A Level Gaze |
|
|
"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual." --G.C. Lichtenberg LinksNew Email Address! levelgaze@gmail.com Blogs NoWarBlog The Lefty Directory The Agonist aintnobaddude alicublog Alas, a Blog Altercation Ambivalent Imbroglio AmericaBlog American Street Amygdala Anger Management Angry Bear Armed Liberal Bad Attitudes Barney Gumble Bartcop Beyond Corporate Billmon Blah3 Body and Soul Booman Tribune Brad DeLong Busy Busy Busy Buzzflash By Neddie Jingo Calculated Risk CalPundit Chase me ladies Chris Nelson Contested Terrrain Cooped Up Conceptual Guerilla corrente Counterspin Crooked Timber Daily Howler Daily Kos Decembrist Demosthenes Driftglass D-Squared Digest Electrolite Eschaton Ethel Ezra Klein Fafblog! Fanatical Apathy Firedoglake First Draft Fistful of Euros get donkey! Globblog The Hamster Here's What's Left Horowitz Watch Housing Bubble Hullabaloo Intl News Istanblog James Wolcott Jesus' General Juan Cole Junius Lean Left Left Coast Breakdown Letter from Gotham Liberal Oasis MacDiva MadKane Mahablog Majikthise Making Light Marginal Revolution Mark Kleiman Matthew Yglesias MaxSpeak Media Whores Online Michael Finley Michael Froomkin MyDD My Left Wing Nathan Newman Off the Kuff Oliver Willis Orcinus Pandagon Pen-Elayne Pfaffenblog PLA The Poor Man R.B. Ham Raed in the Middle Ragout Raw Story ReachM High Cowboy Rittenhouse Review The Road to Surfdom Roger Ailes Rude Pundit Ruminate This Seeing the Forest Seize the Fish Self Made Pundit Sideshow Sirotablog Sisyphus Shrugged Skippy Slacktivist South Knox Bubba Steve Gilliard Talking Points Memo Talk Left The Talking Dog Tapped TBogg Ted Barlow Testify! Thinking It Through Through the Looking Glass TNR Online Tres Producers TRR Two Tears in a Bucket uggabugga Unknown News Vaara Wampum War Liberal Winning Argument Wonkette WTF Is It Now General Interest BBC News The Economist Metafilter RealPolitik Robot Wisdom 
Archives 
|
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Rice to Testify WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After days of intense pressure, the White House on Tuesday agreed to allow national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly and under oath before the commission investigating the September 11 attacks.Bush has been saying from Minute One that he wants to get to the Truth behind what allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place. Are we to conclude that he, in his infinite wisdom, just somehow knows that there is no additional useful information to be gleaned from his staff beyond what Rice will provide? How is he so sure the commission members will ask all of the right questions? What if Rice's testimony points in the direction of another White House official? Do these restrictions indicate even the tiniest shred of respect, let alone reverence, for the truth? If (god forbid) there is another attack on U.S. soil that takes advantage of security failure, a good case could be made for direct White House culpability for it over and above the failure to provide the security. Should such a disaster take place, the Bush administration will have actively and willfully impeded efforts to improve it. Father Knows Best In their fascinating new book, "The Bushes," Peter and Rochelle Schweizer depict former President George H. W. Bush as being proud but somewhat baffled by his son George W.'s rise to power. "You remember when your kid came home with two A's — and you thought she was going to fail," they quote him saying. "That's exactly what it's like."We're baffled, too, H.W. We see him as incurious, impatient, dogmatic, inflexible, callous, bullying, manichean, ill-informed, and abrasive, but you'd probably know better than we would. Help us cut through the crap, Dad. You know what he's like without all the packaging, ghost writing, and fluff, and you were surprised he would emerge as a leader. Why did you doubt his potential, and how would you explain how your hitherto thoroughly unsuccessful (and unappealing) progeny found himself governor of Texas and President of the United States of America? I mean, he never did get an A, did he? Did he accomplish it the same way he managed to make his fortune, through the efforts of your social and business network rather than through any effort or ability on his own part? Was the last name he shared with you a factor in getting the republican establishment behind him? Was backslapping quid pro quo with the conservative moneyed class, whom W has handsomely rewarded viahis tax policies, instrumental in his rise to power? Or did he develop all the qualities of a good leader out of the blue overnight? The child may be father to the man, but you were father to the child. What's his secret? Thursday, March 25, 2004
I Say Yaseen, You Say Yassin... I have an unusual last name, at least in the US. In print, it's usually spelled as above or as 'Yasin.' I almost never hear the sound of it, except when it's directed specifically to me. I expect the Smiths of the world are much less sensitive to the sound of their surnames than I am.* But hearing it on the radio something like 1,000 times in the past few days has been really jarring. My surname is pronounced exactly the same as that of the dead Hamas leader, only mine's Jewish. The somewhat addled mental state that's followed prompted me to give the subject of Yassin and Hamas a good deal more thought than I might have. The Palestinians are, in every meaningful sense, a stateless people. They are neither served nor represented by the government of Israel. They feel very badly treated by Israel. Having no government of their own (Yasser Arafat surrounded by the Israeli army in a bombed-out compound doesn't count), they have put together what is possible under the conditions they find themselves in. With the help of funding from abroad, Hamas and Hezbollah were possible. What are the functions of a sovereign government? Arguably, the first one is to defend the State, to have an army, the members of which must least threaten to kill people. Just about every government in history has killed people. The