If you're like me and you're blessed with a laptop, watching tonight's presidential debate may likely involve a lot of looking up briefly from Lindsay Lohan fan pages to catch a paean or two to freedom. But it's time to get serious, and I decided to change my ways for round one of Bush v Kerry. As such, I invented this thing called "live blogging," which I will be revealing to the world over at Begging To Differ. Me and the six other BTD bloggers will be slogging through the raised eyebrows and expectations with aplomb—as things are being raised. Including the roof, motherfuckers.
One of these days I'll get around to noting this on the sidebar, but I blog at BTD. (And also at DCist once every century or so.) Yep. The litmus over there is more conservative than here, for sure, but it's my opinion that, much like orgies, intelligent debate across a spectrum of political beliefs helps to "eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged." If you're into that, if that's your scene, if you think you might under the right circumstances and maybe after a few drinks be open to the possibility of hott group debate, maybe you're just in that sort of experimentation phase—you know where to find it.
Giblets want you to look for "Made in the USA" on the tag:
Giblets is outraged! Congressional Republicans are trying to sneak provisions into the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act of 2004 that would legalize the foul practice of "extraordinary rendition" - the transfer of suspected terrorists to other countries to be tortured for information. To pass the bill in this form would be inconceivable - for how can any red-blooded pro-torture Congressman justify outsourcing our nation's torture work when American torturers are losing their jobs every day?Standing up against outsourcing—just like John Kerry. Who's this Dennis Hastert guy, House tech support?
Ah, God. I'm laughing through the tears. Check your blood pressure, make sure you're sitting down, and read Obsidian Wings for more.
The Lone Star Iconoclast, the newspaper of President Bush's adopted hometown of Crawford, Texas, betrays Crawford's legacy as the Birthplace of Freedom by endorsing John Kerry:
Today, we are endorsing [Bush's] opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things that Bush has delivered, but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.Now Crawford will only be remembered as a place George Bush played a lot of Super Nintendo—sucks. On the upshot, Crawford can now claim to be under the thrall of the so-called liberal media—rad! That, and Lone Star Iconoclast is a title of which I aspire to be worthy one day.Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq.
[. . .]
Rather than using the billions of dollars expended on the invasion of Iraq to shore up our boundaries and go after Osama bin Laden and the Saudi Arabian terrorists, the funds were used to initiate a war with what Bush called a more immediate menace, Saddam Hussein, in oil-rich Iraq. After all, Bush said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction trained on America. We believed him, just as we believed it when he reported that Iraq was the heart of terrorism. We trusted him.
The Iconoclast, the President’s hometown newspaper, took Bush on his word and editorialized in favor of the invasion. The newspaper’s publisher promoted Bush and the invasion of Iraq to Londoners in a BBC interview during the time that the administration was wooing the support of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Again, he let us down.
Link courtesy of Jeanne d'Arc.
Julian Schnabel, the bête noir previously blacklisted for his poorly executed art's role in the hyperinflation and eventual crash of the art market in the early 90s, is earthworming his way back into NYC. His "neo-expressionist art" makes me want to throw up. Gawker says it's supposed to have that effect: The Olsen twins made an appearance at his C & M Arts gallery opening. It's good that they both showed up—if only the fat Olsen attended I'd have to play Bob Saget to get my Schnabel-to-vomit degrees of separation in order.
Richard Polsky wrote a gloss of Schnabel recently, a kind-but-stern-parent take in my opinion—click away, bulimic nation!
Insofar as anecdotal evidence signifies much . . . this is absurd:
Jim Vyvyan, a high school teacher from Union Grove, Wis., said his and his wife's decisions are likely to hinge on the debates, which begin Thursday in Miami with a discussion of foreign policy. Vyvyan opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and does not believe the upbeat appraisals of conditions there from Bush and Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi. But he harbors strong doubts about Kerry.Really, how come Jim Vyvyan has a question about this? If you think Iraq was bad from the start and getting much worse, W is not your candidate. I want to fly to Miami and smack Mr. Vyvyan around (with the hands I used to throttle John Kerry)."Actually I would have voted for Kerry three months ago, but he's not improved or not shown his positions any more clearly in the last three months than he did a year ago," Vyvyan said. "I think he's trying to be everything to everybody, and you just can't."
Seriously, though, it seems to me that if you listen closely to Democrats mumbling under their breath, there's a palpable wish that we had Howard Dean instead of John Kerry. Not Howard Dean the Candidate, per se, but Howard Dean the Principled Position. It's the same principled position that wouldn't fly in Iowa for all the right reasons, and it's very difficult to know what regard would be given that principled antiwar position had Howard Dean become the Democratic nominee but everything else stayed the same.
Would Iraq feel like the same disaster were there a real antiwar candidate in contention, one whom the Republicans villified for his position from day one? Hard to say, but seeing as how in this universe, one in which over the last few months the American citizenry has flip-flopped on whether the war was justified, Bush has yet to be tacked with any responsibility for the misery in Iraq. In our principled-position dimension, Dean would have been yelling at Bush before anyone was aware that it would get so much worse—I could really see how Bush could have neutralized Dean and his legions as so far out of the mainstream that even when he was proven right, he'd still be wrong.
