black.

Just as there is nothing wrong with war veterans voting for another veteran because he was in the military or Conservative Christians voting for a former Baptist preacher because he is one of their own or dumb, unprincipled rich white guys voting for another dumb, unprincipled rich white guy.

Catholics vote for Catholics, Poles vote for Poles, Italians, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans vote for other Italians, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and Indians.  If the Martians have landed and are living among us they are waiting for their chance to vote for the first candidate with green skin and antenna to come along.

There is nothing wrong with any of us voting for a candidate because that candidate is a member of our own personal demographic, and you know why?

Because we live in a republic.  We are sending these people off to represent us in Washington, in the state capital, down at city hall, and it is only natural that we want the people representing us to be like us.

We are hiring them to champion our causes and defend our rights and advance our interests and it is common sense that, all other things being equal, the best person to do that is somebody who believes in those causes, depends on those rights, and shares those interests.  And the sort of somebody most likely to do that is a somebody who is one of us.

That all other things being equal is important.  Franklin Roosevelt grew up not just rich but an American prince.  Ronald Reagan's family was saved by the New Deal.

I read somewhere online yesterday that there's a push, or at least a hope, among some Republicans to get Condoleeza Rice on the ticket as VP to blunt the history-making demographic fact of whichever the Democrats nominee, Obama or Clinton.  Women aren't going to be fooled by this.  Black people are going to have to try not to laugh out loud.

At any rate, we all vote for the candidates we think are most like us, if only in that we think they will stand up for the things we believe need standing up for.

Not surprisingly, the white boys' club that is the national political press corps and punditocracy and the cheerleaders they let sit with the team as long as they root them on seem only to notice this fact when it comes to black candidates for any office and a woman running for President.

And they only notice the fact to sneer at it as if it proves something about the candidate and the people voting for that candidate.

What it proves in their mind is that the candidate is not really to be taken seriously because that candidate is merely a representative and the people voting for that candidate are not to be taken seriously because serious people don't make their decisions based on who would best represent them.

So far the white boys' club has been somewhat careful about Obama and his support among African-Americans.  That will change if he's the nominee.

But they have been merciless about bringing it up about Clinton and her support among women.

And that may explain why a number of women I've spoken to have expressed some chagrin at the fact that one of the reasons they want Hillary Clinton to be President is that she is a woman.  Imagine this, people in a republic being embarrassed that they want their representative to be representative of them.

Melissa McEwan says in a terrific post, Hillary and the women who support her are damned if they do, damned if they don't:

Every time she mentions being a woman, mentions being a mother, mentions being a daughter, mentions being a wife, or even makes any oblique reference to running a historical campaign or being the first woman to do something (like win a presidential primary), she is accused of playing the gender card. She is diminished, ridiculed, criticized, and dismissed using dog whistles, slurs, graphics, and bluntly misogynist commentary. When her womanness is the weapon most used against her, is it any wonder that women who support her may be hesitant to scream it from the rooftops, reluctant to stand behind her in large numbers, lest we undermine her? When womanness is hated, it will inevitably make women feel like a liability.

I don't even think this is a conscious feeling in many women. It certainly has taken me a long time to reach the point where I found this hesitation within myself, that I could bluntly engage the grim realization that I had internalized the expressions of contempt for a strong woman and let them manifest as a disinclination to speak too loudly of any admiration I had for Hillary, lest the contempt for me, for this strong woman here and her strong opinions, add to the weight of disdain Hillary carries already on her shoulders.

As I said, all things being equal, and this year for the Democrats all things are very close to equal---Choosing between Obama and Hillary is mostly a matter of choosing between emphases---it is natural and right for voters to choose the candidate who is most like them.

Women have good reason to be proud of Hillary Clinton and of voting for her.

Black people have good reason to be proud of Barack Obama and of voting for him.

I would think that black women must be so proud all around that they can hardly contain their joy and in choosing which one to vote for they've had to decide not which candidate is most like them but which interests and causes of their own they think need the most emphasis, and the result of that would logically be that the votes of black women must be counted as among the most thoughtfully and carefully decided.  In other words, they are the voters least likely to be choosing a candidate solely on the basis of race or gender, because it's all one to them, and the most likely to be deciding on the issues.

