Biden on Bush Administration

"This the Nixon administration without the competence."
- Joe Biden, talking about the Bush Administration (And really, how can you not love a guy who can make quips like that?)

Last week, the National Intelligence Estimate basically said, that guy [Iran] doesn't have a gun [nuclear weapons], isn't about to buy a gun [has no development program in place] and gave up on buying a gun about 4 years ago.

The Bush Administration's response? (And for that matter, the response of every Republican candidate for president save Ron Paul, bless his head.) Iran is still a really big threat and we cannot rule out a military option. Or, to go back to the metaphor, even though he knows that Iran has no gun, he's not about to lower the gun aimed at Iran's head.

Last week, Barry Bond was engulfed in media attention, in court because of alleged use of steroids. This for a guy who dresses like a Little Leaguer and plays a game for a living. Meanwhile, Bush continues to act like a guy who has relapsed on his cocaine use (wild swings between paranoia and unfounded optimism), and absolutely no talk about drug testing for him. Is it true that we simply take games more seriously than war?

How Many Foreigners Would You Kill to Save an American?

I'm proud to be American, kind of. I'm proud to be a Davison, kind of. I'm proud to be a Californian, kind of. But my being an American or a Davison doesn't make me feel like my own life is automatically worth more than an Armenian or a Gonzalez or Lee. I don't think that we ought to casually kill Pennsylvanians in order to ensure the life and property of Californians. I've no illusions about Americans or Californians or Davisons being superior to non-Americans, non-Californians, or non-Davisons.


All that to say that I'm convinced that one of the thing that separates the neocons like Cheney and Norman Poderhertz from us normal people is their willingness to use a "foreigner discount rate" equal to nearly 1. Cheney has talked about a 1% doctrine. Simply stated, if there is even a 1% chance that a country poses a threat to the US, we have the right to use preemptive force to stop them. This kind of patriotism seems to me more of a pathological condition than a noble sentiment. It seems more like a sign of mental illness than a sound basis for foreign policy. The foreigner discount rate of nearly 1 suggests that a foreigner's life is worth some fraction of an American's.


You might say that I'm biased. I am, afterall, married to a Canadian. But I've met a variety of people from other countries and have yet to be able to make generalities about them any more than I can about Americans. Some are fat, some are thin, some are generous, some are selfish, some are violent, some are passive ... people are people no matter where the international sperm lottery has placed them.


There is a chance that Iran will gain a nuclear weapon within the next three to five years. There is an even smaller chance that once they have this, they will use it against another country. And there is an even smaller chance yet that this country will be us. How many Iranians does that justify killing today? Cheney and Poderhertz would likely say, all of them. I just don't buy it.


I don't like the idea of killing, but I'd be glad to pull the trigger to stop one foreigner from killing 100 innocent Americans. I wouldn't even be very squeamish about sanctioning the murder of one foreigner to save the life of one American. But once you get to the point of killing 10 foreigners for one American, or 1,000 foreigners for one American - at that point the mathematics of morality seems to make patriotism seem like an excuse for discounting the lives of others rather than a healthy affinity for one's own.


This is one of the questions I would love to hear asked at these seemingly weekly candidate debates. How many foreigners would you sanction killing in order to save the lives of 100 Americans? At this point, we'd learn whether these politicians are more in touch with their patriotism or their humanity. It seems to me like a fairly important question.

Warning - Blog Author Ranting About World War IV

We're getting to the point where there aren't a lot of explanations left. Malice? Stupidity? Conspiracy? Drugs?

At this point, the American government seems intent on igniting a regional war - a conflagration in the Middle East designed to suck in all countries. Norman Podhoretz, one of Giuliani's advisers and head of the gang of neoconservative thugs, says that we're in the midst of World War IV against Islamofascism. Of course, his claim makes about as much sense as the Belgians attacking us after Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City. Whatever this is, this is not a battle between nation-states, but this subtle distinction escapes the likes of Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz and people (like Bush and Cheney) who think these neocons have a clue about the world. And yet, Podhoretz's view about the world is becoming real - not because it describes something coherent or inevitable but because the leaders of the most powerful country in the world seem to believe him.

Last week, the House Democrats seemed to get to George's secret stash of hallucinogens before he did. They decided to reprimand the Ottoman Empire for its treatment of Armenians a century ago. This while showing itself wildly ineffectual against the atrocities in Darfar. It's rare that I agree with Bush, but I have to agree with him that this is really bad timing. Now, emboldened by their outrage against those self-righteous Americans, the Turks have announced their intention to send troops across the border into Iraq.

