Forward, ho!
Do be sure to take the time to thank the fine, fine folks at Move America Forward, purveyors of astroturf since sometime earlier this month: without their hype and handwringing, it’s doubtful Fahrenheit 9/11 would have done nearly so well as it did. Aces, guys! Couldn’t have done it without you!
So. What to do for an encore?
Well, for one thing, team up with jilted Disney to promote a feelgood counterdoc: America’s Heart & Soul, “featuring an original song by John Mellencamp.” —“One of the most inspired and inspiring movies ever made,” says Jim Svejda, a graduate of the Pat Collins school of film criticism. Oh, but I’m being cynical again: America’s Heart & Soul looks like nothing more sinister than a thoroughly inoffensive dollop of feelgood pap: a long-form Chevy truck commerical; a tossed salad of mostly iceberg lettuce with a little cilantro to jazz it up. And I’m sure Svejda is a nice-enough guy. It’s Move America Forward’s puffery that’s a hoot and a half:
Those who oppose the War on Terror have the mouthpiece of the mainstream media to disseminate their propaganda to the entire nation in an almost unchallenged effort. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week it is bash America, bash the military and bash the Bush administration.
So, of course, the only option you have to get your scrappy but beleaguered point of view across in this rigged marketplace of ideas is to team up with the parent corporation of one of the Big Four broadcast networks.
Move America Forward is also (quite) proud that it continues in the footsteps of McCarthy and Birch by hounding and harrassing a scientist guilty of nothing but being the target of an hysterical government lynch mob.
Once you’ve hit the news in a negative light, it’ll stay with you forever, no matter what happens to the contrary. Even if a federal judge in a court of law apologizes to you on behalf of the government.
Witness the strange dust-up in the state Capitol these past several days after a former legislator, Howard Kaloogian, got wind that a group of Asian-American legislators were getting ready to honor Wen Ho Lee with their first ``Profile in Courage’’ award Monday.
Kaloogian took umbrage that “a former accused spy’’ was being honored by “Democratic leaders’’ and shot off e-mails on behalf of his newly formed “Move America Forward’’ organization. The group was launched last week to rally support for the administration’s war against terrorism. He accused the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus of violating its oath to “defend against foreign and domestic enemies.’’
Lee, you may remember, was the Los Alamos scientist fingered by the Clinton administration in 1999 for supposedly leaking key nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. He was fired, his name was leaked to the New York Times and the spy case was all over the news. He spent nine months in prison, shackled in leg irons, as the government’s case slowly came apart. Fifty-eight of the 59 original counts—none of them espionage—were dropped and Lee pleaded guilty to a single charge of mishandling nuclear secrets.
Federal District Court Judge James A. Parker took the unusual step of apologizing to Lee and excoriating the executive branch for bringing its enormous power to bear on a case it mishandled: “They have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.’’
That was four years ago. Sad case, upended lives, a career ruined. But settled. Really.
The Asian Pacific Islander caucus, which is holding a policy summit with community leaders from around the state, chose to honor Lee because of his perseverance in the ordeal and the way he had galvanized Chinese-Americans and Asian-American civil rights groups.
As part of the honor, the caucus planned a legislative resolution, along with a routine five-minute presentation on the Assembly floor, a courtesy routinely extended on a legislator’s request.
Republican legislators, nonetheless, threatened to oppose the resolution. The caucus canceled plans for the Assembly presentation and moved it to Monday’s dinner.
Class act, these folks. —Hey, Kaloogian? Go fuck yourself, would you?
(By golly, I do feel better!)
Ding, dong, the—well, a—okay, one of many wicked witches is dead—
My knee-jerk absolutist First Amendment freedom of speech über alles motherfucker happydance is muted just a smidge by the disquieting notion that this was yet another 5-4 split, and the underlying rationale seems to be well, heck, Congress could have spent time and money promoting (even mandating) dumbass internet filters instead of walling up everything we don’t like behind dumbass credit-card gates and age screens. But nonetheless: a stupid stupid stupid law went down in flames, and Justice Breyer is downright plaintive in his dissent:
“What has happened to the constructive discourse between our courts and our legislatures that is an integral and admirable part of the constitutional design?” Breyer asked, using phrases that Kennedy had used in another case. “Congress passed the current statute in response to the Court’s decision in Reno. . .Congress read Reno with care. . .It incorporated language from the Court’s precedents. . .What else was Congress supposed to do?”
