“I forgot to clean the lint basket in the dryer. If someone broke in to the house and did laundry it could start a fire!” – Marge Simpson
There has been much – and much publicized – Red hang wringing over the decision to have Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other guys (whom nobody cares nearly as much about) stand trial in a federal courthouse New York City. There’s been enough of this absurd theater, which so self evidently oxymoronic that it can only really be described as “belligerent worrying”, to support half an episode of The Daily Show. There’s obviously a lot of comedy to be had in the sight of chest thumping wanna-be warriors cowering in fear of a heavily shackled man, to say nothing of the easily mocked hypocrisy of serially over-reacting nimrods like Rudolph Giuliani. But there’s more to it than just the usual right wing cant of nouns, verbs and “9/11”s.
That refrain, so effective for so long, is fading into history right before our eyes. That is an unambiguous positive for the country as a whole. However, for those who’ve long seen it as their best rhetorical weapon it is a disaster of world changing proportions. This goes not only for office seeking members of the Republican Party, it runs straight down from them through the entire electorate. The 2001 attacks, which have been culturally shorthanded as “9/11”, were more than just a political weapon to be wielded by Bush the Younger and his adoring supporters. “9/11” was a cultural phenomenon that dwarfed any fad in recent history.
It was on t-shirts and bumper stickers, in popular songs and on television. It provided an all encompassing justification for American nationalism at every level from televised Washington talk shows to barbershops, barstools and beauty salons. Every time someone’s conservative uncle went off at a family picnic the entire cultural force of “9/11” was there to back him up. In every conversation about the wider world between teenagers (some of whom would grow up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan), “9/11” was there. Long after the rubble was cleared and the victims mourned, “9/11” stayed. It quickly became less a terrorist attack and more a revival movement, perhaps the greatest America had seen in a century or more. But like the Great Awakenings, like the drive to prohibit alcohol, indeed like all revival movements, this one cannot sustain itself.
The first hard evidence that it was petering out was probably the 2006 election results. But it wasn’t until the last presidential campaign, especially as Giuliani became more and more of a cartoon, that speculation began in national media circles about how we were now living in a post-post-9/11 world. Cutesy phrasing aside, that was an astute point and now we’re seeing it put into reality. This is also part and parcel of why closing Guantanamo is such a bugaboo for terror crazed nationalists. Guantanamo is for prisoners of war, if it’s closing doesn’t that mean the war is ending too?
Putting Mohammed on trial in New York (and, as nobody but Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, even that still isn’t good enough) is the beginning of the end for the cultural fad of “9/11”. The event that everyone at the time agreed “changed everything” actually didn’t change very much at all. For people who go for kitschy “9/11” porn, like bald eagles with tears in their eyes, the 2001 attacks delivered on the failed apocalyptic promises of Y2K and those “Left Behind” books. It was the ultimate in righteous justification, but it wasn’t the apocalypse; after all, here we are eight years later.
None of the above is to suggest that there aren’t millions upon millions of Americans for whom the culture of “9/11” is still roaring along. There are; but there are less of them this year than there were last year and next year there will be even fewer. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He’s just a name, albeit one that has the renown and malice of a spook story to significant chunks of the country. So long as he’s in legal limbo in some exotic tropical prison the myth of the all-capable terrorist mastermind can continue. But when he’s carted off to some anonymous, out-of-sight/out-of-mind concrete box, no different than any other convicted murderer, that’s when his name will fade.
It is in the interest of right wing politicians and their blabbering surrogates to object to that outcome. It will cost them a powerful bogeyman and erode the culture of “9/11” (which they have so egregiously exploited) even further. And so we are left with their belligerent worrying.
“If we quit now we’ll never know how badly they’re gonna beat us.” – Homer Simpson
There is an almost papal quality to watching the anticipation of Barack Obama’s decision on a new Afghan strategy. The leaks and rumors are flying fast and heavy, but in the meantime there’s no deadline on his decision (Red charges of “dithering” fell flat) so all the chattering classes and the byline brigade can do is watch the White House for the white smoke that will mean we have a new Afghan strategy.
What I haven’t seen pointed out anywhere is that the only decision he could make that would actually qualify as Big News is one of the few he is explicitly not considering: a withdrawal of most or all of American troops from Afghanistan. Whether he sends 40,000 more troops or just three extra guys named Ted the Western effort in Afghanistan is going to continue. There is a very strong case to be made that setting a deadline on American involvement and beginning the process of winding down the war is the right thing to do, in both military and humanitarian terms. But those arguments have no place to be heard because the most compelling reason for continuing the war is, and remains, domestic American politics.
I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.
These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.
Indeed. But Wills confines himself to speculation about Barack Obama as a one term president. What he doesn’t address (like I said, it’s a short piece) is what effect that would have on the (presumably) Republican 2012 victor. If the Reds won back the White House on the strength of charges about Blue weakness on “terrorism” and other “national security” type questions they would be almost compelled to send the American military gallivanting around the globe in search of those ever elusive Bad Guys. In other words, a withdrawal from Afghanistan that was so politically costly to Barack Obama as to make him a one term president could very result in more war, not less.
It is nauseating conclusion, that American troops must die on the far side of the world so that foolish Americans at home can be kept away from the levers of power. But it is inescapable. A Red victory in 2012 would be seen, by the victories party and by much of our hackneyed media, as a vindication of the theory of perpetual war, of making America safe by forever fighting abroad. The damage they could wreak with that righteous sense of fresh vindication and political justification is almost beyond imagining.
None of that will come as any comfort to those whose lives will yet be lost or shattered as Obama plods ahead in Afghanistan. That goes for Americans, Afghanis and other alike. But those future casualties, however certain they may be, shrink to insignificance when placed next to the corpse pile amassed by Bush the Younger. That man did tremendous damage to this country, its people, and its politics and there isn’t enough political genius in the world to mend it in a mere four years.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with history can tell you that not everyone who dies for their country dies gloriously for their country. Sometimes they die in pointless avalanches of shit, or in ill conceived gambits by incompetent superiors, or simply by vicissitudes of chance. The history of war is the story of the young dying for the mistakes of their elders. The walking dead of Afghanistan, those who will die (or be shredded) between now and the exhaustion of the conflict, are just the next in that tragic line.
At this point, when America and the world are already waist deep in blood, gore, severed eyeballs and destroyed lives, it’s better to wade through to the certain shore than grasp for an early exist and risk falling head first into the mire. Make no mistake, that is the danger of a one-term Barack Obama. It can be couched in the polite terms of The New York Review of Books, but everything we know about Obama’s likely opposition in 2012 means more war, more waste and more death, especially if one of the main points of contention is that Obama “lost” Afghanistan. One sounds closed-mindedly partisan when saying that, but it doesn’t alter the facts or the stated attitudes of the opposition.
Obama’s only political vulnerability on Afghanistan comes from looking weak. Those of us up in the gallery can only hope that he’s savvy enough to keep himself in office without getting in too deep. Passing zero wars onto his successor isn’t enough; he has to do it in a way that keeps the number at zero after he’s out of office.
“Have I ever told you kids about the Sixties?” – Aging Hippie Teacher
Since The Wire wrapped up early last year, Mad Men has become the new “it” show for critically acclaimed television. It’s smart, it’s unique (how many other shows are set in a sixties advertising agency?), it’s well written and well acted. It’s a show to which non-television websitesdevoteseriousattention. Sunday night it finished its third season run with its characters still reacting to the recent assassination of John Kennedy.
That the show is crafted with extraordinary care goes almost without saying, but the main hook is the fact that it takes place in the early sixties. If it were set in an ad agency amidst chirping Blackberries and edgy “Web 2.0” campaigns it would garner but a small fraction of the attention it does. The late sixties and early seventies, with everything from Vietnam, hippies, Black Power, feminism, and all the rest, are a story that’s been told, retold and mistold a thousand times already. But the early sixties, when the cracks in the post-war American dream began to show, is an almost blank spot in our cultural memory, as such it is ripe for fiction.
But our easy fascination with this mostly unknown era isn’t only due to the fact that it was overwhelmingly overshadowed by the political, cultural and social fireworks that followed it. It’s also just a result of timing. Like Westerns during the 1920s dawn of Hollywood, Mad Men is set in a time that is rapidly passing out of living memory. Less than one in five of today’s Americans were born before the Eisenhower-Kennedy era ended in Dallas. Consider that Don Draper, who is what passes for the show’s main character, fought in the Korean War. Korean War vets today are all in their mid-seventies at least, and most of them are older. People who can actually remember the time portrayed on the show are a small and shrinking minority.
But they are with us still and it provides some startling context when you think about it. How many in the show’s audience know someone who could’ve been career woman Peggy Olson four and a half decades ago? She’d be about seventy now. A doting grandmother with an early career her descendants barely know about, perhaps? Or committed corporate type who, as the odious phrase goes, “had it all”, or tried for it, anyway?
Or what about Salvatore Romano, the deeply closeted commercial director? Stonewall is less than six years away from the current time on the show. His career path could’ve made him similar to guys like Harvey Milk, prosperous men who tired of the closet and formed the nuclei of the first openly homosexual communities.
Paul Kinsey, the show’s resident bearded liberal, might be a bit too old to have become a hippie dropout. But perhaps he ended up as one of those discouraged, old line lefties who shook their heads sadly when Ronald Reagan was elected and wondered what the hell happened. Carla, the Draper’s housekeeper and nanny, might have been one of the wizened old colored ladies who cast her vote for Barack Obama with tears in her eyes, never having thought the chance would come in her lifetime.
Of course there are also the Draper children. Sally, the oldest, would be getting to college just in time for the Summer of Love, and to rebel against her spoiled, emotionally distant parents. Bobby would be close behind her, though he’s probably just a few years too young to get drafted for Vietnam. Gene, the baby, would be graduating high school right as the early 80s recession was hitting, today would be in his late forties.
Speculation like this, conscious or not, is part of the attraction of Mad Men. (Is that really what childhood was like for people who are in their forties and fifties today? Did grandma seriously have to dress like that to go to work?) It is set in a time that most people cannot remember, and yet not so far back that we cannot see in it the outline of things to come, the forces that shaped the world that exists today. Obviously only the show’s creators know what will become of these characters, but whatever happens to them they are recognizable as people that are all around us still. It’s history on the cheap, well told and well executed. That, more than anything, makes it stand out from the vast wasteland, makes it demand attention, and gives it extra layers in which each viewer can place themselves and others.
“See it’s a miniature version of the A-bomb, the government built it in the fifties to drop on beatniks.” – Herman
There is a scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1988 movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” where the intrepid band of heroes finds themselves talking with the Roman god Vulcan. He’s in the weapons manufacturing business and describes to them his greatest creation, the ICBM:
Here’s the relevant exchange:
Baron Munchausen: What does it do?
Vulcan: Do? Kills the enemy.
Baron Munchausen: All the enemy?
Vulcan: Aye, all of them. All their wives, and all their children, and all their sheep, and all their cattle, and all their cats and dogs. All of them. All of them gone for good.
That’s as good a starting point as any for understanding a device that Neil Sheehan, in the subtitle to his marvelous new book “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War”, describes simply as the “ultimate weapon”. That isn’t hyperbole. ICBMs are it. There is no defense against them and even the most ardent and irrational of missile defense advocates concede that countries with the resources of China or Russia could easily construct weapons of sufficient sophistication or quantity to overwhelm any defense, no matter how extravagantly funded. This is particularly scary when you consider that if even one of these things were to be actually used in a war would count as a one of the worst disasters in human history.
