Skip navigation

Monthly Archives: January 2009

Live Nude Girls

“Think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts. . . ” – Mindy Simmons

On Thursdays nytimes.com puts up a preview of the stories that will be in the Sunday magazine.  Last Thursday, “What Do Women Want?“, an article by Daniel Bergner about sexual research, went up accompanied by this rather grandiose subtitle:

A postfeminist generation of researches is discovering things Dr. Freud could never have imagined.

Without commenting on the quality of Freud’s imagination, subtitles like that are designed to garner page views and on-line reactions.  And, as if one cue, they came:

Tracy Clark-Flory at salon.com (on Saturday):

“What does a woman want?” A host of controversial theories about the nature of female desire are offered up — most notably, that it is “rudderless,” “receptive,” “narcissistic” and “dominated by the yearnings of ‘self-love.’” Ouch, that hurts my (apparently immense) erotic ego, not to mention my feminist sensibilities. That said, no reasonable person would expect the secrets of human sexuality to be entirely politically correct; these ideas can’t be dismissed just because they personally offend.

Courtney from feministing.com:

I think this is fascinating. In a world where women are often objectified against their will, is the ultimate turn on being able to control and even illicit our own objectification?

Susannah Breslin (writing at slate.com):

I wonder why the term “postfeminist” is used in the context of Bergner’s essay? Understanding female desire seems more like a universal quest. Either way, I suspect it may be an impossible one.

There are doubtlessly many others.  Of the three above, Breslin has the least political take, simply using the article as a jumping off point to illustrate something she’s noticed on porn movie sets, namely that believably simulating female desire is tricky even for professionals.  Politics doesn’t really enter into it.

Bergner’s article itself is utterly harmless, consisting of little more than a series of factoids.  The word “feminist” occurs only once, self applied by one of the profiled researchers.  The whole thing has about as much to do with gender politics as it does with astrophysics.

Not that it needs to be about feminism to be interesting, but so much of what is being discussed and criticized is being done through a political prism, in the article and in the reactions.  What does this mean for day to day people?  Unfortunately, the answer is: not much.  Of the four scientists and their findings, most seem unrelated and some outright contradictory.  At the end, Bergner throws up his ands and more or less declares the question unanswerable.

That is patently absurd.  The answer may or may not be neat and tidy, but it certainly exists; the problem isn’t with the question it’s with how new the research is.  By Bergner’s own description research into female desire only really began a decade ago in the quest to find a female equivalent to Viagra and it’s still a niche field.  These are not the conclusions of some grand scientific enterprise.

Up at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte nicely sums up the major drawback:

The main thing is that Berger shies away from cultural explanations, as do his researchers, even though the research could easily point to cultural reasons more than biological ones for women’s differences.

Culture is mentioned by Bergner – twice – as undermining pretty much everything.  The obvious next step is simple: attempt to control for cultural differences.  It is often said that Europeans have less dogmatic attitudes towards sex than Americans and Canadians, have similar studies been run in Europe?  Surely all the relevant research hasn’t been restricted to North America.  Did Bergner even look?

The ultimate problem with the article isn’t that it’s particularly weak, it’s pretty middle of the pack by NYT Magazine standards, it’s that it’s just a little too sensational for its own good.  It has pictures of naked white females in various states of arousal; its descriptive blurb contains the blogger-bait term “postfeminist” (though that concept is never broached in the text), and it opens with a sentence about primate porn.  That’s all well and good from a marketing standpoint, but this isn’t an article that aspires to counter-intuitive conclusions that force us to reassess our core viewpoints about women, sex, society or any other subjects.  It’s just a little fluff piece containing information that, however interesting it may be, is neither political nor controversial.

It’s probably too juicy to let pass without comment, but the real winners here are the people at the NYT Magazine who count link backs and unique visitors.

Putting Liberty Back to Work

“We’d like to dedicate this next number to a very special woman.  She’s a hundred years old and she weighs over two hundred . . . tons.” – Homer Simpson
“This enormous woman will devour us all!” – Panicky Idiot

Buried in the local section of yesterday’s New York Times was a story about newly minted Interior Secretary Ken Salazar visiting the Statue of Liberty.  As a high ranking government official, Salazar got the behind the scenes tour, including a trip up into the good lady’s crown.  The interior of the statue is, apparently, still closed to tourists, as it has been since the day the statue watched the planes hit the buildings.  The official rationale for keeping the crown closed is that it doesn’t meet modern fire and safety codes, but that’s a pretty thin piece of bullshit and no one really believes it.  “Closed since September 11th”, and all that that implies, is all anybody cares about.

