I guess this means they don't like him anymore

The US raids the house of Chalabi. Both Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall give plenty of good analysis of this, leading to the good analysis of yet others. But what I found particularly amusing was this quote from an article in Salon by Andrew Cockburn:

U.S. disenchantment with Chalabi has been growing since it dawned on the White House and the Pentagon that everything he had told them about Iraq -- from Saddam Hussein's fiendish weapons arsenal to the crowds who would toss flowers at the invaders to Chalabi's own popularity in Iraq -- had been completely false. Some months ago King Abdullah of Jordan was surprised to be informed by President Bush that the king could "piss on Chalabi."

Nothing like Our Fearless Leader at an unguarded moment...

Us and Them

Our computer is currently out of commission and there's not a lot of time for writing here at work, so here in the meantime is a "guest blog" from brother John:

"It just makes me madder," Bob Mansen, a retired electric company manager, said as he waited to have his hair cut at Art's Barber Shop on Main Street in Oswego, Illinois. "Let's kill them all. Let's wipe them off the face of the earth. This is war, even though a lot of people don't realize it. They’re certainly at war with us, and I'd rather fight them over there than have to fight them here." (New York Times, May 13, 2004)

And the Times quotes Rush Limbaugh from his radio program: "They're the ones who are sick. They're the ones who are perverted. They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman. They are the ones who are human debris, not the United States of America and not our soldiers and not our prison guards."

Now wait just one dog garn minute here. I thought we ended up fighting this war to liberate "them." Wasn't that the fallback justification? There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There are no nuclear arms in Iraq. There are -- well, WERE -- no Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. And there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11. But all that didn’t matter in the end, because this was, after all, "Operation Iraqi Freedom”, right? As our mother said when I challenged her on the legitimacy of this war: "I thought you people were for human rights." Doesn't liberating "them” from Saddam justify an otherwise unjustifiable war?

So what happened to "them"? Well, now, "they" are perverted, dangerous, subhuman, human debris and we should kill "them" all and wipe "them" off the face of the earth.

This is hardly surprising. The right wing always wants to have it both ways. In fact, right wing ideology is a mythology built on contradictory arguments. Deficits were bad; deficits are good. Homosexuals were pedophiles and perverts; homosexuals are a threat to marriage because they want to get married and raise families. All life, from the moment of conception, is to be defended; capital punishment, nuclear armament, unjustifiable war are all to be defended. We are going to war against Iraq because Iraq is an imminent threat to the U.S.; we are going to war to liberate the Iraqi people. This works in mythology. A mythology does not have to make sense. One myth in the mythology does not have to agree with all the other myths. But this does not work in reality.

The reality is that there was no justification for this war. Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. Religious organizations around the world, among them the Roman Catholic Church, The Anti-Defamation Commission of B'nai B'rith and the National Council of Churches, condemned this war as "unjust”.

The reality is that the war and its aftermath (are we at the aftermath yet?) were neither well planned nor well executed by the neo-cons at the Pentagon. In fact, General Eric K. Shinseki, the Chief of Staff of the Army, was forced into early retirement when he insisted that the Secretary of Defense had underestimated the number of troops needed to win the war.

The reality is that the bad planning for the war and the lack of planning for what came after major combat ceased have led to the infiltration of Islamic terrorists into Iraq, have resulted in the atrocities at Abu Ghraib committed by under-trained and understaffed reserve forces, and have manifested a deadly lack of security for both Iraqi civilians and American civilians working in Iraq.

The right wing wants to start pointing fingers at "them." Get real. The problem for the right is that the "they" who are to blame for the fiasco in Iraq have names: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz... Man oh man, where does this list end?

All right, I'm all for it. Let's get rid of them. Vote the liar out of office in November. Iraq cannot be rebuilt without the help of the rest of the world. But the rest of the world distrusts -- all right, loathes --George Bush and his administration. It is only under a new administration that we have a chance to enlist other nations to help "them" in Iraq build a peaceful, secure country.

