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September 15, 2004
Off Topics – Open Thread
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waiting for ivan here in new orleans.will be helping at campain headquarters next week.if ivan
does hit i can use that to my advantage,lots of
people will need help and a nudge.hungry? how about a john kerry cupcake?
Posted by: onzaga | Sep 15 2004 10:45 utc | 1
Thank God, that finally someone is paying attention to and taking care of the really important things in this world.
On the same day, The New York Times informed us that in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a new law banning sex with the dead. I am glad that at least one state legislature is addressing the real problems its citizens face. So be fairly warned; if you have any impulse to disinter Ronald Reagan’s corpse and have a go at it, you are now looking at an eight-year felony.
The rest of the article No sex, no scandal – Sex, after all, is what our media are most comfortable with is interessting too.
Posted by: Fran | Sep 15 2004 15:07 utc | 2
Juan Cole explains the bin Laden strategy:
From the point of view of al-Qaeda, the Muslim world can and should be united into a single country. They believe that it once had this political unity, under the early caliphs.
From al-Qaeda’s point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim states.
Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests have lasted.
Bin Laden sees the Muslim world as continually invaded, divided and weakened by outside forces.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the “far enemy” first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.
Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron.
Another goal is to destroy the US economy, so weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.
Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the US could be defeated and they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism.
Bin Laden had to do a big demonstration project to convince them that another model is possible.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration’s Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden’s wisdom and foresightedness.
If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.
If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.
Bin Laden’s dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda.
Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Sep 15 2004 15:38 utc | 3
If I remember correctly, there have been, on and off, comments that it might be good as a catharic process to vote for Bush. Monford has a nice post on this.
Love Masochism? Vote BushCo! – Could four more brutal years of the Dubya nightmare actually be good for America?
Posted by: Fran | Sep 15 2004 16:09 utc | 4
It must be US election time when Israel breaks all rules:
Israel will ditch road map, says Sharon
Posted by: b | Sep 15 2004 17:00 utc | 5
The Chinese have oil contracts with Sudan? Maybe we need to can stir that pod up a little bit.
US Military Personnel Advise African Union Monitors in Darfur
American military personnel are working with African Union monitors in the Sudanese region of Darfur to help bring the attacking militias under control and restore security to the area, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a student audience at Georgetown University September 10.
…
“We believe that the best solution is to continue to press the Sudanese to bring the Jingaweit and the other militias under control and to meet their responsibilities, and we’ll help them. We’ll help them with the African Union peacekeepers. There are some American military personnel in there working with the monitors,” he said.
They didn´t ask for help, they rejected outer interference, but Powell will help them anyhow….
Posted by: b | Sep 15 2004 17:08 utc | 6
Today’s writing assignment:
Compare and contrast big media’s coverage of cocaine abuse by Marion Barry and GW Bush.
Posted by: biklett | Sep 15 2004 17:49 utc | 7
@biklett:
Marion’s back, imagine that!
Te He He.
Don’t quite know what Marion might think of the disparity.
Someone ought to ask him.
Precious remarks there, biklett.
Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 15 2004 21:33 utc | 8
Available at antiwar.com, a very good Asia Times piece on US Impasse Over ‘Nuclear’ Iran, by Eshan Ahrari:
“Washington’s non-proliferation community lives in a make-believe world of addressing heady issues without injecting a heavy dose of reality into that discussion. There are issues related to Iran that, when not viewed from the viewpoint of realism, portray a different – or even an incorrect – picture. One such reality is the conventional wisdom in that Iran, by going nuclear, presents a serious threat to Israel. Needless to say, Israel plays a leading role in making sure that such conventional wisdom not only stays alive, but that it constantly drives America’s policy that ensures that Iran never becomes a nuclear power. No one bothers to ask why a nuclear Israel is not a threat to Iran, or why a nuclear Iran’s paramount purpose would be to threaten Israel, knowing full well the implications of such threats for its own survival.
“The fact of the matter is that, as a nuclear power since the 1960s, a primary purpose of Israel’s policy is to disallow other Middle Eastern neighbors the option of going nuclear. So the real purpose underlying Israel’s policy has little to do with threats to its security. The ultimate objective is that Israel does not want to lose its nuclear monopoly over other Middle Eastern states. That fact is applicable as much to Iran, which is regarded as an unfriendly state, as it is on Egypt, which has not only been at peace with the Jewish state since 1979, but also has diplomatic ties with it.