I mean, what did Bush nail Kerry with that has him so far down? Windsurfing? Sure, I can't think of a response to Bush's newest TV spot other than "yeearrgh!" But, still—what's Bush's plan for Iraq? He doesn't think he even needs one because he doesn't acknowledge that there's a problem. I do see a problem. Americans are getting their heads chopped off! I can't emphasize enough how unacceptable I find decapitations. Would you have supported Iraq had you known we'd find Saracens with scimitars instead of weapons of mass destruction? Don't you fire the guy who thinks that Americans getting their heads chopped off in the desert is better than the status quo in America? And don't you really fire him if that guy is responsible for both states of affairs? Mr. Vyvyan knows this, so he says, and yet he's still considering George W. Bush. How?
. . . is permanently installed in the National Cathedral. Some friends and I ventured out to the Natty C's open house weekend after we heard a rumor that WAMU's Stained Glass Bluegrass had orchestrated some hoopin' and hollerin' (i.e., bluegrass) for the event. But as you could well understand, we were sidetracked when we saw a flyer stating that Darth Vader was on the premises.
In fact, Darth Vader is in the premises. There's a grotesque of his bust on the north façade. Apparently the Cathedral's planners weren't satisfied with a hodge-podge building comprising various ill-applied historic European traditions—what it really needed was a contest for children to design a few pop elements. Much as I respect Darth Vader—I cherish the Dark Lord of the Sith more than I do most other Lords out there—I'd call this an aesthetic crime on par with the questionable establishment-clause propriety of the whole affair.
UPDATE: I shit you not. Darth Fucking Vader is built into the National Cathedral—I wouldn't kid about something like this. It's impressive. Most impressive.
YOU WILL PAY THE PRICE FOR YOUR LACK OF VISION:
From the site of the sculptor, Patrick Plunkett.
ALWAYS TWO THERE ARE: Lenny at DC Art News notes that the grotesque was sculpted by Jay Hall Carpenter; Plunkett carved the stone. My mistake—my overconfidence was my weakness.
Enough about me, let's move on to someone who really likes to hear herself talk: Tina Brown. Talk about vain—she could play Glenn Close to my John Malkovich. (But definitely not SMG to anyone.) Anyway, I've had many a laugh at Tina's expense in reading Nick Denton's various Web enterprises' treatment of her—she is on the vapid side—but her WaPo editorial is frankly the smartest synopsis I've read about the CBS memos scandal. Damn, Tanina! It really comes down to journalism being journalism, not about blogs, Kerry, Bush, or whatever else. Think about it: When you fuck up at work, how often does it serve a higher ideological purpose?
I sat down last night to write out some thoughts I had about a lecture I attended on Wednesday by Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker. It was altogether enjoyable and has already sparked a few observations, one of which I was going to write about here—when I saw a commercial for Friday Night Lights.
I can't contain it. Schjeldahl will have to wait—this is a real problem for me. After some point maybe about six months ago, I became completely unable to resist movies about high school football. Particularly if there's even a suggestion that the movie documents a 2-A conference in Texas, and especially when said Texasness exhibits itself in the form of a soft-spoken but stern aw-shucks determinism on behalf of the coach, a team of upright loose-cannon underdogs for each of whom the final play of the big game was tailor made to instill an important life lesson, and free-wheeling, cornfed, morally underresourced cheerleaders. As I have passionate (if indeterminate) ambitions to make a career as an aesthete—and few to no marketable skills to fall back on—this weakness could become a significant stumbling block in my future.
It's enough that I like Texas football—there is a very real art world that is very really full of shit and just Wednesday night that art world bore testament to how shitty it can be when, during the Q&A session and reception after Schjeldahl's lecture, in which he emphasized pragmatism and not drawing insider/outsider distinctions, individual after individual assaulted the man with quite sincere question-ish presentations of their own advanced manifestos, dissertation-winning theories and criticisms that leave no room for variance or interpretation, with Schjeldahl's employer (Conde Nast) being a topic of some scrutiny—as players in the DC art world seem to be of the opinion that the debut of Conde Nast's upcoming large-circulation art periodical will signify the end of contemporary art. That's the way it goes, and I'm comfortable in that world, I guess, so long as I never see a video installation of a UT football game in the gallery, at which point my beer-by-the-pitcher voice will rise to the fore and I will likely shout at the piece/quarterback, puncturing the very carefully procured illusion upon which the world of art is predicated.
Football is one thing, an interest that, like comic books, flip-flops, and America's Next Top Model, manifests itself in my life but coexists comfortably enough with my aesthetics. I am not, generally speaking, rife with tension. But there is simply no room in contemporary aesthetics for the schmaltzy high school football text, and I'm not sure which force will win me over. If you come back to this page in several weeks and find posted here a strong essay about the poststructuralist's duty to seek low art for input, know that I have succumbed to a yearning for the fatherly Billy Bob Thornton and his inspiring, pivotal half-time speeches (set to the accompaniment of a tear-jerking score) and the life I might have carved for myself in Odessa-Midland. And please accept me anyway. "Know y'all's selves," the man once said, and isn't that what we're all trying to do out here?