Told largely though the story of Bernard Schriever, an Air Force general and one of the men most responsible for the American missile program, “A Fiery Peace” documents the conception and construction of America’s missile forces. It is a tale masterfully told. Sheehan delves into the deep background of not only the geopolitical realities of the time, many of which are poorly remembered today as everything is lumped under the unchanging rubric of the “Cold War”, but also of the various technical, bureaucratic and military factors that enabled, and required, the construction of nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The context that necessitated and created so terrible a weapon is a tremendous story in and of itself and Sheehan does an excellent job of seeing both the forest and the trees. So when some of the Cold War’s greatest hits (the Berlin Airlift, Francis Gary Powers and the nonexistent “missile gap”, the Cuban Missile Crisis) make their appearance they are given just the right amount of attention. Important people that take center stage have their backgrounds and personalities described in detail, but not excessively so. Similarly, the book goes over the formation of the modern American military after World War II, including the creation of the Air Force as an independent branch of service, but it doesn’t get bogged down in unnecessary minutiae. Given the potential for topics like these to sprawl keeping things broad and still focused is a hell of a triumph all by itself. Sheehan’s previous book, “A Bright, Shining Lie”, was a good way for a lay reader, who doesn’t want to plow through a dozen or more books on the subject, to get a decent handle on just how fucked our Vietnam adventure was from the get go. “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” serves much the same function for the weapons on which our strategic invulnerability is still based.
But the book isn’t a hagiographic history of the square jawed men who defended America and all the righteous things they did. Even in the heady and ideological days of the early Cold War less than scrupulous defense contractors threw fits and tossed up political roadblocks when their profits were threatened, whether or not their product was the one the military wanted or not. Bureaucratic infighting was as potent a derailment then as it is today. Personal likes and dislikes, both within the military and outside of it, had huge and lasting impacts. For example, Schriever was an excellent golfer and used that fact to greatly aid his career, but objectively speaking the ability to put a little white ball in a small hole with a crooked stick is unrelated to anything in the field of rocketry.
Ticks and quirks of that nature had enormous effects in the infancy of our Byzantine military procurement and development processes and they are very much on display here. The creation of a new industry, what we now call aerospace, was a necessary evil and not a pretty process, and it’s impossible not to read the stories of its birth without seeing the germ of today’s war crippled federal budget. Sheehan fights, mostly successfully, against nostalgia for bygone times, but it’s almost quaint to see the Defense Department having to routinely trim programs because of Eisenhower’s insistence on keeping costs down.
There is also an undeniable comfort that comes with reading about the Cold War, even if you set aside American triumphalism. After all, we, homo sapiens sapiens, survived it. Today we see that result as basically inevitable. Communism didn’t work and ideological differences that seemed war worthy sixty years ago look positively silly in hindsight. But the survival of the species was in genuine danger and those silly differences could’ve very easily murdered us all.
To take but one serious danger that was poorly understood at the time, there is the issue of fallout. When Vulcan described his new toy to the Baron he neglected to mention that using them in large quantity dooms the user as surely as the target. Sheehan makes chillingly understated reference to this a couple of times, but during the 1950s, when nuclear weapons were still largely a bomber-based, and therefore defeat-able, weapon, the idea of fallout was poorly understood by the men responsible for its use. They believed that waging an all out war on the Soviet Union was possible because they didn’t know, or didn’t care to know, that setting off that many bombs anywhere would likely have killed almost everyone in the US as well. It’s one thing for leaders to ignore unintended consequences in decisions about whether or not to go to war (certainly we’ve seen some examples of that these last few years), it’s quite another for one of those unintended consequences to include the end of civilization as we know it.
But we survived, and, like it or not, we did so at least in part because of the efforts of Schriever and others like him. There is an undeniable dissonance that comes with the idea of a weapon so terrible that its use cannot be seriously contemplated except in genuinely apocalyptic scenarios. Yet the existence of those weapons kept shooting wars between the two superpowers confined to the casualty and fallout free realm of fiction. Neil Sheehan has written a great book about their genesis.
“The death card?” – Lisa Simpson
“No, that’s good. It means transition, change.” – Renaissance Faire Fortune Teller
“Oh. Heh, oh, that’s cute.” – Lisa Simpson
“Ahhh, the Happy Squirrel!” – Renaissance Faire Fortune Teller
“That’s bad?” – Lisa Simpson
“Possibly, the cards are vague and mysterious.” – Renaissance Faire Fortune Teller
There were a few small elections yesterday and the never circumspect political-analysis industry is all over them today. Even good old Talking Points Memo and its reliably calm Josh Marshall succumbed:
Lot of tea leaves to read this morning and we’re going to be looking at all of them.
As usual, language gives away the game. “Tea leaves” is a common enough phrase, but the underlying assumption is that the configuration of your tea leaves holds some portent of future events. It doesn’t. And neither, for that matter, do last night’s results have much to do with next year’s Congressional elections. There’s one exception to that, but we’ll get to it later. First things first, let’s quickly go over why the twin Red and Blue victories from last night don’t matter all that much.
The Reds won the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. What gets lost in the constant portrayal of politics as an epic and ever connected team sport between Red and Blue is that individual politicians can and do matter. Jon Corzine lost his bid to stay Governor of New Jersey, and since he’s got a D next to his name it’s easy to begin frothing at the mouth over how this is some kind of a rebuke to Obama (even if the numbers don’t bear that out). But declaring Corzine’s defeat as either “bad for Obama” or “not that bad for Obama” misses the fundamental point that Corzine was an unpopular governor and probably deserved to lose his job anyway. A Corzine win would be no more “good” for Obama than a Corzine loss is “bad” for Obama, either is mostly irrelevant. Does anyone think Obama is in serious jeopardy of losing New Jersey in 2012? No? Then why are we talking about this?
Virginia is a slightly different case because it may very well be competitive in 2012. Obama won it in 2008, the first Democrat to do so in a great long while. But you could take Virginia’s electoral votes away from Obama’s pile and he’d still have plenty left to get back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If this election had been for governor of, say, Ohio there’d be some sense in seeing it as having the potential to influence 2012. But even if that were true it still ignores the fact that political conditions a year ago are very different than they are now, which also means that they’ll be different one and three years hence in ways we cannot accurately predict.
Similarly, the Blue victories in last night’s House special elections aren’t all that important. The fact that there is now a very liberal Democrat representing California’s 10th Congressional district and a centrist Democrat representing New York’s 23rd Congressional district doesn’t much affect the balance of power on Capitol Hill. It makes Nancy Pelosi’s job a little bit easier, and her job is pretty hard so every little bit helps, but in the grand scheme of things it just isn’t that important.
Even in New York’s 23rd district, where the big guns of the right wing failed to secure a Red seat in a Red district, the victorious Democrat Bill Owens didn’t win the seat in perpetuity. He’s only got it until this time next year. Then he’ll have to defend his Blue ass in that Red district. Things like this are why there’s no point getting sucked into the drifts and currents of instant analysis. The next election of any real importance is still a year away and to make these analyses even more pointless the election that everyone wants to talk about (look for the name “Obama” in any story about yesterday) is still three years away.
There is a case to be made that the events of the last week in upstate New York may have some bearing on what happens next year, but only in terms of who is representing the Reds. When the modern day Red Guards drove moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava out of the race with such vitriol that she ended up endorsing the Democrat they made a far bigger political impact than the relatively meaningless subtraction of one Republican from the House. After all, if the right wingers are encouraged by their one-step-forward-two-steps-back campaign in New York, then more non-fringe Republicans may find themselves under assault from the right. The political paparazzi are already training their sights on Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio in Florida.
So far the Red Guards have only cost themselves one measly House seat. (Albeit one that had been handed down like a Republican Party heirloom for 130 consecutive years.) But if they mount Crist’s head on the mantle next to Scozzafava’s they might cost themselves a Senate seat, and those are prizes too valuable to be trifled with. Closeted homosexual or not, Crist is widely considered to be the closest thing to a lock a non-incumbent can be for Florida’s 2010 Senate race. Absent a massive Red wave, which is only probable in the fevered masturbatory fantasies of people like Michael Steele, Rubio is a far weaker general election candidate. But that logic didn’t hold them back in New York and it may not stop them in Florida.
So the one thing we can take away from this year’s elections is that we need to keep a close eye on Republican primaries next year. Most states don’t have a third party with as much local clout as the Conservative Party does in New York, so further challenges are more likely to come from within the existing Red power structure. As for other effects, and what they might portent for 2010 or (drum roll, please) 2012, well, you can read all the tea leaves you want, but you’ll be just as successful with goat entrails, crystal balls or cable news political coverage. Some of those are stickier than others, but they’re all equally meaningful.
“Would you like to buy some Itchy & Scratchy money?” – Itchy & Scratchy Land Ticket Lady
“What’s that?” – Homer Simpson
“Well, it’s money that’s made just for the park. It works just like regular money but it’s, uh, fun.” – Itchy & Scratchy Land Ticket Lady
One of the oddest things about American politics, and given all of its quirks that’s a pretty bold statement, is the way dollars spent on the military are denominated differently that dollars spent on everything else. Oh sure, we use the word “dollars” for both, but we conceive of them very differently. A swing of just fifty billion dollars over ten years is considered of huge political importance to the various health care reform packages floating around Congress at the moment. Yet numbers like those would hardly count as a rounding error on the annual defense budget and no one bats an eye.
With that in mind, it was both encouraging and saddening to see Barack Obama put his John Hancock on a $680 billion dollar military budget this week. On the encouraging front Obama and War Secretary Gates managed to score almost unprecedented victories against some of our stupider defense spending grotesqueries. On the saddening front those victories consisted mostly of political symbolism rather than any actual decrease in our inconceivably swollen and wasteful budget. The always reliable Armchair Generalist has some of the disheartening details, but the real tell is that in all 744 words of that rather fawning New York Times article there was never a dollar figure put on the savings.
As TomDispatch routinely chronicles, spending this much coin on what we laughably refer to as “defense” is literally killing us. Those are dollars we could be spending on things like health care, infrastructure, police, economic development, technological innovation, etcetera. Jo Comerford laid it out there recently:
According to the Office of Management and Budget, what that actually means is this: 55% of next year’s discretionary spending — that is, the spending negotiated by the President and Congress — will go to the military just to keep it chugging along.
The 14 million American children in poverty, the millions of citizens who will remain without health insurance (even if some version of the Baucus plan is passed), the 7.6 million people who have lost jobs since 2007, all of them will have to take a number. The same is true of the kinds of projects needed to improve the country’s disintegrating infrastructure, including the 25% of U.S. drinking water that was given a barely passing “D” by the American Society of Civil Engineers in a 2009 study.
But these are military dollars we’re talking about, and enumerating what else we could be buying with them always seems to fall flat rhetorically. We’ve grown so accustomed to treating them like a wholly separate part of the budget that they no longer feel like the same thing; and in a country that loves any excuse to go shopping that is a damning indictment.
How did things get like this? The short and extremely accurate answer was provided almost fifty years ago by outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower. It’s been cited so often over the last few decades that it’s become unfashionably trite, but that doesn’t make it any less true:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual –is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
We have failed – totally – to heed Eisenhower’s warning. Over the intervening years the nearly ruinous results of that failure have become so common as to be unremarkable. Consider that the Times article linked above, an article about the military budget, a budget that has very few restrictions placed upon it because it is considered a matter of life and death, is not in the “News” section of the paper. It’s in the “Business” section. That’s a dead giveaway and it tells you all you really need to know.
The Obama Administration has done admirable things with the defense budget, most notably putting the costs of our sophomoric imperialism right up front along with the rest of the numbers instead of hiding them behind transparent euphemisms (“emergency funding”) like his wretched predecessor. It’s a step in the right direction, toward treating military dollars just like the regular kind. But in this case correcting the mistakes of Bush the Younger alone won’t be enough; this beast has been gorging for five decades and it cannot be tamed in nine months. Obama and Gates had to wage an intense, albeit relatively low key, political campaign to win even modest victories this year. Let’s hope they’re prepared for more, because only serious and sustained presidential attention has any chance of staving off war induced bankruptcy.
“There doesn’t seem to be any “Any” key.” – Homer Simpson
Even by the low stands of this site I am not informed enough to comment knowledgably about Windows 7. I have not yet used it, and while I did follow its development I don’t have any really strong opinions on it one way or the other. For the lowdown on Windows 7 I read this review at Ars Technica. And while I have no ground to stand on when it comes to the functions and features of 7 or the accuracy of this review, one thing about the article did bother me.