Hardly the way the Media would play it.  Has played it.  Didn't CNN run a story a little while back suggesting that black women couldn't make up their pretty little minds because their only concerns were gender and race?

Women aren't voting for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman.  Black people aren't voting for Barack Obama just because he's black.

They are voting for the candidate they think will best represent them, and part of their representativeness includes their gender and their race.  It is not necessarily a deciding fact but it is a fact that naturally has to figure in their thinking.

Women vote for women, black people vote for black people, Southerners vote for other Southerners, Texans vote for Texans, business types vote for business types, Union members would vote for Union members if any run but usually have to settle for voting for people who support Unions.  John Kennedy became President because he was Catholic and Irish and a war veteran and a Democrat and Catholics and Irish-Americans and war veterans and Democrats voted for him because he was Catholic, Irish, Democratic, and a veteran of the war.  George W. Bush became President because he was a Texan and a born-again Christian and a rich white guy and Texans and born-agains and rich white guys voted for him because he was one of them.

We vote for people who are like us because this is what our government is---us.  It's government of us, by us, for us.  The government is us.

We aren't children.  We aren't sheep.

We are the People.

And we, the People, all the people, male, female, white, black, insert further cliches that aren't really cliches here, all of us, have a right to have our say, to have a government that looks like us.

That is us.

Government as a lemon

An oldie but a goody by request.

Greg asks:

Lance, any chance of reposting your beautiful description of goverment/car/republicans?  I thought I'd bookmarked it, and now that I'd like to quote you (accurately) I can't find it.  Thanks!

Glad to oblige.  Here it is, from an old post called Remember good old President Mondale?

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

And they do this so that they don't have to chip in on gas.

The Little Chapel in the Voting Booth

Dear fellow Progressives, Liberals, and Democrats,

It's politics, not religion.  It's a political party, not a chruch.  And there's a difference between someone who honestly disagrees with your opinion and someone who has promulgated a heresy.  Please adjust your arguments and your tone accordingly.

Your friend,

Lance Mannion

Bush's America

The President went to a Rotary Club meeting at Yak-A-Doo's in the Holiday Inn in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and gave a speech boosting the economy.

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. - President Bush worked to reassure Americans on Monday about the economy but said "there's definitely some storm clouds and concern" because of the nation's credit crunch and mortgage problems.

"But the underpinning is good," Bush told business and community leaders at a gathering of Rotary Club members.

Never been to Fredericksburg and don't know who belongs to the Rotary there, but if it's like the Rotary Clubs in most places, Bush was speaking to an audience made up of insurance agents, realtors, officers of the local banks, owners of car dealerships and local businesses, with maybe a few lawyers and doctors thrown into the mix.

What they are then are people who are having to deal right now with the very economic problems Bush was there to wave away:

"We've had a pretty good economic run," the president said in a speech intended to show he is aware of the public's edgy mood these days. Consumer confidence has eroded as turmoil in the housing and credit market have battered the economy.

Bush tried to position himself as an advocate for working families by taking aim at his favorite target: the Democratic Congress.

"The Congress cannot take economic vitality for granted," Bush said.

"The most negative thing Congress can do in the face of economic uncertainty is to raise taxes on the American people," Bush said.

The Rotarians weren't impressed.

The audience of roughly 80 people listened to Bush with respectful silence. Yet a line that normally gets him applause — "I'll veto any tax increase" — drew no reaction at all.

If the Rotarians are who I think they are, some are succeeding, more are struggling; plenty of them might be well enough off---"comfortable"---for now, and a few of them are probably rich, but not Rich rich.  They're the high end of the middle class and they know they are up there and know they will only stay there as long as all the lower levels of the middle class are doing ok enough to afford their services and shop at their stores and come to their offices for help and advice.  And they know this.   They aren't among the American people Bush was talking about, the people Bush wants to protect from any tax increases.

To Bush and his base, his real base, the American people are the Rich.  The rich Rich.  The multi-millionaires and the billionaires and their parasitical offspring who'd be ruined, just ruined, by any taxes on their princely inheritances.  The American royals.  They are the true Americans.  This is their country.