Meanwhile, Russian President Putin scolds Condi Rice after making her wait for a meeting, then heads south to meet with Iranian president Ahmadinejad and announce support for Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology. Throughout all this, the Bush administration continues saber rattling, threatening Iran and rebuking Russia.

The entire thing plays out like a poorly plotted conspiracy novel where the one guy who is supposed to save the world from pending doom has been distracted by Viagra and Prozac and is happy to accept his senior officer's suggestion that he just follow orders and not worry about any of this. It's like we're in a Tom Clancy novel but the hero decided to walk across the book store to pursue the heroine of a Harlequin instead, leaving his story to be played out like dada art.

It's no wonder that in the midst of all this, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert have such high ratings. Absurd is the only thing that can make sense of this. I came across a quote at http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/, a collection of comments overheard in New York. One of these random quotes seems to sum up this period of neo-absurdist policy better than I ever could:

Guy on cell in the Financial District: "So, the ecstasy turned out to be Excedrin."

Sanchez Confused - Poor George Takes the Blame

Because I'm Bernard's friend, I once again found myself at a restaurant with his sister Mattie. She was raving about the restroom.
“This is a really fancy restaurant,” she said. “They have emotion sensors and even have a little farting corner with fans that disperse the odor.”
"Fans for farts?” Bernard asked.
“Yes. They’re just on the wall, and the fans point downwards to take away the gas. Very clever.”
“Mattie,” Bernard sighed. “Those are for drying your hands.”
“Oh no. I don’t think so,” Mattie smiled. “They have paper towels for hands.”
“What’s an emotion sensor,” I stupidly asked.
“They sense when you want water for your hands or want to flush the toilet.”
“Emotion sensors that sense desire. Very useful. I think they have those on Wall Street. They’re designed to detect fear and greed,” I said. Bernard gave me a look of grief and shook his head.
“What?” Mattie asked.
“Nothing. He’s just talking,” Bernard said.
“He’s such a strange man,” she whispered to Bernard, her voice as loud as when she spoke. “He says such confusing things.” She folded her hands into her lap and then said, “Have you seen the news reports.”
“About what?”
“All about General Sanchez.”
I was impressed. Mattie grudgingly watches Fox News in spite of the fact that it’s a “little liberal for my taste,” as she once told us. That she would know about Sanchez, the former head of the military in Iraq impressed me. Sanchez has now said that Bush’s troop surge is a desperate attempt to make up for years of mistaken strategy in Iraq. That Mattie would know about this and even bring it up gave me hope. Perhaps the conservatives were learning from their mistakes and could change.
“I did hear something about that,” Bernard said cautiously.
“Yes. Apparently because of him, President Bush now has to invade Iran.”
“What?” Bernard exclaimed.
“He was head of the invasion of Iraq but apparently he got everything mixed up. President Bush wanted to go into Iran but Sanchez went into Iraq.”
“Sanchez got the countries mixed up and attacked Iraq when Bush wanted to attack Iran?” Bernard repeated.
“Well,” Mattie said in another of her loud, conspiratorial whispers, “he’s one of those Latino-Americans. English is probably his second language. Of course he got the orders confused. Now we have to do this all over again.”
Bernard and I sat in stunned silence. Finally, I found words, “That’s going to be a hard one to do all over again.”
“You do know,” Bernard said, “that Iran’s population is more than twice that of Iraq. As if Iraq wasn’t hard enough.”
“It’ll go better then,” Mattie said. “The more people, the better a democracy does because they have more voters.”
“More voters?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s just like big countries have better economies because they have more shoppers.”
“So, you think that’s a good idea? Attacking Iran?”
“It’s not just me. Bill Kristol thinks so too.” She paused. “And that man has such a lovely smile. It’s not like he would just attack people who didn’t deserve it.”
“Of course not,” Bernard sighed. "Where is our waitress?"
"She's probably using that fancy bathroom," Mattie said. "I just love technology."

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Moby (yep, that Moby) riffs on this issue from a different angle:
http://www.moby.com/journal/2007-10-13/united_states_living_nightmare_iraq_no_e.html

Ahmadinejad - Bush Steel Cage Match Scheduled for Rockefeller Center

Shocking news from the White House today. Bush and Ahmadinejad have agreed to a Steel Cage Match. If Ahmadinejad wins, the U.S. will agree not to invade Iran. If Bush wins, Ahmadinejad has agreed to license a Fox News channel to begin broadcasting in Farsi throughout the country.