Probably the biggest source of whining about Vista—bigger even than compatibility issues or performance concerns—was User Account Control, the new feature that meant any attempt to use superuser privileges gets blocked unless you specifically permit it when prompted, with deliberately annoying prompts. Though this could on occasion result in seeing a plethora of UAC prompts (especially when installing and configuring the system in the first place, which just happens to be the scenario that most reviewers experience), the reality was that normal usage scenarios resulted in few prompts, certainly not enough to be a daily annoyance.
[…]
If you do this—which you probably should—then you’ll find that Windows 7 has virtually the same number of prompts as Vista does. By making it “less annoying” for Administrator users, Microsoft has just made it more likely that home and SOHO users will just run as Administrator all the time, which is precisely what the company was trying to prevent with UAC in the first place.
This attitude is, if not quite prevalent, at least common among professionals in what we’ve loathsomely dubbed “IT”. It’s this wildly false assumption that every install is a well thought out and well maintained one, note the scare quotes around ‘less annoying’. Obviously this is a review that’s been published on a website that expects at least a modicum of technical understanding from its readers. But the problems it is describing are those not of the kind of people who read Ars Technica, but of the less technically inclined, of the great technologically unwashed. Windows Vista, and by the looks of it Windows 7, were designed with the properly configured and tightly run IT environment in mind. How could they not be? But a great deal of systems, in everything from homes to large offices, won’t be run or configured that way because doing so is expensive, time consuming and, for many people, wholly unnecessary.
Sitting at home behind the built in Windows firewall and whatever firewall is built into their router most people are quite secure so long as they don’t fall for a phishing scam or take pity on any down on their luck Nigerians. This is true whether they’re running XP, Vista, or 7. Conversely, if someone does “confirm” their password or open an e-mail attachment they shouldn’t then no amount of built in security features will stop them all.
And thus we arrive back at the essential problem that IT people find so endlessly frustrating: you cannot stop the users from acting stupidly. If you’re running a large network you can restrict what they can do, but if it’s just some random ordinary citizen sitting behind a desk in some random ordinary living room, they’re on their own. They have full privileges to be completely ignorant of the power at their fingertips and inevitably some of them are going to destroy their systems.
The article is written from what I think of as a typical high level IT viewpoint that all too often is afflicted with a blind spot masquerading as annoyance when it comes to this essential flaw in all security systems. Here’s another example:
“Everything “bad” about Vista—and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, because the things that garnered most complaints have negligible legitimacy—is still “bad” in 7.”
It’s the “negligible legitimacy” that gives away the myopia because a serious IT person understands the meaning behind all the prompts and all the security features. To a non-technical user they are simply annoying and that means that they also fail as a security measure because asking a person to render a judgment on a security question they don’t understand is no kind of security at all. It’s like flashing a warning about two choices that reads “Click only the left box, clicking the right box will result in certain doom!”, only it’s written in runes. Many of the people who found Vista frustrating can’t read the runes and blaming them for the poor reception it received isn’t much of a solution.
Microsoft is certainly far from blameless when it comes to the foibles of Windows, but to some extent they are caught between a rock and a hard place. Their systems absolutely have to meet the approval of serious IT people, but at the same time they have to be usable by people who don’t know anything about computers. The features of Vista, that have been carried forward into 7, that the Ars review finds so important and defends so vehemently, are indecipherable to ordinary people. Until that gap can be bridged, until the sharp corners of independent computing can be smoothed out a little more without ordinary users being bothered, problems like this are going to persist. Things like UAC are stopgaps masquerading as solutions.
“The problem with both parties is that they always want to give your tax dollars to the less fortunate.” – Prof. Farnsworth
Today Thomas Dewey is best remembered for a cameo in what is perhaps the most famous picture of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, “Dewey Defeats Truman” screamed the banner headline of the November 3rd, 1948 Chicago Tribune. Before he was an incorrect newspaper headline though, Thomas Dewey was one of the standard bearers of what was left of the Republican Party after Franklin Roosevelt got through with it. He was the governor of New York for more than a decade and was heavily involved with the effort to run Dwight Eisenhower as a Republican in 1952. He was a giant of what is now an almost extinct species, the socially liberal, fiscally conservative Northeastern Republican; the event that marked that sadly departed group for extermination was Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
In “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” Rick Perlstein chronicles not only that campaign, but also the enormous amount of political work required to bring it about. Hovering over all that hullaballoo is a quote from Thomas Dewey that Perlstein uses to both open and close the narrative, one that may be very relevant in the age of Barack Obama and the rodeo show of his right wing opponents. Dewey said that if the two American political parties were ever realigned along their ideological axes, “The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.” That thought was on the mind of many professional political observers in the wake of Goldwater’s 1964 annihilation by Lyndon Johnson.
To the true believer conservatives in Perlstein’s book, however, that defeat was in an inconceivable future. They saw Eisenhower as a lukewarm conservative who had done nothing for their cause and they felt marginalized within their own party. After the 1960 election, which many believed John Kennedy had stolen (to be fair to them it wasn’t a clean election, and even if Kennedy would’ve won anyway it wasn’t a fringe position to think chicanery had made the difference), they were tired of playing second fiddle in their own party. After all, if they weren’t going to win by trotting out moderates like Dewey and Nixon, why on earth shouldn’t they be out front?
Who were these people and what was their cause? By and large they were businessmen who’d chafed under both the New Deal and the wartime restrictions on private enterprise. (They were also strong isolationists.) They wanted to roll back the government that had grown up around Roosevelt and Truman. That they were also violently anti-Communist and none too keen on civil rights (which they attacked as a further increase in federal government power) goes almost without saying.
Perlstein documents, blow by blow, how the true conservatives (just like today they were financed almost exclusively by a few wealthy individuals) took over party organ after party organ. From county and state level committees to auxiliary groups only loosely affiliated with the Republican Party they engaged in an old fashioned political war, door by door, ward by ward, dollar by dollar. They conquered the Party through enormous amounts of hard nosed political work the likes of which is rarely seen. The result was Barry Goldwater’s nomination, a landslide that buried the traditional poobahs of the party.
Much like “Nixonland”, its de facto sequel, “Before the Storm” is filled cover to cover with catnip for those interested in American politics. For example, when the 1964 nominating process got to the Oregon primary, Richard Nixon was not officially running. Though his name was on the ballot in Oregon he wasn’t openly campaigning, preferring instead to play the disinterested elder statesmen whom, should the party ask, would be a good soldier and step into the nomination. Nixon’s advisors told him to play his part and not make any effort in Oregon, victory was unlikely anyway. Instead:
Nixon decided to make a stealth campaign in Oregon whatever the risks. Nadasdy [a young PR man and Nixon backer] reflected with wonder that so careful and shrewd a politician could also relish harebrained cloak-and-dagger schemes that could easily blow up in his face.
In addition to wonderful little nuggets like that there are a number of incidents that eerily parallel our times. Once it got off the ground Goldwater’s campaign was sustained by small donations from people with more passion than money, “A thirteen-year-old sent $5 from his allowance, a twelve-year-old $15 earned cutting grass, a seven-year-old girl a card with three pennies taped on it and the message “I say a prayer for Senator Goldwater every night.” Two young steadies pledged to give up their Saturday night movie and donated the money they saved.” To have donations of such meager amounts make up an important part of the total would be almost unheard of in high level American politics until the rise of on-line fundraising the last few cycles.
But the parallels don’t stop with the money. Giving a right wing radio address before President Kennedy’s fateful trip to Dallas, the oil man H.L. Hunt, an outspoken conservative, warned that if strong, federal civil rights protections were enacted then the next step would certainly be the confiscation of firearms. One need only look at the sales figures for guns and ammunition since the last election to see the perennial nature of that unfounded fear.
The right wing paranoia doesn’t always take the form of “they’re coming for my guns” however. One 1960s rumor, given its first wide exposure in a newsletter sent out by Orange County Republican Representative James B. Utt, had it that the UN was secretly training 100,000 troops in Georgia (including 16,000 “African Negro troops, who are cannibals”) that, with the connivance of the lefty Democrats, would dissolve the Constitution and make the US part of a world government. (The troops were at an Army base receiving training before going home to friendly governments.) As insane as that was, it was believed by millions of Americans. Their gullible successors are the ones spouting off about Obama’s birth certificate, ACORN, and the socialist/fascist/communist plots of Barack Obama. It’s not too difficult to imagine FOX News circa 1964 running a chyron along the lines of “16,000 African Troops Train in Georgia, Officials Says ‘Everything Fine’, Local Residents Worry”.
After Goldwater went down in flames the doyens of the American political establishment moved in to declare conservatism dead. And if you were taking in the whole view that was indeed the way things looked in 1964. Vietnam was still barely on the political radar (though Johnson had already decided to escalate it once the election was over) and the racial issues that were to shred American political assumptions for decades to come were still largely confined to the South. The Watts Riots, with which Perlstein opens Nixonland, happened in 1965.
Massive defeat and all, the Goldwater campaign remains the seminal event from which modern conservatism is descended. Not only did Nixon do tireless work on Goldwater’s behalf (for which he was lambasted at the time but which did him a world of good four years later), but Ronald Reagan, then still merely an actor, made his national political debut giving what was known simply as “The Speech”. It’s a 30 minute harangue that is the perfect distillation of the mid-1960s conservative world view. (Goldwater, on whose behalf it was televised, isn’t even mentioned until halfway through.) As would be his custom through later campaigns and his presidency, Reagan’s facts were often flat out wrong or heavily distorted, but even with that knowledge and forty odd years of hindsight it’s difficult to watch that and not agree with the guy.
And, of course, from Reagan came Bush the Elder, and from Bush the Elder came Bush the Younger and the present sorry state of the Republican Party. The question today is whether or not the conclusion from 1964 holds true because the parties are now, for the first time since then, aligned along their ideological axes. The Republican Party has driven out all the heretics and consists of naught but hard core right wing conservatives. The Democratic Party consists of pretty much everyone else.
After 1964 the Republicans stormed back to power on racial resentment and foreign policy fiasco. Off and on they’ve been leaning on those two crutches for the last eleven presidential elections. But the ground has shifted underneath them, the foreign policy fiascos are now theirs and the racial resentments are a faint echo of what they once were. Can an ideologically pure Republican Party compete on the national level? We’ll find out in the next couple of elections, but Thomas Dewey didn’t think so and he was in a position to know.
“According to Fretful Mother magazine if Maggie doesn’t talk by age one we should consider a corrective tongue extender.” – Marge Simpson
Amy Wallace has an excellent article in Wiredabout the irrational, wasteful and dangerous creature known as the anti-vaccination movement. It’s an excellent piece of reality-based journalism because it not only points out that these people are wrong about everything but it also shows how amazingly stubborn and vicious they can be in defense of their wrongness. And it’s funny:
At this year’s Autism One conference in Chicago, I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye as I walked past a long line of booths pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies (some believe a gluten-free diet alleviates the symptoms of autism), hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.
To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism” onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy (the controversial — and risky — administration of certain chemicals that leech metals from the body), and Lupron (a medicine that shuts down testosterone synthesis).
“infrared sauna”? Awesome. “neuro-feedback machine”? Sounds science-y. But the winner has to be “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism”. Such a wonderfully math-y looking slogan, and it employs precise scientific concepts like “more”.
What the article only touches on briefly, however, is why. What would possess relatively prosperous and well educated people to trust their children’s health to provable quackery? Here’s the brief touch:
Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.
This, combined with the perennial susceptibility of human beings to slickly peddled easy answers, is the real crux of the problem. It was a mere fifty years ago, after all, that the polio vaccine began to be widely administered. It essentially wiped out polio in the US and it was rightly hailed as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. There weren’t a lot of overly concerned parents trying to keep the vaccine away from their kids and one of the big reasons is that polio was fucking scary. It killed, it maimed, and it was all too common.