The rest of us just work here.

Three against a thousand

Maureen Dowd on a speech by Douglas Feith, the genius who, as Dowd describes him, "drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos," or as General Tommy Franks put it, "The stupidest fucking guy on the planet":

[Feith] noted that in battles through American history, “the military fights better over time.” This from a guy who sent our military into Iraq without the right armor, the right force numbers or the right counterinsurgency training.

“A strategic alliance of the ousted Baathists and foreign jihadists was something that our intelligence community did not anticipate,” he said, continuing to spread the blame.

But the intelligence community didn’t miss it. The neocons tried to scrub out that sort of analysis, knowing it would make the war harder to sell.

I'm not so sure it was the case that the neocons worried that it would make the war harder to sell.  I think it's more likely that they just didn't believe that any Iraqis would have the guts to fight back once they were sufficiently shocked and awed.

Back when we were kids, my friends and I used to have long, fierce debates on the playground about how many United States Marines it would take to defeat an attacking horde of whatever historical enemy we were interested in that day.  How many Marines would it take to fight off a band of Vikings, say?  Or how many Marines would it take to whup an army of Saracens or polish off a tribe of Apache warriors?

It was always a given that the Marines would win, although not necessarily handily.  Vikings, Saracens, and Apaches were tough customers, that's why we picked them as the bad guys for these imaginary battles.  So the question included not just how many Marines would be needed to defeat them, but how many casualties the Marines might suffer in the fight.  The answer to both parts of the question was never more than 10, but never less than 3. 

I don't remember our debates taking into account the fact that the Marines would be armed with automatic weapons and grenades, machine guns and mortars while the Vikings and Saracens would be armed with swords and the Apaches with bows and arrows and maybe a Winchester or two, except as signs of the Marines' superior fighting skills, as if choosing to carry an M-16 was something your average Viking would have done if he'd been smarter about picking out his weaponry for the day.  At any rate, the Vikings and Saracens and Apaches always attacked in such overwhelming numbers that the Marines' weapons could be assumed to provide no real advantage.  The Marines triumphed because they were American fighting men and to prove it we often allowed into the debates the possibility that they'd run out of ammo at some point and have to fight it out hand to hand, bayonets against battle axes, scimitars, and tomahawks.

Debates like this have taken place on playgrounds all over and since the invention of boys.  Our tribe can whip any other tribe has always been one of the first lessons little kids in the tribe learn.

I call these arguments the Three Against a Thousand Debate after the Bob Hope routine in Fancy Pants in which Hope, as a valet pretending to be a British noblemen, regales a group of partygoers with the story of how he took part in a terrible battle to defend a fort against enemies of the Raj back in "Inja".  It's a bloody tale, with bodies falling all around Hope and desperation mounting for the defenders of the fort as the implacable enemy keeps on coming and coming, undeterred by any punishment Hope and his friends can dish out, and Hope punctuates it regularly with the refrain, "Three against a thousand."

The story ends with the last of the three falling dead in the dust, which stuns Hope's audience to hear, because there's Hope, still alive to tell the tale.  How did he survive?  Wasn't he one of the three?

Of course the punchline to the story is, "When it was all over, we all agreed that those were three of the toughest blighters we'd ever fought."

Feith was one of the chief neo-cons who are still directing the Bush League's thinking, such as it is, on foreign and military policy.  And I believe that the neo-cons are the kids who grew up believing that a fundamental truth was decided in those playground debates, which is:

A handful of United States Marines can whip any other tribe's warriors anytime, anywhere, no matter the odds.

There's more to being a neo-con than this, but a basic principle of neo-conservativism is that American military supremacy ought to be the basis of our entire foreign policy.  Neo-cons believe, essentially, that a handful of Marines can whip any other tribe at any time, and all other nations on earth ought to know this, respect it, fear it, and defer to us because of it.  But because our enemies are often forgetful of this fact, or too stupid to believe it, it is necessary for us to routinely demonstrate it by picking out some country to beat up on.

This is the principle behind Thomas Friedman's Suck On This argument rationalization of the invasion (and demolishing) of Iraq.