“If one were to examine the history of US behavior toward nuclear proliferation, one would easily find a powerful precedent of Israel’s current proclivity regarding its nuclear status. The United States also did not want the former Soviet Union to break its nuclear monopoly by becoming a nuclear power. The stated purpose of the Baruch Plan, presented by the US in 1946, was to “create a world without nuclear weapons”. It called for the creation of “an international agency that would be responsible for fostering the development of atomic power programs in other countries, licensing and regulating those programs, and ensuring that no country developed atomic weapons”. It “advocated the use of automatic sanctions if countries were found to be in violation of the agency’s terms”. However, the USSR rightly interpreted the real intent of that plan: that it was aimed at prolonging, if not permanently forestalling, its emergence as a nuclear power. Consequently, Moscow promptly rejected it. Israel is pursuing the very same type of policy, but in an era when the chief purpose of US non-proliferation policy is to deprive the so-called ‘axis of evil’ states (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) of nuclear weapons. That makes Israel’s job of maintaining the current status on nuclear non-proliferation quite easy.”
I am not an Israel-basher, and I find myself, with greater frequency, wondering about those who spin themselves into the ground over ‘Zionist conspiracies.’ They are mostly on the Left now, though once they were on the Right.
Having said that, America’s strategic relationship with Israel (which includes a defense treaty, hefty military and economic subsidies, etc.) is a legitimate subject of debate. Israel can be seen as serving a role similar to that of NATO – that is, an extension by formal alliance of American power and influence abroad. But whereas western Europe began to chafe under US hegenomy and resent its subsidiary position well before the end of the Cold War – showing all the signs of resurgent independence in what was, for the most part, a time of peaceful development – Israel has grown more dependent upon the US and more fearful of abandonment by it, in what is arguably an atmosphere of chronic crisis.
I read recently that that crisis now includes, in the minds of many or most Israelis, the specter of a nuclear-capable Iran. ‘Something must be done very quickly after the US election,’ said one Israeli expert on Middle East affairs. But as the author above points out, the what and the why are not really obvious. Israel has extraordinary retaliatory (that is, defensive) capabilities against all nations in the region. And yet much of the country remains convinced of the presence of a potent and permanent existential threat, as if those overwhelming retaliatory capabilites did not exist. Why?
Believe it or not, until very recently memories of the Holocaust played an insignificant role in Israel’s vision and understanding of itself. Strength and independence, rather than a fixed sense of victimization and persecution, informed the the spirit of the new state. The slaughter of Jews like so many animals was, to the Israeli mind, a shameful episode in the history of the diaspora. This was callously unfair to the memory of its victims, but the rejection rather than embrace of suffering that it entailed was absolutely vital. Now there is, within its population, the not uncommon perception that Israel and its Jewish population are the Eternal Victims, regarded with loathing and contempt by a world that will never acknowledge its achievements, will always reject it and be inclined more than not to look on passively, even gladly, as it is attacked and destroyed. (European cheer-leading for and UN indulgence of anti-Israeli terrorism contribute to this view.) There is the perception that, although Israel may have the means to fend off serious challenges, the world does not fully grant Israel the most fundamental right of any state: the right of self-defense. To many Israelis, it is always 1936. Recall Ariel Sharon’s furious public response to Bush’s demand for Israeli restraint in the aftermath of the Passover bombings of 2002: “Israel will not be another Czechoslovakia.”
All of this makes for a degrading and destructive psychology of weakness and persecution, abetted by the dependence upon the US for so much. It is instructive, I think, that that dependence only really began in earnest in the mid-1970’s, when the US first initiated large and regular outlays to the country. Israel has known life without our material support.
There is a lot more to say on the subject but I think I’ve wandered far enough afield for now.
Posted by: Pat | Sep 15 2004 23:08 utc | 9
An article via Juan Cole about ethnic flux in northern Iraq:
Officials monitoring the influx estimate some 72,000 refugees, mainly Kurds, have arrived in and around the city in the past 18 months. Smaller numbers of expelled Turkmen and Assyrian Christians have also erected camps in Kirkuk and surrounding villages. Some 50,000 others, mainly Arabs encouraged to migrate here under Saddam, have fled.
