The Boss for President!

Okay, not really. But there is a current movement to have Bruce Springsteen hold a group concert at Giants Stadium with other like-minded artists the night of the opening of the Republican Convention, as a kind of high-high-publicity protest. Sign up!

The lying never stops, it just comes thick and fast

Big Brother's apparently no fan of Dick Cheney:

Cheney is one of the most vile people I have ever seen on the political stage. He is now accusing the New York Times of muddying the issue of Saddam's having had anything to do with 9/11 with what Cheney claims has been the administration's claim all along that he had only "longstanding ties" to Al Qaeda! The article in the Times about Cheney's accusations reviews its coverage, making a point-by-point case that the Times was perfectly clear when it was discussing the issue of Saddam and 9/11 and when it was discussing the issue of Saddam and Al Qaeda. Of course, the right wing will continue to take the big liar's word for it and bellow on about how the liberal media as embodied in the New York Times is distorting what the Bush administration has been saying. Never mind that it was Cheney who said that it's "not surprising" that people think that Saddam had something to do with 9/11 (this is clarification?), or that the president, in his letter to Congress right before the war in Iraq, included retaliation for 9/11 as one of his legitimate reasons for going to war. So, of course, Cheney is lying, and talking out of that side of his mouth that appears to do all the lying, er, I mean talking. But the rightwingers will all start crying about how the liberal media distorts everything. Will they go to the source? Will they read the Times article and see how very clear it is? Of course not. So Cheney's vile mission is accomplished. On second thought, scratch my first statement. Cheney has no peer. He is the single most vile person I have ever seen on the political stage. And that's including George W. Bush.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

From one blog to another - reading Kevin Drum's blog today I came across the link to this great article by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post about the clearly transparent links that we all now can see between the White House and Abu Ghraib.

Serious absurdity

Presidential press briefings and gaggles are always high camp since Scott McLellan took over from Ari "there is no falsehood too preposterous for me to utter" Fleischer. McLellan is no master of the breathtaking, staggering untruth like his predecessor. Instead he chooses to employ the much less inflammatory but equally frustrating method of endless, unbreachable stonewalling. He likes saying "I disagree with your characterization" a lot. A lot! I mean, all the time! And he always says, "You need to look at the facts", when in fact, the facts say the exact opposite of what he's asserting. It's a great device because it makes the person arguing with you go nearly insane with frustration. You'll find plenty of examples in today's press briefing, during which McLellan gets no relief at all from a press rabid with the 9/11 commission's conclusion that there was no link between Iraq and al Qaeda of any substance. He argues that the Bush Administration's stated position is consistent with the 9/11 commission findings, but as can be seen here, it feels as though he's trying to fight back the deluge of evidence to the contrary being thrown at him by the press with a couple of broken chopsticks, statements made by Powell and Tenet, the first of which has actually been largely retracted by Powell himself, and, well, we all know what happened to Tenet... he's now on his way out "for personal reasons"... Scott McLellan press briefings...always high comedy. I wonder why Kerry doesn't just hand copies of these out as campaign material...

Diplomats for Change

In my experience, I can't remember ever hearing about anything like this happening during a Presidential election, a bi-partisan coalition of 27 former diplomats and military officers, so worried by the policies of a standing President that they band together to help ensure that he is not re-elected:

An unprecedented bipartisan coalition of 27 career chiefs of mission and retired four-star military leaders will launch a nationwide campaign to press for the need for change in U.S. foreign and defense policy because they are deeply concerned by the damage the Bush Administration has caused to our national and international interests.

The Bush-Cheney camp is attempting to cast this in a partisan light of course, despite the presence of a number of life-long Republicans among the coalition, along with such prominent retired officers as General Joseph Hoar, commander of US forces in the Middle East during the administration of Bush's father. What no one has yet asked however is: where are the coalition of diplomats and military officers in support of another four years of the Bush administration? Where is even one?

Has Andrew Sullivan finally seen the light?

I know I should select a partial quote from this rant of Andrew Sullivan's, but then I liked the whole thing so much, and it's such a contained comprehensive laundry list of why true conservatives should not vote for Bush, that I figured, what the hell...