OK, not really really. That's Missy Elliot. We're still bootleg over here. Regardless I've gone all Josh Marshall with the banner pic and changed the subtitle to boot, so now's your chance to tell me how the site is now too shrill to be credible, way far out of the mainstream, lying about the Koufax Awards it's earned, and inextricably linked to Dan "I'd" Rather "Be Lying to You About Some Shit." Tell me about the good old Blogspot days when you got the policy, art, and rhetoric you could trust. Back when grammar was grammar, and police were police.
While you're busy delinking me, be sure to acknowledge the inestimable Justin for helping me out, and let me know if this is showing up okay in your browser. You horrible, horrible people, you.
I can't stress enough how important it is that we follow Catherine's example and steadfastly refuse to appease cancer. And I hope that I don't have to explain to anyone how delightful alcohol is. If you share my positions on these important issues and live in the District or environs, come revel with your comrades at Catherine's Kick Cancer's Ass Happy Hour at Front Page in Dupont Circle. A reasonable cover for the right cause, excellent drink specials, and serious raffle goodness, proceeds from which will be used to support Catherine's fundraising goal of $2,000 in order to run in the Marine Corps Marathon and thereby defeat cancer. Sound crazy? You don't know crazy until you've seen the Zunta crew drunk.
1. My friend Kevin points out that any day that starts with the Red Effing Baron in the news is a fine one. Man has a point. I'll add that anyone whose job it is to, you know, talk about the Red Baron a lot has really got it figured out.
2. 100 Thing to Which You Can Compare Interpol That Aren't Joy Division, courtesy of Hackmuth. I like "a very depressed Dire Straits," "the Strokes," and "lack of water." The absolute fact of the matter is that Interpol is a great but indefensible band.
3. Come on, guys. What would be so awful about banning the Bible. I mean, if the GOP is going to tell voters that that's what the liberals are putting on the table, we might as well get some good Bible-bannage out of the deal?
Finally: This last item is so crass, tasteless, and unwarranted I'm hiding it under a convenient, flimsy screen of HTML.
So I go to Pub Quiz every week, right, and at Pub Quiz the goal is to come up with a team name that is both witty and topical, yadda yadda yadda. Because this is the City That Never Stops Checking CNN, this amounts to a lot of awful puns on politics, current events, and the occasional celebrity mishap. Terrible stuff. The best team name from this week's PQ was "Nice Day for a White Trash Wedding," in reference to you-know-who; our team was "I Went to Iraq and All I Got Was This Lousy Severed Head." (Not exactly inspired, I know. No, not even touching on crass yet.)
A couple weeks back, though, the winning team name—as measured by a drunk crowd's boos, hisses, and through-gritted-teeth cries of indignation—was so far beyond the pale that I'm not sure I would care to meet its genius makers. Get this:
Chechen Education Policy: No Child Left AliveWhile you're deleting your link to my page I'll go ahead and admit that I'm still laughing. If you don't think so, you're . . . well, you're a better person than I. We ban those Bibles now, I get off scot-free!
If you haven't read the skinny on how Tom DeLay's TRMPAC squad got all Rathered up with indictments today, skip my page and head straight to Charles Kuffner's house, since he's been following this story with extreme prejudice since the day it broke. See also Kuff's stuff on Richard Morisson, "the man who's giving Tom DeLay the race of his life." (I know this much: Were indulgences still fashionable, a contribution to Morisson's campaign would buy you a stairway to heaven.) I'd recommend that Texans and Texpatriates alike check out Texas Tuesdays weekly—every Tuesday, in fact—as it's the best resource on Texas politics on the Web. Made more important seeing as how Texas really has become Tammany Hall.
There's a lot of links there but I have one more for the stack: Jeffrey Toobin's nuanced piece on the evolution of the Voting Rights Act, published in last week's New Yorker. Delay is not the subject of the article, but you'd hardly expect a writer to leave him out of a piece on electioneering:
The Voting Section’s role in the controversial redistricting of Texas was more direct and, ultimately, more significant. After the 2000 census, Texas, like most states, put through a new redistricting plan. Then, after the midterm elections, Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, who is from Houston, engineered passage of a revised congressional redistricting plan through the state legislature, which may mean a shift of as many as seven seats from the Democrats to the Republicans. It was unprecedented for a state to make a second redistricting plan after a post-census plan had been adopted. When the DeLay plan was submitted to the Justice Department for approval, career officials in the Voting Section produced an internal legal opinion of seventy-three pages, with seventeen hundred and fifty pages of supporting documents, arguing that the plan should be rejected as a retrogression of minority rights. However, according to people familiar with the deliberations, the political staff of the Voting Section exercised its right to overrule that decision and approved the DeLay plan, which is now in effect for the 2004 elections.Now that certainly is a detail I'd never heard. If that's true, there is someone well-placed within the Justice Department who is, in dereliction of his duty, working to grant the GOP election favors.
