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British troops pulled out of a base in southern Iraq on short notice Thursday, and by Friday evening the base was completely stripped as a heavily outnumbered Iraqi army brigade watched while some 5,000 looters “stole everything — even the bricks.” The Brits responded to the news with classic stiff upper lip-ism. From the . . . → Read More: Brits stand down, Iraqis stand aside, parrot falls over
Swopa suggests the near-simultaneous references might arise from a common factor, e.g., a transnational focus group. Monster PR firm Hill & Knowlton is in Afghanistan trying to convince farmers that growing opium poppies is against their religion — replacing the Rendon Group, whose efforts apparently didn’t pan out all that well — so the pointy-nosed pundit may be right. Or maybe someone tuned the president’s fillings to the Jung Channel. Regardless, the phrase may resonate a bit for those who were around when pollster Pat Caddell persuaded Jimmy Carter to go on national television and tell the American public that we were a bunch of hedonistic pussies collectively in need of a spiritual enema. Continue reading I’ll Have The Strained Psyche With Malaise On The Side
Kaplan’s subject was in part the proposition that democracy and terrorism aren’t mutually exclusive, which is to say that organizations defined as terrorist can be very much a part of political life in democratic states. He quoted an excerpt from Bush’s press conference on the Israel-Lebanon conflict — a performance similar to those prompting Joe Scarborough to devote a show and a column to the question, “Is Bush An Idiot?” — as saying “What’s very interesting about the violence in Lebanon and the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza is this: These are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy.” Bush rarely uses “interesting” to signal interest; as often as not, he means “annoying” or “obvious.” Sometimes the word is a sign that he’s about to say something either incoherent or gob-smackingly ignorant (of course you could say that about “the,” too, but we’re limiting the discussion in deference to time). The three occurrences are not mutually exclusive. Continue reading “Very Interesting”: A Brief History of an Abused Word An expert demanding distrust of experts, Levitt sets a high bar for himself. . . . → Read More: Book Review: Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) Henceforth we will recognize that anything which fulfills certain conditions is a sign.
A bit less than two months ago, one of Time Magazine’s Green Zone correspondents filed a report that struck me, even though I read it only a day or two after it was published, as already quaint. The story was written about a week after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; some of you may not remember Zarqawi, but back in the day he played a major role in news reports and government statements about the ongoing transformation of Iraq into a beacon of secular democracy. His death — or as the inimitable Billmon described it, the Pentagon Channel’s “cancellation of its long-running reality TV series, The Abu Zarqawi Hour” — while not celebrated with quite the same enthused dementia as the end of major combat operations, the killings of Uday and Qusay Hussein, the capture of Saddam, the “return” of “sovereignty” to the Iraqis, the first election, the second election, the third election, the constitutional referendum, the taking of Fallujah, the second taking of Fallujah, the routing of Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces, the integration of Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces into the political process, the successful ousting of the ineffectual former prime minister, the successful installation of the ineffectual current prime minister, the creation of his Unity Government — and how in hell did anyone buy into that neologism — and so on, was still regarded as something of a milestone. Enough so, at any rate, that the headline above Charles Crain’s story, a week or so after Zarqawi’s death, read, “Is The Insurgency on the Rebound?” Continue reading Beyond the Event Horizon, or Why News Sucks The Pentagon and Republicans are collaborating to prevent troops suffering combat head injuries from receiving adequate treatment. In their ongoing war against the men and women who are actually going to war at their behest, House Republicans cut the budget of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC)by half, while the Pentagon is refusing to authorizing screening of returning Iraq veterans for head injuries. The moves are the latest in a long series of failures to adequately protect and care for combat personnel, whether by cutting Veterans Administration appropriations, forcing soldiers to purchase their own body armor or failing to provide up-armored Humvees to protect against roadside bombs in Iraq. USA Today, reporting the