Jonah Goldberg argues that worrying about Bush's fiscal record when he's fighting the war on terror may be legitimate but shouldn't bar anyone from supporting Bush. He goes on, referring to yours truly (i.e. Sullivan):

A blog which soared with high-minded rhetoric about how the war on terror is the test for this generation and that Bush was the right man to lead that struggle, now day-after-day tries to whittle away at reasons to support Bush in the fall as if the war on terror were merely another issue which can be trumped by any other issue you happen to feel more passionate about.

Maybe "fiscal conservatives" aren't defined by their fiscal conservatism? Or maybe they think this election isn't a choice about a single issue be it the deficit or, say, gay marriage? Maybe the election is about a choice between George W. Bush and the people he would appoint to staff his administration and the judicial branch and John F. Kerry and the people he would appoint and how those respective administrations would govern across a wide array of issues including first and foremost the war on terror? And maybe most conservatives find that a cost-benefit analysis on that question yields a fairly obvious answer.

(Sully again:) Fairly obvious? But Jonah himself recently pondered the following observation : "While I still think it would be bad for America if Bush lost the election to Kerry - and terrible for Republicans - it's less clear it would be bad for the conservative movement." Hmmm. And why would he say something like that? Could it be that Bush has not governed as a conservative in critical ways - and hasn't even governed competently in others? Let's list a few: the WMD intelligence debacle - the worst blow to the credibility of the U.S. in a generation; Abu Ghraib - a devastating wound to to America's moral standing in the world; the post-war chaos and incompetence in Iraq; an explosion in federal spending with no end in sight; no entitlement reform; a huge addition to fiscal insolvency with the Medicare drug entitlement; support for a constitutional amendment, shredding states' rights; crusades against victimless crimes, like smoking pot and watching porn; the creeping fusion of religion and politics; the erosion of some critical civil liberties in the Patriot Act. I could go on. Is there any point at which a conservative might consider not voting for Bush? For the editor of National Review Online, the answer is indeed "fairly obvious." But for people not institutionally related to the G.O.P., the only question is: where would that line be?

I take all of this with a grain of salt, perhaps a block of salt, because I've grown to use to seeing Sullivan speak complete sense, only to turn on liberals with the usual "puh-lease, give me a break" style of rhetoric that is such a negative trademark of so much punditry on the right (a style of rhetoric that he used endlessly, among other things, when arguing for what he now admits was a hugely misrun and misadertised war). This style of rhetoric, all dismissive posture with little in the way of substance (and the entire source of Rush Limbaugh's enormous success), suggests that common sense is implicitly a quality of the reasoning on the right, when - as has been seen for example by the colossal vindication of pre-war liberal complaints over justification and post-war planning for the Iraq War - this is decidedly not the case. Which explains my frustration with Andrew Sullivan, who is clearly intelligent but who can mix real sense with this kind of empty blustery posturing so randomly you just want to finally shake him and ask him to just LISTEN TO HIMSELF. And now, maybe, just maybe, it seems he finally has. But I'm not holding my breath.

One last Bloomsday post

Really just a link, to the New York Times editorial...

Better to think about Ulysses

More info on the Bloomsday Centenary from a co-worker...

And more from Jeffrey Eugenides, the author of The Virgin Suicides.

And still more...

The Liars that Came FROM BEYOND!

Do they actually imagine ANYONE is going to believe this? Even if it were true, that is, even if we did live in an alternative realm where the vice president's staff takes care of major pieces of business with the COMPANY HE USED TO RUN and decides to keep this from him, this truth would seem to suggest a massive lack of discipline that would require at least a couple of people getting fired, and right quick! Good Lord...

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was told in 2002 that Cheney's former company would receive no-bid work to secretly plan restoration of Iraq's oil facilities, but the information wasn't given to the vice president, a White House official said Tuesday.

Kevin Kellems, Cheney's spokesman, told The Associated Press he confirmed the decision not to inform Cheney with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

"The vice president was not informed" that Halliburton would get the Defense Department contract, Kellems said.

Sure, sounds plausible...

In case you have a couple of spare minutes today

You too can read Ulysses, right here online!

In the land of the blind

On the way in today I was re-reading the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses, the chapter told in the first person by a character identified only as I, in which Bloom, the main character, an Irish Jew, walks into a bar and after a lengthy political discussion (man those Irish can talk up a storm, and talk about the colorful verbiage...) is eventually chased down the street by a bellicose drunken racist nationalistic windbag known only as "the citizen" after Bloom suggests that not only was Jesus and all of his family Jewish, but his Father in Heaven was as well. Bloom just escapes before being beaned by a biscuitbox that the citizen tosses after him down the street.

If Joyce was writing the same scene in America today, the citizen of course would be known as "the patriot", and there is only the surface language to separate his over-the-top racism, nationalism and religious bigotry from that of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Co. dominating the public face of the right in our country right now. Which was exactly Joyce’s point. Joyce, who had so little tolerance for nationalism that he deliberately chose to become a permanent exile as an adult, a man without a country, clearly had nothing but contempt for bigotry of any stripe (which was why he deliberately made his main character an explicit outsider). His main literary device in writing the chapter is to alternate the local extremely colorful Dublin patois of the first-person "I" with paragraphs employing the language of legal documents, mythology, children’s books, society pages, and on and on, while spewing out endless lists of names of figures both fictional and historical throughout history, as if to say (among other things), regardless of the costume, this scene occurs over and over again in some fashion or another in every society, in every age, over and over again. Which was one reason, among many, I loved the book as much as I did – this constant revelation that Joyce is playing out, that then is now, that history in many ways just plays itself out the same way over and over again in different costumes. And I can right now hear the poor man turning in his grave at this huge act of literary reductionism...

Bloomsday 2004

In about 4 minutes, the 100th Anniversary of Bloomsday begins. I wish I was in Dublin. There the festivities (read: lots and lots of drinking of lots and lots of Guinness and Jameson among whatever else...) have already been going on for a week...

I know a lot of people who've actually attempted to read Ulysses hate the damn book, but it really broke my head open when I read it in college - this explicit demonstration of the absolutely staggering amount of interconnected everything that goes on in the short span of a 24-hour period (albeit for Bloom the main character an almost unbelievably active day). It's too late in the night for me to go into this too deeply, but it affected me pretty deeply. More specifically, it filled me, and still fills me, with a sense of quiet, mystified calm at the oddity of life, and frankly I've been wishing a lot lately that I could have just a bit more time each day to sit down and read and think and concentrate again on such things. While there are vast galaxies of things to not recommend about my life back when I first became obssessed with Joyce (among other writers, though he was the first big obsession) there is one thing - a hard-to-define sensibility that feels like the closest I've ever come to a deeper understanding of life - how random and arbitrary it is that we are where are when we are, and yet how this sudden flashing heartbreaking realization of its beauty can overtake us, however briefly.

Anyway, here's to Bloomsday! I've got to go to bed...

Share these with all of your conservative friends and family please

For those of you out there with stalwart Conservative friends and/or family who can't seem to shake the misguided idea that Bush and Associates are the best thing for National Security since Mutual Assured Destruction, and who are never going to have their opinions changed by "academicians" and op-ed writers (who are of course all "Blame-America" and "hate-America" liberals), send them this article from the NY Times today, describing a coalition of 26 retired American diplomats and military officers urging Americans to vote Bush out of office this November, contending that his administration's policies endanger national security. No one is going to mistake any of these individuals for Michael Moore or Paul Krugman, though I can't wait to see Marc Racicot attempt to paint Gen. Joseph Hoar as a partisan "hate-America" lefty. Unbelievably, I'm sure he'll try...

Also, there is this profile of Rand Beers, who was formerly Bush's special assistant for combating terrorism and is now Kerry's foreign policy advisor. Together I think they'd make a great complementary double-volley for all of those conservative diehards in your life...

Bush asks for Pope on a Rope

Just in case there was any question that recent decisions by certain Catholic bishops to deny communion to parishioners (and Presidential candidates) based on their political beliefs was a political maneuver (okay there was no question) we now have this choice article from the New York Times detailing how Bush is essentially and explicitly pushing the Vatican to help manipulate American Presidential politics...

On his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.

In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."

As Josh Marshall points out at Talking Points Memo, it's hard to remember there was a time when Kennedy had to explicitly deny that he was receiving directives from the Pope...