|
|
By Weldon Berger, on October 20th, 2006
UPDATE: We’ve chosen and submitted six questions from among those suggested here and via email. We hope to have the opportunity to do this again, so please continue to leave suggestions should you have any. I’ve asked Dave Almacy, the White House spokesman who agreed to answer your questions, when we can expect to receive the answers and I’ll pass that along as soon as he lets me know. We’ll announce the questions and answers in a separate post.
Note: this item has been retitled and extensively revised. To see the original version, click here.
If you’ve ever watched a White House press briefing, you’ve probably felt the sensation of drowning in tepid gruel. It can be an extremely frustrating experience and it led me to try, in the wake of the Guckert/Gannon scandal, to place my own unfettered correspondent in the briefing room. In early 2005, I managed to pester the White House press office into providing BTC News contributor — now BTC News White House correspondent — Eric Brewer with semi-regular access to the White House press briefings held by then-press secretary Scott McClellan.
Eric has done a great job under difficult circumstances (you can read his dispatches from the press room here) with both McClellan and Tony Snow, but he’s only one guy, he has a real job and he can’t be there every day. So I asked our press office contact, who is now an official spokesman, if he would field questions submitted by our readers. He agreed to do that on the record, and I’m here to ask you to ask the White House the questions institutional reporters should ask but don’t.
Continue reading Ask the White House: BTC News asks our readers to chime in
By Keifus, on October 20th, 2006
I was in a mood this month to take a bitter but comical view of theology and humanity. Here are two books that scratched the itch.
James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (B+)
I was going to open this review with “what this author lacks in writing ability he makes up for in big brass ones,” but as I went on, I found neither statement to be true. Early on, Morrow drenches his prose in too many bad similes (“eyes scintillating like twin Van de Graf generators” and such), but he does finally catch a groove with it, and by the time I got to the protagonist’s sardonic captain’s log, I found myself chuckling with some regularity. And some of the jokes and puns are ridiculous enough to be good. A bookish priest chasing after a bunch of debauched apostates, begging them to remember their Kantian imperative, is funny stuff. As far as the brazenness is concerned, I guess it’s there, I mean there’s the gigantic dead body of God floating in the ocean and all, presented eventually with all its warts and pimples, and defiled at every opportunity: driven on, towed by its earbones, eaten by sharks and by a desperate crew, burned, rotted, drained of blood and torpedoed. Horrible as all of that sounds, Morrow pulls off something that’s more of a madcap romp than it is biting satire.
Continue reading Blasphemous Book Reviews
By Michel, on October 20th, 2006
Needlenose blogger Swopa is so good at predicting various Iraq-related stupidities, cupidities and disasters that I sometimes think US policymakers are reading the blog and mistaking it as prophetic command. “Swopa says we’re going to alienate al Sadr and magnify his influence again. To hear is to obey!” This entry, “How many soldiers’ lives has eBay saved?”, isn’t one of those; rather, it’s a comment on the skyrocketing debt among service members. Flagging an Associated Press story on the Pentagon policy of not sending troops overly burdened by debt on overseas deployments and a substantial increase in the number of soldiers self-reporting such levels of debt, Swopa wonders “why soldiers would be dramatically more likely all of a sudden to confess to debt problems that keep them from being sent to Iraq overseas. Then again, maybe the question answers itself.”
There’s more to it, of course: military pay isn’t the greatest and soldiers, particularly those with families, can have trouble making ends meet under the best of circumstances, let alone when one or both parents are deployed, and just about everyone has been deployed. But you can’t help wondering if soldiers faced with the choice of going back for a second or third tour in Afghanistan or Iraq might not consider dealing with collection agents a walk in the park compared with the alternatives.
Tristero at Digby’s place has a comment on GOP ads invoking Osama and terrorists with nukes. He seems to think directly reminding voters that Osama is still at large and indirectly reminding them that the country most likely to sell him a nuke just tested one, courtesy the Bush administration, might not work out so well.
Continue reading Blogs on Parade: Living With Debt Edition
By Weldon Berger, on October 18th, 2006
Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum has arrived at the strangest and most geographically dislocated analogy ever for the War on Terra®: it isn’t World War II or the Cold War, but the War of the Rings. There’s no way to do justice to his remarks, so we’ll let them speak for themselves.
“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.
“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” he continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
Iraq must be Gondor, then, which makes sense because it’s the cradle of mortal civilization. Mordor must be Pakistan, since that’s where bin Sauron is holed up, except Sauron’s eye was distracted from Mordor and Santorum wants to keep it distracted from us, which means we must be Mordor, which is confusing because we’re a simple, decent country much like the Shire; this demented tool can’t even get his fictional geography straight. But it’s all good, because we know how it ends: we win, and nobody we really care about dies. The only real question is casting …
Continue reading Three Dots Over Washington: Osama bin Sauron Edition
By Anders Burkus, on October 18th, 2006
Thanks to a blogging librarian in San Antonio, we now know a bit more of what George Bush thinks constitutes torture. BiblioSquirrel has unearthed a 1967 New York Times story in which Bush downplays his fraternity’s practice of branding new recruits with the Delta Kappa Epsilon emblem. A former president of Delta [said] that . . . → Read More: Torture: for Bush, it’s personal
By Weldon Berger, on October 17th, 2006
This item has been seriously updated: see asterisked comments below.