(In Iranian focus groups, an adaptation of Fox News did better than expected. Audiences of all ages particularly enjoyed the talk show that included an angry leprechaun named Will O'Wile, a neo-conservative with Tourette's whose frequent outbursts earned him beatings from an equally angry imam armed with a small cricket bat. Also popular was Bill Kristol-Meth, a commentator with a beatific smile who continued to make increasingly outlandish predictions about the efficacy of American policy while ingesting large quantities of pharmaceutical products.)



His staff reports that Bush is excited about the impending match and already has an outfit. "He already has a little cape he likes to wear when making important decisions," said one aid. "He's very excited about unveiling his new look to the American people." In addition to a cape, his outfit reportedly includes Lycra tights and cowboy boots. For Bush, this is more than a way to resolve his differences with Ahmadinejad - he hopes to silence critics who say that with Karl Rove gone, George has no idea about how to raise his approval ratings.

[AP picture of exhausted leprechaun thanks to Melissa McEwan at Shakesville.]

After the Locust

Spying squirrels and terrorist badgers have descended on the Middle East.

Iranian police have arrested 14 squirrels on charges of espionage.

And

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

I can only speculate that the beleaguered badgers, feeling unsafe in Iraq, had hired the squirrels to scout out a safer location.

[And I'm not sure what more surprises me. That I finally got to use the term "beleaguered badgers" or that both of these accounts come from actual news reports in the same week. The absurdities continue to pile up like so much snow in winter. ]

Ben Franklin's Dark Prophecy

"I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of government but what may be a Blessing to People if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
- Benjamin Franklin's review of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 (from Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson).

A friend of mine came from Iran shortly after the revolution that catapulted the Ayatollah Khomeini into power. I asked him what was most remarkable about the transition from Iran to the U.S. He said, "All the things that are being taken away. Liberty. Freedom. Privacy. Refusal to torture. In Iran, they used religion to intimidate and to support law."

Perhaps Ben Franklin was right that we will simply become too corrupt to maintain a great government. But for me this kind of thing is so unnecessary. There are a lot of problems we haven't yet solved. For instance, how to create a thriving economy without creating lots of green house gases. Or how to ensure a sense of meaning to employees and citizens within large companies or countries. But the problems of individual liberties, of keeping religion out of government, of privacy - these are problems that we've solved. It is the worst kind of idiocy to turn our backs on those already provided solutions and retreat from progress.

Political Suicide by Campaign Karaoke: The Sad Story of John McCain's 2007 Spring Offensive

Have you ever had that annoying experience of getting a song stuck in your head? It doesn't even have to be a good song or an appropriate time. Like bubble gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe, when the pop song meme gets stuck in your consciousness you can find yourself sitting in church with the lyrics to a Marvin Gaye song running through your head.

Now, imagine that the song hijacking your brain chose to take over in the midst of a campaign stop. This happened yesterday to John McCain.

Speaking at Murrells Inlet VFW Hall in South Carolina, McCain was asked when he thought that the US Military might "send an air mail message to Tehran." "McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song," the Georgetown Times reports. "'Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,' he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann," the paper notes.

This is just sad. It's been a rough month for McCain. He has been transformed from an American Icon we all were proud of to someone who looks more like that American Idol contestant with funny hair for whom everyone is embarrassed.

Bush's approval ratings have tanked, in part, because his response to a widespread call for troop withdrawal was a troop surge. McCain, inexplicably showing disdain for popular approval in the midst of an election, chose to criticize Bush for not adding enough troops.

His attempt to convince the American people that Iraqi markets are as safe as the Mall of America backfired spectacularly. Wandering through an Iraqi market surrounded by 100 heavily armed troops, three tanks, two helicopters, three French reporters, two turtle doves, and body parts in armor, he looked as oblivious to his own words as a deaf man involuntarily signing in the midst of a grand mal seizure.

And now, the week of America's worst shooting massacre, McCain blithely suggests the mass murder of Iranians. The obituaries for McCain’s campaign for the presidency will likely date to this, the 12th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. McCain's political suicide is a different kind of tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless.

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I was unable to find the video of McCain's performance on YouTube, but here's one place you can view it.

