Uh . . . did Pakistan just nab bin Laden?
UPDATE: Apparently not:
Pakistan says it has arrested a senior al Qaeda figure wanted for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed hundreds of people.Certainly good news that just happens to fall on the night John Kerry gives what is anticipated to be a massively watched speech. I'll put it like this: If any channel that would be expected under other circumstances to air Kerry's speech chooses instead to lend time to talking heads to debate the impact of this capture, I'm going to feel extremely cynical about the timing. If all the talking head coverage tonight undercuts John Kerry's argument tonight, I'm going to feel queasy. So long as Kerry's given his moment then I think a Qaeda capture's a Qaeda capture, and I don't care whether it helps Bush.Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat identified the man as Ahmed Khalfan Ghailini and said he was a Tanzanian national wanted for the synchronised bombings that killed more than 200 people at the U.S. embassy in Kenya and 11 at the embassy in Tanzania.
(Sure, there's some causality problems in the logic above—but just you wait. I'm going to see F9/11 in a bit and then I'll really be full of shit.)
That's it—I'm going to destroy everything. I usually reserve this space for issues from the larger world, but I'm afraid I might do damage to myself and those around me if I don't put this out. I have a few grievances:
Get too close to M____ Z____ and you will get burned. This woman is determined to scorch everyone in her path. M____ Z____'s weapons are the hottest jalapeno and habanero peppers this side of the Rio Grande. Since she lost the love of her life in a bizarre and tragic potato peeler accident, M____ Z____ has been hell bent on burning every mouth she kisses with her special brand of passion.So now I have to have a goddamned story arch to go with the indigestion from eating these hot-ass chips? Who wrote this shit, Kenny Rogers?
Kathryn Jean-Lopez at the Corner:
GETTING A LITTLE SILLY [KJL]I hope that's the stupidest thing I read today, and it most likely will be so long as I don't click over to that site again. "Silly" isn't the caveat I'd use.
But would you wear red if you were heiress of a ketchup fortune...especially if that all was a biographical fact noone [sic] wanted you to be playing up?
I sincerely regret defining up to a trend from anything KJL writes, but it's something that I've noticed—what's the deal with female coverage of female politicians? A good number of the serious female bloggers covering this convention seem unable to let pass an opportunity to squeeze in some fashion color commentary about a female political figure. For instance:
So it's a minor trend that only strikes me as odd because, for one, I don't see the same people intoning about men's fashion—though there's probably stuff out there about our former Lothario-in-Chief that I didn't catch. There's not a whole lot to men's formal fashion, which for the most part amounts to the same navy suit cut-and-pasted onto different men. Perhaps the observation only really amounts to a trend because no men out there are really writing about jewel-toned anything. But more to the point, there's no good reason to get into convention couture when there are larger issues people want to read about (and let it be said that nearly all the women above oblige with invaluable opinions).
Unserious asides or interesting details? Bad habits? Misogyny or bad reading on my part? Do girls just want to have fun? (If you think I harumph too much, please note that I enjoyed with delight a full hour of VH1's "Red-Carpet Disasters" last night before bed—I only wish I were too good for it all.)
Well, not quite yet, but there's a good deal of hope surrounding Barack Obama. Probably lots of people got their first introduction to the man last night and judging from the way it went, I don't think it will be the last speech we hear from him. At 42 he is young and seems even younger—I understand he's something of a technophile, likes blogs (and runs one), etc.
I want to encourage moderation in all things: There's still plenty of time for compromise bills and compromising circumstances, plenty of opportunity for some of his luster to fade. Still, though, only a handful of states away, the Republicans just nominated Tom Coburn for a Senate run. As God-awful as that news is, it's in a sense genuinely encouraging for the future of the Democratic Party. We're promoting at least one shiny happy liberal on the ground and at our convention. W. will surround himself with, well, John McCain in NYC come September, but the GOP still supports the same tyrannosaurs. They can't win on backasswardsness forever.
I know this doesn't mean anything—I know it's unscientific, unrigorous, how-dare-you-blog-this-sir bad—but let's just put a couple of recent public statements by Obama and Coburn side by side for comparison?
"I say to [Americans] tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America." —July 24, Boston
"I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life." —July 9, Oklahoma CityThe politics of marshmallowy-good hope versus the politics of fuck-all insane grandpa.
The issue of language framing is the subject of discussion at Crooked Timber, led by (guest writer from the Bloviator) Ross Silverman. Smart stuff regarding one aspect of the familiar conservative "marching orders" apparatus, which is nothing more devious than aerodynamic language. Rossman quotes George Lakoff from a piece in the American Prospect, which nicely illustrates the principle, so I'll repeat it here:
On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words “tax relief” started appearing in White House communiqués. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external cause. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, thanks to some reliever.I think this is an angle liberals or progressives would be wise to emulate, and Silverman's preferred example—Health Freedom—is a solid enough start. He's certainly right that "health care," with all its associations to HMOs, PPOs, and not getting good health care, would benefit from a dignified euphemism. I'm not sure that "Health Freedom" specifically is the perfect package for progressive universal health care, but a solid start for sure.This is an example of what cognitive linguists call a “frame.” It is a mental structure that we use in thinking. All words are defined relative to frames. The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero.
It's sorry that we need to attend so thoroughly to language in order to get things done—I, too, would rather talk about progressive taxation than attack tax relief. I'm also sorry that chili dogs don't grown on trees—I, too, would rather pluck myself a half-smoke than buy one. But there you have it. Anyone who's holding out for that mythical honest-talkin' leader who says what we all really feel and says so the way that we all really feel it should replay Dean's Iowa tapes. Politics, unfortunately, makes for politicians.
So long as that's true, we should play the game the right way, and a certain understanding of message discipline is sorely lacking in the progressive debate. There are limits, however, to the pages we should crib from the conservative playbook. "Liberal" has of course been subject to a powerful campaign in order to transform it into a term of real derision. I don't think that contemporary asshole conservatism is going to last, but I don't think we progressives want to demonize "Christian" or whatever in getting it out the door.
This morning I believe I encountered the dread iBook logic board failure for the second time this year. There's nothing more frighting than watching washingtonpost.com simply dissolve. I'm not sure that I ever say my NES fail so spectacularly.
Since I've now lost my hard disk twice for this stupid problem, I feel like I'm due something from the boys at Macintosh HQ. Panther? A memory upgrade? An AirPort Express is probably asking a bit much. (A laptop that works?)
UPDATE: Which is all to say that production at G.p may be spotty until Apple accomodates.
Peter Schjeldahl argues in the New Yorker that Ed Ruscha is overlooked as a seminal 60s artist. Schjeldahl's got something of a point. I think the problem might be that with American Pop and minimalist artists all hitting their stride during this decade, the field was unusually crowded—so if you didn't overhaul visual art, you might be overlooked for the textbook. Ruscha was working on broader semiotic questions. It's not a fault—I think that as with Bruce Nauman some of Ruscha's work was well ahead of its time, and that each of them was building on the lessons of his generation even as those fundamental concepts were still being played out. Then again, I'm not terribly familiar with his work, so maybe it's a bigger cosmic injustice than I'm making it out to be. Personally I don't care for his book-objects but I love his word paintings.
Lisp, 1968
Then Schjeldahl puzzles me with this tangent:
The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.I'm not sure I'd call the camera the dominant problem for art over the last half century—it's certainly been the dominant problem for pure painters, but other dominant problems led to massive expanses in what constitutes art—new genres, new concepts—and I don't think they all reduce to the photograph. Also seems weird to me to talk about the twentieth century in halves, at least as far as art is concerned. Tough questions.
You may have noticed that Google isn't working—apparently some confounded update of the MyDoom virus has the network in a tizzy. For the moment you can run a Google search through this link, provided that you're patient.
I understand that you've probably come here to find something that you won't read anywhere else: the news on the Democratic convention. A piece about how awesome the awesome parties really are (very awesome!), and where the who's who of the Democratic and media elite will go to see, be seen, wine, dine, and sixty-nine all over each other. Or maybe something about how this year is the Year of the Blogger, which portends deep structural changes to the very way in which Democratic conventions take place. Maybe an item about how the convention could potentially even have implications for John Kerry.
Unfortunately . . . I just don't care. I guess it's nice that some folks get to fly to Boston just because they run good blogs—I mean, I wouldn't mind a trip to Beantown—but I certainly don't see reason for pause. The convention bloggers are all promising the "inside scoop" on the convention, which sounds to me like "even more boring" coverage than the press is already providing. As far as this year's convention being some sort of milestone, hmm, well, since the only people taking note in the first place are bloggers or media types than this may indeed amount to one historic circle jerk. (I do recognize that complaining about the wankfest means I am a douche apart.)
And what's with Wonkette? Why's she so excited about partying with a set of people who probably haven't seen a weeknight spent drinking since the last convention? It's like the saddest parody ever of Oscar partying, which would be kind of retarded itself were it not for the fact that everyone in Hollywood is at least hot and drug-addled. I mean, headlined by the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Better than most work parties, I guess . . .
I'm a bit too drunk now (already—I know) for any topical writing, but I thought I'd take a second and direct your attention to some Web platforms that I read daily.
I definitely recommend Begging to Differ. First off, you know you like the Duke reference. They're a group of six guys presenting well-formed opinions from across the political spectrum, not just the liberal blah-dee-blah you read here. Seems that most of them have a strong hand at photography as well.