What Me Worry? Maybe...

I try not to be overly optimistic reading the news about Bush's dive in the polls. I can't help but try to imagine what kind of plan B Bush/Rove and company are planning up in their well-funded Dirty Tricks Dep't. (Does that make me a conspiracy theorist?) I wish they would have used this picture for the article however. I'm always surprised more hasn't been made about Bush's amazingly striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neumann, both his appearance and his demeanor... I can't think of a better model for that shit-eating grin...

"Look, David, the president sets the tone."

And that talk of Watergate reminds me about something Richard Main emailed me - Richard, hope you don't mind me posting it:

I'll never forget this as long as I live:
I remember watching David Frost interview Richard Nixon in the late 70s. Frost was trying to get Nixon to accept responsibility for the abuses of power during his administration. Nixon dodged at first and finally said "Look, David, the president sets the tone." Nixon said he did not know about the Watergate break-in before it happened BUT the results and responsibilities were the same. He accepted that he had set a tone, a climate where these abuses were inevitable.

This President set the tone with his ruling re: the Geneva Conventions. Then he hides behind the principal of "plausible deniability" - ["I didn't know because Rumsfeld didn't tell me"]. But it's his job to know. Further, this president doesn't want to hear bad news or disagreement. He set the tone that kept Rumsfeld from telling him about this.

The American mind is too saturated with fantasy (movies, TV) to connect the dots.

The latest from Sy Hersh

I read the latest article from Sy Hersh in the New Yorker. Rumsfeld's sanctioning of the interrogation methods that led to the disaster at Abu Ghraib, just leaves me with a depressed, sinking feeling, for some reasons that I can articulate and others not as well. On the one hand, the revelations about interrogation methods that go beyond the Geneva Convention are hardly a surprise, especially post-9/11. The article suggests that these methods, selectively applied, were producing a good amount of actionable intelligence. What is perhaps most depressing about the article is that its final conclusion is not that these methods are to be deplored outright, but that the real disaster of Abu Ghraib is that Rumsfeld, through his assistant Stephen Cambone, allowed these methods to be far too loosely applied, allowing something like Abu Ghraib to essentially blow up and reveal the existence of such methods to the world - in the process doing incalculable damage to the effectiveness of these methods, to the moral stance of America in the world, and as a result of both, to the War on Terror. Which is to say that Rush Limbaugh, in the onslaught of brainless comments he made in the previous week about Abu Ghraib, was right to a point, before becoming completely wrong. Yes, selectively applied, these methods were effective. But by approving the extension of these methods to areas (i.e. Abu Ghraib) where such methods could not be, as they must be, carefully controlled, Cambone, and by his approval, Rumsfeld, made a lethal miscalculation.

But beyond the necessary cover-up that has occurred as a result of this mishandling, beyond the existence of the methods themselves, and the abuses that occurred as a result, beyond the further demolition of America's standing in the global community, there is something else to my personal sinking feeling I can't quite put my finger on. Forced to define it, i suppose I'd have to say that it is the feeling of confirmation of my worst assumptions about this administration, a certain bloodless concession to ruthless cynicism, coupled with an almost maniacal, therefore irrational, therefore blinding, sense of self-righteousness, that leads to these kinds of "experiments". The question is - and it is the ridiculously innocent part of myself, the six-year-old that doesn't want to grow up who is asking this - when a person has decided that it is okay to go so far to achieve an end, where does a person's, or a group of individual's, boundaries on their personal actions finally end?

There is also the depressing calculus that one is forced to perform - as bad as these abuses at Abu Ghraib are, they still are nothing, a drop in an enormous bucket, compared to what Saddam did at this same prison. This doesn't forgive the abuses, but doesn't it ameliorate the emotional effect of the abuses to the degree that they are virtually forgiven? Not, apparently, when the one remaining argument for our invading Iraq in the first place, is a supposedly moral one. And it is this in particular that made Rumsfeld's choice to allow these methods to take place, without careful control, so abysmally bad.

