The Vikings were not out to lord it over the Indians or bring democracy here or teach folks about Nordic gods. They were free spirits, sailors, explorers, so they left some carved stones here and there, relished the exhilaration of the voyage and the sight of new lands, and went home and composed sagas for the amusement of their friends and families. That arrogant fool Columbus, who demanded 10 percent of all the gold the Spanish stole in the New World, got the holiday, a town in Ohio and another in Georgia, a major river in the Northwest and a university in New York. But who cares? Scandinavians don't. They celebrate Columbus Day as we all do, by going to the sale and saving 30 percent on towels and bed linens. And by covering the roses and putting the lawn furniture away.
Their history after Leif and Erik and Bjarni has been tangled, of course. The Norwegians suffered under the Danes and then the Swedes. The Danes suffered under the delusion that they were French. The Swedes suffered under Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman, neither of whom was the life of the party. All of them suffered from the long gray winters with twilight at noon and the lunches of fried herring and potatoes and aquavit and the general prohibition against raising your voice or driving pink Cadillacs. But Lutheranism urged them toward kindness, industriousness and self-effacement, and this is not a bad strategy for contentment.
Look around today and you will find the Viking descendants, a calm and stoical and somewhat formal people, by and large, not given to extremes of fashion or chanting "We're Number One" or writing memoirs that hang out the family underwear. Walter Mondale is pretty much the prototype. He lost the presidency by one of the biggest landslides in history to an aging actor whose grip on reality, never firm to begin with, was becoming hallucinatory. Mr. Reagan was sort of the Columbus of our time, a better P.R. man than sailor, but so be it. Mr. Mondale is a buoyant man with a sense of humor who enjoys his life in Minnesota, where people are happy to see him, and when you do, you see that losing is far from the worst thing that can happen to a man. Far from it.
What's worse is the likely fate of the Current Occupant, who is contending with Pierce, Buchanan and Warren G. Harding for the title of All-Time Worst President. He's got a good shot at the title if only because he's had so much more to be worst with. (Any young persons who have been inspired by Mr. Bush to take up public service should be watched very closely.)
I propose that we change Columbus Day to Bush Day, a cautionary holiday, like Halloween, a day to meditate on the hazards of ambition. We could observe it by going through the basement and garage and throwing out stuff we don't want or need. Also by not mortgaging the house to pay for a vacation, and not yelling at the neighbors, and not assuming that the law is for other people. A day to honor kindness, industriousness and modesty.
In an effort to gain Mr. Padilla’s "dependency and trust," he was tortured for nearly the entire three years and eight months of his unlawful detention. The torture took myriad forms, each designed to cause pain, anguish, depression and, ultimately, the loss of will to live. The base ingredient in Mr. Padilla’s torture was stark isolation for a substantial portion of his captivity. For nearly two years – from June 9, 2002 until March 2, 2004, when the Department of Defense permitted Mr. Padilla to have contact with his lawyers – Mr. Padilla was in complete isolation. Even after he was permitted contact with counsel, his conditions of confinement remained essentially the same. He was kept in a unit comprising sixteen individual cells, eight on the upper level and eight on the lower level, where Mr. Padilla’s cell was located. No other cells in the unit were occupied. His cell was electronically monitored twenty-four hours a day, eliminating the need for a guard to patrol his unit. His only contact with another person was when a guard would deliver and retrieve trays of food and when the government desired to interrogate him...
...His tiny cell – nine feet by seven feet – had no view to the outside world. The door to his cell had a window, however, it was covered by a magnetic sticker, depriving Mr. Padilla of even a view into the hallway and adjacent common areas of his unit. He was not given a clock or a watch and for most of the time of his captivity, he was unaware whether it was day or night, or what time of year or day it was...
...Mr. Padilla was also viciously deprived of sleep. This sleep deprivation was achieved in a variety of ways. For a substantial period of his captivity, Mr. Padilla’s cell contained only a steel bunk with no mattress. The pain and discomfort of sleeping on a cold, steel bunk made it impossible for him to sleep...
...Mr. Padilla’s dehumanization at the hands of his captors also took more sinister forms. Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr. Padilla was denied even the smallest, and most personal shreds of human dignity by being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having to endure forced grooming at the whim of his captors...
...Mr. Padilla was threatened with being forcibly removed from the United States to another country, including U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was threatened his fate would be even worse than in the Naval Brig. He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution. He was hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long durations of time. He was forced to endure exceedingly long interrogation sessions, without adequate sleep, wherein he would be confronted with false information, scenarios, and documents to further disorient him. Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault Mr. Padilla. Additionally, Mr. Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations...
BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died [Ed: AP says 655,000] in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here...
...But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.
The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the sectarian killings.
In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry — the two main sources of information for civilian deaths — from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is allowed to release figures. It has not provided statistics for September, though a spokesman said Tuesday that it would...
...The study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo. It sought to measure the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war.
It argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because they were often incomplete.
The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.
Gunshots were the largest cause of death, the study said, at 56 percent of all violent deaths, while car bombs accounted for about 13 percent. Deaths caused by the American military declined as an overall percentage from March 2003 to June 2006.