We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.

One of the neo-cons' reasons for going to war in Iraq was to shove that fact down the throats of leaders in Iran and Syria, not to mention North Korea and China.  It's an important goal of their planned war on Iran---scaring the Chinese and, because they might need some scaring too, the Russians.

The problem with this notion, besides its arrogance, essential childishness, sheer bloody-mindedness, and the bully boy's cowardice that's at the heart of it---you don't feel a need to run around scaring everybody else unless you are terrified of them---is that it doesn't take into account the probability that other tribe's warriors, the ones who are supposed to be easily whipped by a handful of United States Marines, are made up of young men who grew up having their own Three Against a Thousand Debates on their playgrounds.

We can whip one tribe's warriors and then turn to the next tribe and say, "See how easily we took care of them?"

And all the next tribe is likely to do is shrug and say, "Of course you did.  They're a bunch of creampuffs.  Five of our guys could have wiped them out with their right hands tied behind their backs."

The evil and the built-in failure of the neo-con world view derives from the way it turns foreign policy into a constant debate between ten year old boys with guns and bombs and it never considers that the punchline of any of those debates might be that sometimes the other side will include three of the toughest blighters you ever fought.

Just an aside on the way kids' minds work:  Me, above:  "So the question included not just how many Marines would be needed to defeat them, but how many casualties the Marines might suffer in the fight.  The answer to both parts of the question was never more than 10, but never less than 3."

Think about this and you'll quickly figure out that sometimes we allowed ourselves to imagine that all the Marines would die in the fight.  This didn't bother us or change our thinking.  After all, we all knew that the Alamo was a victory for the Texans.  And the last man to fall was always the Marine who'd polished off the last Viking, Saracen, or Apache, and he died of his wounds, stoically as the US cavalry finally appeared coming over the hill.

For further reading: Chris Floyd on Thomas Friedman and his Pottery Barn Rule of Warfare.

Hat-tip to Molly Ivors.

No, I don't want Saddam back...

I just want NOT to have idiots and thieves running OUR government anymore.

Despite the fact that Iraq and U.S. officials have made water projects among their top priorities, the percentage of Iraqis without access to decent water supplies has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent since the start of the U.S.-led war, according to an analysis by Oxfam International last summer. The portion of Iraqis lacking decent sanitation was even worse -- 80 percent.

That's from an AP story this morning.

There's some good news.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers , using more than $1 billion in reconstruction funds, is building massive water treatment plants in urban areas, including one in the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City.

Construction crews over the last three years, working there under heavy guard, have constructed a treatment plant that will produce an additional 25 million gallons of drinking water daily, enough for nearly 200,000 people. Miles of new water lines are also being installed, allowing 2 million of Sadr City's residents to tap directly into the new plant and existing water supplies.

In Nasiriyah, a $277 million water treatment facility is to be handed over to Iraqis in December. It is billed as the largest facility of its kind in Iraq and is designed to provide clean drinking water for an estimated half-million people in southern Iraq .

As many as 1,500 water treatment and sewage projects have been completed, with 150 more in progress, according to the corps of engineers.

And some bad news:

Electricity, which is needed to power pumps, continues to be unreliable in many parts of Iraq , causing some taps to go dry because pumping stations and water treatment plants can't operate.

Oh, and Oxfam is concerned that the water projects will ever get up and running because of "security issues."

The Army is doing what it can over there, but they are trying to clean up a mess made by thieves and idiots...and sociopaths.

As I've said before, they poison everything they touch.

Worse than Scrooge

I might be starting to disagree with Atrios on this one.  Maybe Barack Obama has done a good thing putting Social Security back on the table for debate because...just as with S-CHIP, when the subject comes up conservatives like George Will can't resist revealing their inner Ebenzer Scrooge.

Sixty-five days from now, the first of 78 million baby boomers begun (sic) to retire. Most Americans who collect Social Security begin to collect it at age 62, which is absurd.  We have the public subsidizing increasingly long and comfortable retirement of people for a third to a half of their adult lifetime. Now. That’s why one in four voters in 2004 was over 60 years old. The elderly have the biggest stake in the welfare state, which exists to transfer wealth to them. So this is, politically, a loser.