Ultimately frustrated himself, Breyer declared that the Court may have denied Congress legislative leeway to pass laws in this area. He suggested that, if the Court means to say that nothing Congress could do would be sufficient, “then the Court should say so clearly.”
Well, I’d like to think the Constitution did that already, but see above re: First Amendment freedom of speech über alles motherfucker. I’m willing to admit I might have a little dogma in my eye.
Also: the inestimable Eugene Volokh notes a possible slippage in the meaning of “prurience.”
Oh, never mind: it wasn’t struck down, just kicked back for another freakin’ trial. —Boy, do I feel stupid with these happydancin’ shoes on.
Don’t you mean mittelterrestrial?
So apparently Fahrenheit 9/11 is stuck with the R rating, which, as any fule know, will only make it that much more appealing to the kids we’re supposedly thinking of—hot damn! Must be gory. Faces of Death gory! —Maybe Move America Forward can gin up an astroturf campaign to independently card kids at 9/11 showings. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
Actually, though, it isn’t so much the carnage that made the MPAA bar the door to the lucrative under-seventeen market. Apparently, at one point some soldiers are shown listening to the Bloodhound Gang, and they sing along—
The roof!
The roof!
The roof is on fire!
We don’t need no water
Let the motherfucker burn!
Goodbye, PG-13.
What’s distressing though, is this: the distributors tap Mario Cuomo to pinch-hit their appeal. The MPAA declined to listen to the big gun, but here’s (part of) his argument—
Altogether the hard language and graphic pictures consume about 3 minutes in a film lasting 120 minutes.
The raters agree that there was nothing else in the film that required any cautionary notice to parents: no nudity, sexual conduct, inappropriate theme, or illicit drug use. I think it’s fair to say that given the common uninstructed interpretation by the public of the “R” rating, many of the viewers of the film would be surprised to see so few of the undesirable characteristics they expected to find in an “R” rated film.
Why then should the film not be rated a “PG 13” as was “The Lord of the Rings,” a film that is saturated with slaughter, butchery and corpses—human and extraterrestrial?
Extraterrestrial?
What color are the dolphins in her world?
Here’s what Peggy Noonan wants from Bill Clinton’s forthcoming autobiography:
Sometimes candor is an act of patriotism. The patriotic act we need from him in his book is utter frankness and honesty about how it came to be that terrorism was ignored by our leaders throughout the 1990s, that pivotal time.
I’d crack a joke, but why bother? —Anyway, TMFTML totally aced Nicholas Confessore’s question, so, um, why bother?
“...it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long...”
FastNBulbous is one of the house trolls over at Political Animal, and they have a loyalty oath for all us card-carrying liberals—
A poll for you Political Animal Readers:
The following appeared in a theatre review written by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice:
Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.
This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.
How many of you agree with the author that Republicans should be exterminated and that the Bush family should be sterilized? If you don’t agree, should the author be made to apologize and/or resign and/or be fired, a la Trent Lott? Also, would the publication of this review be prosecutable as a hate crime in Canada?
Posted by: FastNBulbous on June 9, 2004 at 8:04 PM | PERMALINK
Oh, heck—we wouldn’t need to exterminate them all. How was it Quentin Tarantino said that Ezekial 25:17 went?
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
If we executed enough evil tyrants in order to physically intimidate Republicans by making them realize that they could be killed, too, well, heck. The weak would fall into line. The Democratic party could take its rightful place as the corporatist opposition party, and we could all take a deep breath, smile, and get down to the real work of leaving this world better than we found it.
Sure would make things a heck of a lot easier.