This is looking a lot like the political time bombs that Stalin’s ethnic cleansing left in the Caucasus. Saddam forcibly expelled so many people around the country, especially Kurds, and now in the absence of any law and order the fuse is being lit. I hope this part of Iraq doesn’t turn into a repeat of the catastrophe in Armenia and Azerbaijan just to the north.
Posted by: Harrow | Sep 16 2004 3:06 utc | 10
Pat:
All of this makes for a degrading and destructive psychology of weakness and persecution, abetted by the dependence upon the US for so much. It is instructive, I think, that that dependence only really began in earnest in the mid-1970’s, when the US first initiated large and regular outlays to the country.
Intriguing article you posted. But honestly, it sounds like a cranky conservative trying to justify to his skeptical fellow conservatives why to take Israel off the dole: because it’s turned into a dependent welfare queen. A reason they can truly appreciate.
But maybe there’s a much simpler one. As I understand it, the sense of strong “victimization” did not start in the 1970s. After 1973, there was a feeling of shock and dismay at how close the war had been, and a realization that Israel had to come to some kind of agreement with its neighbours. After the new intifada began, dozens of attacks were penetrating the hearts of Israel’s biggest cities, killing hundreds of civilians without warning. The present mood is probably due to the prolonged feeling of terror, rather than short, sharp wars interspersed with low-level strife.
It’s also possible the author Ahrari is full of crap and Israel has always been a prickly, defensive country.
Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 16 2004 3:36 utc | 12
Some interessting links:
Far graver than Vietnam
Nuclear talks stall as US hardens line on Tehran
And once more the link to Riverbend who posted again yesterday.
Fahrenheit 9/11…
Posted by: Fran | Sep 16 2004 5:18 utc | 13
One really wonders what is up, if Paul Wolfowitz is OpEd-ing in the New York Times about an Indonesian court case on the freedom of press.
(The issue is described in Wind of change blows prior to ‘Tempo’ verdict and elsewhere)
But then one finds these nudgets
Our own Declaration of Independence doesn’t speak of elections but rather about the rights of all human beings to certain “inalienable rights,” in particular “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And it is a fundamental principle of our Constitution that citizens cannot be deprived of those rights except by due process of law.
hmmm…
Posted by: b | Sep 16 2004 6:57 utc | 14
Well, Fran, Sid Blumenthal [Far Graver than Vietnam] certainly does add to the already-crowded bulletin board of deeply pessimistic assessments by retired senior military personnel and sundry defense and security experts. The bulletin board of optimistic assessments, on the other hand, is remarkably short of fresh, rather than dusty and fading, material.
I wonder at what point the worry in the White House becomes frantic, as I take it for granted that the bad news to which a spectating public is privy, is but a minor fraction of that confronting the Secretary of Defense and the President. If what anyone reading the paper each day can know is a bad and worsening situation, the situation must be by many degrees more critical still.
The AP reports that Arab League Chief Amr Moussa said Tuesday, “The gates of hell are open in Iraq and the situation is getting more complicated and tense.”
The gates of hell are open, yes, and George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense, who are determined to carry out a war in Iraq as though (one retired general quoted by Blumenthal puts it) we were fighting in Iowa, cannot reverse the trend of events without doing what they won’t be dragged kicking and screaming to do: fight as though we were in Iraq.
It will be quite something when George W. Bush is re-elected as a resolute, tenacious “war president” determined to “do whatever it takes” in Iraq, only to have us withdraw because, from the very beginning, he didn’t.
As Jonah Goldberg once said of one government agency or another: Their motto is ‘Doing Everything Possible But That Which Is Actually Necessary.’ It’s no way to run a war, but if the war in question was unnecessary to begin with, I guess there’s a kind of complimentary logic to it.
The campaign against al Qaeda, however, is a whole ‘nother story, and failure stemming from Everything But That Which Is Necessary will hurt more than just our pride and reputation.
Four more years will not be kind.
Posted by: Pat | Sep 16 2004 8:28 utc | 15
The Nation suggests and finds some clues that Bush skipped his air force medical exam in 1972 because of extensive use of cocaine and alcohol.
Posted by: b | Sep 16 2004 12:08 utc | 16
Aljazeera
Israel appears to be a multi-party democractic nation. You can choose between the right-wing nutcase Likudites – or the new right-wing fascist alternative.
The party was launched in Jerusalem on Saturday night.
Taking part in the ceremony were many leaders of the officially outlawed but effectively tolerated Kach group such as Baruch Marzel and Hen Ben Elyahu.