Polio isn’t scary to most Americans any longer because they have no experience with it. The same is true for the rest of the diseases the vaccines for which the anti-vaccination crowd fears. Of all the frightened people who read sites like the reprehensible Age of Autism how many of them have ever known, or even heard of, someone who had a serious case of polio? Or rubella? Or the mumps? Or any of the other mostly childhood diseases that have been kept to such insignificant numbers by large scale vaccinations?
They don’t see these diseases as any kind of real threat and that makes them vulnerable to the kind of horseshit that anti-vaccine people peddle. Snake oil salesmen, of all varieties, have always employed two main tools: false hope and scary consequences. In the case of the anti-vaccination people the false hope is the shimmering mirage of a risk free childhood and the scary consequences are the parental nightmare of a damaged child.
This myopic thinking, that puts the diseases themselves out of mind and concentrates on the tiny risk of the vaccines, is a byproduct of the “perfect parent” complex that’s developed in this country. All the Fretful Mother magazines, talk shows, and websites have implanted the idea that if you show your kids flash cards when they’re infants they’ll go to Harvard, that if you keep them away from anything even the least bit dirty they’ll never get sick, that if you do everything just right you can ensure what every parent wants out of their kids: a healthy adult. That it’s a fiction, that life is always messy, and that there is no way to eliminate risk, or even to minimize it since everything is tradeoff, gets lost in the shuffle. No amount of organic food, safety nail clippers or anything else can 100% guarantee that your child makes it to adulthood. It is an impossibility.
Vaccines are not risk free, but neither is anything else. Information is Beautiful has a great chart (via) displaying the relative risks of another vaccine, the one against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. The number of people vaccinated is a great green sea on your screen whereas the number of people dying within one year of vaccination (there isn’t even any mention that they died from the vaccine) is so small that it wouldn’t even take up one pixel on your monitor.
Meanwhile, not vaccinating your kids is like patrolling your neighborhood for panel vans while Cousin Steve, the thrice convicted child molester, stays home to babysit. Except it’s actually worse than that because every child that isn’t vaccinated raises the risk that other kids will become sick. So Cousin Steve isn’t just watching your kid, the whole play group is under his tender care.
Vaccines are about as safe and logical as things get, but that isn’t enough to deter the lunatic fringe and it’s good to see mainstream journalism exposing them for the nutters they really are. That it’s an understandable form of nuttery just makes people that much more susceptible to it and makes detailed, point-by-point articles that much more welcome.
“But more importantly, you have to ask yourself, ‘What does this have to do with this case?’ Nothing.” – Johnnie Cochran
Writing in the current issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating and gruesome story about the sometimes severe prices paid by men who play organized football. Unfortunately, as a hook, he attempts to draw a moral equivalence between dog fighting and football that simply doesn’t make sense. His argument is basically that dog fighting is an immoral breech of trust between a dog and its owner and that football players are subjected to similar breech of trust when they are left to deal with the after effects of playing. It’s both sensationalist and tenuous and it’s really too bad because it distracts from an otherwise serious topic.
The better parts of the article, which to be fair make up the bulk of the word count, deal with not only the hideous mental after effects sometimes suffered by football players but also how the blows to the head that cause those injuries are sustained. It’s worth reading in full, but long story short the repetitive and unavoidable head trauma that comes with football can cause serious brain damage that may not manifest itself for years. Autopsies performed on ex-football players show brain deterioration of a kind usually associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but to an even greater degree.
Science is just beginning to understand both how these injuries are sustained and the parameters of the risk associated with them. Since these things are still so ill understood it means that all of the guys who have played football (or are playing football) were (or are) subjecting themselves to considerably more risk of long term health problems than they understand. It is in relation to that last point that Gladwell attempts to link football to dog fighting.
What he’s trying to do is demonstrate that we’re being hypocritical in so vehemently condemning dog fighting while looking the other way on football and the damage it does to the men who play it. In order to do so he glosses over one critical difference between the two and completely ignores another. Gladwell brushes right past the first one here, in a single sentence:
No amount of money or assurances about risk freely assumed can change the fact that, in this moment, an essential bond had been broken.
Football players, especially at the professional level, are pushed to play beyond what may be morally condonable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are people and have more options than a dog. Gladwell quotes ex-NFLer Kyle Turley’s description of playing with his eyes crossed, of playing concussed. It’s not pretty. But Turley cites an incident form 2003 and he didn’t retired in 2007. Now, would he have retired earlier if he knew more about what might happen? Maybe, maybe not. Should he have been better informed and should we make the risks more explicit for current and prospective players? Absolutely. But either way Turley has more information and more options than a dog whose owner forces it to fight. These two things are not two faces of the same coin.
The critical difference that Gladwell outright ignores is the fact that a lot of the information about just how brain damaging football can be is relatively new. It’s not like there was some organized conspiracy to cover up the fact that football players get concussions (or that some of the really unlucky ones can be paralyzed or worse). Pete Rozelle never sat back in a large leather chair, knotted his fingers Bond-villain style and said, “Many of these men will suffer and die and I care not a whit!” The results of dog fighting, on the other hand, are immediately apparent.
Nobody ever gets into football, especially at the professional level, thinking it’s going to improve their long term health. It is no secret that it is a violent game that chews up and spits out bodies. That these particular risks, of multiple repeated blows to the head commonly suffered most by linemen and linebackers, have until now been overly discounted seems true. All that means is that these risks need to be mitigated as much as possible and then factored into the price of playing football. The nature of the game isn’t about to change, nor is the fan’s enthusiasm for it. Gladwell concludes:
There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.
Exactly. We cheer those men on precisely because they do things that ordinary men cannot. Doing the extraordinary is and always has been extremely risky, whether it’s a race to the South Pole, up Everest, or into the last uncharted jungles on the planet. We reward those who risk danger with fame (and often money), it has always been so.
Current players should be monitored better and retired players should be treated better by the league (and the financial juggernaut) they helped build. But trying to draw a moral line from dog fighting to how football treats its players just doesn’t work. Gladwell has still produced an article that is very much worth reading, but the dog fighting angle is both unnecessary and nonsensical.
“Our license renewal is on the bubble, we need educational programming, fast.” – TV Executive
“What about that Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour?” – Krusty the Klown
“That’s barely legal as it is.” – TV Executive
PBS’s Frontline has long been one of the few bastions of genuinely thoughtful television. (This is particularly true in a teevee lineup where the increasingly ironically named “History” channel runs specials concerned with lunatic apocalyptic scenarios (via) and easily disproved Hitler conspiracy theories.) Last night they ran a heavily promoted piece on Afghanistan titled “Obama’s War”. It doesn’t contain a whole lot of new information for anyone who actually keeps up with the news from Afghanistan, but it does provide a fresh look, and reminder, of just what our involvement entails.
Because we live in the future you can watch the entire thing on-line at PBS.org. The whole of it is worth your time, but if nothing else at least watch the first segment. A cameraman embedded with a Marine company – in combat – in southern Afghanistan and in what may be the most telling shot of the entire hour, a Marine, prone against an embankment, finishes firing his fully automatic machine gun and then asks “Where’s it coming from?” The joys of guerilla warfare.
A close second for “most telling shot” comes just a few minutes later as the show leaves Afghanistan for Washington D.C. by way of a simple dissolve. Through the magic of television American troops in full combat gear walking along a dusty Afghan road becomes a conference in Washington complete with officers, guys in suits and, naturally, Power Point presentations. It’s one thing to know that the rear echelon is a world apart from the actual combat, it’s quite another to see it quite so starkly.
Going to Washington is how “Obama’s War” begins to put what those Marines are doing into a larger context and it’s as decent a summary as I’ve yet seen. Confusion and buzzwords back home? Indeed. Karzai government corrupt beyond measure? Check. Election fraud of enormous proportions? Oh yeah. Pathetic little speeches from Afghan and American mandarins out in the provinces? Bingo. What are we trying to do and is there a plan? Um . . . hey look at the time! We’d better get to Pakistan.
It’s in Pakistan, and about the Pakistani connection to the Taliban, that “Obama’s War” stumbles. They interview a myriad of American and Afghani officials who are all seething (some conceal it better than others) over Pakistan’s ongoing support of Taliban militias. The Pakistani spokesman, of course, denies everything. Again, none of this is exactly new information if you’ve been following the war. But it’s here, and only here, that a simplistic conclusion is offered: oh, those darn Pakis, if only they’d stop supporting the Taliban everything might get better.
No effort is made to understand Pakistani reluctance from a Pakistani point of view. No mention is made of the fact that Pakistan itself is an ethnic polyglot with brain numbing internal political complexity. The fact that Pakistan was, prior to the 2001 attacks, one of the only governments on friendly terms with the Taliban is glossed over without explanation. Pakistan had its reasons then, and it has its reasons now, and while I’m no expert a hint at them can be summed up in one sentence: Pakistan has to live next to Afghanistan.
Before the Western invasion in 2001 the Taliban had done what no other entity had managed to do in over two decades: brought a measure of order to Afghanistan. It was a brutal, nearly medieval sort of order, but order nonetheless. The advantage for Pakistan in that is self evident. They have to live there, we do not, and, by our own admission, the Kabul government controls only 30% of the country. From a Pakistani perspective it would be irresponsible to line up wholesale with a bunch of dilettante foreigners who can pack up at any time against an organization that, while less pleasant, has proven its effectiveness and is native to the area.
Despite that imperial myopia, however, “Obama’s War” is still a very good summary of what we’re doing and trying to do in Afghanistan and well worth watching. It is television at its best, using the power of moving images to convey a story in a far more explicit way than words or even pictures can accomplish. Contrasting the endless blather from officials on all side (and the possibly insoluble mess that it describes) with the daily reality of Marines sleeping on concrete is something that cannot be done nearly so well in any other medium.
An End Note on Language: As one would expect the “fuck”s fly fast and heavy from the Marines in combat. No attempt is made to censor it. This is a good and welcome change from a few years ago when this was actually a controversy.
“It says ‘buffering’, what is that?” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“Just give it a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
“All I’m trying to do is make an mpeg.” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“All I’m trying to do is tell you to wait a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
The other day I did a small favor for my sister. We were watching this YouTube video of comedian Dara O’Briain on her laptop. The video was not playing correctly, it kept slowing to a crawl and skipping in a way I’d never seen before. (It wasn’t the usual waiting that comes when the data stream is slow or interrupted.) She was using Internet Explorer as her web browser and it was responding agonizingly slowly. Even a task as simple as opening a new tab required serious patience.
I told her she should switch to Firefox. She said she tried Firefox and didn’t like it. I told her that was fine, use Chrome instead. Five minutes later we had Chrome installed and all of her favorite sites imported from IE. She was blown away at how much faster it was and, to my surprise, so was I. I’d expected it to be faster, sure, but it wasn’t just a little faster, it was blindingly faster. Those couple of minutes spent getting her onto Chrome and off of IE will, in the long run, save her enormous amounts of time and frustration.
None of this is exactly news, IE is for chumps and everyone who is even mildly technically savvy knows it. But it was a very visceral demonstration of just how costly technological ignorance can be to an ordinary person. Like a lot of people my sister lives her life off of her laptop and a lot of that entails web surfing, and she was doing it in a terribly inefficient way. She was doing it that way because to her the laptop is just a tool, all she wants is for it to work.
Of course she’s not alone in that. Millions upon millions of people feel the same way. Computers, which as recently as fifteen years ago were only really used by a very small slice of the population, are now utterly integrated into the lives of very non-technical people. On the whole that’s been a very positive thing, but it does create situations like the one in which my sister found herself. She didn’t even really know that she had a problem, much less that there was a simple and free solution to it.
Issues like that one are now more or less part of the background noise of modern life. We don’t really think about them all that often, nor are they particularly pressing, but that doesn’t make them cost free. On the plus side simple solutions abound, and trying to be slightly more aware about applying them can save us all a great deal of time and hassle. That’s no great insight, but it is worth bearing in mind.