It’s been seven and a half years since hijacked planes and letters full of anthrax powder, and, outside of New York City, Washington, D.C. and airports, life goes on pretty much as it did before.  This is a very good thing.  Returning normalcy to those last three bastions of useless and wasteful paranoia would also be a very good thing.  The Obama Administration has set the right tone early, notably by all but ceasing to use the utterly silly phrase “war on terror”.  Reopening the Statue of Liberty would be another shiv to stick into the bloated, festering corpse of Bush the Younger’s paranoid style.

Lady Liberty is the symbol of everything good about this country, and the fact that the crown is still inaccessible to ordinary people is an absolute disgrace.  Happily, prospects for reopening it appear relatively bright.  Salazar was on the tour with some Congressmen who want to reopen, and both he and his new boss supported measures along those lines while they were in the Senate.

Little changes like not incessantly repeating “war on terror” and reopening the Statue of Liberty are exactly the kinds of steps that can finally close the wounds of 2001.  For nearly eight years the political powers that be deliberately let them fester (a noun, a verb and 9/11) and it’s done nobody any good.  Changing that destructive and self defeating mentality isn’t an overnight project, but it can be done and every little bit helps.  Now, if we could just get the new bosses to rein in security theater we’d really be getting somewhere.

Good Morning, and Good Luck

“The public see our astronauts as clean cut, athletic go getters.  They hate people like that.” – NASA Guy

I would like you to engage in a mental exercise for a moment.  I want you to picture President Barack Obama sitting on the toilet, expensive trousers around his ankles, with a look of unpleasant concentration on his face as he squeezes out last night’s inaugural fare.  Maybe there’s even a rewarding plop, which is unfortunately followed by a surprisingly cold splash back.  Barack Obama taking a serious shit, it’s not an easy image to conjure is it?  But he does shit; he probably even drops a few that leave the bathroom uninhabitable for a good fifteen minutes.

To my knowledge Obama has made no claims, publicly or privately, that his shit doesn’t smell, though at the moment it can feel like that is the opinion many people have of him.  The merchandising is at ludicrous speed, his image is everywhere, and while newly elected presidents tend to get a little approval bump, Obama’s is double that of his two most recent predecessors.  Bill Clinton won 43% of the vote in 1992, Bush the Younger got a little less than 48% in 2000, but both entered office with approval ratings in the mid fifties.  By contrast, Obama won a little less than 53% of the vote, but his approval ratings are now into the seventies and eighties.

There’s an impressive confluence of factors contributing to this, of course: the striking contrast between him and his massively unpopular predecessor, the frightful state of the national and global economies, and the natural American tendency for self fellatio whenever a minority succeeds in a previously all white arena.  The real question is, how much of it will last?

We’ve already seen representatives of the right and the left trading places now that the new guy is in charge.  The Reds have suddenly remembered that they believe in limits on Executive power.  The Blues, equally suddenly, are a lot less worried about Congressional oversight.  It’s perfectly rational to trust Obama and his people more than the endlessly discredited Bush the Younger and his people, but it would be naive not to notice that neither side is exactly standing on principal.  Expect more of the same; after all, a lot of American political discourse still comes down to which team you root for.

As Washington D.C. and the country at large accustom themselves to the new President, will his stratospheric approval ratings prove durable enough to fundamentally alter the way things work?  Obama has a bigger popular mandate and a friendlier Congress than any President since Johnson, combine that with the sorry state of just about everything and he has the opportunity to be a great and transformative president, the kind that fourth graders in 2100 will know about.  Somewhat gratingly, he acquired the personal popularity of a tremendously accomplished President before even taking office; is it possible that we are being overawed simply by the fact that he isn’t Bush the Younger?  Let’s face it, his shit does smell, and very soon opponents and opportunists are going to begin putting it (and anything they can manufacture) in the street.  When the sales of his merchandise inevitably tail off, when the new penny shine is off his presidency and the first genuine scandal breaks, can he remain as he has been?