fact that Palestinians have slapped together organized militias is to be expected. It always happens. If they're not Israeli, they're something else, and feel the need of an army. I'm not saying Yassin was a good man, any more than I would say Sharon is. But his society felt it needed a son of a bitch, and he got the job. When he's gone, there will be another one, and he will have as many followers or more. It's natural for people to join together and form governments and armies as nation-states. It's often seen as legitimate (in some sense) for nation-states to kill people in defense of its citizens and their property. Why are the Palestinians' actions termed terrorism? If they were not prevented from doing so, they would form a state and exercise that power legitimately, and with the responsibilities that come with membership in the international community. They wouldn't last long if they made unprovoked attacks beyond their borders. If Israel wants to end Palestinian terrorism, a Palestinian state is the only reasonable first step. * There's a bit in Bob Marley's I Don't Want to Wait in Vain that goes "Ya see" that never fails to make me jump a little. Edit: incomplete post fixed. Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Why is it Kerry's Fault? Because We Suck. Hesiod brings to our attention a lovely little article in which John Kerry is blamed for the security failures at Boston's Logan International Airport that contributed to the 9/11 attacks. Former FAA security officials say the Massachusetts senator had the power to prevent at least the Boston hijackings and save the World Trade Center and thousands of lives, yet he failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his state's main airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings. Later in the article, Sullivan is quoted as having told Kerry that "The DOT OIG [Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General, to which Kerry had forwarded the materials Sullivan gave him] has become an ineffective overseer of the FAA." Whose fault is it that the DOT had ineffective oversight? Kerry's? Before 9/11, Kerry could be forgiven for assuming that the Bush administration actually cared about airport security, and was doing the best it could to improve it. Especially in light of the fact that the situation was already common knowledge. Rewind to May 6, 2001. That night, a Boston TV station (Fox-25) aired reporter Deborah Sherman's story on an undercover investigation at Logan that Sullivan and another retired agent helped set up. In nine of 10 tries, a crew got knives and other weapons through security checkpoints - including the very ones the 9/11 hijackers would later exploit. Kerry just underscored the point. If he's at fault for the continued security lapses, then so is everyone else who saw that report. Unlike most of them, Kerry actually did something about it. I think their underlying logic is even more telling, even if I do have to stretch to make the point: 1. Kerry's having passed on the warnings to the DOT, under his own imprimateur, wasn't enough because everybody knows the Bush admin wouldn't take anything from a democrat seriously. 2. Instead, Kerry should have jumped up and down, screaming, to get them to do something about this, which would have made Bushco even more suspicious of political motives. 3. Upon reflection in the light of the media attention (?) generated by Kerry's paroxysms, Bushco would finally come to realize that the safety of air travel is its responsibility, and did something about it to guard its political flank. That's the most charitable interpretation of their argument I can come up with. The presuppositions behind it, that the Bush administration is selective about which realities it acknowledges and only reacts to situations that directly affect its political fortunes, both describe a group that is manifestly unfit to wield power. Monday, March 15, 2004
Spanish Self-Interest Kevin Drum believes that it "would reflect very poorly indeed on the Spanish electorate" if they "were upset that Aznar's support for the Iraq war was responsible for al-Qaeda targeting Spain." I'm having trouble with his math. If there's one thing pretty much everyone on the left agrees, it's that the Iraq war was not an "anti-terrorist" act, and especially not one targeted at Al Qaeda. However, the war is an instance of the infidel West attacking Muslims. One of the main goals of AQ is to foment hatred of the West among Muslims. Before the Iraq war, they cited as grievances what they contended was America's support of Israel's brutal repression of Palestinians, US military presence in Saudi Arabia, and the general history of Western interference in Islamic countries. Before the Iraq war, these grievances alone were enough to inspire 19 men to blow themselves on 9/11, to say nothing of their other attacks. The war in Iraq itself furthers their purpose. Had we limited ourselves to attacks on those who had attacked us, little sympathy for the jihadists' cause would have resulted. Killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the course of toppling a dictator who was obviously unaffiliated with AQ and who presented no threat to the West is another matter entirely. Terrorists deserve what happens to them. The Iraqi civilians didn't. The war is being presented by the jihadists as yet another example of the West's high-handedness and contemptious disregard for the lives of Muslims. The goal of terrorism is to affect public opinion and to scare people into not opposing the terrorists' aims. If (if!) the Spanish electorate was punishing Aznar solely because they perceived his actions as being anti-terrorist enough to provoke an al-Qaeda attack, the terrorists have accomplished their goal: the Spanish public has shown that if they are attacked they will vote against a politician who strongly opposed the terrorists. This logic only makes sense with regard to governments that supported the Iraq war. Had the attacks occurred in Germany or France, the electorate there would be more, not less, likely to favor hardline anti-terrorist politicians. Elections would turn on not doing something dumb in the future. In Spain, the election was about having done something dumb in the past. Aznar's government was an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Iraq war. That, and not any anti-terrorist actions, made them a target of AQ. Making yourself a target for no good reason isn't a good idea. I think the Spanish people are smart enough to figure this out. Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Hang Your Head, Gray Lady You have printed in your pages what must be the most actively empty and stupid collection of words in your history, under the headline "Hooked on Heaven Lite." Quoth David Brooks: Who worries you most, Mel Gibson or Mitch Albom? Do you fear Gibson, the religious zealot, the man accused of narrow sectarianism and anti-Semitism, or Albom, the guy who writes sweet best sellers like "Tuesdays With Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven?" Perhaps nobody is protesting or getting angry about our "easygoing narcissism" because it hasn't repeatedly been correlated with intolerance, repression, war, and, occasionally, genocide. I'm sure the Iraqis and Afghanis don't think we've gone soft. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It's all about you. I seem to recall a certain messiah who reduced all morality to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, in other words, to human feelings. As for me, I'll take bromides over brimstone every day of the week. I don't happen to agree that we'd be better if we were only more sheep-like. Brooks attempts to convince his readers that "Our general problem is not that we're too dogmatic. Our more common problems come from the other end of the continuum." If our president is to be believed, the greatest threat to the future of our nation and world peace is the rising tide of Islamic extremism. We are better than our enemies, we are told, because we are a free nation where everyone has the inborn right to express his or her opinion and to act as he or she sees fit, free from the dictates of tyranny. Brooks evidently disagrees, citing with disapproval Christopher Lasch's idea of "the theraputic mentality[,] an anti-religion that tries to liberate people from the idea that they should submit to a higher authority, so they can focus more obsessively on their own emotional needs." To what higher authority should we be submitting ourselves, David? God isn't down here, telling us what to do, unless you are able to discern the will of the divine in tornadoes and car crashes (and 9/11?). To whom, then? Should we abase ourselves before ministers? Priests? Imams? Rabbis? Lamas? Madmen? To which ones in particular, David? Worst of all, Brooks neglects to point out even one negative consequence, however far in the future, that will follow from our putative shift away from "the rich moral framework of organized religion or rigorous philosophy"* It's almost as if he's counting on some universal disgust arising from exposure to words like "narcissism," "obsessively," and "schmaltzy" to do his lifting for him. He doesn't bother to make his own point. If there's something more to be feared than Gibson's exclusionary zealotry or Albom's nonprescriptive theraputic depictions, it's the proliferation of poorly-reasoned, ill-informed, and nakedly pandering spew such as "Hooked on Heaven Lite" in our newspaper of record. * I'd bet Brooks couldn't come up with a rigorous philosophy meeting his criteria that wasn't stuffed to the gills with religion. Thursday, March 04, 2004
Shadow Government Ezra Klein of Pandagon has an intriguing idea about how to keep the media focused on Bush & Co.'s, er, shortcomings: form a shadow government. Name a VP soon, and a "cabinet" in June. Each member of the shadow cabinet would comment on Bush administration actions and proposals in his/her area, point up shortcomings and contradictions, and put forward what a Kerry administration would do instead. The press would eat it up, and the nation would benefit from a democratic counterpoint on every issue. I only see one major problem with this approach, and it could prove a deal-breaker: it's an awful lot of cats to herd. All the participants have to be lined up ahead of time and commit to making themselves available to serve in a Kerry administration. They would have to abandon government positions and careers in exchange for tenuous futures. Further, the scheme would greatly telescope the usual vetting process. If a member of the shadow cabinet were to say something out of tune with the rest of Kerry's platform, the republicans are sure to jump all over it and say that Kerry can't manage people and isn't fit to govern. If their collective message is to be effective, Kerry has to come up with concrete, detailed policies for each department in a very big hurry. Then he has to get each of the participants to sign onto the program, even and especially where it conflicts with his/her own position. Should Bush win, these people will have undermined their credibility for nothing. If there are perceived differences among the "cabinet," the press will find itself with an irresistible drama to follow that can only help Bush's cause. As prospective cabinet members, participants' backgrounds and character would be fair game for the other side, which could target them at leisure, unconstrained by the rules and decorum of the Senate chamber. Anything the slime machine came up with on these people would stick to Kerry, before the election. Instead of a shadow government, Kerry should round up 3 or 4 high-profile Democrats as "official spokesmen," one for foreign policy, one for budgetary issues, one for labor issues, etc. They'd be perceived in much the same way as shadow cabinet members, and receive nearly as much press coverage, without giving the other side such a big target to shoot at. "We must protect the sanctity of marriage" --George W. Bush What is this sanctity? It can accommodate divorce? It can be done for money, for citizenship, out of desperation? This is holy? This is stupid. |