John Ashcroft? The chair of the Voting Section, R. Alexander Acosta (Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division)? Toobin describes the Voting Section as "three dozen or so lawyers who are responsible for enforcing the Voting Rights Act," but that assignment hardly boils down to (ahem) a black and white issue. As Toobin explains, the two vectors by which the Voting Rights Act works to ensure minority rights are protected are 1) voter access and 2) election integrity. The way John Ashcroft has interpreted this aspect of his job, the latter is given significant emphasis over the former—and John Ashcroft's election-integrity focus lends itself to the careful monitoring of Democratic districts for election fraud.
There is a voter uncertainty principle at work here: The way by which you measure the thing changes the thing that is measured, and efforts to curb election fraud have from time to time morphed into voter intimidation:
In the 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, the Republican Party hired armed off-duty police officers to work in a self-described National Ballot Security Task Force, which posted signs at polling places in minority neighborhoods reading, "Warning, This Area Is Being Patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It Is a Crime to Falsify a Ballot or to Violate Election Laws."This is not to say that the Justice Department's voting section is planning to defraud the election (and I think Toobin's article qualifies for nonpartisan), but—to bring it back to Tom DeLay and company—why the hell should we have any confidence that the GOP does not intend to abuse the system recently tooled up by Ashcroft? Consider:As recently as last year’s gubernatorial election in Kentucky, Republicans placed "challengers," who may query a voter’s eligibility, in polling places in Louisville’s predominantly black neighborhoods, an act that many Democrats regarded as an attempt at racial intimidation. An emphasis on voting integrity, whatever the motivations behind it, often helps Republicans at the polls.
I was reading the Internet the other day and I am sure glad that places like The Corner, Weekly Standard, Townhall, and Congress are keeping us safe from Dan Rather. We've been looking for that motherfucker since 9/11, the blogs nabbed him, and now we're all safe to watch 60 Minutes again. I loved that show back when we were innocent!
What's the frequency now, John Kerry? Forget TANG, forget FOIA, forget co-effin-caine—we got Rather. Iraq? Iran? North Korea?
Mission accomplished.
UPDATE: Plus Rathergate taught us all a valuable lesson: HTML superscript tags.
UPDATE:
No, Dan. They don't trust you.
I won't go into the details of why I'm awake at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, but, weirdly enough, since I'm up I'm able to catch my roommate on C-SPAN's Washington Journal—he looks pretty good! I'd find it pretty difficult to take some of these calls that Yglesias is fielding without smirking at the least, but he's getting by on the merits in the face of some some aggressive wingnuts. His debate opponent, Matthew Continetti (of The Weekly Standard) is on task as well, but his bee-stung lips are far too distracting for me to take him seriously. Not something you see every day I guess. I'd "blog" this debate but I'm frankly too sleepy to overcome the distraction of Matt Continetti's bee-stung lips, which are really something to see.
I receive a phone call from someone in the office with not an insignificant measure of authority over my own position, asking me, "What's 'ICGI' stand for?" Before the Google page is even finished loading I find myself reading (aloud), "The International Coalition for Genital Integrity." Someone really should tell the Interagency Committee on Government Information to get on this. (As for me—the coffee's brewing.)
From an August 4 US State Department press release:
Question: Is the U.S. committed to participating / providing funding for the 2005 Venice Biennale? Did the U.S. issue a letter regarding participation in the Venice Biennale? What obstacles exist? Has a new RFP been issued seeking a new agency to manage U.S. participation in the Biennale?My kind of press conference. Now I have to say, the State Department has no excuse for the quagmire we're looking forward to in Venice. They've known since at least 2002 that the Pew Charitable Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation were pinching their purses in a declining economy—plenty of time to assemble a coalition of the willing in order to ensure that our artistic interests abroad are protected. And it's sure as hell not like State's been so busy guiding Iraq policy all this time.Answer: The Department of State is committed to the support of U.S. participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and is prepared to provide $170,000 in support of it. In May 2004, a grant competition seeking a non-profit cultural organization to manage the official U.S. participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale was advertised in the Federal Register and open to all organizations. A panel reviewed all proposals received, but none met the grant criteria; in keeping with standard practice, organizations whose applications were not accepted were notified by letter. We are now looking for a mechanism to ensure U.S. participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale, despite the obstacles of lack of partners and limited time available to mount the exhibition. This includes an ongoing conversation with the owner of the U.S. pavilion, the Guggenheim Museum. No official offer has been made to any entity about U.S. participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale. There are no plans to re-issue a request for grant proposals.
We are looking for a permanent mechanism to ensure U.S. participation in international arts exhibitions, to replace the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions. In December 2003, partners in this Fund, which include the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the Department of State, agreed to disband the partnership as of the end of this year.