At this early vantage point it’s impossible to separate starry-eyed optimism from realistic analysis.  I do know that I’m very glad to be rid of Bush the Younger; I also know that my gag reflex for mushy hope and idealistic bullshit has been triggered so many times in the last three months that it’s almost gone numb.  Some of my retching is doubtlessly warranted; how much of it, though, I cannot say.

Rehabilitation Preemption and a Lifetime of Entertainment

“They . . . laugh at me?  I’d always considered myself rather popular.” – Martin Prince
“You’re not.” – Bart Simpson

In the weeks after the election, Bush the Younger could only get meaningful media attention by appearing with his successor.  Other than that he was basically remaindered to the same dark corner he had been occupying pretty much since the conventions.  No one wanted to listen to him or talk about him, and his own party seemed more than happy to give him the cold shoulder as they bickered over the bleak future he provided for them.  But as we approach the inauguration he started popping up in farewell interviews, awkward lunch meetings, and now in two separate live television appearances.

The purpose of all this is to put as much positive spin on his reputation as humanly possible before he heads back to Texas.  In the main, he and his remaining supporters seem to believe that he didn’t do a great job, per se, but he was dealt a tough hand and did the best he could.  Having once almost gleefully referred to himself as a “war president”, he’s now laying claim to the downside as well: war is hard, and people don’t like it, but in the end it was all necessary.  Like many previous defenses of his Administration, on topics too numerous to list, this is denial at best and dishonest at worst.  One can choose to be charitable about characterizing it or not, but either way it certainly isn’t true.

The comparison made most often is to Harry Truman, how he went from being unpopular when he left office to being well respected given a little time and perspective.  This comparison is, perhaps, the last act of wishful thinking from a group of people who’ve elevated wishful thinking into an art form the last eight years.  From the repeatedly discredited idea that tax cuts for millionaires will enrich us all to being greeted as liberators, this has been a presidency saturated in wishful thinking and they’ve decided to roll with it one last time.

Like many of its wishful predecessors this is a slippery and hard to refute line of thinking.  If four years from now things are much better than they are now, the Bush defenders can say that he got us through the bad times and laid the foundation for the good; if things are the same or worse four years from now they can say, “See?  He wasn’t so bad; your precious Obama is no better.”

Bush the Younger threw the gauntlet down in his farewell speech, “Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States.”  In terms of honesty that’s like saying the glass is half full when in fact it’s shattered on the kitchen floor; but as a legacy argument it’s brilliant.  If you accept that sentence as true, then it doesn’t matter what Obama does in Iraq.  If Obama withdraws and Iraq slowly stabilizes itself more or less along its current political lines then the project was a success even if it took longer than initially planned; if Obama withdraws and Iraq disintegrates into chaos and civil war then it will be Obama’s fault for “losing” Iraq.

Talk of Truman and legacies is an essentially hollow argument that amounts to little more than an admonition to take things in context.  It’s like a primer coat of bullshit, whatever happens in the coming years can be layered on top without seeming out of place.  Things going well?  Bush the Younger got us through the night and Obama just happened to take over before the dawn.  Things going poorly?  Bush the Younger did all he could, it’s just the tough times we live in.

What’s missing is any acknowledgement of responsibility, which is all the more amusing coming from a political party that often stresses personal responsibility as a virtue.  It treats the many disasters of his presidency as accidents of history instead of the result of his own mistakes.  This type of defense comes naturally to spoiled children: blame the circumstances, blame others for not warning you ahead of time, blame your friends; in short, blame anyone but yourself.  Ultimately it’s a cop out, and it’s not even a very convincing one.  The public has fixed the blame squarely on him and there is no escaping it.

Now, here’s the fun part.  Millions of Americans are sympathetic to this argument and are going to parrot it for the rest of their lives.  For the approximately one quarter of the electorate that supported him through it all and still stands behind him, he is a martyr, a tragic hero cruelly mischaracterized and misunderstood by the unfeeling liberal majority.  They aren’t going to be shy about saying so either; they will champion him wherever they can, from the loftiest editorial pages to the dingiest bar stools.

Defending Bush the Younger will be the mark of true conservative grit for decades to come, but, unfortunately for them, things have grown too foul for that notion to ever gain majority appeal.  Some fringe fallacies are dangerous and must be constantly confronted (creationism and its kin spring to mind), but this one will be entertaining and harmless.  Bush the Younger’s appeal has always been based on the idea that Real Americans support him, but he and his policies have been thoroughly repudiated in the last two elections far worse than any political obituary or thundering op-ed piece could ever hope to accomplish.  Those same Real Americans have wanted him gone since 2005 and bitter, protracted three year long divorces rarely produce amicable outcomes.