Hackmuth's blog—call it the Dust Congress as you see on my sidebar, or Falsedawn as you see in the link—reminds me a bit of Charles Demuth's The Figure 5 in Gold painting. That notorious painting is based on a poem by William Carlos Williams, and I think, similarly, Hackmuth puts synthesis to work on his site. Nearly daily he posts poems (with a Beat lean) along with other juicy news and culture items. And anyone who works the Modern Lovers, Holly Golightly, and John Cale into his monthly DJ playlist is gold in my book.
And if you're not reading Fafblog!, that's your own damned fault.
Concerning the Marriage Protection Act, HR 3313, which passed the House this week. The goal of the MPA is to refuse every court in the land the ability to rule on the Defense of Marriage Act. You'd think that this would be contrary to the spirit and the letter of the law, and according to Oxblogger Josh and literate people everywhere, you'd be right:
Put simply, Congress can't do that. Article 3, section 2 of the Constitution reads, "The judicial Power [of the United States] shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority." (Emphasis added. [by Josh])Ah ha, but what those erroneous forefathers never figured on was that Congress could amend the Constitution to exempt the Defense of Marriage Act from all that bureaucratic red tape. High time we put a stop to these activist judges, eh? And what's to stop the president from creating a cabinet-level body to protect our sacred institution—a Marriage Enforcement Department of Defense of Marriage Protection Defense Marriage. Replete with Nuptial Stormtroopers, to ensure that you're not doing any of the dirty bad things in your bedchambers.Now, section 2 also provides that, "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." But the exceptions and regulations language is clearly talking only about the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction. Congress cannot strip jurisdiction over a federal question from the federal judiciary as a whole. In other words, Congress can -- as the 1789 Judiciary Act did --refuse to grant the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over certain federal questions, so long as some federal court is given jurisdiction over those questions -- that is, so long as the judicial power of the United States extends to those questions.
As Oscar Wilde said, "I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible." Inexplicable as HR 3313 is, it's a sure sign that we're seeing the last gasps of this movement. Gay marriage is all but granted to the citizenry at this point—to the next bulwark, social conservatism!
Last fall the Corcoran Gallery was host to a show that has widely been described as one of the worst exhibits DC has ever seen: J. Seward Johnson's "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited." WaPo art critic Blake Gopnik did not mince words when he said, "This is the worst museum exhibition I've ever seen." Seward's show featured bronze "sets" (created by a team of artists) which revealed the larger world beyond the edges of the most famous Impressionist paintings, often to reveal Seward and company at hand—oh, say, he and Manet enjoying a drink at le Folies-Berger or something. Universally panned would be a gentle summary of the critical reaction to the show. (Except for some ebullient praise from National Review's Meghan Keane, who described the show with words like "enchanting"—vomit! vomit!—but we'll not digress into that whole bad aesthetics/bad ethics correlation today.)
The thing is, of course, the kids loved it. And the Corcoran raked in bazillions. It was the equivalent of an Oscar award-winning actress taking a summer breather with a bad knock-off comic book movie.
But it seems like the Corcoran is gearing up for the red carpet again with Sally Mann's "What Remains" exhibit, which has garnered high praise from critics and probably its share of gasps from family outings. In previous efforts Sally Mann has famously documented her children nude, up until the age at which they no longer felt comfortable modeling. (Not exactly the sort of show that inspires the crowd who thoroughly enjoyed traipsing around Seward's candyland, for which Seward obligingly painted footsteps on the ground to outline an optimal route. I imagine the Corcoran suffered the former show so they could take the financial hit with Mann and other, you know, actual artists.) Mann's current show is bluntly centered on death. She's gone so far as to disinter her year-long dead dog in order to photograph the dying and decaying process. I'm seeing the show next Thursday—I'm kind of scared but I caught a sneak peak anyway from Sarah Boxer's review in the NYT.
Boxer makes the point that Mann has gone from sexualizing her children to thanatizing them. (They make an appearance at the end of the show.) I wonder, actually, if there's much difference. Mann's photography has significant Epicurean undertones—pictures of her children with fruit juice gushing from their mouths, down their prepubescent chests—and thanatizing desire (if you will) was an Epicurean way to negate the pleasures that are threatened by death. In this way she transforms her children from sources of suffering (caused by their deaths, caused by the concept of their deaths) into pleasurable aesthetic objects.
Mann may not grace the pages of Today's Parent any time soon, but she's found one way of side-stepping all that security mom hysteria.
With Ali G. This is (at least) her second column dedicated to his show in the last couple years. This one wasn't published during the onset of war, though, and it does tie in loosely to something about Bush; I'm not sure if that means it's a more or less successful MoDo column.
Been looking for this Daily Show clip for days and it's finally up. Check it out—you need to see to believe.
In her editorial today, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses an article that popped up in the NYT a few days ago. The subject of the report was abortion and television:
TWO 14-year-old girls are talking. One, named Manny, says to the other: "I'm just trying to do the right thing here. For me. For everyone, I guess."Even sexually liberal HBO handled abortion with gloves, as Claire in Six Feet Under gets an abortion but is haunted (specifically, in a hallucination) afterward.* Many mainstream television shows have featured women considering abortion, even going so far as a clinic's doors, only to turn back—none go through with it.The speaker is a character on "Degrassi: The Next Generation," a popular Canadian soap opera for kids, who is telling her best friend why she's decided to have an abortion. The two-part episode was shown on CTV in Canada in January. But the N, the Viacom-owned cable channel that shows "Degrassi" in the United States, has decided not to schedule the episodes.
Unlike such once-taboo issues as date rape, gay relationships and teenage sex, abortion on television remains an aberration. Manny is the very rare character who actually has one; what's even more rare is that she doesn't regret it afterward.
Ehrenreich argues that our representations and repressions of abortion issues conflate reproductive rights with other issues. She's assertive:
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis? Medically informed "terminations" are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.She's damned right, and good for her. Implicit in our conventional wisdom that the inconvenience of a disabled child makes a more compelling case for abortion than the inconvenience of an unwanted child is an admission to—a submission to—a national standard. The progressive fight for abortion rights is not about whether I envision more or less approvable decisions for you but about your right to your body—your right to submit to your conscience alone. The stigmatization of sexual decisions has always been an avenue for sexual domination, and limiting abortion rights with "worst-case scenario" mores is an avenue toward eliminating abortion rights.It would be unfair, though, to pick on the women who are in denial about aborting "defective" fetuses. At least 30 million American women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, mostly for the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as "convenience" - a number that amounts to about 40 percent of American women. Yet in a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice group, only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice, suggesting that there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves.
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this "bad faith," meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.
To return to Ehrenreich's starting point, it does suggest the powerful interplay between art and the political zeitgeist. Can anyone even think of an indie film dealing with abortion in a realistic way?
* Six Feet Under may go down as the only show in television history to ever reference Matthew Barney—I've never felt more like a target demographic. I mean, they made a point of it—over and over, calling Claire's date "the Matthew Barney of LAC arts"—so I can only assume that mine is the new heartbeat of America. Claire, by the way, is a fine character who has been subjected to some of the more horrible arts courses imaginable, but it seems as if she's finally gone upper division, where the class covers real-world concepts such as a work's "success" and "hot lesbian action."
According to BTD Vance, the 2004 election is built upon a foundation of subterfuge and lies:
Everyone knows that everyone in New England is a liberal Democrat. It is not a coincidence that a significant factor in the liberal media, ESPN, is based in Connecticut. Additionally, everyone knows that almost every single football fan is a Republican, as football is the essential good ole boy sport, the antithesis of everything that John Kerry represents. As a final point of reference, note that Ohio is a crucial swing state in the election. Since LBJ's election in 1964, every single candidate that carried Ohio won the general election. Three times Democrats have carried Ohio, and those three times we have elected Democratic presidents.Unbelievable. I find politicizing NCAA football ethically objectionable, though the first candidate to run on the Anyone But Stoops platform gets my vote.Now for the frightening conspiracy. On election night, the very night that we elect the president of the free world, ESPN has scheduled a football game. And not just any football game, but rather, one that matches up Mid American Conference rivals Miami (Ohio) and Toledo. Not coincidentally, both universities are located in the state of Ohio. The Republican good ole boys of Ohio will spend the entire day getting drunk and going to a football game while the liberal Democrats will insure that Kerry carries the day in Ohio. There has never been a college football game on Election Tuesday--until this year. It's obviously a conspiracy.
I can't yet say if I'm more anxious for fall to arrive for the actually watchable sports or the election.
No anti-tax jihadist am I, but I felt comfortable with the Senate/House compromise to extend the middle-class tax cuts for two years even if they were not offset by corresponding spending cuts or tax increases. At the very least, the bill was assured enthusiastic support from the White House, and as far as inevitable Republican legislation goes tax breaks for those hit hardest by the economic shortfall isn't reprehensible.
I was prepared to suffer Bush's bragging rights when, lo and behold, Bush up and killed the bill:
But in an improbable series of machinations, White House officials opposed the tentative deal worked out between House and Senate Republican leaders that would have extended the tax cuts for two years at a cost of about $80 billion.Unbelievable! Bush ought to have recognized the predicament from one of Solomon's parables. Instead of the wise decision to split the baby in half between the two interested parties, Bush chose to let his baby die. (That is exactly what happened in the Bible.)That left Republicans conceding that the tax-cutting effort is over, at least until Congress returns from its recess in September.
The Republicans' inability to agree among themselves cost them the chance to highlight their link to tax cuts as the election season moves into high gear.
[. . .]
. . . Republican Congressional officials said the administration did not want a deal that Democratic lawmakers might support, giving them a tax-cutting credential, too.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, had already said he would retain most of Mr. Bush's middle-class tax cuts, and many Democratic lawmakers said they would vote for a modest extension of the tax cuts even if the extension was not paid for.