Instead we get a lot of rhetoric from this administration about how it's dedicated to the cause of democracy promotion, but when does this administration ever promote democracy? In one sense the decline of the American Pavilion mirrors the blind eye that the US turns on Vlad Putin: Colin Powell is full of tough talk but the administration as a whole remains silent on Putin's rolling back of democratic institutions; if the Guggenheim consolidates control over the American Pavillion we should hardly call that democracy promotion. And the administration, in dissolving the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, has abandoned the multilateral approach that has been established precedent since the post-war art period. And now the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs indicates that it is unprepared to keep the peace in Venice. While I wouldn't say that Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, in whose hands the fate of the American Pavilion will almost certainly wind up, is the same caliber thug as Iyad Allawi, power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I think we're looking at a Matthew Barney American Pavilion, an exhibit that isn't exactly likley to win over the hearts and minds. I wish we could make like Belgium and send a hott painter like Luc Tuymans—maybe John Currin, maybe Cecily Brown. But more importantly we need to address the structural problems by electing a Kerry administration. With Kerry we get a cogent Biennale policy, and we'll probably see him there.
What the hell is Kerry's problem?
MILWAUKEE, Sept. 14—Forget soccer moms and NASCAR dads. The most important demographic in these parts transcends gender and geography—it's Green Bay Packers fans.That's a stupid thing to say (don't ya know). But still, I'd rather my candidate piss off the Cheeseheads than lie about Cheez Whiz to appease a city of Eagles fans, who are, without a doubt, the most horrible fans in the history of sports, including whatever Greek city-state cannibalized their fallen gladiators and then tossed their bones to sea just to spite them, the post-apocalyptic stadium-goers from Mad Max 2: Beyond Thunderdome, and (yes) the Raider Nation. There can be no dispute on this topic.Both candidates are targeting them with the ferocity of a Brett Favre bullet, but only John F. Kerry has fumbled the name of the hallowed grounds on which the Packers play, the frozen tundra of Curly Lambeau Field.
At a campaign event last month, the Democratic presidential nominee called it Lambert Field—a slip of the tongue carried on television, in papers throughout the state and on ESPN's Web site.
That's akin to calling the Yankees the Yankers or the Chicago Bulls the Bells. This is a place where Packers jackets often outnumber sports coats in church and thousands of fans wear a big chunk of yellow foam cheese atop their head with the pride of a new parent. President Bush's warning to terrorists is apropos to the passions of Packers fans—you are either with 'em or against 'em.
PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE: Obviously this funny incident proves that George Bush is the common man for drinking beers with, Dan Rather has Kerry's cell phone number, Michael Moore watches arena league football, John Kerry watches ballet, and the Cowboys are turning the corner. Heard it all before.
Lenny at DC Art News could not be more spot-on about DC's best and worst: Graham Caldwell and John Watson, respectively. The jury that selected both of them for the Trawick Prize better have been hung. And hanged.
Earlier this year I suffered a serious bout of jealousy over the fact that the nation was enjoying a bicoastal minimalism explosion, featured simultaneously by the LA MoCA and the Guggenheim in NYC. Being located toward the armpit of the East Coast, I had to live with the fact that A) DC didn't and will not be getting that kind of expansive show, and B) I have jealous fits about minimalist exhibitions.
Neither comforting thoughts, but I take solace in the fact that the District hosts the world's epitomal minimalist masterpiece: the Vietnam War Memorial. And we'll get a bit more with a major retrospective of Dan Flavin's career at the National Gallery of Art.
untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977
I'm pretty excited about this if only for the fact that I haven't seen enough of his work to ever get too excited about it. The things I've seen by him have been pretty tawdry (especially when compared to works by Donald Judd, with whom he's of course historically linked), and I don't understand why Flavin connects his works to people, ideas, etc. in the titles to his pieces. But, eh, I haven't seen a lot of his stuff and I never walk away from a retrospective flat-out disappointed, so I intend to give it a thorough look.
And thanks to the patronage that only cigarettes can buy (i.e., the Altria Group, a.k.a. Philip Morris) you can see the exhibition in Fort Worth and Chicago next year. Hooray for art, hooray for smoking.
This arresting NYT data graphic on US soldiers lost in Iraq really shouldn't go unmentioned. I didn't think to say anything on the anniversary of September 11—for the first time, the date came and went without inspiring any conversations around me about the attacks. I saw a short clip on Friday night from a PBS meditation on 9/11—their context with regard to 90s precursors and today's wars, a discussion of bin Laden's motives, a real-time evaluation of the administration's response that morning (Cheney was the only competent player, it seems, a characteristic for which I won't criticize him; Rumsfeld should have been fired that afternoon). It only becomes clearer to me that the war in Iraq will have no effect on the viability of al Qaeda and bin Laden's global model, a problem that is getting worse, not better.
Have 1,000 of our soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis died in vain? No one can say, but it did not escape anyone's notice that George W. Bush had a lot to say about September 11th and little to note about the actual wars we're fighting. Regardless of how bad it gets in Iraq we're still in the shit with al Qaeda, and we don't really know exactly what that means—a point Matthew Yglesias made to commemorate 9/11. All in all, and especially the NYT's reminder that a thousand soldiers lost is 1,000 people killed, Bill Frist can't get that anti–flag-burning legislation passed fast enough.
Presentation link courtesy of Leslie Hall.