Kach is a violent Jewish militia made up of Jewish activists who reject democracy and advocate the expulsion or, if necessary, annihilation of Arabs from what they call Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel).
According to some Jewish religious authorities, Eretz Yisrael encompasses mandatory Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, and parts of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Turkey.
Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada or uprising four years ago, Kach terrorists have killed scores of Arab civilians.
Those caught by the Israeli authorities usually received symbolic or light prison sentences. The bulk of the perpetrators are allowed to remain at large.
Posted by: DM | Sep 16 2004 12:58 utc | 17
Look, I realize that we are trying for an elevated level of discourse here, but hopefully it is acceptable to speak with force while maintaining decorum.
It is extremely frustrating to read about the entire Bush National Guard scandal and the faithful attempts to prove something historically when it is perfectly clear that we are validating a sideshow. Our tolerating this discussion as one of the most important topics of the day simply lends our support to the idea that the current failures to “do his duty” are irrelevant.
To be specific, our response to the National Guard scandal would be more effectively stated this way: My opinion about whether this man performed his service honorably comes from his current actions. When Bin Laden’s team attacked the U.S., our president and his administration spent the first two days ensuring that every Bin Laden family member escaped from the United States and from my country’s legal purview. On the third day, after two days rescuing our enemy’s family, he finally turned his attention to American families.
In Afghanistan, the military strategy seems virtually designed to create escape routes for Bin Laden while killing American and Afghani soldiers. Again, the Bin Ladens were fed, and we and our children were ground up for the meal.
When has he EVER served the people of the United States before serving its parasites? Who is this war now serving? Not the Iraqis and not us. On 9/11, clearly we were all feeding the Bin Ladens. Which parasites does our blood feed now?
We need to grasp this National Guard issue for the comfortable Rorschach blot that it is, and move the conversation to where it hurts.
Posted by: Citizen | Sep 16 2004 17:28 utc | 18
comment by name moved from other thread
*** OFF TOPIC ***
well, hope is what abductees need most, and that is my lame excuse for posting this here.
dunno if anybody here got the news that two americans and a brit were abducted in baghdad. i found via whatreallyhappened a link which gives the names of the people and the company they were working for. i ran them thru google and came up with some interesting afiliations.
the company who employs these guys is called GSCS:
http://www.gscsgulf.com/home.html
go to their website and check out what they do and who their clients are. looks like the classical mercenary and/or war profiteering racket, albeit with a more “humane” face.
The first guy is called Jack Hensley. See:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2004/03/mil-040310-usa01.htm
Quote: “Staff Sgt. Jack Hensley, 2nd squad leader for Co. Bs 3rd platoon”
The second guy is called Eugene Armstrong. Check
http://www.access.gpo.gov/int/int024.html
Quote: “Eugene Armstrong, Ames Damage Assessment Team, Central Intelligence Agency”
The brit is called Ken Betley according to the website, which sources to al-jazeera, but i found nothing interesting under that name. the two american guys look like enjoying some well-payed aftermath to years of tight salaries on govt payroll.
if the iraqis who caught them are smart, they’ll probably want to connect the balls of these guys to some surplus electrodes from a local hospital and have them sing a bit.
BIG DISCLAIMER: I dont know if the persons referenced at the links which i present are the abductees, but i speculate that the profile and (past ?) affiliations would tend to connect them to a mercenary / war-profiteering outfit.
@ bernhard: if you find it outrageous of me to post this here, you may as well move it to another thread 🙂
Posted by: name | September 16, 2004 02:37 PM
Posted by: b | Sep 16 2004 18:55 utc | 19
John O’Sullivan writes about A Tall Order in the Sept. 27 edition of National Review:
…If bloodshed is to be avoided, the Middle East must learn liberty and democracy under a suitable tutor, in conditions that prevent its different tribes and sects from fighting to impose their own beliefs on one another. This is presumably the president’s democracy project. It is based (though not admittedly) on the insight of Seymour Martin Lipset that countries that had been colonized by the British were more likely to be democracies than those colonized by others. The Bush plan does not require the U.S. to be (as the British Empire had been) the sovereign power in the region. It merely needs to exercise enough power to ensure that liberty gradually advances in these societies under more or less friendly regimes. But there is a second half to this insight: The longer countries had been British colonies, the more likely they were to be democratic. Bush is embarking on a project that will require, say, 60 years of tutorship.