It is a telling point that as he leaves office the biggest non-economic debate going about in political circles is whether or not to prosecute his underlings for all of the illegal things they’ve done.  No achievements to salute, no legislation to praise, just messes left (irresponsibly) to another.  He won’t be missed, but he will be remembered; and that may be the worst possible fate for the deluded and fragile egos of his supporters, to say nothing of his own.

The Old In and Out

“Come on, you never went on a date with a guy just ’cause you were hungry?” – Bender/Coilette
“Well, I . . . uh . . . I thought I might like him on a full stomach.” – Leela

For the past year Susannah Breslin has been running two on-line projects, Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls.  They are exactly what they sound like.  Johns closed on January 3rd after one year of submissions; Girls is closing today, also after one year.  Neither is a statistically representative sample of the general population, the people writing the letters are prosperous and educated enough to be reading blogs, after all; but they don’t need to be.  They’re a tremendously interesting little window on parts of people’s lives that are normally rigorously concealed.

These projects are what documentaries and reality teevee can never be.  (Not to knock documentaries.)  There were no camera crews filming these people; there were no microphones shoved in their faces.  It’s just stories about a subject that for many is too taboo to speak of, even with close friends, lovers or spouses, and the relative anonymity of a keyboard brings them out in a rich way.

By my count there are eighteen from the girls and fifty-one from the boys.  Some of the letters strain believability, and so maybe some are more fiction than truth, but Breslin appears to have a keen eye for that.  On her regular site she described how she edits them:

How do I select the letters? Well, when they arrive in my email box, I read them, and at that point the main thing I’m trying to do is figure out if it’s a real letter or a fake one. For some reason, I’ve gotten a strangely large number of letters that I’m pretty sure are written by men who are pretending to be a woman who has sex with a working girl (a “jane”).

The letters she does post make for fascinating reading and leave no doubt that exchanging sex for money really does pre-date all other occupations.  The enormous variety of ways that lead to two people closing a door is amazing; need and greed are there, of course, but often so are loneliness, fear, curiosity and dozen others.  The ways people fuck and the reasons people fuck (to say nothing of what they prefer to do after) are as varied as the hair styles, bodies, and faces you see everyday.

However, there is one commonality to almost every letter, on both sides of the ledger: the exhortation of normalcy.  For the men it’s most often an explanation of need, I was still a virgin, My wife stopped fucking me.  For the women it’s often a declaration of individuality, I’m usually not like this at all, I didn’t get started the typical way.  The subtext is identical though; both groups feel compelled to display their connection to the “husband, wife, 2.3 kids and dog” model of life.  It says, I’m not weird, before implying, and what don’t you know about your neighbors, friends, and family?

The letters are further confirmation, as if any were needed, of just how bizarre a subject sex is.  There have always been different standards of prim and profane, but the way our society approaches it these days may be unique.  We live in a time when women, while far from achieving actual equality, have unprecedented power and control over their property, their lives and their bodies.  And yet we also cling to downright Victorian sexual mores and norms (witness the “Wedding Industry“).  Even in a society that abounds in bizarre contradictions and hypocrisies, this one is a stunner.

Cataloging that, warts and all, even in a small way, is a real achievement and Breslin deserves the thanks of our horny, nervous and variously inhibited populace.

A Popular Misconception

“Who’s having butt sex?” – Chef

Since California passed Proposition 8 two months ago there has been an enormous and acrimonious backlash.  The most publicized parts of this backlash have occurred around people who supported 8, usually for religious reasons, but who also have a lot of homosexual people in their lives.  Less than two weeks after the election there was a well publicized story out of Sacramento; the art director of a major non-profit theater resigned after it became known that he had donated $1,000 to help ban gay marriage.  The guy, Scott Eckern, is a Mormon, made the donation out of religious conviction, and was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “I honestly had no idea that this would be the reaction.”

That’s an almost incredible statement; what did he think the reaction would be?  Did he think that the euphoria which greeted the court decision legalizing same sex marriage would be replaced with aw-shucks resignation when it was taken away?  Something’s missing from that picture; how could this guy, who works with openly homosexual people day in and day out, not realize how important this issue is to them?  The answer lies in the following chart of a Gallup poll which has been conducted since 1977.