Note: Posted slightly late on account of all kinds of shit.
“It says ‘buffering’, what is that?” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“Just give it a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
“All I’m trying to do is make an mpeg.” – Lois Griffin as Princess Leia
“All I’m trying to do is tell you to wait a minute.” – Cleveland Brown as R2-D2
The other day I did a small favor for my sister. We were watching this YouTube video of comedian Dara O’Briain on her laptop. The video was not playing correctly, it kept slowing to a crawl and skipping in a way I’d never seen before. (It wasn’t the usual waiting that comes when the data stream is slow or interrupted.) She was using Internet Explorer as her web browser and it was responding agonizingly slowly. Even a task as simple as opening a new tab required serious patience.
I told her she should switch to Firefox. She said she tried Firefox and didn’t like it. I told her that was fine, use Chrome instead. Five minutes later we had Chrome installed and all of her favorite sites imported from IE. She was blown away at how much faster it was and, to my surprise, so was I. I’d expected it to be faster, sure, but it wasn’t just a little faster, it was blindingly faster. Those couple of minutes spent getting her onto Chrome and off of IE will, in the long run, save her enormous amounts of time and frustration.
None of this is exactly news, IE is for chumps and everyone who is even mildly technically savvy knows it. But it was a very visceral demonstration of just how costly technological ignorance can be to an ordinary person. Like a lot of people my sister lives her life off of her laptop and a lot of that entails web surfing, and she was doing it in a terribly inefficient way. She was doing it that way because to her the laptop is just a tool, all she wants is for it to work.
Of course she’s not alone in that. Millions upon millions of people feel the same way. Computers, which as recently as fifteen years ago were only really used by a very small slice of the population, are now utterly integrated into the lives of very non-technical people. On the whole that’s been a very positive thing, but it does create situations like the one in which my sister found herself. She didn’t even really know that she had a problem, much less that there was a simple and free solution to it.
Issues like that one are now more or less part of the background noise of modern life. We don’t really think about them all that often, nor are they particularly pressing, but that doesn’t make them cost free. On the plus side simple solutions abound, and trying to be slightly more aware about applying them can save us all a great deal of time and hassle. That’s no great insight, but it is worth bearing in mind.
“Your skin is so smooth, what’s your secret?” – Geraldo Production Assistant
“I scrub my face vigorously with a steel wool pad. Then I stick my face in boiling water for two minutes, exactly.” – Eleanor Sherman
According to Webster one of the definitions of the word “model” is “an example for imitation or emulation”. That’s definition number five; number nine is “one who is employed to displayed clothes or other merchandise”. Of course, the latter definition flows from the former, models sell clothes and other merchandise by making others want to emulate or imitate them. Strictly speaking then, the purpose of “models” is to move product by making lesser people try to be like them.
That is the context in which the following story needs to be placed. In Germany this week the women’s magazine Brigitte renounced the use of professional models in favor of, well, amateur models:
Germany’s most popular women’s magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of “real life” women instead.
In what is seen as the latest attempt to stamp out the “size zero” model, the editors of Brigitte said it would in future only use women with “normal figures”.
[…]
He said the move was a response to complaints by readers who said they had no connection with the women depicted in fashion features and “no longer wanted to see protruding bones”.
This is a fantastic idea if for no other reason that it will, at least in Germany, break up the homogeneity that exists in women’s magazines in terms of the women on display. But as long as we’re talking about “real life” women let’s be realistic, this isn’t even the beginning of the kind of change it would take to relieve women of the pressure to feel like pretty, pretty princesses.
Sentiments like this from Feministing were the typical reaction:
Lately, Europe seems to be eons ahead of us regarding their recognition that the fashion and media having a significantly unhealthy effect on women’s body image. The latest is Germany’s most popular women’s magazine’s announcement of their intention to omit professional models from their pages in an effort to combat unrealistic social beauty standards
(A woman from Cincinnati e-mailed in to BBC radio with a similar message but I couldn’t find a link.) However, congratulations like these, accompanied by calls for more magazines (and advertisements) to take similar steps, are missing a crucial point. Magazine images of this variety have one purpose and one purpose only: making people feel bad in order to get them to buy shit. The BMI of the models in question isn’t completely irrelevant, but it’s also far from the center of the pitch.
These magazines are selling things that are essentially luxury products. Even under a very generous definition of the word “necessity” it would be hard to fit items like designer clothes and name brand cosmetics. Creams, often enormously expensive, that claim to prevent wrinkles or fight “aging” (whatever that means) have never been scientifically shown to do anything but cost a lot. The brands that can afford to advertise like this are the very definition of the word “optional”, which is precisely why magazines and their sponsors push them so relentlessly using the only levers they have: female insecurity and competition.
It seems very unlikely that trying to reign in their excesses will have any appreciable effect. What if you did require models to have a minimum Body Mass Index? (Or at least all the models in a magazine to average a certain BMI?) What if you did require a disclaimer on advertisements that had been photoshopped? What part of the nature of these pitches would change?
A model, even one whose ribs are not there for the counting, is still a model. She likely has a perfectly symmetrical face (most people don’t), knows how to pose to present herself at her best and, most importantly, is still being photographed in a completely artificial environment. A woman carrying twenty, forty or more pounds than a typical model is still the beneficiary of professional hair, makeup, wardrobe and lighting. Even if the resulting image goes into the glossy pages exactly as it was when it hit the CCD it’s still a 100% fake picture.
(Selecting women who aren’t professional models, as the linked story says Brigitte is planning to do, won’t make a bit of difference either. The editor says they’re going to look for “the 18-year-old A-level student, the company chairwoman, the musician, or the footballer”, but there are plenty of fantastically attractive women out there who aren’t professional models and I will guarantee you that they take up most if not all of the new space reserved for “real life” women.)
The only way people look the way anyone does in a magazine is to be in a completely controlled environment under the careful supervision of professionals with lots of time and money at their disposal. Making the human props eat a little bit more will change none of that. People who don’t have those kinds of resources will still be unable to measure up, will still feel bad about it and will continue pumping billions of dollars into the coffers of the people who made them feel that way.
Magazines of this ilk and the advertisements that support them are inherently dishonest mediums. They are predicated on the warped idea that in order to feel good about yourself, the way you look, or the way others perceive you, it is all but mandatory to spend significant sums of money. And, as they say, there’s a look for every budget, ranging from the truly grotesque amounts required for name brand items all the way down to the outlet mall.
The defense of this has always been that it’s fun to dress fashionably and try out different looks. That’s great, and more power to anyone who wants to do whatever they want to do to look how they want to look. But that’s not what glossy magazines are about; they’re about making you desire things you don’t have, don’t need, and probably can’t afford. Giving that message a cosmetic makeover by removing the girls with “protruding bones” is all well and good, but it doesn’t address the real issue which is, has been, and likely always will be, making women feel inadequate in order to get them to pull out the credit card. Couching the inadequacy pitch with slightly more realistic bodies won’t change the fact that the “beauty” industry, in all its forms, is a massive and almost completely useless money hole.
“According to my uncle, who’s a real whiz with volcanoes, a volcano is coming this way.” – Volcano Insurance Salesman
I recently finished reading Rick Perlstein’s book on the rise of Barry Goldwater. There will likely be a book review post about it in the near future, but for today I wanted to quote something which, though more than forty years old, speaks directly to our current political climate. This was an editorial in the newsletter of the American Legion that, in Perlstein’s words, “blasted the alarming rise in political extremism” in the early sixties [emphasis mine]:
I mean those individuals who would save American by forsaking its free institutions. I mean not just the Communists and neo-Fascists who openly assail our system but, more especially, those who, in the conviction that theirs is the only right view, have lost sight of – and faith in – the fundamental processes of self-government. They claim to have the one true answer to every problem. They talk of setting aside the law when the law offends them. They are quick to cry “treason,” slow to admit error, and indifferent to arguments and facts that do not support their beliefs. They are not really leftists or rightists – but simply anarchists.
That paragraph could just as easily have been written in 2009 as in 1963. For proof, here’s Michael Tomasky writing in the current New York Review of Books:
Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel are by now familiar even to people who never listen to or watch them. But if you don’t do so, you have no idea the extent to which they very directly fuel talk of socialism, and twist and sometimes invent information, and create scandals that keep their listeners agitated. To liberals, and to non-ideological Americans who might have heard of him, Cass Sunstein is a highly regarded Harvard law professor who might someday be a plausible Supreme Court nominee and who, if anything, is not a lockstep liberal on such matters as civil liberties. To consumers of the right-wing mass media, however, Sunstein is nothing short of a nut, who believes that meat-eating and hunting should be banned, that pets should be able to sue their owners, and that the government should order that organs be ripped fresh from the bodies of people who die in emergency rooms.
[…]
The charge against Sunstein was led by Fox’s Glenn Beck, who now, even more than Limbaugh, is the guru of this new right wing. Beck, famous for saying that Obama is a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture,” now has (on some nights anyway) more than three million viewers and has surpassed Bill O’Reilly as the leader among cable news hosts.[8]
[…]
These right-wing outlets—which include “news” Web sites like Newsmax and World Net Daily, the latter affiliated with Jerome Corsi, a writer connected with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—create a world in which their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at odds with the reality the rest of us live in.
In other words, the reality based community may have retaken the federal government, but fantasy based community still exists.
Much like today, the early sixties were a very harsh time for far right conservatives in this country. They saw America as under assault and teetering on the edge of utter ruin. They felt the Republican Party had abandoned them – these people loathed Eisenhower – and that they had no voice whatsoever. We are at a similar moment these days, not because the true righties think they’ve been shut out of the Republican Party, but because having gained complete control over the Republican Party they’ve seen it shut out of power.
Moreover, this is the moment when the largest number of people will be affected by that feeling of powerlessness. How terrible must it be to genuinely believe, as millions of Americans surely do, that health care reform will result in government death panels? No such thing is going to happen, and the years ahead will prove that out, but right now those fears are very real and are constantly reinforced by people like Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann. All the facts in the world can’t argue against the likes of them, the only thing that is going to calm the fears they so relentlessly exploit is the passage of time.
Proof of this can be found, ironically enough, in Medicare. The creation of Medicare was a hard fought victory over the intellectual ancestors of the people who are currently railing against health care reform. Yet today we have an ostensibly conservative senator, Charles Grassley, Republican from Iowa, calling Medicare part of the “social fabric of America”. It’s easy to point out the intellectual hypocrisy of that and move along, but it’s worth considering just how that rather odd situation came into being.
As it was being created Medicare was decried as socialism, communism and every other affront to the natural order of mom, apple pie and America. None of the scary predictions came even remotely true and here we are forty years later and it’s almost impossible to imagine mom, apple pie and America without Medicare. Time and a lack of catastrophe is the only thing that made that so.
Goofy, extremist right wing horseshit has been a cottage industry for more than fifty years now and it isn’t going to end. But once the sky fails to fall the positions taken by the extremists will slink back to the margins. Reality typically triumphs over fantasy, even if it sometimes takes years.
“Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.” – Parallel Prof. Farnsworth
Let’s begin by acknowledging that the Bomb is the greatest threat to human beings, in groups or as a species, period. Even the most nightmarish of global warming models are Edenic next to what would happen to us in the event of a serious exchange of nuclear weapons. That said, we’ve lived with them for sixty years now, their total number is way way down from where it was just twenty years ago and the risk of a big time nuclear war is about as low as it’s ever been. This is despite the fact that in the history of the Bomb, from 1945 to the present, only one country has ever gotten the thing and then given it up, that would be post-Apartheid South Africa, and no, the non-Russian former Soviet republics don’t count.
Meanwhile the number of nuclear powers has increased almost every single decade, with the US and Russia getting there in the forties, the British tested their first bomb in the early 50s, the French, Chinese and Israelis (wink wink, nudge nuge) all tested bombs in the 60s, the Indians tested one in the 70s, the Pakistanis joined them in the 90s and the North Koreans (probably) in the 00s. That is a pretty steady increase in the number of human beings with the power to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of their fellows (and in the number of potential command and control problems to have the same result). And yet we’re all still here.