He is therefore asking the American people to bear a very significant burden. In doing so he risks running up against historically strong currents in American opinion — isolationist and anti-imperialist currents that draw support from the right as well as the left. For his commitment to a decades-long struggle to foster democracy in the Middle East, even if it rests on sovereign independent governments rather than on colonies, is still an exercise in liberal imperialism. (Perhaps the term should be liberal neo-imperialism; pun intended but not the whole point.)
That is not a political outlook with deep roots in American history — but it is one that makes considerable demands on a society. As Max Boot has argued, it would require some novel American version of the British Colonial Office with its own cadres of technical experts, soldiers, and political advisers to develop and standardize the techniques of nation-building, civil construction, training in democratic governance, and assistance to the civil power. Such a body is needed so that each exercise in extending liberty to another nation does not repeatedly surprise us with the same problems. Some of this stored experience already exists in institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, but these are modest organizations compared to the magnitude of the likely tasks. A U.S. Colonial Office — call it the Democracy Department — would have to be supplemented, moreover, by considerable private-sector investment in the skills that a democratic neo-imperialism needs. That means not just the expansion of military “outsourcing” organizations such as Halliburton but also new schools at Harvard and Stanford specializing in the language, culture, and history of the recipient societies, and even the general adoption of a new social outlook by Americans. A career spent in Baghdad or the Gulf would need to carry as much prestige as, if less income than, one on Wall Street or in Sullivan and Cromwell…
Once the U.S. government commits itself to a major project, however, it brings to bear enormous human and economic resources. It may therefore be able to shape any transnational project to advance democracy in its own libertarian direction. It would thus become a program to extend the blessings of American liberty, rather than one to impose the European Union’s vision of demo-bureaucracy. Even then, however, the president would still be asking Americans to join him in a formidable historical endeavor. Do they really want to go down such a potentially rocky road?
Mickey Kaus, the moderate-liberal commentator, argued against me in a recent radio debate that Kerry’s last chance was to convince the voters that Bush was offering them more history than they wanted to consume. If Iraq continues to fester — and in particular, if it begins to look like the unwinnable quagmire that liberals have always secretly believed it to be — then Kaus could be right. Americans might reject the democracy project because they lack the neo-imperial mindset that it requires. If they don’t reject it, however, they are volunteering to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Better luck this time.
Posted by: Pat | Sep 16 2004 19:18 utc | 20
If they don’t reject it, however, they are volunteering to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
You are of course assuming we the American public have a choice in the manner. As you have said Kerry will no more withdraw from Iraq than Bush will. Kinda looks to me like we are getting screwed but maybe get to choose who is doing the screwing.
Millions of people have already rejected this war and have been shrugged off as “focus groups”. I read that about 500,000 people protested the war in New York during the RNC but that didn’t even make the nightly news.
Choice indeed.
Posted by: Dan of Steele | Sep 16 2004 19:38 utc | 21
A word about John O’Sullivan’s Tall Order:
This is the kind of vast, untethered, ominously ambitious talk for which the Left was once famous. Rather, notorious. On what grounds can a party that professes to believe that the federal government is ill-suited to deliver health care and pensions, among much else, claim that that same government is a suitable vehicle for the transformation of the Muslim world? How can the party that stresses its objection to growing government interference in the lives and day-to-day business of American citizens, at the same time advocate one of the grandest schemes of aggressive government meddling in the lives of those who do not even fall under its domain? How can a party that expresses anxiety over the attrition of national sovereignty by the energetic and imaginative offices of vast international bureaucracies, dare submit that our own energies and imagination be turned toward the same end? How can a party that wages the “culture wars” on the side of religion, tradition, and the invariability of social constructs, argue for a “neo-imperialistic” campaign against these same pillars of Middle Eastern and Muslim societies?
Extraordinary.
Posted by: Pat | Sep 16 2004 21:01 utc | 22
Millions of people have already rejected this war and have been shrugged off as “focus groups”. I read that about 500,000 people protested the war in New York during the RNC but that didn’t even make the nightly news.
But there is leekage.
Bit by bit, and micro-iota by kilobyte.
The Iraq-mess does seem to be crawling back into public consciousness.
Tenaciously if not secretly…
Bullet by bullet, and wound by boom by gloom.
This is a mysterious world we live in.