Date

Born with

Upbringing / Environment

Both

Neither

No Opinion

1977-JUN

13%

56%

14%

3%

14%

1982-JUN

17

52

13

2

16

1989-OCT

19

48

12

2

19

1996-NOV

31

40

13

3

13

1998-JUN

31

47

6

3

13

1999-FEB

34

44

13

1

8

2001-MAY

40

39

9

3

9

2002-MAY

40

36

12

4

8

2003-MAY

38

44

11

2

5

2006-MAR

38

44

13

not an option

5

2007-MAY

42

35

not an option

not an option

23
Margin of error is generally ± 3 to 5%.

The scientific consensus (at least in males) is heavily on “Born With“.  And while the percentage of Americans who agree has been steadily increasing for decades (with a brief dip during the gay mongering of the mid naughts), it’s still a minority opinion.  What’s more, when Gallup removed “Both” and “Neither” (which are cop out nonsense), “No Opinion” shot up like a rocket but “Born With” held steady.  That tells us that it’s very likely that a majority of Americans do not believe that sexual orientation in inherent at birth.

That fact goes a long way towards explaining how Eckern and others like him were blindsided by the reaction to the passage of Proposition 8.  If you’ve never internalized or accepted the fact that homosexuality is not a choice then you wouldn’t think of gay marriage as a life or death issue.

The real proof is in the language though.  Without batting an eye people will use terms like “choice of lifestyle”, “ex-gay”, and “homosexual agenda“.  All three of those very common formulations assume a conscious decision on the part of the person in question.  A person makes a “choice” between two alternatives; to be “ex-” anything is to imply a non-permanent condition; an “agenda” is a list of things a person wants, not of things a person needs.

For exactly the same reason support for civil unions equivalent to marriage always runs higher than support for actual gay marriage.  If homosexuality is a choice then it’s much easier to defend the idea of reserving the M-word for heterosexual couples.  In that framework “marriage” becomes a kind of hetero-merit badge for people who chose to do things the old fashioned way.

Advocates of gay marriage and gay rights in general often portray their cause as a civil rights issue, which it is.  But arguing it on civil rights grounds in a country where “Born With” is a minority opinion is like trying to build a house without a foundation.  Gay marriage – gay anything - can only be understood as a civil rights issue once you accept the fact that being homosexual is not a choice.  If, deep down in your heart of hearts, you believe that homosexuality is a choice, then gay marriage is nothing more than a kind of preferential treatment and homosexuals are just another interest group.  That’s the type of thinking that misleads people like Scott Eckern.  Civil rights arguments will be wasted on them until they understand that homosexuality isn’t just a phase people can pass through.

Icebergs Ahead

“Wiggum, you glorified night watchman, let her go!” – Mayor Quimby
“But, she broke the law.” – Chief Wiggum
“Thanks for the civics lesson!  Now listen to me.  If Marge Simpson goes to jail I can kiss the chick vote goodbye!” – Mayor Quimby

There is no longer any reasonable doubt that numerous government officials, ranging from the White House all the way down to ass-end of various federal organizational charts, have broken the law the last eight years.  Of those crimes, the three most prosecutable are probably torture, wiretapping, and politicizing the Justice Department.  (Perjury accompanies all three like an eager puppy.)  As we inch closer to the official transfer of power the question of what is to be done about all that is growing more prominent.

The criminals involved have so far hidden behind a very friendly Justice Department.  Despite that, there is already more than enough damning evidence in the public record to give a lot of them good reason to be nervous, and my strong hunch is that what we know is only the tip of the iceberg.  The information we have is the result of the ACLU, investigative reporters and plain old conscientious Americans working against an iron curtain of governmental stonewalling which is going to start coming down a week from Tuesday.  Whether or not it comes down all the way is an open question; but it isn’t going to be nearly as robust as it has been, that’s for sure.  To take but a small, prominent example, John Conyers is about to gain the ability to have his subpoenas enforced.  Chaos is likely to ensue.