The reason no one has died from a nuclear war shot (as opposed to a test) since 1945 is that since the end of World War II the use of such weapons has only been considered seriously once, during a few terrifying days in October of 1962. Why is that? Because every country with the resources and technical wherewithal to build the fucking things is established enough not to want to see itself and its people destroyed. It’s the great paradox of the Bomb: you finally have the power to kill all those people you hate, but to do so you also have to sign the death warrant of pretty much everyone you know and everything you love.
This bizarre but very reliable (so far, at least) concept is always the first thing to get ignored every time some new nation decides to split the atom. In 1998 India and Pakistan engaged in a nuclear game of “mine’s bigger than yours” so childish it would’ve seemed uncouth on a grade school playground. Newspapers and magazines were filled with doom laden articles about how India and Pakistan share a long, heavily militarized border, and how they’d fought three wars since 1947, and if ever there was a place where nuclear weapons could be used it was here. All of this ignored or severely downplayed the fact that in an age of missiles Islamabad and New Delhi really aren’t all that far from each other and that neither side, however irrational each may be over the subject of Kashmir, has a death wish.
The current subject of international nuclear hysteria is Iran. Set aside the twin elephants in the room: 1) as far as we actually know Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program years ago and 2) the last time the US Government thought a Middle Eastern country was on the verge of building a bomb it turned out to be 100% bullshit (though that didn’t stop it from being uncritically swallowed by almost all major media outlets). Most stories are going to ignore the first and once again parrot whatever the government leaks them on the second. As valid as they are no one is going to pay attention to them anyway so let’s just skip them as well, shall we?
Right on cue, as soon as “Iran” and “nuclear” became topics-du-jour, the usual half-assed arguments began being trotted out, all based on one unquestioned assumption: Iran must not build a bomb. Well, what happens if they do? There’ll be international outrage in the form of strongly worded editorials, hyperventilating pundits and condemnatory diplomatic protests. There would even probably be some additional economic sanctions placed on the Islamic Republic. But the Sun wouldn’t stop rising, nor would the oil beneath Iran’s sands lose its value.
The instant Iran possessed a viable nuclear threat, and again there is no evidence that they are trying and no reason to believe that even if they were trying it’s anything but years away, the Islamic Republic would be constrained by the same paradox that binds all other nuclear powers. If they gain the ability to incinerate Tel Aviv, Haifa and even Jerusalem, so what? They could only do so at the cost of Tehran, Esfahan, Qom and probably the rest of their major cities. The leadership of Iran is many things, ruthless, undemocratic, corrupt, but it has never given any indication that it is suicidal.
And so the usual back and forth about sanctions, inspections and the rest of the nuclear kabuki will play out across media of all forms. And it would be better if the Americans, Russians and Europeans can get Iran’s nuclear program as out in the open as possible. But if all that doesn’t work, the world will not have changed much. It will be a slightly more dangerous place, no doubts there, but it would hardly be a development to shake the foundations of the world.
“You know, ever since that barbeque nothing’s gone right. It’s like there’s been a curse on me.” – Ned Flanders
As we enter the home stretch of the decade it will be interesting to see if the year-in-review pieces begin popping up earlier than usual. Commemorating a decade that still doesn’t even have an agreed upon name is a bigger task than commemorating just one year. Not to push this too far or anything, but the fact that we cannot even agree on a name for the decade seems appropriate. The two sides of American politics spent the last ten years talking past each other, what better way to epitomize that than in an inability to come to a consensus over the simple naming of the decade? I’m a fan of “naughts”, by the way. “Aughts” is good too, but you need that “n”, these were nothing if not negative years. (“Nils”, maybe?)
At any rate, whether they’re eventually known as the “naughts” or something else, the decade of Bush the Younger was a disaster. It started with 3,000 dead Americans who were but the first pebbles in a landslide of violent deaths that hasn’t stopped yet. The economy never really recovered from the first recession and that was before it came to a screeching halt last year. The naughts saw a war based 100% on lies, torture, civil liberties infractions that would make J .Edgar Hoover blush, and – oh yeah – the planet that much closer to a climate disaster so enormous it threatens to touch every person alive. If this list is familiar it’s because these problems have been obvious for years. People who spent the decade reading Paul Krugman, people who made Howard Dean’s presidential campaign a national sensation eighteen months before the 2004 election, have been pointing them out since the 2000 election. Remember Ralph Nader?
It’s cool to hate on Nader now, especially in light of the fact that his campaign was a major part of the 173 improbable coincidences that landed Bush the Younger in the White House, but pretty much everything he was warning about in 2000 came to pass. In fact, as Bush the Younger’s ascendancy to the throne was the genesis of much of the woe of our sorry decade it will be interesting to see how it’s commemorated over the coming months. Indeed, it might be a good time to remember just how it happened.
George Walker Bush spent the first four decades of his life drinking and failing upward, blowing other people’s money and shirking his responsibilities only to be rescued by his wealthy and powerful father time and again. This man’s resume would make you scared to hire him as a assistant manager at Shenanigans and yet, in 1994, riding that big Republican wave that he did nothing to create, he became governor of Texas.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were in the midst of a comedy of errors. Bill Clinton managed to keep the World’s Most Famous Blowjob a secret until after the 1996 election. Ignoring the oldest rule in politics he tried to cover it up and got impeached for his trouble. Despite Clinton’s high approval ratings throughout the impeachment saga, and Democratic gains in the 1998 election, Al Gore was still so scared of the fallout from Lewinsky that he wouldn’t let Clinton campaign for him and selected Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate.
The press fell asleep on the job, something they would be doing a lot of, and allowed Bush to start getting away with provable falsehoods, particularly about the budget. On election night Florida and the presidency were erroneously called by all the networks for Bush (starting, naturally enough, at FOX News), and Gore very nearly conceded. He never shook the sore loser taint. A later analysis will conclude that Gore almost certainly won the state. Bush stole it with a massive and illegitimate purge of minority voters, butterfly ballots, an intentional riot, and the connivance of his brother the governor (and transparent party hacks like Kathleen Harris). The Supreme Court, two of whom were appointed by his father and fully seven of whom were nominated by Republican presidents, issued a 5-4 decision so embarrassingly thin that they banned later courts from ever citing it as precedent.
The above reads like a conspiracy theory, which is why some people think it was a conspiracy. If you went back in time to 1996 and told someone what was going to happen in the next election they wouldn’t have believed you. It’d just be too far fetched.
That is how the decade started, and it was all downhill from there: thousands of dead American civilians in New York and New Orleans, thousands of dead American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq; dead foreigners in numbers too large to be accurately counted. The federal budget was destroyed, America’s reputation left in tatters, and, as a grim finale, a near total economic collapse. It was a terrible decade and plenty of its horrors have been omitted here for the simple reason that recounting them over and over again is both pointless and exhausting. But they’re almost over; and while there is – ahem – hope that things might now be getting better, how we got ourselves into this mess must never be forgotten.
The naughts were a lost decade – in so many ways – and it will be good to be rid of them. Ring in the 2010s. And look, the new decade already has a name, “the twenty-tens”. It works much better than “nineteen tens” (too much “te”) and “twenty teens” (too much number confusion). The 2010s, here’s to them.
“I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try.” – Bart Simpson
The latest issue of The New York Review of Books contains an article titled “The Afghanistan Impasse” by Ahmed Rashid. It is predictably thorough, detailed and depressing and is the most comprehensive look at the wars currently tearing up both Afghanistan and Pakistan. This of course includes the direct US engagement in the former and the active US encouragement of the latter. The ostensible goal of these wars is the defeat of the “Taliban” on both sides of the border and the establishment of a vaguely democratic government in Afghanistan. The real goal is the continued political marginalization of the Republican Party here in the United States.
As paranoid, goofy and disrespectful as that sounds, it’s true. Barack Obama, and therefore the United States along with him, is committed to the continued existence of the government in Kabul. He campaigned on it and in doing so gave himself political cover with the American public (and the doltish American media) that he could be trusted to – ahem – keep us safe. That means that Karzai, or someone like him, has to remain the titular leader of Afghanistan. His government must not cease to exist, for if it disappears it will mean that Obama “lost” Afghanistan to our “enemies”.
That’s a crude and wildly ill informed concept, but it’s the way politics works here in a United States of America that is still recovering from one of the most disastrous periods in its history. The world rejoiced when he won because it made it seem like the insanity coming from Washington was over. But he’s up for re-election in three short years and barring an economic collapse in 2012 the only thing that really threatens him is “national security” and “terrorism”. If Obama is seen as having let al-Qaeda or the “Taliban” recover their strength, or if there’s another major terrorist attack against America, he becomes instantly vulnerable to charges that he simply isn’t tough enough, and those types of attacks are always dangerous for Democrats (see: Kerry, John; Dukakis, Michael; Mondale, Walter; and Carter, Jimmy).
Obviously we don’t know who the challenger will be in 2012, or what the main issues will be. But we do know the date, and we do know that the challenger will come from a party that has traditionally been able to exploit Democratic foreign policy failures. If the “Taliban” or something like them has kicked us out of Afghanistan Obama will have a major vulnerability that the Reds will be only too happy to attack. Maybe it’ll be enough to sink him, maybe it won’t; but it’s hard to imagine a worse weakness.
It isn’t fair. People in Helmand and the North-West Frontier Province shouldn’t have to die so that people in Iowa and Ohio can feel safe. But the greater threat to the world isn’t a bunch of guys in caves, it’s the reestablishment of neoconservative control over American foreign policy.* You’d be hard pressed to find any serious observer of world affairs, outside of right wing American think tanks that is, who believe that the 2001 attacks were worse than Bush the Younger’s reaction to them. The Iraq War alone has caused the violent deaths of more than thirty times as many people as perished eight years ago in America.
As the recent health care protests have shown, it would be unwise to discount the ability of the right wingers to scare the living shit out of ordinary Americans on a given issue. Then there’s the lead story in this morning’s New York Times, anonymously sourced from the White House and Pentagon, saying that Obama is unhappy with Afghanistan and may be considering . . . well, something. It isn’t entirely clear what his other options are, but the political implications are obvious just in the tone of the article: he’s thinking about backing down. The article was co-written by Elisabeth Bumiller, who isn’t much of a reporter but is a very good bellwether for the conventional stupidity inside the Beltway’s green rooms and salons. The threat there is greater than the one along the Afghani-Pakistani border.
Whatever the progress, or lack thereof, in Afghanistan itself, Obama and his minions have already made the political calculation that they cannot end both wars at once. Iraq is the bigger, stupider and costlier war, it ends first. They campaigned on fighting the good fight, and now they’ve got to at least try it or they’ll look like the fickle Democrats of old. That means that Afghanistan, and the American troops sent there, will have to endure a few years longer; and tragically sad stories like the one in Bob Herbert’s column yesterday will continue.
It sucks, it isn’t fair, and it will doubtless be small comfort to those who will be killed, injured or lose someone in the interim (American, Afghani and otherwise). But that’s the reality of the world Bush the Younger left to us.
End Note: It was big news these last couple weeks when polls began showing that Americans are souring on the Afghan War. And much as the hyperbole outraced the numbers there is an unmistakable trend there. But Obama cannot be challenged on Afghanistan from the Left and the only challenge that will come from the Right is to fight more and harder. The peace movement, sadly, has nowhere to go.
* And if you think any 2012 Republican wouldn’t have such a foreign policy, well then, I’ve got some land in Florida to sell you. As late as last year the bulk of their foreign policy establishment still thought Iraq was a really keen war and worth continuing.