Cheney's Troop Withdrawal Plan

Dick Cheney has finally agreed to a troop withdrawal by summer. There is only one catch: he wants to route the troops through Tehran.

Chapter 29 - in which democrats jump into a time machine and the president is revealed to be a dada artist

Joe Biden and Carl Levin have proposed a bill to rescind Bush’s 2002 right to invade Iraq. One can only hope that they next plan to rescind the 2001 NASDAQ market crash.

This may be what separates politicians from mere mortals. We have to decide what we're going to do before hand. They can wait until later, deciding in 2007 to apologize for slavery, attending Holocaust museums while ignoring on-going genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, and deciding in 2007 that they ought not to have invaded Iraq.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney (who is, rather explicably, never called “Richard") is making noise about military action against Iran. One might think that locking Dick into an undisclosed location would be a higher priority than passing a bill that depends upon the invention of a time machine in order to be relevant.

The point of challenging the Bush administration on the Iraq invasion should be to provoke the articulation of a new worldview in DC – one that actually seems connected to the realities of the Middle East. It might be worth noting that everything that Bush predicted has proven wrong - and not just slightly wrong. It is as if he was asked to name a tune and blurted out the name of a china pattern.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream; I have a fantasy. It is that one day we all learn that the Bush administration has actually been a staged production put on by a collaboration between a media eager for ratings and dada artists who needed money. We'll learn that this entire episode made absolutely no sense for the simple reason that it was intended not to make any sense. At this point, it is the only thing that makes any sense.

It's '007and I've got a license to blog

The other day a good buddy of mine, a conservative, suggested in an email that my recent blog comments about the president and his policy towards Iran had seemed rather egregious. He's right. I did not make the attempt that the writer of an Atlantic Magazine article might make to been evenhanded, to consider the facts, to show respect to each side of the argument or respect the office of the president. And as much as I love The Atlantic for that very reason, I think that this blogging liberty is great because I don't have that burden.

A boat can be splendid. It may be beautifully designed, well crafted, based on sound principles - but it can still have a hole in it. In this case, the policy of saber-rattling towards Iran is simply unsound. We can't even conduct one war and occupation and Bush thinks that we can credibly threaten (or worse - actually attempt) to invade Iran? This is simple nonsense and the facts about Iran's threat, their movement towards nuclear weaponry, etc., are all tangential to this simple fact. I could talk about the great aspects of the boat, but it seems that the most important feature of the boat to those about to board is the hole. You don’t write an essay about a hole in a boat. You quickly point it out, shouting if you have to. I felt that way about the nonsensical noise suggesting that the Pentagon was making preparations to attack Iran.

And that is the beauty of blogs. Unlike the columnists in DC and New York, we are unlikely to censor our comments because we're afraid of an awkward moment at the country club or because we're afraid that we'll offend someone we need to interview for a future story. We have no vested interest. This allows a certain freedom to comment, unhindered by a plethora of facts and analysis, sure, but also unhindered by the need to take time making points that are ultimately irrelevant. Bloggers are free to get to the heart of an issue as we see it. We know that Howard Dean, George Bush, and Tony Blair were never going to talk to us anyway, so we’ve no fear of offending them or even pointing out how unnecessarily pompous the mainstream media have gotten, shaking our heads at how seriously people like Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take themselves. We’ve learned a little secret – these political and media celebrities haven’t actually got any exclusive on insight or analysis. And sometimes knowing a great deal about boats is irrelevant if you fail (or refuse) to notice the hole in the boat.

Perhaps no technology better allows the individual to realize the right to freedom of speech than blogging. Freedom of speech meant something in a small burg of, say, 300 when everyone knew and could hear one another. Freedom of speech is fairly meaningless in a community of 300 million. Fairly meaningless, that is, until blogging. We now have a means to express ourselves to as many people as we can attract the attention of – and all without the need for editorial or political approval.

It's the year '007 and I've got a license to blog. And so do you.

Quick, Laura, Grab My Drugs! We're Invading Iran!

Pentagon officials have announced that they're building up forces for an invasion of Iran. This after the November election indicated that this nation has largely lost its confidence in the Bush administration's ability to start and conduct wars.

Baffles the mind, doesn't it? We require drug testing for grownups playing children's games like baseball and football but don't require psychiatric and drug testing for people who make policy? George has got to be doing cocaine again; his administration has been characterized by unmoored optimism interrupted by random bouts of paranoia. Unbelievable.