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What a despicable worm. What a revolting, loathsome, toad.
But this leads me to all this suspicion and fear of conspiracy about the latest terrorist warnings, well outlined, by the way, in the Post's White House Briefing by Dan Froomkin (there we go again, with the Post!) This is a pathetic state of affairs. Anyone with a mind ought to know by now that Bush has pretty much ignored the real war against terrorism (he's busy losing a war on "terror"). As a result we are even more susceptible to a terrorist attack than we were in the Fall of 2001. Al Qaeda has decentralized and grown, Afghanistan is on the edge of chaos and the Iraq war has been a boon for recruitment for Islamic extremists. From reports I've read (look 'em up, I'm being lazy), among other things Homeland Security has not addressed a issue near and dear to my heart (and home): inspection of cargo containers at the nation's ports. My roommate Steve and I have laid a bet: he wagers the dirty bomb will go off in the middle of Manhattan, I say it will go off at the container docks two blocks west of our place. This is a fun bet of course: we'll neither of us be able to collect on it. But many, many people don't -- or can't -- take Homeland Security seriously anymore. So many people are suspicious of the warnings, sure that the administration is only trying to change the subject. And so our suspicions are directed at the Bush administration, not at possible attacks. And so we are even more vulnerable. Ah, me, I sigh again. How is it that anyone can still be supportive of this morally bankrupt, dangerous administration?
First this: I was going to write about the New York Times' Editorial Note from yesterday apologizing for its bad coverage about WMD's leading up to the debacle in Iraq, so let me get it out of the way. I was going to write a letter to the editor asking the Times to fire Judith Miller, whose articles, though unattributed in the Note, were most often sited. Judy Miller raised my alarm bells most recently in her coverage of Richard Clarke, in which she seemed, under the circumstances, to be awfully easy on Bush. I was able to use her coverage as an example to my mother of how the Times has balanced reporting (that is, to my mother's thinking), but that is hardly a ringing endorsement of Miller's journalism. But mainly, I was going to tell the editor that I can't really trust the Times as I have before. I am transferring my allegiance to the Washington Post. Here's why. The Post has online forums with its journalists and in those forums I am given a sense of how the journalist works and how reporting decisions are made. Yesterday, Dana Priest was online, and she had this to say in response a question about the timing of the latest terrorist threats: "I'm very suspicious, especially of the 'election threat' -- so we didn't write this story for a while, in order to ask a wider range of people and certainly enough non-political types to feel certain we were not being spun." This isn't the first time I've read such a thing on the Post's online forums, and I find this inside look at how the journalist works along with the editorial staff much more reassuring than the Times' mea culpa. I will continue to read the Times, of course (it's my hometown paper after all), but with less confidence. Ah, me. Maybe I ought to write that damn letter to the editor, after all.
We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”
How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.
So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.
That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.
Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.
What a difference a year and bad policy make. I remember reading an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes a year or so ago in which a college professor wrote about how conservative her students had become and how out of touch they found her liberalism. Rather depressing it was. But now, in a contributed piece in the New York Times Week in Review on Sunday, Joshua Foer, a senior at Yale, describes how there has been a shift in students' political outlook as a result of the Bush administration's running of the war on terror. Foer convincingly argues that his generation had not experienced first-hand any of the political traumas that had made older generations suspicious of government. Instead of living through Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra, they had lived through military excursions that they saw as well-intentioned: getting food to the starving in Somalia and stopping ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. If anything, he maintains, they saw inaction in places like Rwanda as the government's not doing the right thing. But Bush's policies and tactics have changed all that. Foer summarizes a growing awareness among his colleagues that leadership cannot always be trusted by quoting statistics from a poll released last month by the Harvard University Institute of Politics: "The percentage of students who describe themselves as liberal has increased significantly over the last year - from 36 percent to 44 percent." Go here to read more on the survey. A bona fide positive accomplishment by the Bush administration at last!