"If the Democrats had been on the same side, it would have taken a lot of arrows out of the quiver,'' said one Republican staff member. [emphasis added]
If there was ever any doubt about the sincerity of Bush's oath to change the tone—to unite and not divide—this bill's death has to have put the lie to his campaign promises. He won't even pursue his ideology if Democrats can take partial credit for the outocome. I'll admit, I'm surprised, though I suppose the middle class aren't parcel to his haves-and-have-mores base.
Also: It sort of sucks that legislation on the floor of Congress carries all the weight of a game of Magic: The Gathering between the forces of incumbent and the forces of challenger, but I don't think that's new.
I didn't catch this item from a few weeks back until last night's Daily Show, but Laurie Anderson has been selected as NASA's artist-in-residence. I've met exactly one person who really got into LA and her brand of performance art. Frankly, I'm with Jon Stewart, who says that her work "combines music, performance, and me getting up and leaving." If you're unfortunate enough to have heard her 1981 radio aberration, "O Superman," just be glad that you never had to write an essay about it in college.
Wouldn't someone like Matthew Ritchie be a more appropriate fit as NASA's court artisan? He did name a piece after the fine-structure constant—you're more likely to find someone at NASA than in the art world to analyze that decision. (From what I've been told, Ritchie can't explain it to you, either, but I'm not one to gossip.)
Proposition Player, 2003
Bostonians Applicable Massachusetts residents can check out Ritchie at the MASS Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) through the spring of next year. Masochists worldwide can preview/download Anderson's music through the usual channels. I strongly suggest you consider this warning first:
I won't tell you twice.
ALSO: The WaPo article also says that the Federal Reserve Board also has a healthy visual art budget. I have a feeling that they buy for the investment.
. . . I'm not sure if that could even be described as an attempt at a joke.
I'm going to tempt fate and divulge some longstanding strife between Susan and me to the wider public—and it's all Catherine's fault for linking to criminalcheck.com, which allows you to search for sex offenders by zip code. Turns out that my haven of half-smokes and half-crazy hosts 83 sex offenders. Pretty heinous.
Now it pains me to take the objectively pro-sex offender stance here, especially when Susan's argument is so compelling: The justice system seems incapable of either rehabilitating or effectively prosecuting sex offenders. A sex offender registry seems like a prudent ex ante solution to the problem of a probable recidivist moving into your neighborhood.
A realist's answer, but if that's what you want to do, you don't want to go about it with an online registry that many people in this neighborhood can't even access. Not even us gentrifying types knew the database existed before now. You're going to want the pamphleteering or yard signs that some communities have mandated. If you really plug the gap in the justice system, it would probably be best to, say, paint a sex-offender's yard black. Or castrate him.
I'm not trying to invoke the slippery slope—I'm just noting that we don't find these effective solutions palatable because we recognize that our justice system does rehabilitate some criminals (right?), and once a criminal pays his debt to society, we acknowledge that. That's why we have a provision to let them out in the first place. If we know we shouldn't be letting them out, we shouldn't let them out only to tell everyone that we shouldn't have let them out.
There are good answers: better identification and prosecution of sex offenders that are considered non-rehabilitatable. Severe penalties for the crimes that society holds as the most grave. Stricter, better supervised paroles—which I think go a long way toward fighting recidivism in many criminal categories. But I think we've retired the scarlet letters with good reason.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what the story is with Sandy Berger, but there can be no doubt that serious Schaudenfreude is at hand. Valerie who?
Note the convenient timing of this July surprise. Really, though, if this investigation's been brewing since October, why didn't Berger step down from his unofficial post as national security adviser to John Kerry? Why didn't Kerry lose him? If I were John Kerry: "And I say to you, Sandy Berger, you're a nice guy. But people say you stuff national security secrets in your socks, and that's weird."
Probably Kerry's first campaign mistake—so how grave?
UPDATE: Re: comments below and Kevin Drum's thoughts, it would appear that Terry McAuliffe doesn't think that a Democrat leaked the Sandy Berger story, since the DNC filed a FOIA request "for the release of correspondence between the Department of Justice and the White House regarding this investigation." I have no doubts the memos are forthcoming.
The Senate stay fresh to death:
At this point, according to observers, both statesmen decided—by seemingly unspoken mutual consent—to abandon the gutter patois of the common carnival worker and to resort instead to an eminently more quotable (but, to those not versed in the vagaries of hip-hop idiom, more confusing) exchange of viewpoints.Ah . . . white people.“Oh, it’s like that?” Mr. Cheney queried.
“Whut? Whut?” Mr. Leahy shot back.
“Once again,” Mr. Cheney replied (quite obviously quoting a lyric from Ice Cube’s 1990 album, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”), “it’s on.”
[. . .]
Most of the rhymes kicked therein cannot be quoted in a family publication, but observers gave Mr. Cheney credit for his deceptively laid-back flow. Mr. Leahy was applauded for managing to rhyme the phrases “unethical for certain,” “crude oil spurtin’,” and “like Halliburton.”
Despite the fact that both participants brought their A-game and succeeded in dropping mad scientifics, the bout seemed to end in a draw.
[. . .]
Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) was the first to notice that the two men were circling each other, Mr. Cheney brandishing a switchblade and Mr. Leahy the jagged neck of a broken bottle.
“Oh, snap!” Mr. Kennedy recalls thinking at the time. “It’s getting kind of hectic up in this piece.”
Something I've talked about with a few people: It's not worth it to pile up on the Bush twins, unless you think you can really nail them. OK, OK, I kid—my feeling is that they're perfectly normal girls and it's a bit Atrios-y to punish them for getting hussied up and hammered, which is more or less an American pastime. And f you grew up in Texas, you'd try your damnedest to come by a fake ID as well—those margaritas are a siren's call.
I don't know if anyone that public has, say, suggested that either twin is the WH dog or anything, but there's been some regrettable mumbling about Bush's many public appearances with its daughters of late. Frankly it's been a shrewd move on Bush's behalf: They're successful, accessible, and a hell of a lot softer than Donald Rumsfeld. And it's not exactly coldly calculating or whatever to take pictures with your daughters. (For every shining photo op, however, Wonkette is expected to regale us with stories about how someone saw them in the bar and they were getting slutty.)
As with the jukebox, it would appear that elevators cannot escape the forces of the marketplace. In my workplace elevator there is a digital flatscreen monitor that rotates a series of ads (primarily "AD SPACE AVAILABLE"). Occasionally I'm subjected to four floors' worth of trivia, and today's "Did you know . . . ?" tells me that the etymology of the word "golf" is an acronym: "Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden."
Tthe Augusta National notwithstanding, the elevator's claim is false. "Golf" is some take on some ancient Scottish word for "club," or so the golf-industrial complex would lead me to believe. I dare not imagine the implications for the world of miniature golf were the rumor correct.
NOTE: Golf is still extremely boring, and no acronym could change that fact.
UPDATE: From comments I'm learning that golf isn't so bad if you're hungover and asleep. I stand corrected.
For no justifiable reason the first thing I did after I woke up this morning was beeline to William Safire's column. Even at the tender hour of 7 a.m.—an hour at which my brain reaches its prime if all involuntary processes are running on schedule—I recognized a few very significant errors in Safire's Niger analysis. Not just the typical The-Hillary-forged-the-document variety misstep that you've come to expect, either.
Laura Rozen, writing at 6:58 a.m. and showing a morning mental capacity of several times my own, beat me to the punch, so I'll let her take it away. She quotes Safire:
. . .State Department intelligence also was dubious, reports the Senate, more so in October when an Italian journalist brought in a bunch of phony documents somebody was trying to sell him about a Niger uranium transaction. This outweighed the report of a top security official in the French Foreign Ministry, who told U.S. diplomats in November 2002 that "France believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger."And then ripostes:Two months later, with no objection from C.I.A., the famous 16 words went into Bush's 2003 State of the Union.
But when word leaked about the fake documents — which were not the basis of the previous reporting by our allies — Wilson launched his publicity campaign, acting as if he had known earlier about the forgeries. [emphasis Rozen's]
-- The Italian journalist was not a "he."These are the sort of errors that warrant the correction I fully expect the NYT to run tomorrow. "The Times was in error when it continued to employ William Safire as a columnist. We regret the oversight."-- The forged Niger docs were indeed the chief basis for Italy's reporting to the US on the Niger uranium claims.
-- The French report was based on the forged Niger uranium docs.
-- Reports from the fake documents were the chief source of the previous reporting to the US by the Italians, and partly by the British as well, on the Niger uranium issue.
I don't know if Kos refuses to think things through or I'm misreading him, but he seems to be affirming the efforts of Michael Rogers, who is working to out gay congressional aides from their GOP closets. Because Kos left out a crucial verb and adverb pair in the sentence introducing Rogers, it's not totally clear how he feels. But Kos's other comments seem to approve outing campaigns in general:
About the most frustrating aspect of this whole "marriage" debate are the asshole Republicans who supposedly stand in defense of the institution of marriage, when they have two or three marriages under their belts. An outing campaign of FMA supporters who cheat on their wives would be delicious indeed.The problem isn't that asshole Republicans aren't themselves castigated along with everyone else over the details of their sex lives. The problem is the obsessive sexual component to American politics, which isn't cured by scrutinizing political sex lives more obsessively. And besides, outing staffers only serves to get gay staffers fired. Plus there's probably not an enormous gaggle of gay GOP aides, so we're really talking about some blogger picking on a small number of people. I'm missing where the sea change comes in.