Susan gives me a tired duh look whenever I blast off around her with Michelle Malkin–inspired indignation, so I know well and good to keep my outrage to myself. I know the blog could use a safety valve so that someone could forcibly shut me up when it comes to Malkin (and Steven Spielberg).
But this column. Look at it. MM is so stupid. If you're going to go and suggest that Allah is a failed god by detailing all the atrocities that al Qaeda has committed, you're advised to not mention David Koresh in your second paragraph. Or better yet stop writing and go sign up with the Marines if you're so set on exacting violence against Muslims. Or just stop being such a horrible person.
Anyway, for a shiny about-face, I have six five Gmail invites to hand out. So tell me whom you hate and you can have one.
Since Chris Bertram did such a thorough job of disproving Daniel Pipes when Pipes said that the media were whitewashing terrorism—and since Bertram did so just by reading the sources that Pipes cited, who do in fact call terrorists "terrorists"—I'll do my part and forward his Bertram's salvo to Michelle Malkin, who didn't get the message. Malkin asks:
How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic "militants" or "guerrillas" or "rebels" or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted the Pakistan Times called them, "activists"?The answer is, "I haven't." Reuters is the only Western-servicing news agency in the world of which I'm aware (after looking through the 20 sources Pipes cited) that refused to use the term "terrorist" to describe the Beslan terrorists. While it's within the realm of possibility that the Reuters newswire is a front for al Qaeda, my suspicision is that Reuters reserves the term "terrorist" for the specific al Qaeda/Islamofascist–conflict. It seems sensible enough to mitigate on the point of whether the Beslan terrorists were Terrorists. Think about it: were the IRA still actively fighting, for example, I'm sure that many people outside the UK would resist lumping that fight together with the War Against Terror. Pick-ups advertising "The South Will Rise Again" aren't saying "Terrorist On Board." Distinctions are important.
Original intent is important, too. I don't get from the Pakistan Times article that the writer—who uses "activist" to refer to the Chechen cause and "terrorist tactics" to refer to the Beslan school attack—is an al Qaeda/Beslan/whatever sympathizer. I do get the feeling that this wasn't written in English, and I know that intent gets lost in translation, particularly at a fine-grain level of semantics ("terrorist," "Terrorist," "attackers," "militants"). What did the writer say? Pipes doesn't do this work for us and I can't do it, so we don't know. Judging from the English translation, it would indicate a willful misrepresenation on the part of the translator for the original copy to be the malicious whitewashing that Pipes says it is.
Most important of all, though, is to just read the shit you're talking about. If it doesn't say the shit you want it to say, don't pretend it does—the wingnut hack division is peculiarly dedicated to this tactic. Malkin and Pipes both write and she certainly ought to know that sometimes you have to use different words to refer to something so as not to look crazed. Also important is to not believe stupid shit. The belief that the media is rooting for Terrorism is fucking stupid.
Don't forget that more of my shrill posturing is to be found over at Begging To Differ. I'm certainly happy to discuss whether we should feed Texas Democrats to the pigs—give 'em Zell! send 'em to Muqtada! and what have you—though I have yet to determine how my homeland brethren are to blame for the forgery allegations. Regardless, the discussion on this topic at BTD is top-notch, so take a look. If it's spittle-fueled liberal harangues you're looking for, though, don't change the dial, because most of the other six BTD guys are to my right by a stretch.
I'll certainly prepare myself for some gotcha! if these documents go belly up, but as of happy hour on Friday I still register myself as more skeptical than Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall (much less J. Scott Bernard), to include myself in good company. Stepping back for just a moment, I see another take: President Bush could clear this up, all the mystery, in a heartbeat. Bush's microfiche personnel file, housed at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin and subject of a longstanding AP Freedom of Information Act request-cum-lawsuit, is the definitive record on the matter. It's what we were promised in February after Bush said on Meet the Press that he would reveal his entire personnel file to the public. The White House subsequently backed off, and days later reiterated Bush's promise of total transparency—but then passed off incomplete records in a Friday dump. That's why the AP sued the Pentagon for the real file (though, apparently, FOIA authority has been transferred to the White House, which is a questionable if not illegal evasive maneuver). As I keep saying, the onus isn't on the President because he's being accused and certainly not because these documents look funny—it's because he promised something to the public that he then half-delivered in bad faith.
I know that the left can play as loose and dirty as the right, so I'm encouraged that a loud conservative basso has joined the chorus for the truth. And for the hundredth time, Bush's National Guard record is pretty damned irrelevant to the tasks set before his office. He could've said so in February and put an end to the talk—or at least made liberals who kept harping about it look foolish. But he didn't. . . so we're all still here. What's in the file may not be important but holding the President to his word definitely is.
I think the simplest explanation regarding the 60 Minutes documents is that they're real—otherwise, they'd have to be fake but legitimate in a narrative sense so as not to set off alarms with the White House and passable in a technical sense so as to fool both CBS and the White House. It's definitely possible, and I feel sort of sheepish for making fun of Jonah for suggesting it, but I'm firmly skeptical. Extra dubious now that the site that has spearheaded the amateur vetting sees connections to the Kerry campaign. Can Michael Moore's fat fingers be far removed?