First, Ebenezer...I mean, George...let's define comfortable.

By comfortable do you mean able to live off something more than cat food and unafraid to turn the heat up in winter?

Or are a steady diet of Little Friskies and a space heater your idea of living the life of Riley and is anyone who expects more than that with help from a government program that they kicked in to for 40 or so years a shiftless cheat and a chisler?

Will is actually worse than Scrooge because Scrooge was content for the social welfare system of his day---workhouses and debtors' prisons---to continue its function and he was even willing to pay taxes to support it.  He just wasn't willing to contribute more than the minimum of what he considered his fair share and---this was an even greater evil on his part in Dickens' mind, the root of all his other sins---he refused to imagine how hard life could be on his fellow men and women.  Secret, solitary, and self-contained as an oyster, Scrooge made a point of not looking outside his shell.

Will gets outside his shell.  He sees what's going on.  He can imagine what life is like for other people, and it bothers him, because it's not hard enough.

He's like the gentlemen of the workhouse board who lecture Oliver Twist on his sin of having been born and born poor and his compounding of the sin by becoming an orphan.  Men who would just as soon Oliver had never been born, they remind him to be grateful to them for allowing him not to starve to death.

The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and
when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered- the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work. "Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; "we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all, in no time." So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people.

Will, no doubt, thinks that Social Security makes old age a continual vacation on a Carnival cruise ship and he would agree with the gentlemen of the board that a better and more morally uplifting  way to save people from the effects of their own misfortune is to make them frightened of becoming misfortunate.

Faced with a miserable and starved and cold old age, people will get on the stick and get busy getting rich or at least avoiding being poor.  If they don't avoid it, if bad luck or bad health or bad decisions by the company you work for or out and out theft of your pension fund by that company's executives leaves you hurting for money into your seventh decade, well, that's your own doing, isn't it, and how dare you expect the public to subsidize your comfortable old age.

How dare you get old, Will says, lecturing the Boomers about to cash their first Social Security checks.

How dare you get old without having gotten rich?

How dare you stop working at an age when the economic system I otherwise cheerlead for unquestioningly has no more use for you?

How dare you keep on living, comfortably, after we have no more use for you, continuing on for decades, comfortably, through illness, increasing weakness, debility, and senescence?

How dare you not have the good sense to just die and decrease the surplus population?

I know, Scrooge's joke.  But for Scrooge it is a joke.  He uses it to deflect any calls upon his sympathy.  He doesn't necessarily mean it.

Which is why Scrooge is given a chance and hope of redemption.

The gentlemen of the board aren't as fortunate.  They turn up again in A Christmas Carol, blown about on the wind with the ghosts of all the others like them who in life had refused to use the power they had to help others:

The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took,
the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge;  and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step.  The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Shave her bald!

Shakespeare's Sister popped her cork over an article in Maxim picking on Ann Coulter's looks and wrote the editors a letter listing a whole lot of more important things about Coulter that need picking on.

Shakes is beautiful when she's angry.

But I'm not sure I'm with her on this one.

Normally, I'm against attacks on anybody, including loathsome Right Wing demagogues and hate-mongers masquerading as cultural critics, based on how they look.  I don't even like the Smirky McChimpy stuff about Bush.  But with Coulter there might be a valid exception.

Criticizing Ann Coulter's appearance is like analyzing the deceptive packaging on a defective product, like say the eye-popping and hypnotic visuals of a degenerate horror movie or the shiny new paint job on a lemon of car.

Ann Coulter is a product, designed, manufactured, and marketed by a former attorney named Ann Coulter, and the long blond hair, the girlish figure, the mini-skirts are the deceptive packaging.

Ann Coulter is packaged and sold as a pretty young woman.  The packaging not only helps sell the product, it is intrinsic to its effectiveness.

In the guise of a pretty young woman Coulter gets away with her awfulness for the same reason pretty young women get out of tickets for speeding.  No matter what outrageous or hateful thing she said last time she was on television, she gets invited back because she looks good on camera...or at least TV producers believe she does.