Can hypocrisy be the only reason you'd stay closeted as a GOP aide, or as a gay in general? While I think anyone who's working for the GOP is confused, a queer GOP staffer would be a mighty curious animal indeed. Still, you know, not every gay supports gay marriage—I believe it was the editorial opinion of the Village Voice that gay marriage should be shunned as an heterosexualist institution. (The radical separatist gay GOP staffer has to be quite rare.) Really, though—when was the last time your boss (a congressman, at that) asked you what you thought about sex? Sometimes there's no appropriate opportunity to announce your sexual proclivities to your boss. You miss your chance in those first couple weeks, it just gets awkward later. A person might even be genuinely confused about his sexual orientation. It's even conceivable that a staffer puts universal political considerations at a higher priority than his own self interest (though this is almost certainly disproved by every staffer I've met here). It's just not wise business to assume that if someone doesn't share your ethics that they must certainly hold the ethics at the polar end of the spectrum.
Kos should revise or at least clarify his thinking here, lest the Ghost of Independent Investigations Past come trolling around to remind him how much we hated smear efforts against Clinton.
Florida never ceases to amaze. As one of a handful of states that refuse ex-felons the right to vote, Florida shaved the course of the 2000 election with a remarkably flawed ex-con database. The state corrected its rolls for 2004—so they said, because only after a successful lawsuit by CNN did Florida finally release the purge list that was supposed to exculpate the state's methodology.
The results did not inspire confidence. Of 47,000 names collected in a state where one in five citizens is Hispanic, just 50 names on the list were Hispanic. 20% of the population is Hispanic, but only 0.1% of the state's ex-felons are the same? It does not take much of a conspiratorial leap to recognize that the data are populated nearly entirely by Democratic-leaning minorities, while Republican-voting minorities have been granted a reprieve.
From work experience I know that race status presents real difficulties in this sort of demographic data collection. Unlike white or African-American variables, Hispanic variables aren't (or are rarely) binary. This would be problematic even for heavily Cuban Hispanic Florida, where Puerto Ricans, Santo Domingans, and a handful of Mexicans would occupy the same race variable.
This sort of data error you notice and then correct. Bureaucratic organizations and contracts exist in order to ensure data quality, even if there's no simple solution for many database problems. I know, for example, that a recent national estimate regarding cancer data employed a Hispanic-race variable that wrought normal values throughout the nation, with the exception of one state, in which the variable doubled the Hispanic population. Still, data collection problems at the national level—which are in part produced by a bevy of binding state laws—wouldn't be encountered at the state/county level. That the state does not answer to anyone but the press over the quality of its data strikes me as an enormous problem that you wouldn't find at the national level, where data are required to meet certain standards.
Even accepting some global data incompetence on behalf of the state—the state kept its records secret. The press had to sue the Sunshine State to shed some light on records that were intended to vindicate the state to the people and its press. And these aren't records that are normally kept secret—that was a completely unique provision this time around. It's just too damned difficult to do the gymnastics to prove that there's a good explanation for what very much sounds like corruption.
(Check out Legal Fiction and Billmon.)
So we've all seen this, right? The account regarding a group of 14 Syrian men engaged in an apparent dry-run attempt to make a bomb on-flight?
The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.I have yet to see any major media outlet corroborate this story, and the blogosphere's collectively puzzled.Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.
For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit - still wearing sunglasses - was also standing. Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.
Occam's razor cuts this one down to a hoax. The success of an airborn terrorist attack depends entirely upon novelty—it is a scheme that is given time but not opportunity to define. If our woman Annie Jacobsen can surmise the nature of what was happening during the dry run, obviously any terror/intelligence analyst in America could—thereby totally negating the usefulness of practicing the plan. We all know that a September 11th only works once—I have my doubts as to whether a terrorist will ever try that tack again.
Maybe these terrorists aren't so rational as all that; maybe their goal is the advent of racial profiling in America. That sounds to me more like the goal of a bogus, fear-mongering article than of an Islamicist conspiracy. And, frankly, that this shit could go down with no one but "Women's Wall Street" ending up with a story is too ridiculous for words. (Check out Red State for a few more suspicions about her narrative.)
UPDATE: And, you know, one part of a bomb has to be dangerous, right? Even if 13 bad dudes get through with nuts and bolts, one guy has to have gun powder. Plus, here's one of Ms. Jacobsen's quotes:
What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats.Doesn't that sound, I don't know, like bullshit?
It's not always the case but I think at a certain level of legislation you do arrive at a zero-sum between liberty and security. When perfectly normal activities that would hardly be described as "liberties," such as snapping photographs in the subway, come under scrutiny for their capacity to abet evil, I think we're going a bit overboard. Not only is enforcement a totally ludicrous suggestion, anyone anywhere with two free minutes and a modem or a library card could summon much more detailed information than a terrorist could obtain from a camera phone snapshot that authorities wouldn't detect in the first place. Let's be realistic—banning the gathering of information in America is not a vital front in the war on terror.
Meanwhile, further south, nothing to worry about:
In the first episode, at a Starbucks, Fairfax police wrongly confiscated weapons from two college students and charged them with a misdemeanor. Police realized their mistake, returned the guns and tore up the charges the next day. Police commanders have since issued a reminder to officers that "open carry" is the law of the land in the Old Dominion.These Virginians probably aren't taking up photography or information-gathering of any variety any time soon, so, you know, that makes me feel safe.[. . .]
In Virginia, as in many states, carrying a concealed weapon requires a permit, issued by a local court. But no permit is required to simply wield a gun in the open, a right reinforced by a state law that took effect July 1. Not so in the District and Maryland, unless you're a police or federal officer.
[. . .]
[T]he second paragraph of the law defines firearms only as any semiautomatic weapon that holds more than 20 rounds or a shotgun that holds more than seven rounds -- assault rifles, mostly, Van Cleave said. Regular six-shooters or pistols with nine- or 10-shot magazines are not "firearms" under this Virginia law.
So that's why those robots in the new Will Smith movie bug me—they really do look like Chris Elliott. A more horrifying future is difficult to imagine. (Observation from an AICN thread, courtesy of Norbizness.)
Not planning to see this movie—so long as Will Smith indignates an "Oh hell no" and wins in the end, I think I already have. It's too bad that the traditional robot threat—a Frankenstein menace of intellectual overreach and betrayal—has been upended by lithe Mac ninjas, all because the computer technology that will one day usher the age of the machines has become more technically but less aesthetically sophisticated. (Witness the same computer-affected trend in movie zombies, which have traded in mob mentality (and brain-feastage) for more athletic characteristics.) Computer-driven special effects have come a long way in glossing over the complex threat of HAL.
Summer blockbusters are all sizzle and no steak—but is that what computers want us to believe? 'Cause I don't know if I'm buying the Get a Life subterfuge.
Reading over the answers that Jeanne D'Arc listed to that 100-question either/or survey that's all over the ol' interWeb, I spotted this question:
55. Minimalism or conceptual art?Which strikes me as a "bananas or fruit?" sort of question. (Anyone who wants a quick primer on either ought to check Barbara Reise's notes, presented by the Tate Gallery: minimalism; conceptualism.) I'd take arguments but I think minimalism is best understood as a prequel to the broader conceptualist development.
Regardless, I think you could get something interesting out of the question above if you consider another recent conversation, one with grumplepuss excelsior, Harold Bloom. Bloom says that high culture doesn't jibe with the Internet, but I think that minimalism and especially conceptualism are extremely e-transmittable. Plus, there are useful distinctions to be made between this subgenre (minimalism) and genre (conceptualism) by comparing their respective online potentials. (If you were ever inclined to do something like that.)
What's at work there is 1) the shape of the stripe, and 2) the width of the stripe. Until he started introducing more variables, that's what determined the outcome of his paintings. I think it's still important to witness minimalist art but it's clearly not unreasonable to ask why. (The answer, I think, is: The art was made, so if you want to see it, you have to see it.)
FOOTNOTE: And like the American system itself, neither the concepualist nor the minimalist movement would have come to life were the groundwork not laid by other artists long ago. I think you'd specifically want to cite Duchamp as a proto-conceptualist who arrived at the conclusion that any object was art with the support of the idea, even a urinal, but never quite made the full realization that the idea alone can be the art. A real man ahead of his time, though. Similarly Malevich presaged minimalism by some degree in his reference to a natural form that didn't actually occur in nature, The Black Square. Not quite the same thing as producing work that refers to nothing, even if it looks minimalist enough. Still, the rest of Malevich's Suprematist experiment was built around applying transformative rules to his square—spinning it to make circles, sliding it to make crosses—and he also eventually introduced variables like color and dimensionality before Suprematism expired itself.
I'm sure the survey Jeanne D'Arc took had the Picasso/Matisse question, but it seems like the real question about the 20th century's greatest artist is between Malevich and Duchamp.
UPDATE: It also occurs to me that I wanted to note that I nearly had a religious experience seeing a Gerhard Richter painting for the first time this weekend—I missed his huge retrospective when it came everywhere but Austin, Texas. But then I wasn't going to write about it because it would be no use. You wouldn't be able to see it in a JPEG, that's for sure. So the Internet is great and all, but.
B.F., EGYPT — Polls conducted in terrorist camps throughout the Middle East show little ambiguity regarding the number one priority in global terrorism: affecting the outcome of the 2004 American presidential election.
The 2004 election has displaced a range of previously stated goals, such as restoring the Caliphate, redacting modernity, instituting a fundamentally flawed interpretation of Koranic law, and destroying Western civilization.