And democracy–however diluted and looted ours may be–has a way of springing surprises upon the most crestfallen breast.
So heads up!
It ain’t over yet. Just as every boom must have its doom…so too..every gloom eventually gives way to bloom.
Which is to say:
There may yet be a quorum of well-placed and well-faced individuals who sense the utter debauchery of our burgeoning Iraq cemetery.
And…
who have decided to do something about it.
So again–It ain’t over…even when you think it is over.
I sense something secretly slouching towards the truth…
Posted by: koreyel | Sep 16 2004 21:25 utc | 23
@pat On what grounds can a party that professes to believe that the federal government is ill-suited to deliver health care and pensions, among much else, claim that that same government is a suitable vehicle for the transformation of the Muslim world?
A very good question, but Bush is not in that party. Bush is for big government – strong regulation on helth care and pensions, but in favor of big capital. The small government libertarians are screaming at this and the war.
Posted by: b | Sep 16 2004 21:53 utc | 24
@b
Someone said of Bush, correctly, that (undiscerning) Republicans accept him as a conservative because… well, because he says he is.
Small government libertarians – or classical liberals, take your pick – have largely passed the point of horror and despair (that process would’ve commenced with Reagan’s first term) and count their blessings as the uninvolved, if melancholic, spectators to madness.
Posted by: Pat | Sep 16 2004 22:32 utc | 25
Mr. Wolfowitz is voicing his concerns about democracy in Indonesia (where he played a glorious role as ambassador during the glorious presidency of Suharto, AFAIK).
Cry wolf.
Posted by: teuton | Sep 16 2004 22:50 utc | 26
War On Terror Has Cost More Civilian Lives Than Terrorism
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Sep 16 2004 23:11 utc | 27
From The Agonist:
Woman arrested after interrupting Laura Bush’s speech
John P. McAlpin | Hamilton, N.J, | September 16
AP – Police escorted Sue Niederer of Hopewell out of the rally after she demanded to know why her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq. Dvorin died in February while trying to disarm a bomb.
[I don’t even know what to say, except that “defending and promoting freedom” has become an enormous evil pretense.]
Posted by: Pat | Sep 17 2004 5:15 utc | 28
Times Reporter Ordered to Testify in Leak Case
A federal district judge in Washington has ordered a reporter for The New York Times to testify before a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer.
In a decision dated Sept. 9 and released yesterday, the judge, Thomas F. Hogan, said the reporter, Judith Miller, must describe any conversations she had with “a specified executive branch official.” The judge said Ms. Miller had received subpoenas issued by a special prosecutor investigating “the potentially illegal disclosure of the identity of C.I.A. official Valerie Plame.”
Posted by: b | Sep 17 2004 6:33 utc | 29
This happened on Friday, 28 January, 1972, according to the UPI at the time: “A woman in a singing group caused an embarrassed moment at a White House formal dinner tonight when she waved a placard and called to President Nixon to stop the bombing in Vietnam….The incident occurred as the dinner guests, assembled to pay honor to Mrs. and Mrs. DeWitt Wallace, founders of the Reader’s Digest, went into the East Room and sat down for some entertainment….As the Ray Conniff singers prepared for their first number, the young women, later idenitifed as Miss Carol Feraci of Los Angeles, suddenly pulled a sign written on cloth from the top of her dress that read ‘Stop the Killing.’… (more)
Posted by: alabama | Sep 17 2004 7:23 utc | 30
…At the same time she called out to Mr. Nixon, seated with his wife in the first row, ‘President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals, and vegetation….You go to church on Sunday and pray to Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘If Jesus Christ were in this room tonight you would not dare to drop another bomb.’….After the group sang the first number, Ray Conniff told the discomfited audience ‘The beginning of this program was as much a surprise to me as everybody.’….At that the audience shuffled and there were additional groans, boos and the shout ‘You ought to throw her out.’….Mr. Coniff told Miss Feraci it would be better if she left, and she did.”
Posted by: alabama | Sep 17 2004 7:25 utc | 31
Nice one ala–
Funny nobody pulled her hair, knocked her down, or kicked her while she was on the floor.
Chuckie Colson and the Plumbers not withstanding, I guess this is a pretty good micro-scale indication of just how far neothugological evolution of the Cabal has advanced down the road towards the Eve of Destruction.
(tell me over and over and over and over again….)
Posted by: RossK | Sep 17 2004 7:43 utc | 32