story, says the Pentagon refused a request by DVBIC to screen returning veterans for head injuries because “more research is needed” to justify the practice, while a House appropriations committee spokesperson told the paper that “Honestly, they would have loved to have funded it, but there were just so many priorities. They didn’t have any flexibility in such a tight fiscal year.” Continue reading Pentagon, Republicans screw the troops, again The outpouring of angst from those Lieberman fans aptly described by Michael Tomasky as “neurasthenic Victorians” is slowing. Tomasky was writing in Slate the day after Slate editor Jacob Weisberg took to his bed with the vapors. Lieberman is getting virtually no overt support from the Democratic Leadership Council, which organization he once chaired, and the leadership of which has been all but silent since his Democratic primary loss. DLC president Bruce Reed has a column in Slate, but the last time he mentioned Lieberman was in a June entry bemoaning the failure by Democrats to use five years of Republican rule as an opportunity for redefining unity to mean putting up with Joe. DLC foot soldiers have taken to the streets to spread the word that the failure by Connecticut voters and other bushy-haired strangers to embrace Joe’s embrace of the worst national security administration ever bespeaks weakness on the national security front, but the somewhat embarrassing alignment of Lieberman’s talking points with Dick Cheney’s is having a measurable impact on that line of patter. Continuing on the theme of Jacob Weisberg’s wayward brain: characterizing the invasion of Iraq as “a terrible mistake” is a blatant abuse of language. A terrible mistake is something like accidentally amputating the wrong limb. Iraq is more akin to deliberately amputating the wrong limb on the theory that doing so will heal the afflicted one. Calling it a mistake is a way of exculpating those who, like Weisberg, forcefully argued in favor of the invasion despite the mounds of evidence indicating that the administration were lying about the threat posed by Iraq and were wholly and fatally unprepared to deal with the occupation. It wasn’t a mistake: it was a bloody fucking national security disaster, and the people who responsibly opposed it are the only people who have any real credibility on national security issues. Weisberg also says opponents of the war fail to take seriously the “bigger conflict,” by which he presumably means combatting terrorism and the conditions which promote the use of it. In fact, the non-serious actors in Weisberg’s little passion play are, again, those who, like Weisberg, conceived and supported policies that were guaranteed to exacerbate the proliferation of terror. No serious proponent of counter-terrorism would exclude non-explosive diplomacy from the strategic and tactical arsenal deployed against terrorists, yet that’s exactly what the Bush administration and their supporters did and for the most part continue to do. Continue reading Jacob Weisberg’s No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Brain (cont’d)
Despite increasingly favorable political tea leaf readings, Democrats are far from a lock to recapture Congress in whole or part come November. The GOP still enjoys a fund-raising advantage over Democrats, and has enjoyed considerable success at suppressing Democratic turnout in recent elections. Democrats are closing the financial gap, but their own vote suppression efforts consist almost entirely of standing around as Republicans work hard to make voting for themselves a horribly depressing prospect. (Fortunately for the Dems, the tactic seems to be working: even the Republican National Committee is telling GOP candidates to run away from president Bush and the record of the Republican Congress. ) Whatever the prospects for a Democratic victory, party leaders would be foolish not to plan for the eventuality. On some fronts, they are: House minority leader Nancy Pelosi released a laundry list of Democratic legislative priorities a few months back (which drew a gasp of horror from my friend John Dickerson on account of a promise to investigate something or other), and Democrats in and out of Congress have been discussing potential committee assignments and leadership positions. Continue reading Congressional Republicans as cooperating witnesses |
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The ever disreputable Swopa, whose foreign policy analysis is both obsessive and superb, has detected a rash of strained national psyches. President Bush, 
Fred Kaplan has an interesting column in Slate 
Want to be perceived as tough on crime? Go out and commit a murder. Want to be seen as a deficit hawk? Run up the debt as far and as fast as you can. Want to champion civil liberties? Violate them early and often. Need to burnish your national security credentials? Support the biggest national security blunder in modern history.