But! Alas. We are all of us here on the sinistral side crippled with the terrible moral burden of trying, trying real hard, to be the shepherd. We are most of us trying so hard we won’t even claim to be better than those we fight: we know that anyone can slip, and that claim no matter how right it might feel in our gut leads to the dehumanization of those who set themselves against us. All we can do is remember that there are no ends, only means, and one of the means we must eschew is their eliminationist rhetoric, no matter how satisfyingly cathartic it might be to stop a moment and say to yourself, what if—
But no. We’re trying, real hard. To the ever-increasing us! —I’ll always drink to that.
But not with just anyone. There’s limits; there’s always limits. A little later in the dicussion, FastNBulbous, responding left and right to those who’ve forgotten Rule No. 1, lays this on us—
I repeat, has any other public figure, or someone as “cultured” as a theatre critic, called for the genocide of millions of Americans based on their political views?
Coulter’s call for the execution of one individual who fought on the side of those who were responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans against our troops is not analagous, imho.
Of course, this asshat of a reviewer is entitled to make statements that bely his status as an assclown.
I just find it interesting that when someone calls for the extermination of millions of Americans, the response of most people here is to point out relatively mild statements by Republicans rather than condemn the genocidal wishes.
I was hoping that more people would try to convince me that they don’t agree with this jerk.
Posted by: FastNBulbous on June 9, 2004 at 9:15 PM | PERMALINK
Why should we point out relatively mild statements? Why should we be concerned with hyperbolic calls for genocide from Village Voice theatre critics when smiling Republican ignorance and hate killed so many thousands and laughed about it until they were forced by blood and sweat and oceans of tears to pay the least respect a fellow human being is due?
So I’m only human. I’m not going to rush to buy Bulbous a drink unless there’s some small sign of contrition; some vague gesture toward an apology. But I am only human: I’m not going to spit in their face, either. (Read this, I might say, and think, real hard, about what it is you’re doing, and why.) —Or kill them, for God’s sake. “Execute” them. (Ha! As if I could.)
Oh, one more goddamn thing:
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
—from that WSJ story on that torture memo
They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says—and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb.
—from Hunter S. Thompson’s Nixon obituary
Pumpkinry.
Like many of you, I am a devoted follower of Fafblog!, the world’s only source for Fafblog. I was especially keen on last week’s nigh-exclusive interviews with many movers and shakers, including Dr. James Dobson, Donald Rumsfeld, Osama bin Laden, and Jesus Christ. But the capper to Interview Week was a sit-down with An Enormous Pumpkin:
Fafblog!: Now I understand you are deliverin an address at the World War II memorial this Monday.
An Enormous Pumpkin: That’s true. It’s a great honor, even for such a huge pumpkin.
FB: Can you tell us what it’ll sound like?
AEP: Mostly silence, with some rooty settling noises, seeing that, as a pumpkin, I am incapable of speech.
FB: That’s very appropriate and thoughtful.
AEP: I certainly thought so.
Color me stumped. Certainly, a conversation with An Enormous Pumpkin is important in the scheme of things, but is it really vitally important? Enough so to deserve the attention of Fafnir, Giblets, and the Medium Lobster? It did not appear so. And yet it had. A puzzlement. —And so stumped I remained, until I popped by the Whiskey Bar for a quick one. Billmon had the historical perspective I needed, in the course of comparing Ahmad Chalabi with Alger Hiss:
Handsome and Harvard educated, well connected in Washington circles, Hiss started out with the media and the weight of “respectable” opinion on his side—particularly since his accuser, journalist Whittaker Chambers, was an eccentric flake. But young California congressman Richard Nixon, newly assigned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, heard Hiss testify and decided he was lying. Nixon wound up in control of a three-man subcommittee charged with investigating Chamber’s accusations.
Hiss’s story had holes in it, but he might have avoided prison if he hadn’t sued Chambers for slander. As evidence in the case, Chambers produced a roll of microfilm of classified State Department documents allegedly passed to him by Hiss for delivery to the Soviets. Worried that someone might steal the film, Chambers hid it in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm—thus stamping the documents for all time as “the pumpkin papers.”
Signs! Signs and wonders! Thank you, Fafblog!