“Didn’t you have ads in the twentieth century?” – Leela
“Well, sure, but not in our dreams, only on teevee and radio, and in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and bananas and written on the sky, but not in dreams!” – Fry
I won’t live to see it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, thousands of years from now, anthropologists and historians describe our culture as one driven primarily by advertising. Be it movies, television programs, or commercials (the length of which is measured in seconds) video with sound (a “talkie” in ye olde speak) is about the most profound medium we’ve yet devised. These days anyone can put shit on YouTube, but of the stuff we as a society deem important enough to be worthy of professional production values (and the resources that requires) the overwhelming majority has to be television advertisements.
For every vilely laughtracked sitcom, ponderous drama, and dimwittedly earnest reality show there are dozens of commercials. They are dense missiles of communication, scientifically designed to nuzzle an idea (or a need) into the most primal part of your mind. They are insidiously violent weapons. Mercifully, their only immediate goal is to get you to reach for one brightly colored package over another.
I’m writing about this out of trauma. Like most technically savvy Americans I’ve managed to almost completely insulate myself from television advertisements. It’s rare that I watch commercially supported television with the commercials. Between digital video discs and the ongoing miracle that is the internet almost everything I view that isn’t live has no advertising interruptions. But the coming of autumn has brought televised football and that means that I’m forced to watch commercials.
Having seen hardly any for months, the beginning of football season slams so many of them into my eyes that I feel molested. Other human beings are doing things to me which I most certainly don’t like and have only barely consented to. I recognize these things as the price of televised football, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them, or, more importantly, buy the shitty products they’re designed to hawk. Still, one must admire the artistry.
Ultimately it doesn’t much matter. It seems unlikely that any great number of people will reach for a different colored box of beer on account of the dim memory of a cute blond girl in a thirty second television spot. But the effort and skill that goes into the ads, and the keen cultural understanding that underpins them, cannot be denied. Art museums and other high brow expressions are all well and good, but in the time it takes to walk through a gallery of painstaking creations thousands more advertisements will be beamed out across the land. In an age when everything is recorded it is the banal and the catchy that will be most well remembered. It is not a form we often honor, nor is it one of which we are particularly fond, but it is undeniably the way we most often express ourselves. It’s stupid, but it’s worth remembering; and, thousands of years from now, it might be what they remember best.
“Oh yeah, and it won’t be long before they drive all of us poor underachieving people out of town with inflated real estate costs.” – Mr. Garrison
“Damn I hate them stupid richers!” – Skeeter
This past week was the first anniversary of the financial panic/meltdown/catastrophe that sent the already weak US economy into a free fall. Consequently, there were lots of “one year later” type stories and articles trying to answer unanswerable questions like “what did it all mean?” and “what else could’ve been done?”. These sorts of things are silly in the extreme for the simple reason that the crisis that peaked, but certainly did not begin, one year ago is still very far from over. There may no longer be daily photos of distraught looking traders on the floors of the world’s exchanges, but to loosely paraphrase Bob Herbert: the economy is still Fucked with a capital F and anyone who tells you otherwise is myopic, rich or both.
The consensus seems to be that the GDP will turn itself to positive very soon but that employment will continue to suck hind tit for a long time to come. That means that the economic pain that was a major factor in ushering Barack Obama to his current residence will continue. There’s a lot of misery ahead for pretty much anyone not at the tippy top of the socio-economic ladder (which is to say most American voters). Much of that misery has been, and will continue to be, blamed on financial institutions, bankers, Wall Street, etcetera.
One thing that’s been noticeably absent from Obama’s legislative agenda thus far has been an overhaul of the way high finance is regulated. The fact that it hasn’t been seen as a priority (so far) has led to despair that there ever will be reform and to sentiments like the one expressed in yesterday’s Times, “For Obama, a Chance to Reform the Street Is Fading”. Granting that there is ample reason for pessimism when it comes to the idea of our bought out parliament of whores standing up to their paymasters, this seems to ignore several obvious facts.
The first is that economic stability was not only an immediate necessity upon Obama’s taking office, it was also a necessary precursor to having the credibility to seriously challenge the biggest of Big Money. An Obama presiding over an economy that is at least nominally growing is in a strong position to say something like, “Okay, now it’s time to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” That’s a powerful sentiment and one that Obama and his people are capable of exploiting for political advantage.
The second important fact is that this is the most popular of populist issues. Last year’s financial mess took money (real, tangible, I-could-spend-it-if-I-had-it money) from virtually every American. This includes the wealthy and the poor, the employed and the unemployed. It is as close to a universal issue as one is likely to find, and issues like that are very rare.
Third, that kind of popular pressure and outrage is most easily exploited in the shadow of a looming election. In this political environment the last thing anyone in Congress wants to be seen as (in an election year!) is a friend to the financial wizards. Those well dressed assholes cost voters money and the sting is still very fresh. The political power of popular anger is magnified by the coming of an election.
Which is not to say that meaningful reform, defined as the kind that will prevent another corporate financial fiasco in the LTCM/Enron/AIG vein, is a sure thing. The power of serious and entrenched money on Capitol Hill is not to be underestimated. But the time to strike is not now, it’s later this year and into next year, when the Congressional calendar begins to get short.
Flavor of the month journalism might lead you to think that the window on reform is closing, but it’s foolish to declare that when it hasn’t opened fully yet. Somewhere in the White House (possibly just rattling around in the back of Rahm Emmanuel’s skull) is a loose schedule of what they want to try before Congress closes shop next year. Something with as much political potential as sticking it to the rich pricks who brought America to its knees is no doubt highlighted in seven colors with stars around it. An anniversary is a decent time to run commemorative pieces, but the passage of a tumultuous year, one that also had a lot of other crises to deal with, doesn’t mean reform is dead or even yet in jeopardy.
“Mr. Scorpio says productivity is up 2%, and it’s all because of my motivational techniques, like donuts, and the possibility of more donuts to come.” – Homer Simpson
It was during the sitzkrieg of the interminable presidential nominating contests, a mere two years ago, that Hillary Clinton mocked Barack Obama for being naive in wanting to talk with the world’s less popular nations. Think about that, you had the lead candidate insinuating that one of her rivals was unfit for leadership for even deigning to speak with governments that didn’t test well with US focus groups. And this was in the left party! Bush the Younger’s America was a very strange place and we are going to have a hard time explaining it to our children. But it’s over now and this weekend came word that President Obama is moving forward in talking with both of the remaining members of the Axis of Evil.*
North Korea is a dystopian nightmare so twisted and bizarre it can be difficult to suspend disbelief that it actually exists. It seems to fit more naturally as the fever dream of some Hollywood scribe conjuring next summer’s blockbuster. But it’s real and pretending otherwise won’t make it go away. Whether or not North Korea has actually managed to test a small nuclear device (and count me as a skeptic) is almost irrelevant. They’re still capable of enormous disruption and destruction, managing to kill six South Koreans this week alone. On Friday the new and improved US government recognized that reality and said it’s willing to sit down and talk.
Iran is a more conventional country if only because it’s impossible to be weirder than North Korea. Though it’s premature to completely write off the reformist’s protests after the cooked election, it appears that the conservative government is going to remain firmly in power and is moving forward. Which means, distasteful as it is, the United States and the world at large must continue dealing with them. In that vein, Friday also saw our government announce that it was willing to sit down and directly negotiate with the Islamic Republic about, among other things, its nuclear program.
It seems very likely that little will come of either of these negotiations, at least at first. The only motivation of the North Korean government seems to be its continued survival and it’s unclear what, if anything, the outside world can promise it. Iran is wedged between both of America’s wars but would very much like to normalize itself if for no other reason than economics. American sanctions have been, shall we say, less than effective in toppling the regime or in slowing its nuclear enrichment program, but that doesn’t mean they are without cost for Tehran. A genuine change in the relationship between America and Iran is a real, if far off, possibility.
Obviously nothing is assured just because some diplomats sit at a table and repeat banalities to each other for hours on end, but doing so means that there is at least a chance of some materially good outcomes. Refusing to talk, on the other hand, merely guarantees bad ones. So while diplomatic wheels grind slowly, these first steps are potentially very significant. That these things can go forward with relatively little teevee attention is a testament to how far we’ve come. Things are getting better.
*Say what you will about Bush the Younger, and I have, but his marketing people were linguistic masters.
“Okay, Lois’ list says clean the windows, clear the gutters, and wash the siding. To most folks that’s three chores, to Peter Griffin and his big hose it’s one.” – Peter Griffin
There are three things coming to a boil soon, and though they may appear to be only superficially connected in reality each is in some way dependent on the other:
1. Netanyahu Government Deathwatch: Day 162 – Our old friend Benjamin Netanyahu went ahead and authorized the construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank. This is Netanyahu more or less openly biting his thumb at Barack Obama while the latter man has more pressing issues on his agenda. But, like most of Netanyahu’s plans, it seems frightfully short sighted. Obama is in a much more politically secure position than Netanyahu, he won’t always be busy with things like health care, and he can make Netanyahu’s political life quite difficult by simply ignoring him (Clinton did the same thing a decade ago). On top of that Netanyahu’s cabinet is conflicted about the wisdom of further settlements beyond those just authorized. When things like this go into the country’s main newspaper . . .
The foreign minister [Avigdor Lieberman] vowed that disagreements over a settlement freeze will not threaten the governing coalition, saying “the right will not topple the right,” adding that his right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party would stay in the coalition even if a freeze is enacted.
. . . you know it spells trouble. The first stage is always denial.
Netanyahu is stuck between the same rock and hard place he was when he came to power in the spring. The blank check the Bush Administration gave Israel is long gone, but the hard liners he depends upon for his majority are still around and they aren’t going to relax on settlements (or anything else) any time soon. Keeping his coalition together will piss off the Obama Administration, which will eventually sour relations with America and cause his government to collapse. Appeasing the Obama Administration will piss off the right wingers in his coalition and cause his government to collapse. His hold on power is likely too tenuous to survive the trials and tribulations ahead, one way or the other.
2. The Health Care Thing – It’s getting down to nut cutting time on health care, with tonight’s speech being the beginning of the end. No one has any idea how it’s going to turn out at this point, the possibilities range from a bill that will please House Progressives to no bill at all or something so shamefully terrible that it’ll act like a millstone around the Democrats’ collective neck. Who knows?
What we do know is that this is going to set the stage for pretty much all of the remaining legislation Obama wants to enact before Congress starts clamming up in anticipation of next year’s midterms. If he gets his way on this one, and at this point the more “liberal” the bill the more it’s going to look like a victory for the White House (no matter what they say), it’s going to make things a lot easier. The passage of genuine health care reform, after the Republicans threw everything but the kitchen sink at it, would be an undeniable signal of the Democrats’ newfound power. It won’t stop everything and the kitchen sink being thrown at the energy bill, finance regulation, or anything else, but it will make all of those attacks seem considerably less threatening.
3. The Afghan Election – Hamid Karzai appears to have cheated his brains out in order to avoid a runoff in his reelection campaign. Now the UN, which has an important say in the matter, is ordering recounts of numerous highly suspicious ballots. Much like on health care at this point no one knows how it will turn out, whether or not there will be a recount. But Karzai’s legitimacy has already been badly tarnished; only a successful runoff can come close to restoring it in the eyes of the poobahs (press, government and otherwise) in Europe, the US and elsewhere.
Obama is committed in Afghanistan for at least the duration of his current term. He campaigned on it and he’s already increased the number of American troops there. Moreover, he’s walled himself in politically. Afghanistan is how he answers his national security critics, and if you think the conservative opposition to health care was vitriolic, you ain’t seen nothing compared to what they’d do if they saw him moving out of Afghanistan. Even if that action consisted of little more than the approach he’s taking in Iraq (a loose deadline and a gradual withdrawal) the opposition would make lies like the death panels (ludicrous and totally fictional but nevertheless persistent and pernicious) seem like nothing. Obama needs Karzai (or possibly Abdullah if Karzai screws this up) to have at least a veneer of democratic legitimacy, otherwise he’s spending American lives to support an undemocratic regime in a rubble strewn badland on the far side of the globe. That would be an extremely tough position to justify to his domestic supporters and to other world leaders.