George Bush today signed into law a bill that tramples and spits on the Constitution and whatever claim to lofty morals the US once had. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 sends the 900-year-old right of habeas corpus on a permanent vacation, leaves it to the president to provide the official US interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and retroactively immunizes Bush administration personnel from prosecution under the 1996 War Crimes Act.
One might think all that is as bad as a bill can get, but the administration isn’t through with it yet. Missing in action to this point is the bill signing statement that probably explains the delay between the passage of the legislation and today’s presidential pen moment. Gamblers among our readers can safely bet that the statement will assert the president’s right to ignore most of the human and civil rights safeguards in the bill, such as they are, if he feels like doing so.**
Continue reading Think the torture bill sucks? Wait for the signing statement
By Weldon Berger, on October 17th, 2006
” ‘Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?’ I asked [Republican Congressman Terry Everett] a few weeks ago.
“Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: ‘One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.’ “
When Iraq’s Shiite Muslims mistook the first president Bush’s post-Gulf War call to overthrow Saddam as a call to overthrow Saddam, the long-oppressed religious majority rose up and began slaughtering Saddam’s Baath party minions, most of whom happened to be Sunni. With tacit US consent, Saddam responded with an overwhelming and indiscriminate application of force, killing tens of thousands of the rebels and their families; Bush had, it seems, wanted not so much a change of regime as a change of personnel at the top of the existing one. Iraq’s Kurdish population took another beating as well, with hundreds of thousands fleeing into Turkey and Iran as the fighting went against them.
When the current administration’s intentions toward Iraq became clear, the recent history of ethnic, sectarian and political violence in the country was among the practical objections raised by opponents of the invasion: overthrowing Saddam would blow the lid off a country in which a large majority of the population nursed intense grievances, variously political and religious, against a substantial minority. And all of them, obviously, had guns.
Continue reading Policymakers can’t tell Iraq players even with a scorecard
By Weldon Berger, on October 16th, 2006
Undaunted by the fiasco that was Michael Brown, president Bush has told Congress to butt out of the hunt for the next FEMA chief. Brown, the Arabian horse aficionado who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Katrina disaster, had no previous disaster management experience and Bush says he has the authority to appoint equally unqualified successors.
What Congress did was write a set of minimum qualifications for the position into the budget authorization bill for the Department of Mothership Security. What Bush did was issue a signing statement saying that the bill “purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office.”
In other words, the Congressional demand for someone with the expertise to run the office rules out most of the president’s applicant pool. (This is the same signing statement in which the president asserted the right to edit or suppress Congressionally mandated reports from Homeland Security on the agency’s compliance with privacy rules.)
Continue reading Bush reserves right to name his friend Flicka as FEMA chief
By Weldon Berger, on October 10th, 2006
Two leading journalists contributed to and kept secret a report the Bush administration used to argue for the invasion of Iraq. Newsweek senior editor Fareed Zakaria, an ardent proponent of the invasion who has now given it up as a lost cause, and Robert Kaplan, a highly touted foreign affairs journalist and another advocate of the invasion, both attended a secret meeting convened in November of 2001 by Paul Wolfowitz, then the assistant secretary of defense. The two journalists and a handful of unnamed others collaborated to produce the report that, in Kaplan’s words to the New York Times, assembled “a forceful summary of some of the best pro-war arguments at the time.”
Both men signed confidentiality agreements as a condition of attending the meeting. What this means is that two nationally known journalists who have together written dozens of Iraq-related stories not only knew the administration were marshalling Iraq invasion talking points barely a month after 911 but helped them do it, and then kept that information hidden from their readers even as the administration insisted until almost the moment of the invasion that no decision to attack had been made.
Kaplan and Zakaria are certainly not alone among journalists in talking up the war and concealing the extent and nature of their relationships with government officials, but so far as we know they’re the only ones who formally advised the Bush administration on how to sell the invasion; even Judy Miller can’t claim that distinction.
Continue reading Top journos secretly helped draft Iraq war talking points
By Weldon Berger, on October 7th, 2006
You’ll know Baghdad is safe for human habitation when a Bush administration official can announce a visit to Iraq’s capitol in advance. That won’t happen before the clock runs out on the administration in January of 2009: the city isn’t safe for anyone, even inside the alternate reality known as the Green Zone, and it’s getting worse, not better. To punctuate the reality, Condoleezza Rice’s landing on her recent unannounced visit was delayed to wait out a wave of rocket fire directed at the Baghdad airport.
The continually escalating violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country was the subject of Rice’s visit to the large compound that demarcates the effective boundaries of Iraqi government control. The US secretary of state informed Iraqis that the violence to which they’re daily subjected is unacceptable and they have to do something about it. Then she departed for Kurdistan, where she told Kurdish leaders that they have to share what they’ve come to see as their oil with the rest of the country, and that they too must stop the violence. During her visit, a Kurdish member of parliament was kidnapped and killed, and several US soldiers died in combat as well.
After meeting with the Kurds she told reporters that “[w]e had a very good discussion about the national reconciliation process and the vision of [a] unified democratic Iraq that is stable, that is at peace and at peace with its neighbors.” Mission accomplished.
Continue reading Hamster wheel diplomacy: Rice goes nowhere in Middle East
|
Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
|