To take another small example, dday had an encouraging post yesterday up at Hullabaloo about two pending pieces of litigation in San Francisco.  The first is about the al-Haramain charity foundation which is trying to prove that it was the subject of illegal government surveillance (it was; the government accidentally handed over classified transcripts of illegal wiretaps); the second is about the EFF’s efforts to nullify the retroactive immunity provisions of last summer’s grotesquely un-American FISA bill.  In both cases the government has hit some roadblocks, but dday’s conclusion contains the truly interesting point:

It will be interesting to see what the Obama Administration does with this once they come into office. The legal team assembled over the last few weeks doesn’t seem like they’d be willing to carry forward Mukasey et al.’s warped legal theories, and yet Obama himself voted for immunity. Should be another early test.

That is the real nut of it.  The legal challenges to the Bush Administration’s various psychotic policies aren’t going anywhere just because the man himself is on his way back to Texas.  John Conyers, Henry Waxman and others still has their gavels.  The incriminating memos and e-mails still exist and the criminal statutes are still on the books.  The question isn’t whether or not illegal deeds were committed – they were; the question is what are Barack Obama and his people going to do about in the face of ever increasing evidence of it?

Ignoring everything and letting bygones be bygones has its appeal, but it isn’t a realistic course of action anymore.  Too much is already known and there is probably more waiting to come to light.  The December issue of Harper’s and the 15 January issue of the New York Review of Books both make the suggestion that the only way out of this is with one of those fabled “Blue Ribbon, bi-partisan commissions”.  (Scott Horton in Harper’s has a particularly thorough run down of just what such a commission might look like.)  That may indeed be the only viable solution; but those types of commissions are notorious for papering over the misdeeds of those at or near the top and it is precisely those people who need the most scrutiny.  It would be nice for some justice to be served, but more importantly, the next crop of high ranking government officials needs to know that there are limits to their authority and penalties for overstepping it.

Of Numbers Games and Other People’s Messes

“My old man can’t get a beer because his old man won’t give a bear to another old man.  Let’s get him!” – Nelson Muntz
“Wait, why are we gettin’ him?” – Jimbo Jones

There have been many turning points and victory declarations when it comes to our sophomoric imperialism in Iraq, each as meaningless and forgettable as the last.  All of them, purple fingers, transfers of sovereignty, new prime ministers and the rest, have had one unshakable tenet in common: the number of American troops in Iraq never decreased.  No matter how many Iraqi troops were said to be trained, no matter how many barrels of oil were said to be moving, no matter how many insurgents were said to be killed, the number of Americans in Iraq, the number that matters most, never really came down.

Last week’s legal transition from American troops being in Iraq under a United Nations mandate to being in Iraq under a mutually negotiated Iraqi-American agreement could be different though.  Not because it contains a deadline for American withdrawal, there have been more artificial deadlines set for this war than I care to remember.  The real reason we’re getting ready to leave is the election of Barack Obama two months ago.  Of course, there would’ve been a new status of forces agreement no matter who won our election.  But prior to November 4th the biggest stumbling block to an agreement had been Iraqi insistence on a hard deadline for American withdrawal.  The instant Obama was declared the winner that point of contention dissolved away, if McCain had won things would already be very different.

Taken in the larger context Obama’s election means that we no longer have any fundamental disagreements with Iraq, the first time that’s been true since 1990.  First came the invasion of Kuwait, then it was Saddam Hussein’s plot against Bush the Elder, then it was about weapons inspections and human rights, then it was about no-fly zones and oil-for-food.  Then we invaded, then the Hussein government crumbled, then we failed to set up a new one, then we tried to set ourselves up as permanent guests (though the Iraqis clearly do not want us), and so on and so forth.  That’s an unending chain of serious disagreements that goes back almost twenty years.

Ever since those tanks rolled into Kuwait, almost two decades ago, the American military has been actively fighting or containing Iraqis.  That long conflict, which has been nothing but trouble for both peoples, is finally coming to an end.  But it’s not coming to an end because of battlefield success or economic exhaustion, on either side; it’s ending because of leadership change in both countries.  Nobody won and nobody’s happy; it’s just over.  The current leaders don’t care about the things that galled their predecessors into starting wars.  Try to remember that if you hear someone doling our credit or blame for winning or losing in Iraq.

The true tale isn’t told by another transfer of sovereignty, it’s told by American troops getting in airplanes and coming home.  It looks like we’re finally going to take that step, so maybe when 2009 goes out and turns into 2010, there will have been real progress in the one number that matters.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.