"The Shi'ites, the Sunnis, the Chechnyans, Palestine, Bali—we're all on board here," said one terrorist. "Frankly, I'm glad our organization's started calling for message discipline. Used to be, back when we were irrational, you'd have different cells telling you all sorts of reasons why they supported acts of homicide on a global level. Now we're not crazy—now we've got a game plan. We're motivated and set to get involved in the political process."
But the same polls reveal a startling partisan divide over which candidates the terrorists will support through attacks. Terrorists cite a number of concerns, ranging from job security to the availability of WMD materials, as influential in their evaluation of the 2004 campaign.
One terrorist displayed his support for the GOP ticket by sporting a "Bush/Cheney '04" sticker on his RPG-launcher. "Bush has done wonders for recruitment around the globe, and that means more jobs for terrorists," he said. "Plus, I don't think that Bush is pursuing terrorism except at the state-authored level, which is great for us little guys. He's good for business."
"When Osama condemns the Great Satan, he means it's time to 'Cut the Bushit,'" reported one terrorist who would be terrorizing for Kerry. "I think you can always trust a Democrat to not do what needs to be done to protect the homeland."
Another Kerry supporter said that the locations of the Democratic and Republican conventions factored into his decision. "Frankly, I'd rather blow myself to smithereens in New York City. I've always pulled for the BoSox. Terrorists—we're underdogs, too."
"A few months ago you'd hear a lot of people talking about, 'Who would you rather share a hooka with, Kerry or Bush?'" recalled one cell leader. "Then everyone kind of realized that we're supposed to be killing these guys. So terrorists are definitely thinking about the issues now."
"I don't think we can assume to understand the way that Western civilization works, or that we should plan terror according to our understanding of the electoral scene," said one politically uncommitted terrorist—a rare find, when 7 of 10 terrorists report that they have made up their mind and will not change their positions before November. "I read a lot of William Safire, and I just want to know: Where's Hillary in all this? Count on an October surprise, that's all I'm saying."
Islamofascist analysts are working to put the new political focus into an historical terrorist context.
"It never really occurred to us during the Reagan or Clinton administrations—really, right up until the latest news cycle. But our focus on the 2004 election is definitely a fundamental paradigm shift on behalf of various terrorist organizations and not just motivations ascribed to us for the purpose of cultivating an atmosphere of uncertainty among American voters in order to advance a political agenda," said one authority on authoritarianism in the Islam world. "New developments in the campaign are having an immediate effect on global terrorism. There was wide consensus that if Kerry went with Gephardt, we'd immediately attack America's water supply. The Edwards pick surprised a lot of us—so it's back to the drawing board, maybe with ports. And what if Bush dumps Cheney? It's an exciting season for terror."
Many terrorists voice a common complaint about the lack of representation in the American political system, which they say pushes them to resort to less traditional displays of political speech such as suicide terrorism. "It's all about access," said one terrorist associated with the growing Jihad Without Representation movement. "American political parties always cite our beliefs as reasons why the citizenry should vote one way or the other. But we can't vote on the issues being bandied about in our name, and that is so frustrating. Our organization believes that the best way to address this fundamental imbalance is to kill ourselves and others simultaneously."
Not all terrorists agree that the new focus on the November election is beneficial to the Islamofascist cause. "I feel like it might be too much inside baseball for people who are considering whether they want to get into terrorism," said one. "Some people see American elections as too obscure, too far away. The kids, they think influencing voting is for old people. Terrorism should be about values. Whatever happened to the cult of death?"
By Richard Serra. Courtesy of the Arts Newspaper.
Tom Coburn, enemy of modernity:
"I favor the death penalty," Coburn told the AP last week, "for abortionists and other people who take life."So you all read if you checked in with Josh Marshall. I only bring it up to reiterate that it seems that the Republican Party is edging toward a crisis. This kind of extremism isn't sustainable for the GOP: When a member is informed by divine will rather than the normal representative obligations, how can he stand down on anything? Compromise isn't an option, and the Party's best bet then is to stoke the culture wars and hope that the nation also holds extreme fundamentalist beliefs. But it really doesn't—certainly not like Coburn's—so it's not going to work.
No one believes the Bush administration is trying to turn the US into a theocracy. But their unmitigated efforts to cater to a truly fundamentalist margin on the right makes that margin difficult to ignore. Guys like Coburn are adamant about this stuff, and it's not going to be easy for the GOP to hide these radicals behind the public face of McCain and Scharzenegger indefinitely. (You'd think conservatives would realize there's a reason these guys are popular and go with it . . . .)
NEWARK, July 13 - Gov. James E. McGreevey's top contributor was charged on Tuesday in a bizarre scheme to enlist prostitutes in an effort to silence potential witnesses in a federal investigation of possible illegal campaign contributions.Pretty sure I caught this one on Cinemax late one night—it doesn't end well for the Democratic incumbent.In a criminal complaint that reads like a plot line from an Elmore Leonard novel, Charles Kushner, a New Jersey landowner and businessman with close ties to many religious and political figures, was charged with hiring prostitutes to entice his brother-in-law and his accountant into sexually compromising situations.
The complaint says that the accountant did not take the bait, but that the brother-in-law did. The result, prosecutors said, was a sexual encounter between the brother-in-law and a high-priced New York call girl in a Bridgewater motel room last December that was recorded by a hidden camera.
The complaint, which mentions no name except Mr. Kushner's, says that he and his co-conspirators mailed the incriminating tape to a relative with whom he was feuding and who was cooperating with investigators. Based on the allegations in a separate civil suit, that family member is believed to be Mr. Kushner's sister, Esther Schulder. Her husband, William E. Schulder, did not return calls seeking confirmation that he was involved. Robert Yontef, the accountant, could not be reached either. The mailing, according to the complaint, was an attempt to "retaliate" against the potential witnesses and block any further cooperation.
What's really important about this gay marriage debate isn't whether heterosexual marriage is headed for the toilet—not in the slightest. If you think that, you're just a fool. What we're really talking about is whether gay men should be persecuted for being gay. Consider this revealing jewel from the GOP Web site, courtesy of Yglesias:
Edwards Believes In Right To Privacy When It Comes To State Sodomy Laws. ABC's GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "Here in the state of South Carolina, it's a felony for two gay men to have sex in their own home. Senator Edwards, do you support the right of the people of South Carolina to keep that law on the books, or do you think that under the Constitution there’s a fundamental right to privacy that protects that right?" EDWARDS: "I believe there is a fundamental right to privacy. I do not believe the government belongs in people's bedrooms. I think that applies to both gay and lesbian couples and heterosexual couples." (Sen. John Edwards, Remarks At Democrat Presidential Candidates Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/3/03)So I'll just repeat Yglesias: "It seems to me, though, that the GOP's been pretty slow on the ball in terms of actually locking up fags instead of just talking a big game about how it's constitutional for them to do it if they feel like."
If you're inclined to the belief that gays should be warranted as a criminal class, here's your party. It's part of a long tradition of the conservative philosophy, which has, for example, only recently ceased to institutionally resist miscegenation. I think it's unfortunate that the Republican Party continues to hand its reigns to a religious faction that is, indeed, wild as the Taliban, and I hope that a resounding loss in November coupled with a defeat on the FMA will lead the GOP to rethink its stance on compassion and freedom. It certainly doesn't have to take its cues from people who claim to receive policy advice from God if it doesn't want to.
So which would you rather talk about: Politicized intelligence or gay marriage? Maybe a little Joe Wilson? We need to have this election already so we can just get past this damned news cycle. I feel like I'm going to hear about how the cicadas are back soon enough, but at least Dallas will have another shot at Sac-town.
But at some crucial juncture, liberals and conservatives seems to have taken different paths in reliving the last few news cycles. Here's a snippet from Josh Marshall:
Government officials are not allowed to disclose the identity of covert intelligence agents, whether they feel like they have a good reason or not.And the riposte from Jonah Goldberg:
Frankly, I'll await someone else's legal analysis before I make up my mind about that . . . [M]aybe Marshall's correct about the law, but he's pretty deep in the bunker if he thinks there's no difference -- to the public or to a jury -- between someone trying to rebut and explain a partisan attack from someone pretending to be a dispassionate public servent [sic] and inadvertantly [sic] spilling the beans about her job and someone saying "let's frag Wilson's wife."Perhaps JG should defer to the Justice Department, which decided it needed to recuse itself from investigating the case because of its significant merit. It's pretty stinking dishonest to intentionally obfuscate on the point of whether laws were broken, which most certainly were, so that you can justify some slimy purpose for the law-breaking at hand.
Let's all agree now that the Vice President's office (or whoever, but, yes, the Vice President's office) was not trying to screw Valerie Plame because Joe Wilson knocked the Niger documents. They wanted to discredit Wilson, not slur him, and the easiest, most obvious way to do that—they figured—was to link them to that moral snakepit of craven cowards, the CIA. This should further illustrate the deranged hue of the fairy-tale colors in the Vice President's world—one in which actual Americans hate the intelligence apparatus as much as his office does and would immediately disregard any information remotely connected to the dread CIA.
But to answer Jonah's question: It all doesn't matter a bit. Whether Joe is a scumbag or isn't doesn't matter—that's some squishy relativism about motive, if even. Whether Valerie Plame's typical workday looked like Alias—more squishiness about consequences. Because Jonah doesn't think the ramifications for breaking the law were all that serious here is irrelevant. If it didn't really matter, why didn't those people come forward? If they really believe that, let's hear them say it—"It was me. No big deal."—and see if the court of the day agrees.
. . . with the notion, "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War." Apparently.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court here, the Berkeley-based Project Billboard said Clear Channel, a company whose leaders have been strong supporters of the Bush administration, had breached a contract to put up the highly visible billboard that depicted a bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War."I could really go for that liberal media right about now. I want to emphatically note that "Clear Channel controls about one-half of the billboards in Times Square." That's in addition to the enormous influence they hold over the nation's radio airwaves, across both bands. It's hardly a matter of one company choosing with whom it wants to do business when that one company is a media apparatus. This is the sort of machine groundwork that builds Tammany Hall.Clear Channel Outdoor, the division that controls the company's billboard leasing, rejected the ad, calling it "distasteful" and "politically charged," according to an e-mail the company sent to Project Billboard. After negotiations over the imagery, Project Billboard offered to replace the bomb with a dove but still failed to win approval.
[. . .]
"It's not the message; it was the imagery," Meyer said. "In the city of New York, at the current time, bomb imagery is inappropriate."
Project Billboard argued the company has taken issue with the political nature of the ad. A revised version presented by the media company omitted the mention of war and replaced the dove with an image of a flag-waving girl, according to the advocacy group.
Caught a caller on some morning talk show as I walked out the door unveiling one of the more awesome hybrids of Clinton-hate and Bush-love that I've ever heard: She intoned that Clinton's Bosnia campaign laid the foundation for a "terror corridor" between the Middle East and Europe, through which terrorists traveled to affect Western elections with impunity. Hence Bosnia was an injust intervention, terrorism is Clinton's fault, the Hillary is taking over—dogs and cats, living together.
And then Stephen Hayes spoke up and agreed. Marvelous.
That's where lefty blogs thrive, according to Tacitus, writing from the nu hive of the right, Red State. The right's answer to the wanker fest that is Daily Kos.
Speaking of petri dishes and pessimism, Steve Kurtz has been officially charged with four counts of mail and wire fraud. Robert Ferrell, genetics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, will be arraigned later this week. I'll have more to say about this soon, but you can familiarize yourself with the rough details of the story by browsing here.
Everyone's piling on Harold Bloom: Sue and Not U links to Penn English prof Michael Berube who knocks big Bloom for pish-poshing Harry Potter. Though Bloom's take was once precisely my own—if you're going to invest yourself into that large a book, make it a good one—I've since seen all 8,000 pages of the light, and like a dope I'll be in line with every post-toddler in the city allowed to stay up so late on the eve of the sale of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I mournfully admit that whether or not Professor Snape is in fact a vampire is a question that presses me urgently.
But Josh Chafetz, Kevin Drum, and (my new roommate) Matt Yglesias are tackling Harold Bloom for his age-revealing resistance of the Internet as a cultural milieu. Josh says that "[t]he danger is that we'll close our minds to other ideas, while maintaining the patina of learning and the simulacrum of an open mind by citing works which we do not, in fact, understand." I don't think this is a danger. In fact, I don't see the danger at all.
Matt Yglesias points to sites about the Preraphaelites, Magritte, and T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland as eminent examples of the way in which the Internet presents high culture resources. I couldn't disagree more with his first two choices—a Web site is no surrogate for a gallery, and a JPG in lieu of a painting is comparable to reading every other page of a novel or listening to the left half of a band. I think there's even something indispensable about the tactile value of a book that is lost on the computer screen—though this may be a value that doesn't hold up over time. You can't translate actual art into binary and HTML and still have actual art (the medium is the message).
But the Internet is great when it comes to disseminating criticism or discussion—secondary resources. The Wastland annotations page is more effective than passing around photocopies of the same; my having a Web site is better than my calling you every time I have something to say about something. My calling you over a telephone, though, would be much more efficient than my telegraphing you; it would take even more time (and wood) to smoke-signal a discussion on poststructuralist architecture across the coast. And though I'm sure monks bitched about it at the time (the Church did, anyway), I think we can all agree that the printing press was a plus in the distribution of high art.
You might argue that television has had a deleterious effect on high art, like a cheap drug flooding the marketplace and superceding the place of more refined traditions. But television specifically and broadcast media more generally are not passive media—they're industries. I suspect that anyone who tells me that she hates television really doesn't hate so much the concept of portable theater as she does the low art, lowest commond denominator product of a forced monopoly. The Internet really is a more democratic place than all that.
Bottom line: I've yet to see the Internet do anything as high culture—though it seems to be a damn near instantaneous transmitter of viral concepts, which you know if you understand the title of this post. The ol' Web poses a threat to both the canon and established criticism by democratizing both, but only because the Internet is more efficient than previous attempts (from coffeeshop discussions to 'zines) to storm the citadel. If you're Harold Bloom, you shudder to think.
Tom DeLay: Not neocon, not paleocon, just good ol' fashioned decepticon:
In May 2001, Enron's top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.Plus this:DeLay requested that the new donation come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.
The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state's congressional districts.
WASHINGTON -- Of the five Republicans investigating an ethics complaint against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, four have received campaign contributions from DeLay's political action committee, splitting $28,504 over the past seven years, records show.Charles Kuffner asks, "Am I the only one who's reminded of Tony Soprano's consulting with every halfway decent divorce lawyer in the NY/NJ metro area in order to ensure they couldn't represent Carmela?" So shrill and imbalanced! Comparing Tom DeLay to a mobster? Practically Michael Moore.The contributions, all delivered before the ethics committee received the DeLay complaint June 15, highlight the conflict-of-interest pitfalls and awkward situations spawned by the U.S. House's decision to police itself on ethics.
[. . .]
The breakdown, according to Federal Election Commission records from 1997 through May 2004, is:
* $14,777 for Rep. Kenny Hulshof of Missouri. The latest contributions, totaling $9,000, were in 2000.
* $10,553 for Rep. Steven LaTourette of Ohio, with $10,000 coming this year.
* $1,764 for Rep. Judy Biggert of Illinois in 1998.
* $1,410 for Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, also in 1998.
* Chairman Joel Hefley of Colorado received no money from DeLay's political action committee.
In addition, DeLay's PAC gave money to most members of the "ethics pool," a group designated by House Speaker Dennis Hastert to serve on potential investigative subcommittees. The PAC contributed $65,902 to eight of the 10 Republican members, ranging from $525 to Rep. Sam Johnson of Dallas to $20,000 for Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, Election Commission records show.
UPDATE: Good Decepticons know that if you want something to disappear, you send it to the Pentagon. Even the microfiche doesn't make it out of there. Between Lay and DeLay, they didn't have the connections?
UPDATE II: Decepticon, not to be confused with Deceptacon, which is both ethical and danceable.
OK, how 'bout this one. Who would win in an election: Barack Obama, or tiny Mike Ditka?
In the wake of Steve Rauschenberger’s withdrawal from the Illinois Senate race, former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka has surfaced as a favorite of many Hill and state Republicans, according to interviews with GOP members and staff in Illinois and Washington.Da Republicans. Just in time. I was about to complain that what we need are more celebrities with no significant political experience whatsoever entering hotly contested races and affecting the texture of the bipartisan divide in our country, a force over which they have no hope of exerting any influence, all for vanity's sake. Pass the kielbasa.The Super Bowl-winning coach and Hall-of-Fame player is a Chicago icon whose name identification and stature would make him a well-known, if inexperienced, candidate in the race to replace Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R), who is stepping down at the end of this legislative session.
Ditka has not made a public statement about his candidacy, but Republicans on the Hill and in Illinois said they would be eager for him to enter the race.
“If Ditka ran, Democrats would claim to vote for Obama and then secretly vote for Ditka,” said Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) “It would immediately put Chicago in play.”
A true story in which man bears witness to the awesome fury of Nature, who naturally selected my dog over a vicious rat in the field of mortal kombat known as my back yard.
My dog Wreck fights evil below the cut. Warning: Graphic images of one splayed rat.
Friday night and I'm sitting with Susan and blogless Erik on Erik's balcony, which extends from the upstairs unit of our duplex. Wreck has just recently overcome his fear of heights sufficiently to include Erik's balcony in his sphere of protection—meaning that all foreign subjects that aren't plastic bags or other things that terrify him are subject to his terrible wrath once they penetrate even the penumbra of the yard. We didn't notice when Wreck flew down the stairs, but Wreck's wrath involves a lot of banging into the fence and BBQ grill, so we noticed the battle right about as the rat began squealing in protest as Wreck threw it into the air. Wreck's preternatural and may I say downright feral instincts saw out the day.
That rubbery stuff is guts. Greater testament to how awesome my dog is I cannot bear.
So you get an understanding of what the Wrecking Crew was up against, I've pictured the rat with a scale:
Dirk Nowitzki kindly lent his hand for this shot, which is nearly 18" in length. So the rat is, as you see, almost three feet long. That's not including the razor-edged talons, which landed Wreck's muzzle (in a lucky shot):
His services did not go unpaid—he won a healthy share of ribs from our barbecue yesterday. Good owner that I am, I took him to the vet, who told me that rats aren't actually big carriers of rabies, believe it or not. He also takes dogs' temperatures from an uncomfortable place, which I think sends an unfortunately mixed message about the repurcussions of protecting my house, but it looks like Wreck's okay. Most importantly, we were all entertained—one of these days Hollywood's going to catch on to this violence stuff and we'll really be set.
And before the war started you may recall that I said Iraq was shipping WMDs to Syria and Iran, and remember that a couple of weeks ago the government of Sudan publicly asked the Syrians to take back their WMDs.Yes, yes, and yes.In short, I believe there were WMDs, and the issue is, what happened to them?
If you don't believe that, you will have to explain how every major intelligence service in the world agreed there were WMDs. Do you think Ahmad Chalabi duped the Israelis? The Russians? The French?