Scandal or no, what an opportunity to talk about typography! Kerning and tracking—the two components of the art and science of spacing font—are at root in the discussion over whether these documents were composed by typewriter in the 70s. You can master the same alleged document manipulation in your own home. Say you need to keep that one damned line from spilling to the next page, but your margins are already pinched and you're font size strains the eye: consider Format Font --> Character Spacing. Kern wisely; as with the practice of any wisdom, you run the risk of coming afoul of a school of thought with no patience for the amateur.
UPDATE: Apparently this littly guy
was churning out kern as early as 1941. Courtesy of Yglesias.
Imagine that President Clinton (and let's be gentle with the man, his poor heart and all) after having lied to the country about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, finally fessed up to the world: "My fellow Americans, I am sorry to report to you that I lied in office—I did, in fact, make out with Ms. Lewinsky."
You'd've been pissed, right? Even if you hadn't cared what he did with Ms. Lewinsky in the first place. You'd be even more pissed when you found out that this wasn't the end of the story, and you'd probably see the case cracked open again. And so we're back to AWOL.
Though Eric Boehlert's account of Paul Lukasiak's extensive research paints President Bush as one squirrelly coward, I really don't think that take is the important one today. For all the bitching and moaning about how this issue has been treaded and retreaded, the blame falls squarely with President Bush. If the White House would set the dogs on any TANG file-toting journalist that shows up at the door, or instead (as they said they did back in February) release Bush's complete records and move on, we could all say, "President Bush sure was one squirrelly coward," and get on with a campaign on more current events. But this Soviet document production standard just ensures that journalists will keep ripping off the band-aid, for better or for worse, until the White House finally tells the whole truth or tells the media that it isn't picking up the phone.
Anyway, in related commentary over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg is asking bloggers with "specialized expertise in fonts, printing, etc. [to] please add your insights to the effort" to prove that the documents released on 60 Minutes last night (and corroborated by the White House afterward) are forgeries, because, he says, he would very much like it if they were forgeries. So that's a different take.
By now we've all seen Vice President Dick Cheney's notorious comment:
It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.Which is funny and terrible on its own, but Cheney reminded me of someone else whom I couldn't quite place until Charles Kuffner kickstarted my memory: Dennis Hastert. Here's Hastert on George Soros:
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - having already enraged some New Yorkers with his remarks about local office-holders' "unseemly scramble" for federal money after 9/11 - yesterday opened a second front. On "Fox News Sunday," the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who's funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. "You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where - if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years - George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."You can watch the video here.
That, in turn, reminded me of yet another person, whom Josh Marshall wrote about recently: Tom Coburn. Coburn sees his Oklahoma senatorial race as a contest of Biblical merit:
Following up from a debate on Monday where Tom Coburn called this race, “as the battle of good versus evil”, Patrick Davis, Political Director for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (NRSC), echoed those comments today speaking to a breakfast of Oklahoma delegates at the National Republican Convention saying, “we also view this race as good versus evil”.But I'm led to believe from both supporters and their press offices that Dick Cheney doesn't actually believe that voting for John Kerry will produce an attack by Al Qaeda, Dennis Hastert doesn't actually believe that George Soros runs drug cartels, and Tom Coburn doesn't actually believe that approximately half the nation supports Evil. They don't actually believe those things because they didn't "actually" say those things, or so the line goes.
That this follows without outrage in the news says to me that we need to dedicate more funding into our nation's English departments. Who accepts that you can mean only that which you explicitly say? You ask those guys, they'll tell you that Robert Frost is just some guy wandering around the woods, Kafka has to be the most abominable liar ever, and there's nothing notable about a character named Stephen Dedalus. Those of us who made it out of high school (probably with some thanks to the above writers) know that meaning isn't restricted to the transcript. I'm not exactly sure at what year you acquire the great interpretive faculties required to leap from listening to the words someone says to understanding what it is someone means, but there's apparently a disconnect somewhere.
To wit: These Rebublicans are gaming the system with a brand of literalism that allows them to very truly mean things that they do not precisely say, and they do so by violating structural weaknesses in the media and the English language itself, i.e., saying that they never "said" the things they said. The most reprehensible violator of all is George W. Bush, who very truly said that Saddam Hussein presented a clear and present danger to the United States stemming from his accumulation of WMD, even though George W. Bush never precisely said, "Saddam Hussein present[s] a clear and present danger to the United States stemming from his accumulation of WMD." Though that is exactly what he meant and said. And that was a lie by any high school English class's standards.
Chris Bertram reminds me why the blogosphere is a damned useful and relevant media tool. No reporter is going to spend valuable fishwrap inches explaining how Daniel Pipes misrepresents 18 media outlets in order to prove a point that he seemingly invented. Pipes says that the media hesitates to call the Beslan terrorists "terrorists" and has the gall to link to 18 stories that, in fact, use the word "terrorist" and mean terrorist. No bones about it.