As long as he gets America all the way out of Iraq before he’s up for re-election the American left will forgive him Afghanistan, regardless of Karzai’s legitimacy. (It would of course help matters if he had a convincing plan to end the war in his second term.) But that’s three years away and in the meantime every soldier and euro he can squeeze out of the other members of NATO makes his job easier. And those soldiers and euros are going to become increasingly scarce if the Afghani election is perceived as a sham.
Add these three things together (Netanyahu’s intransigence, health care reform on the edge of a knife, and Afghanistan threatening to take a serious turn for the worse) and what do you get? You get a very interesting autumn for Barack Obama, the United States and the world at large. These problems, and people’s expectations about what can be done about them, were frozen in time for the last two lame duck years of Bush the Younger. Nothing could be accomplished so long as the American government was paralyzed with incompetence.
But now they’re all in motion again, and they’re all connected. Heath care reform will go a long way towards deciding Obama’s domestic popularity and Netanyahu has much more reason to fear a popular Obama than he does an unpopular Obama. Afghanistan is an open wound and is going to remain so for years, but it can be mitigated (and the death toll along with it). An Obama who can wring genuine concessions out of Israel (health care reform or not), who can materially and politically improve the condition of the Palestinians, is one who could also rally the world behind him on Afghanistan and give hostile Afghans a reason to bargain. Similarly, a significant foreign policy triumph can return that new penny shine to Obama at home. It all matters, and as this tragic decade winds down over the next few months we might begin to see the shape of things in the next one.
“Yes, it reminds me of a joke I heard about upper middle class people.” – Judge Whitey
I’m aware that I did this a couple of weeks ago, but fuck it. Once again someone else has expressed my thoughts far better than I can. In this case it was an article in the most recent London Review of Books written by Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Discussing a book titled “Who Cares about the White Working Class?” it is a clear eyed picture of where American politics seems to be heading:
More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.
An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics.
This is what “post racial”, if we ever get there, will actually mean. The inexorable demographic trends that are giving America a darker complexion will eventually render the racism inherent in Southern Strategy style politics irrelevant. But the war between those who Have and those who do not will continue. It’s been with us since the Roman Republic and before and it isn’t ever going to end.
Inequality to some degree is never going to go away, of course, and nor should it. But structural inequality can and should be minimized and the fight to do so is just beginning. This is apparent in literally every political debate we have. On something like health care it’s right out front because it’s people of lesser incomes, of all colors and genders, who will benefit the most from aggressive health care reform. On something like global warming it’s less obvious but it’s still a fundamental aspect of the issue because rich people will inevitably be the least effected by rising temperatures, rising seas and all the rest.
The entire piece is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how politics is going to work once the culture wars (and much of the racism and sexism that underlie them) finish winding down. So read the whole thing. And the next time you wonder why something like the Lilly Ledbetter bill can sail through Congress when the equally sensible act of stimulating the economy causes a political war to break out, think of this:
Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture.
“You’re ignorant! That’s the Wright Brothers’ plane, at Kitty Hawk in 1903, Charles Lindbergh flew it 15 miles on a thimble full of corn oil, single handedly won us the Civil War, it did.” – Abe “Grandpa” Simpson
Like its parent publication (The Washington Post), Slate has a pretty poor ratio of useful/good articles to worthless/bad articles. On top of that, its editorial stance seems to be dedicated almost solely to expanding the furthest frontiers of snide. It is usually best ignored, but I happened across this little nugget of arrogant stupidity:
Set aside the fact that this article was written by well documented idiot (via) Anne Applebaum and that ultimately it’s just a silly little article in a silly little on-line magazine. It’s still indicative of two larger and more important ignorances that genuinely affect the way America interacts with the planet at large. The first is our simple tendency to think the world revolves around us. The most famous expression of this can be found in the “they hate us for our freedoms” canard, as though people on the other side of the world plot against us for motives as nebulous as those of a cartoon super-villain. In this particular instance, there is this:
The British and the French will be there for the same reason—Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions and generally have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Top-level U.S. politicians will presumably be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously.
Last time I looked the US was treaty bound to defend much of central Europe, so we do indeed have reasons to take them “seriously”. But it’s more ego stroking to ignore that fact and deride them as not worth our time. And so, in keeping with the general policy of “snide”, that’s what goes into the article.
The second ignorance is the general historical ignorance that to some degree affects us all, but seems particularly prevalent here in the United States for the simple reason that we were spared most of the 20th century’s horrors. The combined body count of December 7th, 1941 and September 11th, 2001 amounts to little more than a rounding error when compared with the wholesale slaughter on the Nazi-Soviet front, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Indian Partition, the Khmer Rouge regime, the Rwandan Genocide or a dozen other tragedies. (And all those things happened after World War II started, the list could get a lot longer if you wanted to include things like the Japanese invasion of China, the Great Depression (which the United States weathered comparatively well) and, of course, World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic.) There’s a reason Europeans commemorate World War II a lot; it, more than any other event, shaped modern Europe and anyone with half an education ought to know that.
The article in question dimly acknowledges this, but the tone of it, in everything from the headline to the conclusion, is one of almost exasperated pedantry. “Okay, you silly Europeans”, it seems to say, “We’ll let you keep commemorating this but you really should let it go.” That rather shallow and myopic point of view stems directly from an extremely thin and very American-centric reading of the 20th century. Even asking the question, “What’s with all the World War II memorials?” (to say nothing of wasting 800 odd words actually answering it), betrays a deep historical ignorance.
American centric worldview? Check. Extremely narrow historical understanding? Check. Snide tone? Check mate. None of these are good things, however.
“A letter of surrender, we did it! Whew, it’s a good thing too because I really didn’t have an exit strategy.” – Stewie Griffin
The Iraq War is ending. It is ending excruciatingly slowly, but the President of the United States of America has stated repeatedly that he wants to end the war and he has a public schedule for doing so, one that ends ten months before his next election. Those are facts. And they point to a single conclusion: The Iraq War is ending. Of course, America is fighting two wars these days (thanks, George!), and to understand how the Afghanistan War is going to end we must look at the reasons the Iraq War is ending.
The Iraq War is ending for one reason: the Blues won. And they won in large part because of the war. Mired as we are in this recession, and as influential as last fall’s financial panic was, it’s all too easy to forget that it was the Iraq War that permanently soured the public on the Reds. (Yes, yes Katrina broke the camel’s back, but the Iraq War was most of the weight.) It was their idea, they bungled it to the tune of several thousand dead Americans, and the public rightly blamed them for the whole fiasco. In addition to that, Barack Obama won that precious Democratic nomination because of the Iraq War. The anti-war crowd (myself included) could never forgive Hillary Clinton for her war vote in 2002. His opposition to the war is the single greatest reason Obama is President.
Unfortunately (and as I’ve argued before), Afghanistan is almost politically irrelevant to Barack Obama. It is all but inconceivable that there could be any kind of serious challenge to him from the national-security left in 2012. But even that wildly improbably scenario looks like a mathematical certainty when compared with the chances of Reds nominating someone whose main arguments include “Peace NOW in Afghanistan”. The only political risk to Obama on Afghanistan is looking weak or incompetent and that can only be exploited by someone from the otherwise impotent right.
Could the Reds actually exploit that? Uh . . . maybe? Red fear mongering failed recently, but it’s been successful enough in the past that it would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand. Still, it seems unlikely that a party that is despised on almost every other issue, out of step with the national character, and responsible for bungling the war in the first place could make a serious issue out of Afghanistan. This will be even more true if Obama manages to end American in Iraq with a minimum of fuss.
So the answer to the question “Is Obama Politically Invincible on Afghanistan?” is a qualified “Yes”. The qualification is, normal ups and downs of a presidency aside, that there be no major national security disasters of the World Trade Center/Pentagon, Iraq War or Katrina level. Assuming he can avoid one of those, he’s in pretty good shape and that means that we’re staying Afghanistan at least through his current term. That’s a useful thing to keep in mind as one reads about the recent Afghan election, the legitimacy and outcome of which are still unknown. It’s an important event that will have a profound impact on the future of the country, but the war is going to continue for years, regardless.
“Now each one of you take a floor and get started!” – Marge Simpson
“I call the basement!” – Homer Simpson
“Fine.” – Bart, Lisa & Marge Simpson
“D’oh?” – Homer Simpson
There were two further developments on the torture front this week. The first was the release of a heavily censored Inspector General’s report on all the heinous shit the CIA did to its prisoners. The second was Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to open an investigation into these disgraces.
(Well, there was a third piece of “news” as well, though it hardly merits mentioning for anyone who has been paying attention to torture. However, because it cannot be repeated enough for anybody who is still unclear on this point, we’re all looking at you Mr. Ex-Vice President, I’m going to say it again: no useful information was ever produced by torture. I will now repeat that, in all caps: NO USEFUL INFORMATION WAS EVER PRODUCED BY TORTURE. That is not, despite what Dick Cheney says, an area that is any longer open for debate.)
There is still a great deal of confusion as to what exactly this investigation will entail, but the justifiably pessimistic speculation is rampant:
Perhaps worst of all, the Report notes that many of the detainees who were subjected to this treatment were so treated due to “assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence” — meaning there was no real reason to think they had done anything wrong whatsoever. As has been known for quite some time, many of the people who were tortured by the United States were completely innocent — guilty of absolutely nothing.
Manifestly, none of this happened by accident. As the IG Report continuously notes, all of these methods were severe departures from long-standing CIA guidelines (if not practices). This all occurred because the officials at the highest levels of the U.S. Government pronounced that this was permissible, the protections of the Geneva Conventions were “quaint,” obsolete and inapplicable, and the U.S. was justified in doing anything and everything in the name of fighting Terrorists. As stomach-turning as these individual acts of sadism are, it is far worse to consider that only low-level interrogators will suffer consequences while those who were truly responsible — the criminally depraved leaders and lawyers who ordered and authorized it — will be protected.
It would be yet another scar on our country, this one indisputably perpetrated by the Obama Administration, if a bunch of CIA agents face trial while the twisted masterminds of the whole affair are once again given a pass. There is some cause for optimism though, and it was inadvertently reinforced by this morning’s pre-Ted Kennedy lead story in the New York Times, “Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations”. The article itself is a re-hash of information that was largely confirmed, rather than originally disclosed, in the Inspector General’s report. Namely, that officials at CIA headquarters and in the White House avidly followed, from thousands of miles away, the progress of the torture they had authorized. The Times article tries to make the entire operation seem very precise and well controlled, one document cited even stoops to use the word “clinical”. What the article fails to mention is that such remote supervision is a bureaucratic impossibility.
People in cushy offices, of any variety, are notoriously ill informed about what’s actually going on “in the field”. This includes large corporations, non-profits and governments at war. From that many removes, that many layers of human interpretation and repetition, it’s impossible to have a solid grasp on just what was going on. Holder’s investigation presumes that there was defined control and that it will therefore be possible to sort the authorized torture (which they don’t want to prosecute) from the unauthorized torture (which they also don’t want to prosecute but don’t see a way not to). That neat distinctions of that kind exist at all seems highly unlikely and it will be even harder to make those distinctions in a legally clear way.
Are we to believe that one man is to be prosecuted because he used slightly too much water when torturing a prisoner but that another man will be protected because he measured his water better? The bureaucratic guidelines that were created to permit American torture never had a chance of being scrupulously followed for the simple reason that the guidelines themselves were monstrous. If you’re already crossing all kinds of lines of human decency and longstanding American tradition, why not press just a little bit harder? Indeed, ABC News is reporting that some of the censored information in the report is about deaths in American custody (which we already knew about) and the fact that the CIA simply lost some of these men. Just lost them.
Holder and company have a great big mess to clean up and they’ve got to do it with a Justice Department that was gutted and politicized for eight years. It is not an enviable task and so it’s understandable that they’re looking to limit the scope of their responsibility. But the neat lines that would let them do so probably do not exist and once they start digging it’s going to be very difficult to pretend that they do.
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos 