[Transcript and embedded video below the fold]
On Tuesday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart started off by commemorating "Still President" George W. Bush's 134th overseas trip. It is doubly shocking to hear that President Bush has set a new record for most overseas visits by any U.S. President, considering that he had made the fewest overseas trips of any U.S. Presidential candidate in modern history. Up to age 50, not including border crossings into Mexico, Dubya had been abroad only once, visiting his father (at the time, the U.S. ambassador) in China for a month in 1975. As late as 1998, he had never been to Europe, never been to Australia, never been to Africa, never even been to Canada. He did manage to get in two trips towards the end of his term as governor of Texas, going to the Middle East and The Gambia in 1998 and 2000, respectively, but he was stunningly incurious about the rest of the world, for a man who held the ambition of leading the community of nations.
The bulk of Stewart's commentary, though, covered some of President Bush's linguistic legacy, not merely mangling and mispronouncing words, but proactively redefining them.
The video is in three segments, with transcript below.
Thank you very much, you're very kind. Welcome to the show; my name is Jon Stewart. Man, the show tonight — from whatever the longitude and latitude is here in the studio. [roughly 40.76°N, 73.99°W] Seth Rogen's going to be joining us, from the film Pineapple Express. It's an incredible film: one man — I'm just gonna give you the brief plot point — one man has 24 hours to get a train full of pineapples across the country, or his nephew's luau-themed bar mitzvah — ruined!! You're not buying any of this shit; all right, fair enough.
But for now, all eyes on Beijing and the Summer Olympics; the opening ceremony, Friday, 8.8.08 at 8pm. By the way, bet that number in Pick-4; I'm sure no one else will — you can share the prize with 1.2 billion Chinese. People from all around the world, succumbing to Olympic fever — which, by the way, you can catch in China without the Olympics. Whatever you do, don't go near their pigs or birds. All right.
Of course, President Bush left for the games early, in an effort to beat the traffic. Landing in South Korea for a day of trade talks, the President received a mixed welcome, some hailing his arrival, others demonstrating against him, with a mix of synchronized "terrorist fist jabs" and characters from Nintendo's new game, "Wii Protest." It seemed like just another ordinary trip for the President, except [balloons and confetti] it's his 134th visit to a foreign country! It's a record! Hold on — [party "blowout" noisemaker] — he's now officially — this is true — our most-travelled President in history. It's a little suspicious, perhaps validating what I've been saying all along: President George W. Bush either has a thirst for international knowledge, or is a drug mule. You decide. [character voice:] I know there's one way to check, but I'm not goin' there.
But there's no denying the President's a hard-core man of the road; that's why, everywhere he visits, he leaves hobo symbols for future Presidents — you know, "10 Downing Street's got nice lady and good food!" Bush, of course, also holds the record for most Presidential vacation days: 506 and counting. You know, between that and the travel days, I think it's clear: there's something about being at the White House our President cannot stand. [Bush character voice:] "I can't help but thinkin', I'm sleepin' in the same bed where my mom and dad used to do it."
Now, seeing the President — that is disturbing onso many different levels — seeing the President overseas reminds us that he is still President, and that we don't really have that much more time with him to fully appreciate all that he's ... done for us. So, perhaps there's no time like the present to begin assessing the damage.
[graphics: "George Walker Bush — His Not Yet Legacy: Language"]
Tonight, we focus on the President's use of language, and we've all heard the jokes, how he stumbles over words, doesn't know how to pronounce them, has shit in his mouth — you know, "subliminable," "fool me once, can't be fooled the shame on who wanna wacka wacka wacka wacka." Laugh it up, a–holes, but the truth is this: George W. Bush's real contribution to language has been in redefining it. For instance, when people began suggesting that we think about leaving Iraq:
Bush, 2007-04-24: Well, what I won't accept is, you know, artificial timetables of withdrawal...
Bush, 2005-06-28: Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message ...
Bush, 2007-04-23: I believe artificial timetables of withdrawal, uh, uh, would be a mistake ...
NO!! artificial timetables — this is a free-range, organic war; that's why it costs so much. And then you remember Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki suggested that maybe the United States should think about gettin' out, in maybe the next 16 to 23 months, which the Administration thought might be a good idea, so in your mind you're thinkin', Isn't that an artificial timetable? It's not!
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, 2008-07-21: What we want is a kind of "aspirational time horizon" ...
Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2008-07-02: The strategic goals of having "time horizons" are ones that we all seek...
Andy Card, former White House Chief of Staff, 2008-07-21: A "timeline" is dangerous [flash forward] "horizon" that allows you to pay attention to what's happening in the real world, on the ground ...
See, timelines are dangerous; what we need is a horizon, a withdrawal strategy named after something that, no matter how long you head towards it, you never quite reach it; it's asymptotic.
Now, here's what the Administration has learned: that a rose, by any other name — could be anything! Might not even be a flower. For instance, when the Shia and Sunni started fighting each other for control of Iraq — you know, brother fighting brother, "Frankly, Mahmoud, I don't give a damn" kind of thing, "some day, we'll all look back on this with a chess set and a documentary." What was that called again??
Bush, 2006-08-07: Some people say, "Well, civil war this" and "civil war that" ...
Bush, 2006-11-08: You know, you hear all the time, well, maybe this is a civil war; well, I don't believe it is ...
Of course you don't believe it is!! That would've been a horrible thing for us to have caused! This is merely the —
Bush, 2007-01-16: Sectarian violence in Baghdad ...
Condi, 2006-08-04: They have sectarian differences, and some of those are violent.
Gen. David Petraeus, 2008-04-08: ... ethno-sectarian competition ...
Yeah, what's a little ethno-sectarian competition? I'll tell you what's a great weekend: take the kids, load 'em in the minivan, and drive 'em down to one of those ethno-sectarian competition reenactments. [kiss] Why is this important? Because the consequences of miscommunication can be devastating. For instance, let's say you're a giant business, and the business that you're in is home loans and you suck at it, and your name is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and someone says to you,
Bush, 2008-07-15: We are going to provide — if needed — temporary assistance through either debt or capital.
So, you might think, Oh my God! Temporary debt or capital? They're gonna give us money! We've been bailed out, everybody! Well, not only do you suck at your job, you also have poor listening skills.
Bush, 2008-07-15: By the way, the decisions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — I hear some say "bailout"; I don't think it's a bailout.
It's not a bailout, it's a — monetary shielding unit, a capital restraint system, fiduciary stilts —
Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson, 2008-07-13: It's a liquidity backstop.
Dammit! What difference does it make whether we call something a bailout or a civil war or any of those things? It's just semantics; no harm, no foul, nobody gets hurt.
Bush, 2007-10-07: We don't torture.
Bush, 2007-08-09: We don't torture.
Bush, 2007-10-17: We don't torture. We, we, we — I've said all along American — to the American people, we won't torture.
So, that's when this technique comes in handy: when the definition of the word is an internationally recognized war crime. So what do we do?
Former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft: Enhanced interrogation techniques ...
Douglas Feith, former Defense Undersec. for Policy: Counter-resistance techniques... [note: the C–SPAN caption reads "Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D–NY)," but it is Feith on screen, responding to Nadler's question.]
Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey: The "shocks the conscience" standard ...
Feith: Grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing ...
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D–NY): [reading from a report] "stress positions, isolation, nudity, the use of dogs ..."
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D–MA): "using the individual as a human shield ..."
Rep. Linda Sanchez (D–CA) [Ashcroft on screen]: "induced hypothermia or forced sleeplessness ..."
Sen. Dick Durbin (D–IL) [split-screen with Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales]: "mock execution ..."
Gen. Michael Hayden, Director, CIA: We've conducted renditions.
Rdml. Jane Dalton (fmr. legal adviser to Gen. Richard B. Myers, USAF, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs): working dogs in an interrogation booth, unmuzzled and snarling ...
Feith: Removing clothing is different from naked!
Hayden: Waterboarding has been used on only three detainees.
Feith: The idea was to induce stress ...
Vice President Dick Cheney: It's a tougher program for tougher customers.
Tough customers? You know, I've worked in some bad retail situations; not once did I ever shock a guy's nuts.
Technorati tags: Jon Stewart, Daily Show, President Bush
Click below for embedded video clips and transcript...
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Daily Show on Bush and Language
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Disturbing subject lines in spam messages
I get lots — and I do mean lots — of spam, literally hundreds every day, offering the usual assortment of home mortgage enlargement, cheap software for your penis, and college diplomas for your computer. Most of them get shuttled into my spam folder, or get blocked before they even get that far, but no spam filtering is perfect, so I try to check in and make sure that no legit messages have been overzealously marked as spam. I was glancing through today's haul and noticed a rather disturbing trend emerging in the subject lines the spammers use to try to lure you into opening their messages.
Quite a few have reasonably straightforward subject lines: "rolex mania," or "debt consolidation," or "BuyViagra online At The *Chepeast* Price!" [sic]. A few try to be a bit more coy: "Nights full of pleasure are possible," or "million selections," or "Want to make money while surfing." Some are just gibberish: "sidereal dully louisa jostle inherit," for an example that sounds suspiciously like some of the "dictionary attack" addresses at which I receive spam. (I get spammed at such common usernames as RutledgeDependWiltonBeing@lincmad.com, SidewalkMolecular@lincmad.com, and a1aaa1azzzz1zaaaaa@lincmad.com.) But the ones that caught my eye today are trying to shock the recipient into opening the e-mail:
By the way, on a bit of a wild tangent just to prove that you can't always trust what you read in the "mainstream" dead-tree press, today's San Francisco Chronicle gives yesterday's highest and lowest temperatures both for California and for the other 47 contiguous states. Yesterday's high in California was 120° [49°C] at Death Valley, beating the rest of the country by a healthy margin — 113° [45°C] in Bullhead City, Arizona. However, the Chron says that yesterday's low in the state was 9° [–13°C] at Cabrillo National Monument. Trouble is, the monument is on a point jutting out between San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean. It can be pretty chilly with the onshore breeze, but I'd be surprised if it has ever been below freezing in my lifetime, much less in August. About the coldest actual temperature in California yesterday was in Truckee, at 39° [+4°C], down from the day's high of 81° [27°C].
Technorati tags: spam
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
Brian Williams on The Daily Show
[Transcript and embedded video below the fold, plus links to related video clips]
NBC News anchor Brian Williams, fresh back from a trip to Tehran to interview Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his Presidential Palace, was Jon Stewart's guest on Comedy Central's Daily Show on Thursday, 2008-07-31. Stewart and Williams traded comedic jabs, but in amidst the snark you will find some actual information, including some reasons to be interested in watching the Ahmadinejad interview. Brian Williams gives Jon Stewart some of his first-hand impressions of Iran and its president, including the dimension so seldom highlighted in US news coverage that Ahmadinejad is to some extent playing political games for the benefit of his domestic "base" within Iran, and draws some further parallels between the apparent threat posed by Iran today with the threats we believed we faced from the Cold-War-era USSR and from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Transcript:
Jon Stewart: Welcome back. My guest tonight, the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, just back from Iran; please welcome back to the show Brian Williams!
Sit down. I won't have it! Sit. This is not Tehran; I am the mullah, here.
Brian Williams: Are you the mullah or the mullet?
Stewart: You wanna go Jersey on me? You wanna go Jersey on me right now?
Williams: Hey — of the two of us, I'm from Jersey, and I can go Jersey on you, easier than you can go Jersey on me. If there's a can of whoop-ass out here, I open it. Okay? Look at me: I've been out here all of 20 seconds ...
Stewart: I welcome you to the show and suddenly you're threatening me with physical violence.
Williams: I'm verklempt; you threw down.
Stewart: I am delighted that you're here. You're just back from Iran, interviewing President Ahmoud Ahmadinejad. My question is this to you — and it's a simple question. In America we have a rule: we don't talk to terrorists. My question to you is, When did you turn your back on America?
Williams: Are we doin' this? Is this happening? Are we doin' this?
Stewart: Oh, we're on, baby; take out your can, 'cause I'm openin' mine.
Williams: This is happening. Oh, we're doin' this. Okay.
Stewart: Did you get anywhere with this guy? You sat down with Ahmadinejad.
Williams: I think, Jon — and I speak for the real news world —
Stewart: What?!! [tears up one of his note cards]
Williams: Oh, your "note" has been torn up. A card with my name on it —
Stewart: It just says, in big letters, Talk about a can of whoop-ass; that's all it says.
Williams: Jon's "interview prep."
Stewart: Tell me about this guy!
Williams: He is a lot of things: he's a Ph.D., he's the former mayor of Tehran, he's got an election next year, and after all, at the end of the day, he's a politician.
Stewart: Right.
Williams: And he may very well know that the religious folks — who are, some would argue, more in charge than he is — have decided that embracing the West, the U.S., while these talks are going on in Geneva, wouldn't be a bad idea. You enter that country, and you see what sanctions do. You see that the city streets remind you of a cross between Havana and Baghdad; kind of a used-to-be Eastern bloc nation [except that it was Western bloc] that hasn't had a cent invested in it in years. We were staying in what used to be a Hilton, and it just has gone to hell. You know, the walls of the hotel are scraped, and it's dirty and awful —
Stewart: Any stuff to bomb? Anything we could bring down with some type of ... explosions?
Williams: So, the first indication we had —
Stewart: Were you at the Presidential palace?
Williams: We were. Never happened before. I mean, this is like the most heavily guarded — you come down several streets.
Stewart: You must be very special.
Williams: Ohhh...
Stewart: Let me ask you this: do they have favors? Do they have, like — when you went to the bathroom, what are the soaps like? Do they say, like, Tehran or Presidential Palace? Were there ashtrays to steal? What'd you find over there?
Williams: We're on your time, okay? [throws up his hands resignedly, turns in his chair as if to stand and walk away]
Stewart: Come back!
Williams: If you feel — no, okay. I never left — just for the record. It's an amazing place. You're in this courtyard, 95° heat [35°C], he comes out of what is the equivalent of the West Wing, his residence is behind you, you realize briefly that you're in this courtyard that the CIA would've given thousands of dollars just to see up close — it's never — we have very little human intelligence in Iran — and he was clear he had a message to impart. It was clear from when we were picked up at the airport, when we learned where the interview was going to be. Ten minutes after he went out, I went on the Today show, from his courtyard. Just absolutely unheard-of. And buried in his rhetoric —
Stewart: Let me guess the message. Can I guess it?
Williams: [patronizingly] Yes, Jon.
Stewart: "Death to America"?
Williams: Not so much. It was more like — and I'm gonna use a big one here — rapprochement; can you handle it?
Stewart: Sounds pretty — I don't know, French?
Williams: And what's Stewart?
Stewart: Sort-of Jew.
When you talk to them, do you feel like — you know, when he says the crazy things that he says — and he says crazy things —
Williams: Oh, yeah.
Stewart: Is he playing to his base? Is this just a politician — because, I think, wasn't that the mistake we made with Saddam Hussein: his bragadaccio [sic], all those things, were of necessity, because he has to play to this base. Are we misinterpreting their belligerence and thinking it's baiting us into a war when in fact it's just a way to stay in power?
Williams: Well, that's exactly what it is. There's universals in politics: he's playing to his base just like a politician in Cleveland. You can go through the transcript — and, you know, you were joking — he says all but "Death to America!" At one point, he says to me, and I'm paraphrasing very loosely, the atomic bomb is so "20th century."
Stewart: What?!
Williams: He wanted us to know they're —
Stewart: Do they have a death ray? What do you mean, "the atomic bomb is..."
Williams: I don't know — it does beg the question: what do you guys got?
Stewart: Really?
Williams: Yeah. But he delves into sarcasm, he tries false flattery, but then —
Stewart: Have we made a mistake, elevating them to this idea that they are now the Axis powers? That they are Germany in the '30s? Have we made a mistake in this type of elevation?