Naturally, The Corner has already taken Pipes's lede and run with it. I will cede the point that reporters, like writers of any stripe, vary their diction (e.g., "attackers" for "terrorists"), but the reading of this revelation that says that reporters endorse what happened at Beslan just shows the level of cognition to which these people rise. Hack is the generous term.
NYT: "Former President Bill Clinton Had a Heart Attack and Is in a New York Hospital (12:20 PM ET)." There's no news yet anywhere about it.
. . . and now the WaPo has the AP wire.
. . . bypass surgery scheduled tomorrow, says CNN, likely of the quadruple variety. Sounds serious.
After snoozing and snarking through most of his speech last night, I was suprised to find myself nodding my head in vigorous agreement with something President Bush said:
I support the protection of marriage against activist judges.I cannot agree emphatically enough—there is probably no greater threat to the future of the family than activist judges marrying one another. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong per se about being an activist judge. It's not natural, but I support an American's rights to his own career orientation. But it hardly follows that the foundations of heterosexual marriage should be undermined because some people choose to become activist judges.
Frankly—let's get down to brass tacks, here—I don't even think anyone has to be an activist judge. No one's born that way; it seems like every activist judge I know experimented with a few government classes in college, and then just found themselves in a bit too deep with law school—then suddenly they're fraternalizing together in activist judge courthouses. Like I said, that's fine. But marriage is and always has been a sacred institution between a man and a woman that would be rendered meaningless if activist judges were to enter into the arrangement. And I'm so glad that President Bush spoke clearly to truth about it last night.
UPDATE: Thinks about the children, who are our future.
UPDATE: Simply disgusting.
[Funny joke over at Talking Points Memo. Watch it go over my head, after the jump!]
Michelle Malkin, allow Zell to bump thee:
Our tribe will attack their tribe. And then we will kill their men, make their livestock our own and take their women to mate.Josh Marshall says that this was a line from Zell Miller's original draft of his speech for the 2004 RNC keynote address that he delivered last night. Considering the fact that—I'm assuming here that, as terrorists don't have tribes, Zell's talking about Muslims and Arabs, though when you put the quote in context he could be referring to reporters, poets, or protesters—more convention coverage is being aired by Al Jazeera than by ABC, NBC, and CBS combined, it's probably for the best that Zell kept it low key. Loose lips sink ships, Z.
But since it's just us—once more, with feeling!
Our tribe will attack their tribe. And then we will kill their men, make their livestock our own and take their women to mate.That, folks, is your Ford-tough GOP.
UPDATE: I get it. So deleting this.
I already wrote about Zell Miller's keynote address over at Begging To Differ and Susan hit all the same notes about the unbearable militance of Miller's speech, but it's a point that bears repeating. The specific mentions, if you missed them, go like this:
For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.I thought all night about how terrible this stuff is for all the reasons I outline at the debate blog (click the link already, will you?) and couldn't get over it. This morning I was envisioning myself in Zell Miller's world—truly, a dark and apocryphal dystopia. I saw myself coming into work. . .It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom he abuses to burn that flag.
MY BOSS: Hey Kriston, for it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the editor, who has given us the freedom of edited copy.Probably even fewer benefits and definitely no overtime pay, too.ME: You, uh, make a point there. . . so should I be patriotic and go edit?
MY BOSS: Stet! Nein! God bless America!
Now I understand that Zell Miller got up there to serve some red meat to the GOP faithful, but even as such it was far right of tartar. The man is an unreconstructed Dixiecrat who has quibbled with the Democratic Party since LBJ delivered it from its racist policies, and following his old school trajectory has landed Zell squarely within the GOP, in an honored seat at that. Take from this what you will. But as Andrew Sullivan nicely said, I'm putting in with Barack Obama.
MORE: According to newdonkey.com, the theme of last night's convention activities was a defense of the Bush administration's economic record. Well, I was unimpressed, so that sounds about right.
Not much time for comment but holy shit is the Russia/Chechnya border heating up right now. Twenty armed terrorists (Chechens? Ossetians?) took somewhere between 200 to 400 hostages this morning by hijacking a school in an assault that included a military vehicle; they are holding the entire staff, faculty, and student body for the release of fighters captured in recent raids. Earlier this morning a bomb detonated outside Moscow's Prospekt Mira Metro station, killing ten people—the perpetrator is said to be "a Chechen "black widow" - female terrorists whose men died at the hands of Russian troops." (Shudder.) For the record, I've been to the Prospekt Mira station—it's on the circle, and any stop on the circle is not a small one.
Then, of course, the Chechens are also suspected of coordinating the twin explosions that destructed two airliners nearly simultaneously last week. I don't have a great working knowledge of the Russia/Chechnya conflict. . . though my recent reading has alerted me to the fact that there is likely a much greater presence of trained terrorists/insurgents operating in Chechnya than I would have guessed. Has the domestic Chechen conflict seen this sort of coordination in previous terror tactics?
UPDATE: And, obviously, three large attacks in one week might not be coordination—could be, you know, Moscow's lucky week. Screw-and-bolt suicide bombs are DIY enough, but the redundancy in the plane bombings points to something I think we've all seen before.