(Were I the Poor Man, this would be another edition of Easy Answers to Unnecessarily Complicated Questions. But really the only easy answer here is Michael Ledeen's, because you can prove anything by demanding that other people validate negative proofs.)
Let's talk more about electioneering and the war on terrorism. First of all, if you're honest, I think you'll agree that it's not prudent for the Bush administration (whether the Department of Homeland Security or the Justice Department) to continually announce nothing and do so on Democratic holidays. It would be perfectly fine to elevate the danger chart on Edwards Day, but if the message can wait—seeing as Tom Ridge told us not to do anything differently—it should wait. Not for some sense of fairness, but for the government's own credibility: It's just too easy to conclude that they're calling press conferences to announce nothing in order to steal Kerry's thunder. Best of all would be for the government to not announce nothing, since this scares my grandmother, and doesn't even suggest she go buy out Home Depot to calm down. I'm not talking about a conspiracy but they are most certainly risking dilution of the message.
The thing that really caught my eye about the press conference is that I think we're witnessing a huge shift in the way the Bush administration frames the war on terror. Yesterday we saw Tom Ridge restate the terrorist mission: They want to disrupt the elections. We're not given any indication that al Qaeda actually intends to do this and the government has found out, or that this terrorist plot is markedly different from the normal mission statement—restore the Caliphate, eject the great satan from the Red Crescent world, and submit those nations to a radical shariah law. To these ends the difference between Kerry and Bush is irrelevant and we all need to stop this ridiculous talk about who the terrorists are voting for. Frankly, I don't think that we will ever hear from the Bush administration again about these other terrorist ambitions.
How could an attack not influence the election? It's a relevant question, but it's different from the Bush administration's converse: Any attack is designed to influence the election. And that's all beside the point. Our government should be warning us about dangers to our lives, not dangers to their jobs.
UPDATE: Thought I'd point back to an item on continuity of elections in the instance of an attack. It is important to think about these things, don't get me wrong, and the more emphatically the Bush administration frames potential terrorism in its election-deterring capacity, the more we need rules on the books that elaborate our policy. What I'm saying above is that fear-mongering based on danger to our lives is at least focused on what's important.
I'm busy as a bee, little boys and girls—good stuff in the works, though. I wish I could be like Josh Marshall and promise you groundbreaking, tectonic-plate shifting, climax-upon-climax inspiring rumors, but I'm trying to write about art. (I do think I have a handle on all the rumors, though.)
In the meantime, you might be wondering how President Bush has molested the nation's foreign policy today. Rest assured that he has—and how:
This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. ...Now, I'm for capturing Osama any way we can get him. Much as I hate the fact that Bush is motivated more by electioneering than a committment to fighting the bad guys, Osama's capture this month under pretenses that stink like shit is better than his capture later after the election ceases to play a role in all this.This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."
[. . .]
The Bush administration has matched this public and private pressure with enticements and implicit threats. During his March visit to Islamabad, Powell designated Pakistan a major non-nato ally, a status that allows its military to purchase a wider array of U.S. weaponry. Powell pointedly refused to criticize Musharraf for pardoning nuclear physicist A.Q. Khan--who, the previous month, had admitted exporting nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya--declaring Khan's transgressions an "internal" Pakistani issue. In addition, the administration is pushing a five-year, $3 billion aid package for Pakistan through Congress over Democratic concerns about the country's proliferation of nuclear technology and lack of democratic reform.
But Powell conspicuously did not commit the United States to selling F-16s to Pakistan, which it desperately wants in order to tilt the regional balance of power against India. And the Pakistanis fear that, if they don't produce an HVT, they won't get the planes. Equally, they fear that, if they don't deliver, either Bush or a prospective Kerry administration would turn its attention to the apparent role of Pakistan's security establishment in facilitating Khan's illicit proliferation network. One Pakistani general recently in Washington confided in a journalist, "If we don't find these guys by the election, they are going to stick this whole nuclear mess up our asshole."
That said, President Bush's is really screwing us all by playing fast-and-wild with Pakistan. Pak requires sensitive diplomacy—an equation in which the world's nuclear security interests aren't weighed against November of 2004. As great a problem Musharraf presents to us, the seemingly national Islamicist current running just underneath the surface of the government is not a presence we want spilling over. A destabilized Pak—maybe we should say a further destabilized Pak—is much, much, much more dangerous than Osama bin Laden. It seems that Bush neither realizes this nor cares.
Link courtesy of the Poor Man.
I'm going to preempt Andrew Sullivan and droolingly note that Spider-Man 2 brought in more in its opening weekend than F9/11. This doesn't prove that Spider-Man is per se a Republican—Stan Lee never said that outright. But Spidey's patriotic colors, concern for individual moral responsibility, and battle against a large, lumbering man with a questionable grasp on the truth all taken together suggests that Spider-Man stands for lower taxes and President Bush's war of liberation in Iraq.
Ah, I swear, one day soon we're going to get back to talking about important stuff over here, but I hope to forestall that by noting that everyone ought to get out and see Spider-Man 2. I caught an early matinee showing—not exactly filled with with web-heads dressed like Hobgoblin—and at the crucial subway scene, the entire theater erupted in applause. It's just very good—serious nerding off about it below the cut (spoiler-free!).
The reason that this sequel and its cousin, X-Men 2, have exceeded precedent and expectations is clearly due to the time-tested value of the original stories—and, unlike with Batman, a dedication to the original material. The X-Men's "Phoenix Saga" and Spider-Man's arch are both great—with the first a bit more episodically defined than the latter.
So how far will they take the Spidey series? The natural ending would be after the third film, with the Osborne family drama nicely topped off and MJ and Peter set to wed—but you can't tell me that they're going to close out the Spider-Man franchise without an appearance by Venom. There will be some problems fitting that story into Raimi's vision, since the Venom symbiote came from space (though I sort of see a possibility with J. Jonah Jamison's astronaut kid, if that's necessary). Plus Raimi obviously intends to work the Lizard in there somewhere (that's Dr. Connors, Peter Parker's professor in the film).
I think the only way to do the series right would entail only more film—with a slight dip into the sketchy villain team-up waters of the Batman films—featuring Hobgoblin and the Lizard. God knows if we pull any deeper from the Sinister Six bench than the Lizard, we're in some serious trouble. (If I so much as see a mean-looking fishbowl, much less Mysterio, I'll destroy everything.) I think Raimi's Venom would be goddamned fun, but I'm not sure how Raimi would go about pairing Spidey-vs-Venom with the appropriate tension from Peter Parker's personal life for a fourth film. Though the Mary Jane tension is great—you see the look she gives him at the very end of the film?—stretching it out over two to three more hours might not be feasible.
Matt Yglesias has some words (1, 2) on the Mary Jane/Peter Parker dynamic. Though the Spider-Man Gwen Stacy story (from which Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane character heavily draws) has a tragic ending, I'm pretty sure that Hollywood dictates a comedic ending here. How many films (how much money) get made remains to be seen, but you can bet that it ends with Peter Parker and Mary Jane goin' to the chapel.
Jonah Goldberg wants to know if John Kerry would have picked John Edwards were Edwards's biography that of Jack Napier, aka the Joker, Batman's most pernicious foe:
His stump schtick plays well with the populist forces in the Democratic Party and he's pretty (no serious person I know thinks Edward would have ever gotten into politics if he'd been burnt by acid as a teenager).All serious persons will probably agree. Kerry would never go for the Joker.
. . . but what about Two-Face??!!!1!
. . . won't be much for the Democratic Party. A friend of mine who's working on Kerry's campaign complained that John Edwards would start running for president the day he got in office. So what? I don't think that Edwards is going to box Kerry out of the spotlight for four years on a winning smile alone—especially since many of the VP's duties are assigned by the president. But still, we need bright Democratic stars in our sky, and it's easier for a vice president to graduate to the Oval Office than it is to prime a Wes Clark for another run down the road.
I think that the hope for a 2008 Hillary ticket is palpable, and there's just a tinge of disappointment out there that a really successful Kerry administration would segue into an Edwards administration. (Allow us Dems to get ahead of ourselves for a minute.) No need to worry here—as Wiliam Safire keeps reminding us, the Hillary could take over at any time. No man will know the hour of her return to the White House. Also, we have a pretty good hand going right now.
Gore laments that he received something in the neighborhood of three e-mails from Clinton over the course of both terms. A similar problem could surface in the Kerry administration: If John Kerry really doesn't like John Edwards, Kerry's probably not going to give him many opportunities to shine. Guess that's where that winning smile comes in. But again, getting ahead of ourselves, it's moot, especially as the Hillary will take over in time.
And Christmas comes early to all the good Democratic boys and girls in the land. Every one of us knew it all along. With the Edwards selection Kerry continues an essentially error-free campaign; if the last few weeks' worth of speculation speaks to style of the Kerry camp at all, they've taken Bush's loose-lips-sink-ships value to heart. (Had only the campaign exhibited that sort of discipline when Kerry made plans to not officially accept the party crown at the convention—that leak was not an intentional effort to float the idea. Whether he officially accepted the helm at the convention would be a distinction on paper only, and it was brilliant of Kerry to try to stretch his fundraising season to match Bush's. Not a mistake on his part, I think, but a missed opportunity.)
So yes—hooray for John Edwards! Let's hope that he's able to fully invest the campaign with his "Two Americas" message, which is an important one—and if the personalized email I received this morning from Mr. Kerry is any indication, that's what Kerry intends to accomplish. And, of course, we're all quite excited to see Dick Cheney unleash the full arsenal of his potty-mouth on sweet lost li'l lamb Johnny E—though if things get out of hand, I'm afraid to picture what Big Time Dick might do to the boy.
Over the weekend I watched Naked States, an HBO documentary on Spencer Tunick, whom I believe I've written about in this pages (in the blog's previous incarnation). Since Tunick's art is about photographing naked people, often in massive groups, the movie's plenty fun—I'm convinced that we're never quite as happy as we are when we're naked with hundreds of other naked people. One man who participated in one of Tunick's installations/photographs quite pleased with the experience and quoted Leonard Cohen: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." Which is both charming and, if you think about it, pretty funny.
I was amazed by Tunick's total lack of an organizational apparatus—he simply shows up in towns and starts passing out fliers. (This state of affairs is partly enforced by his girlfriend, who has all sorts of annoying ideas about how artists are supposed to do business; she spanks him whenever he seems close to a publicity breakthrough.) His reputation precedes him now, but you can still sign up for updates on shoots in your area. The registration form even presents a palette from which you can select your skintone—your computer doesn't ask you that too often, does it?
New York, 1995
Barcelona, 2003
Some witch on MSNBC right now is enraged that Michael Moore compared the opening of F9/11 to the opening of The Passion of the Christ. She wasn't saying that Moore was out-of-his-mind wrong because her data showed The Passion to clearly be in a league of its own—no, she said that the comparison was wrong because Mel Gibson's film "hewed so closely to the Gospels." I didn't catch her name—she's with Women Influencing the Nation, whose Web site was listed as www.seethepassion.com, so, hmm, you tell me—but I thought I'd clarify two small points:
It turns out that Mel Gibson's movie was not actually four days long—worse still, the Gospels are not film-literal minutes of his trial and punishment. And I hate to break your heart on the eve of Arthur, but even that feature is someone's take on the legend. But when Joe Scarborough closed his show by telling us that Michael Moore has called for "the deaths of more American children," that is undeniably the unvarnished truth. Most certainly not polemical invective.
Kos says there are worse choices than Dick Gephardt for Kerry's VP. Certainly. Fritz Hollings and Dick Cheney. Darth Vader, also maybe not so much, though he polls high on national security. Omarosa. The Internet nerd responsible for all the Hitler fuss would be a bad choice. Indeed, Adolph Hitler would be a considerably worse choice than Dick Gephardt—but these aren't excelsior recommendations of Gep. Especially when the Dem bench is loaded with players who are not only not-quite-Empire-awful but are good politicians in and of themselves.
I think that a Gephardt pick would confirm to many that Kerry's political antennae are less sophisticated and up for the challenge of this election than we thought. And no, not because I expect John Kerry to check in with the Calpundit every day before he makes his calls. Though these people who are screaming about Gep are pretty mutantly absorbed with politics, their complaints aren't exactly inside baseball: In a fiery Democratic contest, DG was the only candidate out of about 6 serious contesters to never spark once. Dick Gephardt makes Joe Lieberman look like Paris Hilton. He talks like Grandpa. His issues are Grandpa's—I think unions are important but I still can recognize how little they factor into this election. More importantly DG does well with union bosses, but it's not clear that that translates into support from union joes. Where, say, Edwards cleans up. And there's no real indication that DG can swing either his state or Iowa, too. I'm not sure what Gephardt brings to the ticket except pissing me off. I hear he likes Manhattan Transfer, puts mayonnaise on his hot dogs, and advocates an achronistically protectionist platform that has done little more than to merit a tattoo of DG's name on Big Ethanol's ass.
And while it's not a spin the Bush administration can rightly levy at John Kerry if he goes with Gephardt, it would ring true with me: Kerry would be putting his sense of Washington it's-my-turnism ahead of real party calculation. There might be real advantages here I'm discounting—Gep's certainly too boring to give the Bush administration much of a foothold—but this sounds like it's a real lack of imagination on Kerry's part. Guess we'll know soon enough whether the buzz is true. Lots of folks trying to soften the blow . . .
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that we have former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt to thank for scrapping the movement on the Democratic side to oppose or hinder the war in Iraq. He thought he could trade off for Democratic political credit down the line by siding with Republican hawks against the Biden/Lugar resolution. Worked so well that the Dems replaced him with Nanc Pelosi! After this I promise to write all my posts saying how actually this is shrewd, and Gep's not as bad as I thought because I forgot how terrible Dick Cheney is, and Gep was clearly a better candidate for the Dem VP nod than, say, Dick Cheney, to name just one. But for right now I want to enjoy a candidacy that's played things pretty well so far . . .
Well no one called this:
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign's effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.Okay, Pope, your ball. You beat that?
"I'm appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission."The bottom line is, when a church does it, it's nonpartisan and appropriate. When a campaign does it, it's partisan and inappropriate," he said.
"I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way."
Seriously, if in a few hours I don't find myself watching this film somewhere I'm probably going to go all Doc-Ock on our nation's capital. There have got to be more productive ways to slough off the last half hour of a Friday, but I'm posting some rather important movie memorabilia (most of which was sent my way by a friend). Ladies, you're going to want to avert your eyes: I don't think you really want to see this stuff.
New Batmobile clip. I actually can't see it from work, so I'm not giving it my seal of approval. I was kind of hoping that the original Batman wouldn't have a flashy Batmobile . . . but I guess he couldn't exactly take the subway.
I know that a few of our female readers stumbled through the cut anyhow, and if you're one of them, you might be somewhat confused. The nuances are difficult to explain, but suffice it to say, guys like to put Optimus Prime in places he never originally appeared.
Yessir, that's Jennifer Garner, who will be reprising her role from Daredevil as Elektra in . . . Elektra. It's like they took everything in Daredevil that was bad and converted him into everything that was great about the movie.
This image is somehow connected to Blade; I'm familiar with neither the movies nor the comics, but if they honestly feature Jessica Biel qua Stormshadow, I need to start making up for lost time.
And finally, this is just hilarious, but I mean it—if you did not possess testicles from 1983 to 2003, you're not going to like this a bit:
And, finally, now that it's probably just us men in here: Aliens vs Predator. One of the great things that's happened since we met and decided to take over the movie industry a few years ago was that we could start settling some of these pressing questions once and for all. Won't be long before we realize our goal: Alien vs Predator vs Terminator vs Robocop. Taking bets now. And I say, for fairness's sake, as his special move Robocop can summon either Ed209 or actress Nancy Allen.
UPDATE: More Batman.
UPDATE 2:
In America, interviews with the President go something like this:
JOURNALIST: President Bush, please feed me a platitude.Recently, as you're all aware, an intrepid Irish journalist named Carole Coleman exposed the USA and all it stands for to the bizarrely Europhilic concept of "follow-up questions." Witness:PRESIDENT BUSH: My job is to do my job.
Q Indeed, Mr. President, just to get back to that. Can I just turn to the Middle East --That's neither the most nor the least egregious example from the interview (in which he did say "my job is to do my job"); you can watch or read it and decide for yourselves how awful/journalistic she is, though I know you all already did like eight years ago.THE PRESIDENT: Sure.
Q -- and you will be discussing at the EU summit and the idea of bringing democracy to the broader Middle East.
THE PRESIDENT: Right.
Q Is that something that really should start, though, with the solving of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think, first of all, you've got a democracy in Turkey. And you've got a democracy emerging in Afghanistan. You've got a democracy in Pakistan. In other words --
Q But shouldn't that be on the top of the list --
THE PRESIDENT: Please. Please. Please, for a minute, okay. It'll be better if you let me finish my answers, and then you can follow up, if you don't mind.
(I thought about it noting it back then, but mostly to clarify that Irishmen protesting Bush's visit had it all wrong when they made signs saying that Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was Bush's "lapdog." Duh, President Bush only has one lapdog, Tony Blair.)
But this Carole Coleman story won't stay down. Weeks later, the White House is making a big deal of registering a complaint with the Irish Embassy. Well, what the fuck are they supposed to do about it? Take all her gold? They really hate that. Pour out her Guiness? Steal her lucky green clogs? I'm not sure what a complaint like that would even look like. Even if President Bush truly felt blunted by her interviewing style, is that the stuff of formal international bitching: "she interrupted me"?
How come this guy can't take the heat?
Great NYT op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich—it's a real breath of fresh air. She's pinch-opining through July for Tom Friedman. Her thesis, to wit, is that "the idea of a liberal elite nourishes the right's perpetual delusion that it is a tiny band of patriots bravely battling an evil power structure." The important thing here is not the common debate regarding relative Democratic or Republican per capita power/wealth/eliteness (which George W. Bush eagerly settled in F9/11—I don't even need to say it, do I?—by explaining that the "haves" and "have-mores" make up his base). The idea to note is about this bullshit, white proletariat solidarity movement, commonly expressed as a victimization of the right by the various fifth columnal forces of political correctness, judicial activism, secular humanism, feminism/multiculturalism, and lest we forget, the dread ACLU. It's perhaps best and singularly exemplified by Tom DeLay's (R-Hell) explanation that though he sincerely desired to serve his God-blessed country in 'Nam, all the available spots were taken by minorities.
My own perspective—which might be described as liberal elite, despite the spattering of red ink periodically marking my bank statements—is that the nation is no more served/squelched by a liberal elite than it is informed by an authentically pious sacre coeur. We're neither as depraved and elitist as I'd like us to be, nor as spiritual and upstanding as the right says we are—and I don't believe that we're fundamentally divided along those seams, either. But clearly I'm wandering into David Brooks territory, when all I meant to say was that the Times's editorial page might actually be worth reading this month.