Williams: That's the great argument. First time I go to Russia, I realize Tom Friedman's theory that this "dirty little secret" was that they couldn't build a light bulb, back during those years we were so worried about them. First time you go, I was in Saddam's palace, two days after the invasion, went to drink from the faucet in his bathroom, and realized the gold sink was paint and the underside was just black metal, and that's a perfect metaphor for so much of what these rulers build up, so maybe you could argue that a Military-Industrial Complex depends on having enemies. I'm not saying that; it's been proferred before.
Stewart: Brian Williams says, "Beware the Military-Industrial Complex"; he makes a plea, I think, to the American leaders tonight on this show, to stand down and embrace the Iranian people; he speaks French — and, other than that, I think really, no news made here tonight.
Williams: Can we go back to the guy named Bragadoccio you mentioned earlier? I think I grew up with him in Jersey.
Stewart: Brian Williams, everybody; watch the interview!
Technorati tags: Brian Williams, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, Transcript, Ahmadinejad, Iran
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Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Ben Wattenberg on The Daily Show
[Transcript and embedded video below the fold.] Jon Stewart's guest on The Daily Show 2008-07-30 was Ben Wattenberg, host of PBS' Think Tank program and author of Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism. Wattenberg defends the invasion of Iraq as part of the essential war on terror, and, whether intentionally or not, juxtaposes Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in a way suggesting a much stronger connection between them than has ever been shown to exist. It was a pretty combative interview, but I think Jon Stewart did a pretty good job of laying bare the flaws of the neocon approach to fighting terrorism.
Transcript:
Jon Stewart: Tonight, he is the moderator of PBS' Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, his new book is called Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism; please welcome Ben Wattenberg. Sir! How are you, my friend? Nice to see you. Come, enjoy, have a seat! Nice to see you.
Ben Wattenberg: Nice to see you.
Stewart: I'm glad to see you brought your Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg cap.
Wattenberg: Well, it's a little trick. You know, most people give you mugs... [turns on LED flashlight embedded in the brim of the cap]
Stewart: A laser!
Wattenberg: That's pretty good.
Stewart: That's nice, because now when I look at you, I just see two giant orbs. I can see nothing. You have blinded me, sir!
Wattenberg: Jon, if you're real nice, you get one, and it'll say Jon in the back.
Stewart: Oh, that's very exciting. Thank you. Or I could take Ben's.
Wattenberg: You could, if you were lookin' for a fight.
Stewart: Settle down! Let's talk about your — Fighting Words: How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism.
Wattenberg: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism. It's the first book I've written that's a narrative. It's a story, it's a yarn. People said it's like beach reading. It is not — all my other books have been "here are six points..."
Stewart: So this is fiction? You made this up?
Wattenberg: No-o-o. No, no, it's a story, a yarn, about how a nice, moderately Jewish boy from the Bronx —
Stewart: Right.
Wattenberg: — the Bronx, that's singular, not plural — came to be called a conservative anything.
Stewart: Right.
Wattenberg: And what I think has happened is, the word has gotten a bum rap. If you called it chocolate instead of neo-conservatism, the way I read the polls, 65 to 70% of the American people would generally sign on to chocolate; about 1% sign on to neo-conservatism.
Stewart: Well, chocolate was never the basis for the invasion of Iraq — from what I understand. Now, I'm not saying that in the future, we won't, in a search for delicious chocolate, invade — I've heard Switzerland has enormous chocolate reserves.
Wattenberg: That's right.
Stewart: And if we invade them in the name of chocolate, I think you will see chocolate's favorability ratings plummet.
Wattenberg: Now, hold on a minute.
Stewart: All right.
Wattenberg: You recall 9/11, and the President, and everybody in America, said, "We gotta have a war on terror."
Stewart: That's correct. I don't think they said we gotta have a war on terror; I think what they said is, "We have to defeat this bin Laden character; I've heard he's in Afghanistan. Let's go get him." [☟1]
Wattenberg: No, no, excuse me, it was terror generically, because —
Stewart: Oh, I didn't know we signed on to the generic terror.
Wattenberg: Well, what difference does it make —
Stewart: Isn't that just a tactic?
Wattenberg: No. Now, just listen to me. What difference does it make if you're killed by Osama bin Laden, or by Saddam Hussein, or — look, look —
Stewart: What difference does it make if you're killed by a rock falling from a mountain? I mean, you're still dead.
Wattenberg: Come on, now. Let's try to be serious.
Stewart: [laughs] You're the one who came out with the laser hat!
Wattenberg: Now, look: partly through President Bush, but also a lot of the other leaders of the free world —
Stewart: Right.
Wattenberg: — we have not had a replication of a major terror attack in the United States. Now, so bin Laden and his people are into terror. Saddam Hussein is into — now, now, I'm not saying there's a relationship; that's very complicated — let's just say there's not —
Stewart: You just happened to use their names right next to each other in a sentence.
Wattenberg: Please, please, I'll stipulate that there's no relationship, but you have to stipulate that Saddam Hussein is in the terror business. He sends $25,000 to every widow of a Palestinian guerrilla, he's exported terror around the world — [☟2]
Stewart: Is Pakistan in the terror business?
Wattenberg: I think they —
Stewart: Is Saudi Arabia?
Wattenberg: I don't know about Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Look, they're —
Stewart: Is Iran? North Korea? Sudan?
Wattenberg: North Korea? Yeah! [note: it's not clear whether the "yeah" was in response to North Korea or Sudan]
Stewart: So we have a lot of countries to invade.
Wattenberg: No-o-o, I didn't say to invade, I said —
Stewart: I'm just saying —
Wattenberg: Now, now, be serious.
Stewart: I'm being serious. I believe I'm being serious.
Wattenberg: I'll flash this [cap light] at you again.
Stewart: I know, I understand.
Wattenberg: Now, look: if you're going to try to fight terror, you may have to fight it in Iran, you may have to fight it in Iraq, you may have to fight — and all the governments of the world, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Brits, the French, every serious stable government is in the terror-fighting business. Now, let me tell you what I think neo-conservatism is about, because I think it's gotten a bum rap. First of all, it didn't start with foreign policy. It started with domestic issues, particularly crime.
Stewart: Yes! It was about "law and order."
Wattenberg: You got it.
Stewart: So, neo-conservatives basically were saying, "It's OK to bring order to domestic life, in our domestic policy."
Wattenberg: You said it.
Stewart: So, let me ask you a question.
Wattenberg: No, let me — can I tell you —
Stewart: Why are they so cavalier about bringing chaos to foreign lands when —
Wattenberg: Stopping terrorism is not bringing chaos —
Stewart: I mean, if you were to ask the Iraqi people whether they felt like their lives were upended by our terror fight, they might say, "Oh, you guys are the law and order guys? Oh."
Wattenberg: Really? I'm being serious.
Stewart: We talk a lot, this certain agenda that you talk about, about bringing order to a society. We went into an Iraqi society — not for the high-minded goals of spreading democracy; that wasn't the speech that was made. The speech that was made was Colin Powell at the UN holding anthrax in a vial; he wasn't holding "freedom powder" and saying we gotta spread this over there. So, we went over there with the idea of protecting ourselves, and brought a certain amount of chaos — you have to admit — to their society, and called it "birth pangs of a [new] Middle East." We didn't use —
Wattenberg: Excuse me: they have an elected polity and they wanted us in. They hated — Saddam Hussein killed, out of a population —
Stewart: Who are you to say they wanted us in? They didn't send out the Bat Signal; we bombed them. That is an arrogant, very arrogant statement.
Wattenberg: Well, we'll see who's being arrogant. I'll get ya again [holds up cap]. Hold it, they elected a government, okay? They have a free press, a constitution, a prime minister, and courts, and they are saying, "We want you in here to help us." Because it was chaos. Saddam Hussein — look, first of all, he used weapons of mass destruction. The UN — [☟3]
Stewart: I remember the argument.
Wattenberg: How well?
Stewart: Really fucking well. But my point is —
Wattenberg: Me, too.
Stewart: My point is that it's very easy to stand here and say, "Look at the great thing we've done for these people — we, who believe in these high-minded ideals of law and order," when we really didn't give them a choice in that. They didn't vote for us to come in there — the purple finger thing happened afterwards — and that's just one event. You can't just export democracy and say, "They had elections; [pantomimes washing his hands and kissing the matter closed]." You know —
Wattenberg: This book is trying to explain something in a readable popular story —
Stewart: I understand.
Wattenberg: — that tells —
Stewart: It's a yarn.
Wattenberg: It's a yarn, and it's a pretty good read.
Stewart: No, I know. I enjoyed it. I actually did enjoy it.
Wattenberg: Well, thank you very much. Would you put a blurb on it?
Stewart: Oh, I'd put a blurb on it! We gotta get going; we went way too long, but this is a fascinating discussion, and it's surprising to me, you know.... Fighting Words is on the bookshelves. (Settle down!) Ben Wattenberg!
☝1. I have to side entirely with Jon Stewart on this point. The American people were solidly behind going after Al Qaeda; it was the neocons who manipulated public sentiment into a nebulous, all-encompassing "war on terror." The Rand Corporation — hardly a bastion of hippie liberal thinking — just released a report, concluding that we need to abandon the military approach to combatting terrorism, putting intelligence and law enforcement forefront, and that we should abandon the term "war on terror." In short, the American people were all for kickin' some Al Qaeda and Taliban ass, but we were duped into the war in Iraq.
☝2. Analogously, if we were attacked by Firestone, we would declare a global war on tires and invade Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart is in the tire business. Al Qaeda is exclusively in the international terror biz, but for Saddam it was a minor sideline.
☝3. It is unspeakably arrogant to presume that the Iraqi people wanted the US [oh, and we mustn't forget our "coalition partners"] to invade, simply because Saddam was evil. It is equally arrogant to claim that the average Iraqi citizen is better off because of the invasion; it depends crucially on how you weigh the value of democracy against the value of the very "law and order" that we demolished. As to the issue of liberty, the Iraqi people no longer have a single despot keeping them under his thumb, but instead they have ethnic strife, an insurgency, suicide bombs, and a host of other impediments to their freedom. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died are certainly not better off than they were under Saddam, and it's pretty tough to argue that the millions of refugees are better off, whether their exile is within Iraq or in a nearby country. About 1 in 6 Iraqis has been killed or displaced. Would we say that America was better off out from under the thumb of a brutal dictator if it meant that 50 million of our citizens were killed or driven from their homes?
Technorati tags: Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Ben Wattenberg, Fighting Words, Neo-Conservative, Neocon, Iraq War
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Nancy Pelosi on the Daily Show
Transcript and embedded video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 2008-07-28, below the fold.
The Speaker addressed issues of ending the Iraq War, offshore drilling, public approval ratings of Congress, balance of power and limits on executive power, and restoring America's leadership in the world.
Transcript:
Jon Stewart: Welcome back! My guest tonight — she is the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. She has a new book out called Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters. Please welcome back to the show Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Madame Speaker, have a seat, please. Enjoy! Nice to see you again.
Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco, CA): Great to be here, thank you.
Stewart: The book is called Know Your Power: —
Pelosi: Know Your Power.
Stewart: — A Message to America's Daughters; are you worried that by putting a message out to America's daughters, our enemies' daughters also get the message?
Pelosi: We want all daughters to get the message — and sons, too, to know their power as well.
Stewart: Now, what is their power?
Pelosi: Their power is to make change, to make a difference, to understand their uniqueness, to understand their strengths. So many times, women say to me — one of the reasons I wrote this was, women come up to me all the time: "How did you go from being a housewife to a House Speaker? How did you go from a homemaker to House Speaker?" And I tell my story, and in doing so, tell them how I —
Stewart: — inspire other people.
Pelosi: Well, hopefully they will draw strength from their own experiences, as I drew from mine.
Stewart: In terms of favorability ratings — when you were a housewife, what were the favorability ratings you were getting then? Because right now, House Speaker, it's been tough — it's been a rough ride.
Pelosi: Well, the Congress of the United States has always been an institution that has been mockable.
Stewart: I believe that is on our seal — in Latin — of Congress: We Are Mockable. [SVMVS DERIDICVLVM, or is it SVMVS DERIDICVLIS?]
Pelosi: I am more pleased about the ratings that the Democrats in Congress are getting, in every category you can name.
Stewart: The individuals, you mean?
Pelosi: Well, the individuals and the Democrats in Congress, and so, by 20 points, 15 points, you name the issue, we're ahead, so I feel confident —
Stewart: What do you feel good about? What would you say was — 'cause you guys came in with a head of steam. You said, you know, no blank check for the war, we're gonna check this President's unchecked power; do you feel like that's been accomplished?
Pelosi: Well, in the House of Representatives we have sent that bill over and over to the Senate with it hitting a brick wall over there, but I do feel good about things that we have done other than that. But in terms of Congress' performance on the war, I'm with the public on that: I'm disappointed. I hope that we can —
Stewart: On the war, you think that Congress has dropped the ball?
Pelosi: Not the House of Representatives. In the House, we have sent a "timeline," a "goal," whatever we thought they could accept, pass, and send to the President.
Stewart: Why can't the House of Representatives put a little bit of pressure on the Senate? In the hierarchy of the balance of power, are you the little —
Pelosi: No, the Speaker has awesome power for our house, but it's a bicameral legislature, and in the Senate, a majority doesn't matter; 60 votes —
Stewart: Senator [Harry] Reid (D–Nevada) came on the program —
Pelosi: I saw him!
Stewart: — he sat across from me; can I tell you something? It was a 6-minute interview; he was asleep for 4 minutes. He left and I just kept asking questions to the chair.
Pelosi: It's a tough job.
Stewart: I'd never seen anything like it. Is he just sad? What happened?
Pelosi: He's great.
Stewart: But can't you put the pressure on him, or publicly —
Pelosi: No, it's not him. Remember, you need 60 votes, so he gets the Democratic votes, and that's a majority, but you still need 9 more votes. That's why this election is so important. I mean, we have been able to accomplish a lot: we passed our energy bill, the minimum wage — first time in 10 years —
Stewart: Couldn't you take stronger — in terms of, you know, the war, why not just withhold funding? That could be done.
Pelosi: Well, we did that this last time, and we sent the bill over with no funding and conditions for how we would stay there; the bill came back from the Senate with the funding and no conditions on how we stay there. We need a new President.
Stewart: Couldn't you, at that point, say —
Pelosi: No.
Stewart: We do need a new President; I would say that. Let me ask you this —
Pelosi: Our election in '86 [sic], we thought the President would listen to the will of the American people. It was very clear they wanted an end to the war. That wasn't true.
Stewart: Which election? 2006?
Pelosi: In 2006. Now, that was Step One; 2008, we get a Democratic President, bring the war to an end, and return to a position of leadership in the world.
Stewart: Is Congress, as it is made up today, obsolete? With a powerful President, is Congress sort of a vestigial — unless it has 60 votes in the Senate and a huge majority in the House of Representatives.
Pelosi: Fair question, because —
Stewart: Seriously?
Pelosi: — because the Republicans in Congress vote so much as a rubber stamp with the President that they are abdicating the role of Article I — we are the first article of the Constitution, the Congress of the United States — but if you say, "I'm just going to vote with the President, stick with the President every time," then he has power that he should not have.
Stewart: When you exercise that kind of — let's say Barack Obama is fortunate enough to win the Presidency, and you —
Pelosi: Yes, let's say that! [claps]
Stewart: — or, or — I don't want to play favorites here — or Hillary Clinton. Let's say either one of them —
Pelosi: All right. [claps]
Stewart: — is fortunate enough to do that. Are you saying that the Democrats will exercise more and more stringent oversight over a Democratic President than the Republican Congress did over President Bush?
Pelosi: Well, the same thing: I mean, the point is —
Stewart: No rubber stamp.
Pelosi: No rubber stamp, and in terms of, for example, domestic surveillance, no President, Democrat or Republican, should have the power that this President claims to have. So it isn't — and the Congress of the United States has to assert its prerogatives, and this Republican Congress has been a rubber stamp for so long, but that will change.
Stewart: Tell me about the drilling; that's the one thing I couldn't wrap my head around. You know, I know there's talk about drilling in some offshore areas; you didn't want that to come up for a vote.
Pelosi: Well, in the past 2 weeks or so, the President is trying to maintain that, but for the offshore drilling in protected areas, the economy would be in great shape. I can't let him get away with that. So the point is this: did you know that, in the "Lower 48," there are 68 million acres [28 million hectares] that are approved for drilling, 33 million [13 Mha] of which are offshore. In Alaska — you wanna drill in Alaska, we'll give you Alaska: there are tens of millions of acres in Alaska approved for drilling. But they want to drill in the protected areas.
Stewart: Is there oil underneath those acres?
Pelosi: Oh, tons of oil. Great oil.
Stewart: Can't you just open up the whole damned thing?
Pelosi: Well, why would you — in other words, we're saying to them —
Stewart: You say drill the stuff you've already got.
Pelosi: "Use it or lose it!" Drill where you have the environmental permits and the approvals to go ahead, or lose that and let somebody else drill that.
Stewart: I'm saying, let's steal everybody else's milkshake. [reference to the film There Will Be Blood] That's what I'm saying: let's get the straws in there —
Pelosi: As long as it's chocolate, right.
Stewart: Exactly.
Pelosi: Well, then, but also —
Stewart: So you think, no vote for that?
Pelosi: Well, for two weeks, they've been saying, "Oh, she won't let us have a vote on it!" For ten years we couldn't have a vote on the minimum wage, and nobody made a big fuss about that, and when we came in, we brought it to the floor vote on the minimum wage, the first time in 10 years. So they can try to make their case —
Stewart: It's an ugly little world up there in Washington, innit? It's not fun.
Pelosi: It's not for the faint of heart to be there. It's rough.
Stewart: What happens when you see people at a bar afterwards — I'm not saying you go to a bar, but let's say you go to a bar and you see a guy from the other side and you guys look at each other — I mean, do you ever just walk up to somebody and say, "Let's go outside, my brotha"?
Pelosi: No, just right there, go pow! [pantomimes punching Jon Stewart in the face]
Stewart: Know Your Power, people; it's on the bookshelves now. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi!
Technorati tags: Nancy Pelosi, Daily Show, Jon Stewart
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Well, Hello, Dolly!
My parents live in the historic small town of Goliad, about 120 miles (200 km) almost due south of Austin; after leaving Netroots Nation on Sunday, I went down to visit for a few days. As I write this, Hurricane Dolly is pushing inland, a bit farther south. A couple of minutes ago, I was surprised by a sudden gust of wind that blew open my bedroom door. The last couple of hours, we've had brief bursts of high winds and torrential rains — nothing like what they're getting in Corpus Christi and farther south, but impressive all the same, especially when the rain falls almost horizontally. We're about 50 miles (80 km) from the coast, in the flood plain along the San Antonio River. Twice in the last ten years, we've had "hundred-year" floods, which can easily leave the center of town completely cut off from the rest of the world, with bridges flooded in all four directions. On the other hand, the locals, most especially the farmers, have been suffering from an unusually dry summer, so some rain is more than welcome.
Three years ago, Hurricane Rita (Katrina's little sister) prompted the evacuation of the entire county, although in the end it did remarkably little damage here. Long-time residents, though, remember 1967's Hurricane Beulah, an enormous, slow-moving Category 5 storm that brought about 20 inches (500 mm) of rain and caused major flooding. Beulah made landfall in just about the same spot as Dolly today, but Dolly only barely rose to Category 2. (Having weathered 1999's Hurricane José, also a Category 2, I can tell you it's nothing to scoff at, but it's still a pale shadow of a Cat-5.) Hurricane Claudette in 2003, a "mere" Category 1, was almost a direct hit, and did substantial damage, uprooting trees and breaking off large limbs. In 1980, Hurricane Allen — another Category 5 — brought a dramatic end to a severe summer drought here, although it also spawned a tornado in Austin, causing over $100 million in damage. We're not expecting any serious flooding here this time around, although there may be problems farther south.
In a curious coincidence, FEMA was in town this morning, presenting information about digital flood risk maps they're planning to make available. (The current FEMA map of Goliad only covers the city limits of the county seat, besides which it's over 20 years old.) The San Antonio River itself is south of most of the town, but various creeks wind through on their way into the big river. The land is remarkably flat, so if there is any flooding at all, it's likely to cut a wide swath. Since I now live in a city famous for its hills, I feel almost disoriented by the near total lack of high ground here. (Of course, it's also a bit of a shift to be in a place where "only" doubling San Francisco's annual rainfall qualifies as a drought.) The likely route of the proposed Interstate 69 "NAFTA Superhighway" passes through Goliad, which would offer much more reliable access to the city during a flood, but the existing highways (US 59 and US 183 / 77-A) are vulnerable.
For tonight, though, it looks like Dolly will bring us a bit of much-needed rain and some gusty winds, but no serious flooding this far north. Of course, it's a lousy day to be on the beach at South Padre Island, and the folks trying to surf near Corpus Christi are just plain crazy. Brownsville has lots of uprooted trees and substantial flooding. My flight out of Austin tomorrow should be fine, though, and then I'll be back to sunny California. Good-bye, Dolly!
Technorati tags: Hurricane Dolly, Netroots Nation, NN08
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Friday, July 18, 2008
NN08 My Dinner with a Dittohead
Friday evening, I took a break from the Netroots Nation 2008 conference to go out to dinner with a friend of mine from high school and his girlfriend; I'll call them Joe and Mary. Joe isn't exactly what you'd call a liberal, by most measures, but he's genuinely open to the possibility that the liberal position on a specific issue may be right. He's also not at all a religious sort, but neither an ardent atheist. Mary, on the other hand, is a Southern Baptist who listens to Rush Limbaugh and watches Fox News. Yes, a real live conservative, although she insists that she's somewhere near the center. She's not really a full-blown Dittohead, but hey, she does listen to Rush and watch Hannity & Colmes. It was quite an interesting chat.
Joe served in the U.S. Army for several years, a good chunk of that in Korea, somewhere about midway between Seoul and the DMZ. When he was stationed near me in the US, at the beginning of the first Gulf War, he once had to cancel plans for a Saturday because he had to stay and process deployment paperwork for a group of soldiers. He never saw combat, and he's been out of the military for several years now, but he remains justifiably proud to be a veteran. All the same, he told me that he would never vote for McCain, because he would never vote for someone that old, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, war hero or not — indeed, he is offended at the way John McCain has paraded his P.O.W. record. Of course, he also still remembers the Keating Five, a serious banking scandal that touched McCain when he was still a new kid in the Senate. (McCain was cleared of ethics violations, but rebuked for "poor judgment.") Joe believes that we need to have sensible regulations for banks, in order to prevent another mortgage meltdown, and he sees clearly that the Bush Administration has been a complete disaster in shockingly many respects.
Mary, on the other hand, insists that what she admits is corruption in the Bush regime is nothing out of the ordinary, since all politicians are corrupt, both parties. She also insists that Rush Limbaugh gives out accurate information, and so does Fox News. I called her attention to the PIPA/Knowledge Networks October 2003 survey that correlated the respondent's primary source of news with three misconceptions about Iraq: (1) we found WMD in Iraq, (2) we found significant links between Saddam and al Qaeda, and (3) most of the world supported our decision to invade. Those who got their news primarily from Fox News were almost four times as likely (80% to 23%) to have at least one of those three false impressions as those who got their news from NPR, which was Mary's top example of untrustworthy "liberal bias" in the news media.
On the subject of the mortgage crisis, I was talking about the way that the deregulation of lenders — pushed through by McCain's (former) economic advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm (D–TX turned R–TX) — had created the perfect conditions for a "bubble" in the housing market, and that we needed to re-regulate. Mary said something along the lines of, "Yes, but who knows what regulations we should pass to fix it?" I said, quite simply, "How about exactly the regulations we used to have?"
We also talked about healthcare. I pointed out that the cost of paperwork for verifying eligibility — corporate bureaucrats' red tape, in other words — exceeds the cost of providing healthcare to every uninsured American. In return, Mary, who moved from Germany to the U.S. in her teens, opined that Obama's healthcare proposal (sadly, nothing even close to Dennis Kucinich's not-for-profit single-payer system, the only plan that makes any sense at all) was rampant socialism that would remove all economic incentive for hard work, just like it did in (West) Germany. I didn't press the point that she obviously doesn't know much about the country where she was born, but I did mention that if she thinks anything Obama is saying is remotely close to the socialist nanny state, she's out of her mind.
Back on the subject of sources of news, I suggested to her that yes, every TV news network in the United States is biased: specifically, they all have a pro-American bias, which, quite simply, is not always warranted. Sometimes, the United States does not do the right thing. I suggested that she watch Al Jazeera English, and disabused her of some of her stereotyped views of a network she had never actually seen. My handy laptop provided her a first glimpse at their News Hour program, although the WiFi was having problems with the RealPlayer feed. As I told her, the American people need to grasp that, in an era when 19 men with a budget of $500,000 can bring America to its knees for days and draw us into two intractable wars, our national security depends directly on understanding how the rest of the world sees us, because our national security depends on having an overwhelming majority of the world population view us as the good guys. Not even PBS, nor the BBC, can give us a real look at how we are perceived in the world, especially in the Middle East.
That was about as far as we got, which I suppose is probably just as well, but I think I gave her a few things to think about — thanks in no small part to the sessions I attended here at Netroots Nation the last couple of days.
Technorati tags: Netroots Nation, NN08
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Photoblogging is not my forte
I brought my camera along to Howard Dean's keynote last night and tried to take some pictures, but found my equipment not up to the task. First of all, the speakers at the podium were brightly lit, with nothing behind them except a black backdrop behind the stage, making for an extreme contrast in lighting, beyond my consumer-grade camera's capacity to compensate. I thought I had checked the batteries, but the camera still had that infuriating delay from pressing the button to taking an actual photo, meaning that the subject had moved from the perfectly photogenic pose I tried to capture. I was able to take some meta-photos, capturing the image on the video projector screen to the side of the stage, but even that was a challenge. Then I got back to my hotel room and discovered that among the many cables, wires, and power bricks that took up almost half my luggage space, I did not have the USB-to-mini-USB cable I needed to get what photos I was able to take, into the computer.
Sigh.
Technorati tags: Netroots Nation, NN08
Thursday, July 17, 2008
A Bad Situationist
In the spring and summer of 2001, Sam Seder and some of his friends (including Sarah Silverman and Janeane Garofalo) made a movie about Joe Lieberman's (entirely fictional) son Arthur. (Joe Lieberman has a son and a stepson, but the character of Arthur Lieberman is not based on either of them.) The movie opens with a scene, set in August 2001, of Arthur firing a bazooka at a high-rise in New York City. We then flash back a couple of months, with Arthur despairing that no one seems to take an interest in the fact that the 2000 Presidential election was decided by the Supreme Court rather than by the voters. He stands on the sidewalk outside a subway entrance, trying to sell his annotated version of the Supreme Court decision for $10, but is greeted with indifference or outright hostility. He's clearly more than a bit obsessed, with pictures of various figures from the election plastered on his wall, many of them with cartoon-style speech bubbles. A picture of the inauguration has Dick Cheney's daughter's head masked out with the notation that it should have been Arthur standing there.
That's about as far as I got, though, because some technical glitch required restarting the film, and I was too tired to sit through the beginning a second time. It's out on DVD, so maybe I'll take a second look, but not tonight. For more information, to view some sample clips, or to order the DVD, check out the official web site.
Technorati tags: Netroots Nation, NN08, A Bad Situationist, Sam Seder, 2000 Election
Netroots Nation, Day One
The first day of sessions for Netroots Nation 2008 is done, but there's still the opening keynote with Governor Howard Dean, coming up in a few minutes, and then a movie afterwards. I hadn't really planned any particular theme for my choice of sessions, but one seems to be emerging nonetheless: the Iraq war, including the failures on the part of both the Bush Administration and the Mainstream Media that got us into it, the illegal tactics the Bushies have employed, and the work that will be needed to undo the damage the Bush Presidency has done to our national security, our Constitution, and our standing in the world.
I started off today with a workshop on how to give a good interview, if you ever find yourself on radio or television, including a brief mock interview, played back for feedback from the panelists and the other attendees. Apparently I need to smile more....
That session took the whole morning. After lunch, I went to the Media That Matters Film Festival, a series of short films on subjects ranging from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the havoc caused by mandatory minimum sentencing laws to the threat posed to our food supply by the collapse of honey-bee colonies. I bookended that session with the LGBTQ Caucus, where I joined in a discussion of anti-bullying laws and other issues facing queer youth, and the Science Bloggers Caucus, where we mostly talked about energy policy, including the myths of "clean coal," the fantasy that we can build enough nuclear power plants to provide our energy needs (even supposing we could safely deal with the nuclear waste without allowing any of it to fall into the hands of terrorists), and some very simple ideas for reducing the number of internal-combustion vehicles on the road: plug-in electric hybrids for mail delivery trucks and school buses.
The movie after Howard Dean's keynote tonight is A Bad Situationist, a film by Sam Seder, shot in between the 2000 election and 9/11; elements of the plot made it an awkward project to finish in the aftermath. More on that later — for now, I'm off to see Howard Dean.
Technorati tags: Netroots Nation, NN08
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Netroots Nation 2008
I'm in Austin, Texas, right now, about to start the Netroots*Nation conference (yearly conference for DailyKos.com). The line-up isn't quite as jaw-dropping as last year, when we had 7 of the then 8 Democratic Presidential candidates, but we've got a number of impressive guests, including Speaker of the House (and my own rep) Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, John Dean, John Aravosis (AmericaBlog), George Lakoff, and many more. I'll have more to say through the weekend, although the schedule is pretty jam-packed. Right now, though, I need to find some breakfast....
Technorati tags: Netroots Nation, NN08
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Friday, July 04, 2008
Bye-bye, Jesse!
Former five-term U.S. Senator Jesse Helms (R–NC) is dead at the age of 86.
I don't normally approve of speaking ill of the dead, especially the recently deceased. However, Jesse Helms so often went so far out of his way to make so many people's lives more miserable, I'm making an exception. I am unequivocally glad he's dead — the world is truly a better place without him. He was a racist, even against the backdrop of the Deep South, but his bigotry wasn't limited to blacks. In his first Senate campaign, he portrayed his opponent, a Greek-American, as not "one of us." And, of course, he reserved an especial vitriol for "the homosexual agenda." He advocated slashing AIDS research funding because its victims got infected by their own "immoral" conduct — like getting a blood transfusion or having an unfaithful partner or a drug-addicted mother — as if the virus could somehow distinguish the god-fearing from the godless. He came around on the issue of AIDS late in his career, but remained an unrepentant bigot in every other respect.
Jesse Helms won't be here to witness the effects of global warming, but I'm sure he's enjoying that nice warm fire and brimstone. Say hi to Satan for us, Jesse.
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199 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes
One of the running jokes in the early years of Saturday Night Live was Chevy Chase, in the role of Weekend Update news anchor, announcing the headline that "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead."
This year, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has created a recurring segment called "George Walker Bush: Still President."
As of this Fourth of July morning, though, we are in the last 200 days of the Bush Administration. Specifically,
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Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Further Proof Americans Don't Speak Metric
The last week and a half, I've been up to my eyeballs in the Frameline32 San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, but a display ad in the newspaper did catch my eye. It's for a new condo development in Petaluma (an outer suburb about 60 km north of San Francisco). The condos are very "green" in construction, for which I applaud them — they have a variety of energy-saving and water-conserving features, low-VOC paints, Energy Star appliances, tankless water heaters, double-paned windows, and so on, plus granite and marble countertops, slate tile flooring, and a bathroom for almost every bedroom. They're even located in the center of town, providing considerable opportunities for shopping and recreation without needing to hop in a car. All very fine things.
But then there's the name of the development: Celsius 44.
Most Americans have little to no concept what that means, so permit me to translate:
Not quite "Death Valley in July" [PDF], but not exactly a moniker that speaks of comfortable living, particularly in a metropolitan area where the citizens complain about the heat if the daytime high tops 20° (68°F). What were they thinking??
Monday, June 30, 2008
Military Service as an Issue in Presidential Politics
General Wesley Clark inadvertently touched off our indignation-du-jour yesterday by commenting that Senator John McCain's lack of "executive responsibility" — commanding at the broad strategic level rather than at the immediate tactical level — means that McCain's military experience, as much as it proves his courage, dedication, patriotism, and character, does not by itself qualify him for the ultimate "executive responsibility" of being President of the United States with two full-blown shooting wars. General Clark made the point awkwardly and undiplomatically, and in particular sounded somewhat self-serving in pointing out that he, too, had been wounded in battle, but that he had also held a position of strategic command responsibility. I've written my own remarks to more clearly make the point I believe General Clark ought to be making.
Military experience alone is not the deciding factor of who will make the best President of the United States. If it were, we would now be drawing to the close of the first term of President Wesley Clark — he clearly had the strongest military qualifications of any candidate from either party, beating President Bush hands-down. But Wesley Clark was not elected in 2004; he was not even an also-ran in his own party's nomination process. Why is that, if military experience is so important? It's because there are other aspects to the Presidency where Wes Clark had insufficient credentials. He didn't have the political experience to mount an effective national campaign, to pull himself out of the background noise up to the front of the pack, just for one.
But let's look at this year's candidates. John McCain served in the military with distinction and honor. He proved beyond a shadow of a doubt his personal courage in a life-or-death situation, his dedication to his fellow prisoners of war, his patriotic devotion to our country, and his strength of character in refusing special treatment. He is an American hero. But, to put it in more familiar terms, John McCain has not yet passed the "Commander-in-Chief test," merely because he was a war hero. Gen. Douglas McArthur was a hero in World War II, but he would've made a terrible Commander-in-Chief. The President needs to have a vision, not only of where we should be headed as a nation, but of how we get there. The President needs to have the judgment to balance competing demands for resources to pursue our national goals. The President needs to be nimble in using all the modes of American power in the world, not just our military might. By that score, Senator McCain's record is quite mixed. He is boxed in by his party's blinkered view that the military must remain at the forefront of the so-called War on Terror. He is deluded into believing that it is possible — never mind desirable — for the United States to maintain a significant military presence in Iraq indefinitely. He is constrained by the demands of personal loyalty to a corrupt President who has spent eight years undermining the Constitution of the United States, and thus cannot even begin to undo the damage caused by legitimizing torture, discarding the Fourth Amendment, discarding the principle of habeas corpus, politicizing the Justice Department, keeping our gasoline prices high by refusing to repeal the "every bit as evil as it sounds" Enron Loophole. McCain has contorted himself on so many issues to curry favor with the shrinking minority of us who believe that George W. Bush has even tried to do a good job.
Then there's Senator Barack Obama. He can't look to his military service to prove his patriotism. (Perhaps worse even than that, he hasn't had a flag pin super-glued to every piece of clothing he owns.) He just gave a major speech about the role of patriotism in his life and how it would inform his view of the office he seeks. Barack Obama loves his country, and will commit every fiber of his being to "preserve, protect and defend" our freedom "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Then there is the issue of judgment. Unlike John McCain, Barack Obama stood up in 2002 against the authorization for George Bush to start a war against Iraq. Obama saw and said publicly that it would be a mistake, which is exactly what it has been from Day One. Obama also understands the point that we will never be made safe from terrorism by military power alone. We need diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence, and yes, public relations. If nineteen guys with a budget of half a million dollars can bring our nation to a complete halt, even for a moment, then we have to rethink the whole notion of "asymmetric warfare." Al Qaeda has no country. You bomb Afghanistan, they move to Pakistan. If you chase them out of there, they'll move again, and again and again and again. We need to dry up their financing. We need to get intel on their whereabouts and their plans, and we can't count on wiretaps alone. We need to get other governments and the people on the streets to be willing to turn against al Qaeda and rat them out, and that's awfully hard to do when we're so busy playing "Ugly American on steroids" in the heart of the Middle East.
I believe that Barack Obama's life experience, including the mere act of living abroad as well community organizing in Chicago and teaching Constitutional law and speaking out against the Iraq War, has better prepared him to make the difficult judgment calls that will be required of our next Commander-in-Chief.
Technorati tags: Wesley Clark, John McCain, Barack Obama, Iraq War
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Thursday, June 19, 2008
Constituent Letter to Nancy Pelosi about FISA
An open letter to Nancy Pelosi, from a constituent of the 8th District of California
Madame Speaker:
I watched with great consternation the MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann program tonight, and particularly the segment with guest Jonathan Turley, Constitutional law professor at GWU.
[embedded video, below the fold]
This [FISA] bill has quite literally no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering — the type of thing the Bush Administration is famous for, and now the Democrats are doing: that is, to change the law to conform to past conduct. It's what any criminal would love to do. — Jonathan Turley, 2006-06-19, on MSNBC Countdown with Keith OlbermannThe bill gives blanket immunity, not only for past conduct in which the telecom companies co-operated with an illegal program, but for any future conduct. It eviscerates the Fourth Amendment by "allow[ing] the government to go into law-abiding homes, on their word alone, on their suspicion alone, to engage in warrantless surveillance." It is, as Professor Turley says, precisely what the Founders of this nation did NOT intend.
It is also, I can assure you, precisely what the citizens of the Eighth Congressional District of California do NOT want to see. President Bush and his followers have consistently taken the position that the Courts are an unnecessary inconvenience, standing in the way of the incorruptible President, when in fact they are our front line of defense against the potential tyranny of our own government. Without strong courts, we cannot remain a Nation of Laws. If the courts are eviscerated, it will not be long before a person of far fewer scruples even than Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, comes along to take away more of our freedoms. If there are no courts, or they are so weakened as to be unable effectively to oppose him (or her), then the President could simply declare that (s)he can dissolve the Congress "in a national emergency," if it, too, becomes an impediment to his ambitions. Mr. Bush himself said that one must never give in to legislative bullies, but that is exactly what this FISA Bill represents.
You cannot claim to represent the people of the Eighth District if you do not lay down your political life to block the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, most particularly the new Title VIII, "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government."
— Lincoln Madison,
a voter in Precinct 3821
cc: Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Barbara Boxer
Technorati tags: Nancy Pelosi, FISA Bill, Fourth Amendment, Jonathan Turley, Keith Olbermann, President Bush, Warrantless Wiretapping, Rule of Law
also posted to my Daily Kos diary, where the comment thread may be more active than here
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Lara Logan on The Daily Show
[transcript below the fold] Jon Stewart's guest tonight was the Chief Foreign Correspondent for CBS News, Lara Logan, who has lived in Baghdad since the beginning of the Iraq War. She has some blunt things to say about the view of the war that manages to filter through to the average American's awareness via the mainstream media, that Americans need to see the dead bodies of American soldiers (and Iraqi civilians) in order to understand the situation there. We need to see and understand the resurgence of the Taliban — including breaking 400 of their top fighters out of prison just this weekend. I'll put it to you this way: no matter how brave, dedicated, and well-trained our military forces are, they can never win a war without the support and involvement of the entire country. We will never see an end to the war on terror as long as the American people don't care what happens "over there" wherever our troops are at the time, nor as long as so much of the world thinks we're more of a threat to peace and stability than Al Qaeda and the Taliban and and the Tamil Tigers and ETA combined. Anyway, enough of my soapbox, you tuned in for a transcript....
Jon Stewart interviewing Lara Logan, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, ©2008-06-17 Comedy Central®
Transcript:
Jon Stewart: Welcome back. My guest tonight, she is the Chief Foreign Correspondent for CBS News, welcome to the program Lara Logan; ma'am! Come join me, please, have a seat. You remind me of a young Ted Koppel.
Lara Logan: Dan Rather used to say that about me.
Stewart: Stop it! What's happenin'? How are ya? It's nice to see ya. You just got back from — ?
Logan: Iraq.
Stewart: Iraq. What'd you get me? Did you bring me anything back, or —?
Logan: I did.
Stewart: A small token?
Logan: A few components of suicide bombs, you know, a couple of useful things.
Stewart: What is — what don't we know? Do we know anything about what's going on over there? Are reports of what's really going [on] over there, getting out? You've been there since this whole thing started — what are we missing? We know nothing.
Logan: No, I don't think we really do have much of an idea of what's going on in Iraq. We have all these armchair academics who go over for one visit, you see Laura Bush going, "This is my third time" going to Afghanistan; she doesn't mention that she was only there for a few seconds. You know, listening to —
Stewart: Are you saying that a few seconds in Afghanistan is not enough to really get the full flavor of a country torn by violent war?
Logan: It depends what you're looking for.
Stewart: Mm-hmm. You think they might not be looking for the right things? How hard is it? I know you're over there filing these amazing stories; do you have to fight for airtime? Do you say, "I've got the scoop on the Afghan warlords that have turned against the United States and are helping the Taliban," and they're all like, "Geez, I dunno — [stage whisper:] Britney's back in rehab!?
Logan: Or Paris Hilton's getting arrested, yes.
Stewart: WHAT?? "Breaking News:" [pause] But how hard is it to get those stories on?
Logan: It goes in cycles. You know, this is an election year, so "politics, politics, politics!" all the time. And you hear that people are tired of hearing about the war, so you have to fight against that, but generally what I say is, I'm holding the RPG; it's aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don't put my story on air, I'm going to pull the trigger. That's worked.
Stewart: So — I guess if you're giving advice to a young journalism student, you might say, "Threats of violence to the editors"?
Logan: And the jihadi manuals on suicide bombings.
Stewart: That's the way to read through it!
Logan: It's all on the Internet.
Stewart: What do you feel like — do you watch the news that we're watching in the United States?
Logan: No.
Stewart: Do you see what we're hearing about the war?
Logan: No.
Stewart: We might actually know everything.
Logan: If I were to watch the news that you're hearing here in the United States, I'd just blow my brains out, because it would just drive me nuts.
Stewart: Really??
Logan: Yes. [audience cheers]
Stewart: I am glad to see you overcome your shyness, because — [pause] Where do you think — ? If you were to say, if you had your druthers, would we be focused right now — in terms of just reporting, because I know this isn't about policy — Afghanistan or Iraq? Where do you think the big story is?
Logan: I don't think we should have to choose between — which war, you know, is...
Stewart: Right.
Logan: So we have more soldiers on the ground in Iraq than we do in Afghanistan, do we pay more attention? I think we should — I mean, it's very hard, because you hear all the time: "People are tired of the same thing over and over." I did a piece with Navy SEALs once. It took me six months of begging, screaming, breaking down walls, crawling on my knees, to get that imbed, and when I came back with that story I was told, "These guys — you know, one guy in uniform looks like any other guy in a uniform." And I'm on high-value target raids, taking down some of the most wanted Taliban fighters and Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, and I'm told, "Well, you know, one Arabic name sounds — unless it's Osama bin Laden, who cares about — you know, Mullah Ben Shaq, whatever?" So —
Stewart: Who's — ? I mean, these are the people that are in charge of what goes on these programs.
Logan: Well, although, for example — well, you know, Jeff Fager of 60 Minutes always says to me, "Iraq, Iraq, Iraq! Afghanistan, Afghanistan! We don't see enough of it, I want people to know more, people to see more" — I mean, it's —
Stewart: There are people pushing it —
Logan: Yes.
Stewart: — to try and get it through.
Logan: There are lots of people trying to get it through.
Stewart: And what about the danger for you? I mean, you're clearly, you know, you're a big, intimidating force — when you go out there, I mean, have you been hurt? Have you been — I mean, how do you protect yourself?
Logan: You know, often I work until 8 in the morning. I woke up one morning and I looked at the clock, and it was like, 11:00 a.m., and I thought, "Shit! I've got to get up!" and then I thought —
Stewart: Uh — I don't allow that type of language on this program. I don't care that you've just spent the last 5 years in a war zone, we have standards here.
Logan: Usually that's a good way to break the ice. You get in a Humvee with soldiers, they're all on their best behavior, they've been told not to swear about you, and you say, "Yo, what's up, motherfuckers?" and then it's all done.
Stewart: Really? [audience cheers] Wow. You know where that doesn't work? Florida retirement villages. [pause] What about you, though, safety-wise? Are you there with security details? Are you there with armed —
Logan: We have security details, we have Iraqi security guards.
Stewart: Then have you been exposed to gunfire and explosions and that type of thing.
Logan: Sure. Well, that morning in Baghdad, I looked at the clock, and I thought, Well, okay, I can have half an hour more, because I've only had 3 hours, went back to sleep, woke up, sat on the side of the bed thinking, I've gotta get up! and then it's like "Boom!" and the hotel blew up underneath me, so... They blew up the building. I think they were trying to kill some sheikhs, but, you know, they got a few other people, including a 5-year-old Iraqi girl.
Stewart: See, even that — the idea of that to me — if that happened in this country, that would be the biggest story for the next two years. It's as though we've become numb. I mean, there were 51 people killed today, in a Shi'ite neighborhood in Iraq — are we just numb? Have we lost our humanity with this entire situation?
Logan: Yeah, we have. You know, I was asked once, "Do you feel responsible for the American people having a bad view — a negative view — of the war in Iraq?" and I looked at the reporter, and I said, "Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier. What does that look like? Who in America knows what that looks like? 'Cause I know what that looks like, and I feel responsible for the fact that no one else does." You know. That's what I feel responsible for: that nobody really understands, and the soldiers do feel forgotten. They do, no doubt. From Afghanistan to Iraq, they absolutely feel — it may be — we may be tired of hearing about this 5 years later, they still have to go out and do the same job. I was in Sadr City, when it was just going absolutely hell for — I mean, Sadr City was like Armageddon, and there were soldiers there who'd been in-country 9 months who'd never seen combat like that, just thrown into it. You're talking about a convoys ambushed with 5, 6 armor-piercing bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, everything — 9, 10, 15-hour battles.
Stewart: And it's something that we might get just a brief glimpse of on the news or just a mention, and that kind of thing? Well, what kind of —
Logan: And more soldiers just died in Afghanistan last month than Iraq — who's paying attention to that? 33,000: highest troop level since the war began, 7 years after we defeated the Taliban.
Stewart: Well, certainly, you know, it's funny — we criticize the government an awful lot, but I guess we have a responsibility that we haven't lived up to as people, either, to keep ourselves up on it, so we appreciate everything you're doin', and thanks for comin' on and seein' us.
Logan: Thank you.
Stewart: And be safe. [to audience:] Lara Logan!
My take: if our nation is at war, then the entire nation, not just the military, must be engaged to give our all to the fight, and that means paying attention to what is happening in the war. If we aren't willing to pay attention to the war, and demand truthful and accurate information, then we have to get our troops out.
The American people do not back a prolonged military presence in Iraq. The Iraqi people do not back a prolonged military presence in Iraq. Thus, in the interests of both the American people and the Iraqi people, we must withdraw as rapidly as we safely can. We should do our best to minimize the damage to our national interests — not forgetting that the peace and stability of Iraq is in our national interest. We must recognize that our national interests are damaged if more of our soldiers are wounded or killed, but also when people on our side commit torture and other war crimes. If you think that pulling out of Iraq will cause "blowback" against the United States, compare that against the blowback from having the reputation as the country that tortures and indiscriminately kills Muslim men, women, and children. The War on Terror has changed one thing quite decisively in our national security equation: it is now more important that we be loved (or at least liked and respected) than that we be feared.
Lastly, my top recommendation if you want to know what's really going on in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the rest of the world), there's no better place to start than the top name in international journalism, Al Jazeera. It's a damned shame that the American people aren't clamoring to demand their cable systems carry the English-language channel, even while we demand that CBS News and all the other domestic sources give more airtime to reporters like Lara Logan and others of her dedication to getting the truth out there.
P.S. My brother, Bill Madison, used to work at CBS News. I haven't had a chance to ask him if he knows Lara Logan, but he did write in his blog, "Billevesées," about his reflections on the view from a competing newsroom of Tim Russert
Technorati tags: , Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Comedy Central, Lara Logan, CBS News, Iraq War, Afghanistan, Taliban, War on Terror, Transcript
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