If it could be demonstrated that she is not in fact pretty or young---and as it happens, she is truly neither---if we could take away the props of her phony prettiness, the long blond hair, the make-up, the mini-skirts, and somehow have her seen by all and sundry as what she is, a scrawny, lantern-jawed, WASPishly plain, middle-aged harridan, we would go a long way towards driving her off the TV screens forever.

The trouble is that there isn't a good way to do that except to do what I just did, string together a list of insults that like most insults have a way of hitting more than the intended target.  I'll bet that, reading the last paragraph, many of my women readers who hate Coulter felt themselves vaguely insulted.

That's the way it is with name-calling.  No matter how factually descriptive the names are of the person they're aimed at, everybody else who's in earshot can't help taking them to heart.

Better to let time do the job for us.  Plastic surgery can only accomplish so much.  The day is coming when Ann Coulter won't be able to play the part of Ann Coulter anymore.  And as she feels that day approaching she will either start withdrawing from the scene to go count her money or become increasingly desperate to hold the spotlight.  I'm betting the latter.  I'm hoping for it.  The more desperate she gets, the wilder and crazier she'll get.  Eventually the packaging won't be able to hide the product.  Maybe that's already happening, which would explain the Jew-baiting kick she's suddenly on.

It happens to artists and performers all the time.  All at once, for no intelligible reason, they set off down a path their fans don't want to follow or they develop a tin ear for what their audiences want to hear or they just lose their touch.

And make no mistake, Coulter is first and foremost a performer.  That's the difference between her and the likes of Michelle Malkin.  As publius explains, Malkin wants to be an effective movement propagandist, while Coulter wants to be...Ann Coulter, the Greatest Show On Earth.

I’m obviously speculating, but I think Coulter is essentially an act. She’s extreme, sure. What she says is abhorrent, agreed. But I think she’s carved out a niche for herself where her interests aren’t necessarily aligned with the conservative movement. She’s a self-promoting outrage artist -- her goal is not to promote an agenda but to stoke the fires. For instance, I have no doubt she was nothing but ecstatic about the public reception to her Edwards comments.

The point is that when Coulter sits at home at night, I suspect she conceives of herself as an entertainer.  A shock-artist, sure -- and someone who is deliberately offensive.  But, an entertainer nonetheless.

I'm sure Coulter believes in the Right Wing bilgewater she pumps up and out from the dark, dank bottom of the rat-infested cargo hold that passes for her soul, as far as that goes.  But she's only interested in the effect of what she says to the degree that it gets her attention and makes her money.  Malkin wants to be effective, politically, and, in her bizarre way, she wants to be right.  She's given herself a job to do and she wants to do it well and that's why she goes so crazy when she screws up, as she did with her assault on the Frost family.  Coulter never worries about being wrong, says publius.

Coulter, by contrast, is smarter and far smoother.  She couldn’t care less about any pushback -- she wants the pushback. That’s why it’s rarer to see Coulter engage in defensive, rage-filled rambling. Attacks don’t make her mad -- even if she’s factually wrong. She’s not a believer in the cause, or her journalistic integrity -- she’s an entertainer.

Yup.  This is why she can't be argued with.  She can only be out-performed.

The worst thing that can happen to Ann Coulter from Ann Coutler's point of view is that she winds up sharing a stage or a camera with someone whose act is funnier than hers.

She's usually careful not to let that happen.  Don't know how then she put herself in the position of having Al Franken teach her how to tell a joke.

The irony is that Coulter's act was sketched out for her by liberals.  Not political liberals.  Cultural ones.

Since the rise of Lenny Bruce, MAD magazine, the National Lampoon, and on into the early years of Saturday Night, cultural elitists, usually of a socially liberal bent (politically they have been all over the map, with many of them best described as anarchists, but the majority have probably been politically to the left) have championed a notion of comedy in particular---art in general---as a subversive act.

Skewering sacred cows and mocking the powers that be has been the job of comics and clowns since the invention of comedy.  Satire is an old art form.  But within that generation satire became the comedic ideal and it was granted a more directly political mission.  Comedy became a way to engage in political action.

At least, it was seen to be.