The sad thing is the degree to which this same article will inflame the worst of the conservative press - Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael "That Liberal's Liver Tasted Great with a Nice Chianti and Some Fava Beans" Savage - with false vindication about Rumsfeld's judgment in the first place... it's all really just the fault of the LIBERAL PRESS, who allowed all of this to blow up out of all proportion. The liberal press! And it's Sy Hersh! On the one hand it's Vietnam, on the other hand, it's 1972 and Watergate, with all of the same heated reactions, accusations, and denials, coming from every which way, all over again...

To think in 1972, I was only four at the time, I was just a babe, addicted to Bugs Bunny and the Odyssey Home Video Game, I had no idea what was going on in the sad, overheated adult world swirling around my head, Republicans in full Republican-denial mode....

For hopeless geeks only

Spent the last two days at E3, Electronic Entertainment Exposition, watching thousands of addicts happily plugging away at the latest released or soon-to-be-released video games. Didn't think about politics much. In fact, subjected to that media barrage of sex, violence, and unmitigated marketing blitzkrieg, after a few hours of the deluge it's questionable whether I was technically thinking at all, or simply operating under the basest instincts of my reptilian brain. But a few actual thoughts did creep up out of the shadowy murk. First of all, for those of you who care (probably best if you don't), graphics at the highest end are becoming almost unbelievably photo-realistic and beautiful as well. I was completely awed by the demonstration of lighting effects created by the latest Unreal development tools. Light pouring out of a spinning frame of stained glass did all of the right things on a distant brick wall, on a wooden table, on a chair against the wall. These environments, rendered on the spot and subject to any manner of spontaneous change, could not have looked more real, more perfectly lit, more literally glowing. Difficult not to be awed by the creative forces that are able to recreate such things from a dance of nothing but ones and zeroes.

On the other hand, developers are still far, far away from mastering human motion and expression. It's getting better, but still it's stiff, stiff, stiff. That said, I did have more than a couple of moments when I was honestly confused, at least momentarily, by whether people on the mega-screens covering any and all available corners of the convention halls were virtual or actual, so they must be getting something right.

In the end though, I just find myself incredibly curious about the end result of all of this game play. It is arguably the most addictive non-narcotic activity in modern culture, but what ultimately does it achieve? People spend endless hours at these things, in certain respects (and I've felt this certainly) they are gone, the real world does not exist, they are in the game. I used to stay up until five in the morning playing Quake. I couldn't stop myself, I literally lost the wiill to drag myself away. (I also occasionally suffered brief paranoid fantasies in which I began to wonder if I wasn't working the controls behind a real man-killing robot running around somewhere. Hey, your mind goes funny at four in the morning but that's another story...) It's just entertainment, sure, but at what point does entertainment overstep itself and constitute an actual health, or mental health hazard? Or are games ultimately a good thing in some strange obscure fashion I can't quite comprehend? All I know is, if there were only time enough and unlimited resources, it's easy to imagine that some gamers would never, ever stop, except to fulfill the most essential of survival functions. Given enough time, let's say an additional life just like in a video game, would I? Hmmm..... (In reality, yes, because I'd have to make time for all of those movies, and then all of those albums, books, tv shows, concerts, trips to various points on the globe, and etc... I hereby advocate an extra life for each one!)

Maybe the highlight was the display of old arcade games and home console games downstairs. Got to play Galaga for free - my childhood dream come true. The old obsession with Galaga, upon which I must have spent the greater part of my income from delivering papers, came back full force without a blink. Strangely enough, I think I actually played better yesterday than I did twenty years (oh my god is it really twenty years) ago. And then there was the old Odyssey, the very first of the home console games, where graphics were reduced to color overlays that we had to stick on the television screen through the magic of static electricity. My favorite, after jai alai, which didn't need the screens, was the haunted house game. I was only five but I was addicted even then...