(But wait—does that mean that Giblets & co. know Chalabi is really as innocent as Hiss never ceased claiming to be? Will a tell-all book yet tumble from An Enormous Pumpkin, telling us what we need to finally make sense of it all? Is a zombie robot Richard Nixon about to claw his way out of Linus’s pumpkin patch with a bag of toys for all the good children? —Holy shit! George Tenet just resigned! Or was pushed! Golly, politics sure is weird.)
Heh. Indeed.
Though Mr. Yglesias has some distressingly retrograde ideas when it comes to women and their participation in “politics” (I do not think that word means what he thinks it means), one cannot help but be charmed by his attempt to dustbin Godwin’s law:
But while the “two presidents” theory has some merit, it is unsatisfying both intellectually and emotionally. As in physics, where quantum field theory and general relativity coexist uneasily, we yearn for a grand unified theory of Bushism that would put the two halves of the agenda together. Now, at last, with the revelation that Ahmad Chalabi has been passing intelligence information to the regime in Iran, the opportunity presents itself to construct just such a unified theory. The truth, hard as it is to accept, is that Bush is an Iranian agent.
The cheek! The unmitigated cheek!
Civilization gap.
Racism began in the West as a biological explanation for a large gap of civilizational development separating blacks from whites. Today racism is reinforced and made plausible by the reemergence of that gap within the United States. For many whites the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization. If this is true, the best way to eradicate beliefs in black inferiority is to remove their empirical basis. As African American scholars Jeff Howard and Ray Hammond argue, if blacks as a group can show that they are capable of performing competitively in schools and the work force, and exercising both the rights and the responsibilities of American citizenship, then racism will be deprived of its foundation in experience. If blacks can close this civilization gap, the race problem in this country is likely to become insignificant.
—Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism
Greg Palast: In the year 2000, 1.9 million votes were cast and not counted across this country—1.9 million votes. And of those 1.9 million votes, about a million were cast by African-Americans. This investigation was conducted by Harvard and the Civil Rights Commission, and I grabbed the material. There’s a 1965 Voting Rights Act that gave black people the right to vote, but not the right to have their votes counted.
All this came out of my first investigation in Florida. I brought it to the attention of the Civil Rights Commission that the so-called “spoilage rate” seemed to be different among black people than with white people. What that means is that, if you make a mistake on a ballot, or if there’s some problem with reading your ballot, your vote doesn’t count.
In Florida, the researchers went precinct by precinct and determined that if you are a black person, you are 10 times more likely to have your vote marked spoiled and voided than if you’re a white voter—10 times! And what’s disgusting is that that is the national average. So we basically have a big black thumbprint on the electoral scale in our election, and it’s going to be worse in 2004.
BuzzFlash: You’re saying that the Florida 2000 election was just the tip of the iceberg and that there is essentially a national epidemic of erasing or not counting African-American votes?
Greg Palast: There are several things. First, there is the big story I broke last time. As it turns out in Florida, 90,000 mostly African-American voters—which is the latest official number from the courts—were illegally targeted for removal from the voter rolls. Those people were not allowed to even register to vote and therefore didn’t cast a ballot in the election.
But for those African-Americans who did get to vote, their votes were far more likely not to be counted than other votes. I saw this in Florida, and it is deliberate. When it’s 10 to 1, as any statistician told me, unless lightning strikes seven times in one spot, how can it not be deliberate?
—BuzzFlash interview with Greg Palast
via the Sideshow
With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored.
Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.
Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida’s largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach.
Those counties that have responded told the state that they have restored 679 voters to the rolls so far—more than enough to have tipped the balance of the 2000 election had they voted for Al Gore. President Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.
—”Many voters not yet back on rolls”
by Gary Fineout, the Miami Herald
via the Suburban Guerilla
Definition: incompetence.
“It’s extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government,” says Hastert spokesman John Feehery, a burden of which Democrats would happily relieve them.
Via Atrios, of course.
These pictures will not be the last ones of this sort that will see the light of day.
Tools.
This, this is rich:
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran
BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT
WASHINGTON – The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his agency’s internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But he said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. “Some of the information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high value targets and on force protection issues,” he said. “And some of the information wasn’t so great.”
At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a 47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during a raid on Chalabi’s home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest.
Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of the information collection program.
The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions said that Karim’s “fingerprints are all over it.”
“There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government, inadvertently,” he said.
Via Julia, though this one’s climbing the charts like mad. Why not? It isn’t every day you discover that your own government may have been so mind-boggling stupid. If this pans out, do the math: we took out Hussein’s government, doing all the dirty work and stirring up the shit until every tenth orphaned widower has taken up arms against us, while Iran waits quietly, patiently, to pick up the pieces when all’s said and mostly done.
We were their fucking flypaper.
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit, by half. No, the funny bit is this:
The tools are still going to figure out a way to blame it all on us.
This exercise in Dolchstasslegende brought to you by cartoonist Cerdipity, by way of Dean Esmay. Thanks to Orcinus.
Housekeeping: the Newsday article cited (rather in full) above has moved from here to here. What’s where it was now is an innoccuous AP piece about how Chalabi is “turning to politics for survival.”
The triumph of William Jennings Bryan.
The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the campaign of 1896. He will be remembered, perhaps, as its supreme impostor, the reduction ad adsurdum of its pretension. Bryan came very near being President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something—by a narrow margin, but still safely.
—“To Expose a Fool,” H.L. Mencken’s celebrated obituary
of William Jennings Bryan
We escaped it then, but we forgot our history, and now we’re doomed to repeat it: a farce that never was very funny, a Punch and Judy show that just won’t stop beating the shit out of us. “Atsawaytodoit!” —But unlike a lot of us plying our boats about the Islets of Bloggerhans, I’m not reading this recent Village Voice article as an instance of Pastor Simpson gumming up the works in the Blue Room:
It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.
But now we know.
“Everything that you’re discussing is information you’re not supposed to have,” barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be “the Christian Voice in the Nation’s Capital,” the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David’s temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won’t come back to earth.
Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that “the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph’s tomb or Rachel’s tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.”
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
As the incomparable Slacktivist points out, if read carefully, this logic is at best post hoc ergo propter hoc: what’s described isn’t a highrolling geopolitical summit with apocalyptic fanatics, but instead a slick bit of fanservice for the rubes, a huckster’s shill to puff them up, make them think they’re playas, and part them from their votes and money.
The group sent “45 ministers including wives” to the White House, where they sat in a room as a series of second- and third-tier staffers came through to assure them that the president appreciates their concerns and is counting on their support. At the end of the day, they were allowed outside to wave as the president departed in a helicopter. It was their only glimpse of him. (Robert G. Upton, the AC’s leader, described this as a “heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter.”)
The White House shores up support in a fragment of its base, and Upton gets to return to his office and crank out fund-raising letters assuring his deluded followers that he has insider access with “key leaders” in the Bush administration.
The author himself chimes in: a rather critical paragraph was, apparently, cut. This particular instance isn’t an example of consulting eschaton immanentizers on foreign policy decisions that affect us all. The Golden Text isn’t written on any White House walls, and if any one of those 45 ministers prayed for rain, no one in the administration took it seriously.
They are, after all, one fuck of a lot scarier.
In 1999, candidate Bush gave a speech to the little-known Council on National Policy.
His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.
(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign “strict constructionist” phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn’t).
The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush’s presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.
Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.
Now, this might be more post hoc ergo propter hoc. But there are very real questions as to how, exactly, Bush rose to the top of the Republican lists. And even if you don’t want to believe that an interlocking directorate of Christian political organizations and prominent Republican politicians could kingmake a failed businessman and one-term governor with a market-tested family name (“CNP will forever be nothing more than a ‘comfortable place’ for like-minded folks to brainstorm, one member said,” or so goes the ABC article that’s still the best one-stop shop on the CNP. “‘What they decided at one point was that people will simply feel more at ease,’ said another member, Balint Vazsonyi, who joined the group in 1997. ‘It’s certainly not for a political reason. The views discussed here are among those you see on the television or when you open a newspaper’”), what you have to ask yourself is why so many prominent Republicans see no political difficulties in associating themselves with individuals and organizations that explicitly call for overthrowing American democracy in favor of a Christian theocracy. And you can still write this off as fanservice if you want, glandhanding the rubes while picking their pockets, like the absurdly messianic coronation of Sun Myung Moon attended by hordes of money-hungry Republican movers, shakers, and congressfolk. But then you have to go back a year or so to Jeffrey Sharlet’s “Jesus Plus Nothing,” his “undercover” account of hanging with up-and-coming Christian(ist) power brokers:
“King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy who slept with another man’s wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murders her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”
The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been “chosen.” To illustrate this point David Coe turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”
Beau shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”
“No, Beau. I wouldn’t. Because I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing.”
“Jesus ?” Beau said. David smiled and winked.
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?” He was thinking of Christ’s parable of the wineskins. “You can’t pour new into old,” David said, returning to his chair. “We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his.”
He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus , you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus , you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. ‘Get your vision straight, then relate.’ Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.
Maybe it’s fanservice. Maybe it’s skinning the rubes. But it’s getting awfully damned hard to tell who the rubes are, anymore. These Christianist red-state jes’-plain-folks rubes own electronic voting machine companies, after all, and spent eight years hounding a president, almost running him out of office. And if those voting machines don’t assure their candidate’s victory come November, they’ll gear up for another bruising snipe hunt—no matter at all what we the people might want. (And even if we do win, and survive, we’re all still stuck half-in, half-out of that vast empire of theirs, whose capital has just been named: Camp Redemption, ladies and gentlemen. Dop, dop, dop.)
Is the Bush administration then the triumph of William Jennings Bryan? —Not to speak too well of the Great Commoner, but he at least had some convictions to lend him courage. For all its rank rabble-rousery, his populism was ultimately rooted in the idea of trying to do some good for the people, and some little good was done. Bryan used fervent religion and crackpot economics to build a powerful coalition of people who’d had little to no power before. He was trying an end-run around the vested interests to do what he thought had to be done.
Bush is speaking to the vested interests.
That’s what’s making all the difference.
Brownsark.
From the latest op-ed by Tony Blankley, editorial page editor for that “newspaper,” the Washington Times:
We have the strength—military, economic, cultural, diplomatic, (dare I include the strength of our religious faith, also?)—to persist around the world unto victory—for generations if necessary.
But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president’s political and media opposition want the president’s defeat more than America’s victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently—although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)
Why on earth would this be the case, Mr. Blankley? Will the next terrorist attack be a rewriting of the constitution?
(More here and here. Turn on the lights and scatter the cockroaches. —My God, you can almost hear the bated breath, you can almost smell the expectant sweat. One more terrorist attack will show you. The gloves will finally be off! We can at last do what must be done! Gloriosky, God in heaven, bring it on!)
A few basic precautions.
Professor DeLong’s father is rattled by seeing his house on the cover of Reason magazine:
The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: “James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!”
DeLong père ends up as sanguine about the database nation as Declan McCullagh, who wrote the article on the upside of data mining that the stunt cover publicizes. But DeLong fils isn’t so sure:
I don’t have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon—at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that’s six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments—future Stasis—will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. [...]
Sometimes what look like quantitative changes—the falling cost of information processing—make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.
All of which is really just an excuse to cut ’n’ past the lyrics to a delightful song by Momus, written in the headier, happier days of 1997, on this very topic. Ladies and gentlemen, from the exquisite Ping Pong: “The Age of Information.”
This is a public service announcement.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It’s perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?
Axiom 1 for the world we’ve begun:
Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal
The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact
Is dead: we are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can’t keep your cards to your chest
I’d suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess
Axiom 2 to make the world new:
Paranoia’s simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star
Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody’s hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax:
If you’re an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts
Axiom 3 for transparency:
In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations
There is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations
In the days before communication
Privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut
Unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Axiom 4 for this world I adore:
Our loyalties should shift in view according to what we know
And who we are speaking to
Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I’m disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist
With every new fact I learn
It depends who I’m speaking to
And who they speak to in turn
Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:
Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests personal and vested
Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded from brain to brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
What part of “no” do they not understand?
NORTH: Alan—Alan, for 13 or 14 days now, all we have seen on the front pages of America’s newspapers is a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform.