What we failed to take into account here is that for the first two-thirds of the 20th Century America was busy shaping itself into a liberal society.  Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are villains because they set out to destroy that society.

Our sacred cows---democracy, tolerance, civil rights for all---are liberal sacred cows.  The powers that be are, or were, liberal elites.  Nixon and Reagan were effective because they were able to persuade a large chunk of the People that they were not included in that society, that they were in fact oppressed by it.

Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly continue their work.

Within this context, Coulter could pretend to be, and be taken to be, a satirist doing the same job as Lenny Bruce and the first cast of Saturday Night Live.

Well, except for the fact that she's not funny.  But that's why the pretty young woman packaging is so important.

Coulter's act has always contained within it the means of its own negation.  She undermines herself, not, unfortunately, with the terrible things she says, but by packaging herself as a pretty young woman.  Even as she gets out of trouble the way real pretty young women get out of speeding tickets, she can be dismissed the way real pretty young women are often dismissed.

A lot of people we here in West Blogtopia (TM Skippy) would like to see enraged by her aren't enraged because they don't take her seriously.

Some of them accept her as "just" an entertainer.  Some of them, though, see her as just a pretty face.  They don't believe that anyone who looks like her could mean the awful things she says, and some of them, deep in their sexist hearts, don't believe someone who looks like her even understands what she says.

Coulter is sharp enough to know this and count on it when she's worried she's gone too far.  "It's a joke," she'll say, tossing all that long blond hair as if to add, "How could you think anyone as pretty and perky and charming as me could be so nasty?"

Times like that I wish for a squad of ninja barbers to drop on ropes from the studio catwalks.

PS.  None of what I said about comedy and our having a liberal society should be taken to mean that a liberal society is exempt from satire.  Just because a society is liberal doesn't mean its sacred cows shouldn't be skewered and its powers-that-be shouldn't be mocked.  Liberal societies even encourage such skewerings and mockeries.  Keeps them honest and on their toes.  The likes of an Ann Coulter take advantage of that fact.  They depend on our liberalism.

The miracle in Iraq

It's a miracle.

No Iraqi civilian has died a violent death since May 2003.

Ok.  Technically?  Tens of thousands have ceased to exist in bloody and unnatural ways.  But that's nothing to get upset about.  It's even a good thing.  Know why?  Because if we hadn't invaded and they hadn't been killed as a result of the invasion and the Civil War we've unleashed they might have been killed by Saddam Hussein.

Much better that they were blown up on their way to buy bread than that Saddam might have had them disappeared.

So much better that if they'd had the chance before they were blown up they'd have probably thanked us for arranging for them to die that way instead of leaving them to maybe be murdered by Saddam.

Saddam might have tortured them too.

So their deaths don't matter.  Not in the grand scheme of things.  They might as well not have died for all the harm it did them...or saved them from, possibly.

Not only that, but in the future, when the Mission is finally, truly accomplished and peace and tranquility reign all over the Mideast, and democracy flourishes in Iraq, Israeal is safe forever, and social and political liberalism have been expanded throughout all the oppressive parts of the world, it will be shown that all these people did not die in vain.  Their deaths will have been worth it.  A small price.  And as we all know from the movies any death that serves a higher purpose is not to be mourned.  It's hardly even a death.  It's even better to have died than to have lived.  A death that is better than a life isn't really a death, then, is it?

Why mourn for a death, any number of deaths, that aren't really deaths?

No, the only deaths worth mourning, the only deaths that matter, are the ones Saddam caused before we invaded and the ones he might have caused if we'd left him alone.  Why, he might have killed millions.  He was a Mideastern Pol Pot, you know.

Or a Hitler.

Or Stalin.

Some historical mass murderer, at any rate.  Saddam could have been another one of him, whoever he was.

If you want to mourn dead Iraqis, those are the Iraqis to mourn.  The ones Saddam killed.  Those and the millions I believe he would have killed in his prisons, the millions and millions more after that he'd have caused to die when he finally got around to starting World War IV, as I'm pretty sure he would have, if he'd had the chance.

What about them?

Why doesn't your heart bleed for them?

Don't you agonize over their deaths?

I do.

I agonize.

Now this is somewhat more acceptable

Updated.  Saturday morning.

From the credit where credit is due department.

Last week I complained that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn't sound angry enough about General Pretaeus' plan to de-surge in Iraq.  Maybe Harry can't give 'em hell, but he sure knows how to give 'em the needle.

Reid says the Democrats aren't going to wait around any longer for Republicans' to come to their senses on the war.  Via Atrios:

When asked why Democrats won't soften the deadline, the majority leader said he doesn't have confidence Republicans are willing to challenge Bush on the war.

"I think they've decided definitely they want this to be the Senate Republicans' war, not just Bush's. They're jealous," he said with a smile.

You want a donkey's attention, you bring a fucking pole down between his ears update:  You know what, I don't care if Harry Reid's witty or if he learns how to untemper his language by one Sunday School Teacher approved polite euphuism.  He can start talking like Al fucking Swearengen for all I fucking care or continue to natter on nicely like like a clerk in a shoe store apologetically suggesting that a regular customer might like to try that lovely pump in a larger size.  He can say whatever he wants however he is most comfortable saying it, if only more of what he says ends with "it's not getting to the floor."

The Left Coaster:  Reid: Botching another opportunity.

Lemieux.

Yglesias.

Pierce: "Not to put too fine a point on it, but has anybody checked to see if Harry Reid is, you know, actually alive?"

Small price

House Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner, says that all the dead soldiers and Marines, all the wounded, crippled, maimed, and broken men and women coming back home from Iraq are a "small price" to pay to achieve whatever goal the war supporters decide this week has been the goal of the war all along.

He also referred to the war as an "investment."

I like that phrase.  "Small price."  Stirring words.  Comforting words.  I wonder if Boehner puts them in the condolence letters he writes to the families of the dead from his district.

"My deepest sympathy on the loss of your son/daughter/husband/wife/father/mother/brother/sister.  Thank you, though, for the small price your family paid to continue this necessary investment."

Does he use it in eulogies when he goes to their funerals?

"Friends, we're all greatly grieved by our loss today, but we can take comfort in knowing that the dearly departed is up in heaven now and proud of the small price he/she paid to be part of our investment."

Stirring words.  Comforting words.  I don't think the Congressman should limit their effect to his own district.  I think he needs to share them with all the families of all the dead and wounded and maimed and broken troops across the country.

That's a tall order though.  Maybe he should just focus his attention on the families of the dead for now.  He should call each and every one.  That's only a little over thirty-seven hundred phone calls.  If he calls eleven or so families a day, he can be finished by the end of next summer.

Of course by that time, five or six hundred or more small prices will have been paid.

Unacceptable language

AP's reporting that Harry Reid has declared General Petraeus' plan to appear to be reducing the troop levels in Iraq while not actually reducing the troop levels "unacceptable."

"This is unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to the American people," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Unacceptable?

Unacceptable?

Is there anywhere in the English-speaking world outside of the Mother Superior's office in a convent where a novice has just been scolded for listening to her iPod during morning prayers where calling something "unacceptable" produces anything but derision and scorn?

Unacceptable?

You know how President Bush is reacting to being told his pet general's plan is "unacceptable"?

He's rolling on his beloved rug in the Oval Office laughing so hard his gut aches.

Maybe it's too much to ask that we get the Democrats to show a little backbone.  But can we at least get them to sound a little angry when they're supposed to be angry?  Can we find somebody there who can talk like a regular person who is fed up with Bush's lies and his failures and not like a mildly annoyed nun?

Reid says Petraeus' plan is just more of the same, which is true, as much as it is a plan.  But it's not a plan.

There is no plan.

There has never been a plan.

There is no plan to leave.

There is no plan for staying, beyond just staying, which isn't a plan, it's a sulk.

There is no plan for a military victory.  There is no plan for a political solution.

There is no plan.

There is only a goal.

And the goal is to make Iraq the next President's problem so that George Bush can leave office feeling like a war hero.

Hundreds of Americans will die, thousands of Iraqis will die so that George W. Bush doesn't have to face the fact that he screwed up, once again.