Authorities found the mutilated bodies of 60 men in Baghdad in the 24 hours ending Tuesday morning, likely the latest victims of the sectarian death squads that roam the capital.
The bullet-riddled bodies all had their hands and feet bound and showed signs of torture — hallmarks of death-squad killings, police 1st Lt. Mohamed Khayon said.
The victims were from 20 to 50 years old, and their bodies had been dumped in several neighborhoods.
Sectarian death squads have killed thousands in recent months and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is coming under increased pressure to find an end to the violence.
Chief U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said Monday that there had been a spike in sectarian violence with the onset of Ramadan two weeks ago but provided no numbers.
"We anticipated it and we expect it to continue," Caldwell said. "The sectarian tensions in the city are high."
Glimmers of progress in iraq [Rich Lowry]
There's this wire story from the other day (AUGUST 28, 2006):
The meeting came amid reports from military commanders in Iraq that violent incidents in Baghdad have come down by 40 percent in the past three weeks as US and Iraqi troops have cordoned off and cleared some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods.
Rumsfeld said he had discussed the situation with his top commanders in Iraq and was encouraged by the turnaround.
The military's efforts "have been successful in the sense that we are seeing a reduction in the levels of violence, and in the numbers of attacks, in the areas particularly that the forces have been able to clear," Rumsfeld said.
"Iraqi forces have been doing a very good job," he added.
Thousands of US troops were brought into the capital earlier this month amid fears that spiralling sectarian violence could descend into all-out civil war, pitting Shiites against Sunnis.
Some analysts believe the situation had become a low-level civil war with elements of the Iraqi security forces either abetting the violence or looking the other way.
But Mahdi said the improved security situation in Baghdad was "our answer to all those talking about civil war in Iraq. We don't think we are leading to one."
Posted at 5:00 PM
Bush is less worried about his standing with history, telling aides that George Washington's legacy is still being debated two centuries later. But he understands that losing one chamber of Congress will cripple his lame duck-weakened final two years.
Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going.
MR. RUSSERT: Knowing what you know today, knowing what you know today, that Saddam did not have the weapons of destruction that our intelligence agencies thought he had, if you knew that today, would you still vote for the war?
SEN. TALENT: Well, yeah, I mean, I think...
MR. RUSSERT: You still would?
SEN. TALENT: ...it was the—I think it was the only possible strategic choice. Look, Saddam had been an organic threat in the region for a long time. He represented a threat to us. That threat is now gone. Tim, look at what’s not happening.
MR. RUSSERT: But Senator, isn’t it an important question: if, if, if the CIA said to you, “Saddam does not have weapons of biological, chemical, or a nuclear program,” you would still vote for the war?
SEN. TALENT: Well, he wanted them. He was trying to get rid of economic sanctions. He would’ve had $70-a-barrel oil. He’d have been competing with—I mean, if action had not been taken to remove Saddam, the same people who are being critical of what’s going on in Iraq now would be screaming that we’d left him in power. We’d have another Iran there. That threat’s been removed.
MS. McCASKILL: Well, I’m certainly not going to Monday morning quarterback the senators and congressmen that voted for this war. I’ve never seen what they saw. Knowing what we know now, absolutely not. And frankly, I’m surprised that Senator Talent would say that knowing what we know now, knowing what is going on in Iraq right now, knowing that we are not more secure and more stable as a result of this conflict, that he agrees that we should repeat that mistake if it came along again.
But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.
Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences. President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be true. Kim Jong-il may have nuclear weapons now; he certainly has enough plutonium to build some, and the reactors to breed more.
Yet Bush has neither threatened war nor pursued diplomacy. He has recently, and halfheartedly, agreed to hold talks; the next round is set for June. But any deal that the United States might cut now to dismantle North Korea's nuclear-weapons program will be harder and costlier than a deal that Bush could have cut 18 months ago, when he first had the chance, before Kim Jong-il got his hands on bomb-grade material and the leverage that goes with it.
The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle--as described to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who participated in the events--will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything the way the Clinton administration did it.
Kolbe once invited four former pages to make use of his Washington home while he was out of town, according to an instant message between Foley and another former page, Jordan Edmund, in January 2002. The pages planned to attend a first-year reunion of their page class. But because of a snowstorm, they did not take Kolbe up on his offer, according to one of the four pages.
Cline said one of the youths invited was a former page of Kolbe's. Because the congressman frequently travels on weekends, either to his Arizona ranch or abroad, the house is often available to friends, constituents, staffers and former staff members, such as a former page, she said.
Kolbe, the only openly gay Republican in Congress, is retiring at the end of the year.
North Korea claimed it conducted a successful underground nuclear test Monday, according to the country's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)...
...The U.S. Geological Survey Web site recorded a light 4.2-magnitude earthquake in North Korea at 10:35 a.m., about 385 kilometers (240 miles) northeast of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
It is now clear, Korea experts agree, that in the late 1990s North Korea continued to pursue a clandestine nuclear weapons program. For this reason, the Bush administration demanded verifiable dismantlement of North Korea's weapons program before it would again consider rekindling any similar agreement.
The Clinton administration saw the agreement as the best possible solution of two bad alternatives: either go to war with North Korea or ignore its burgeoning nuclear program. It chose the middle ground by essentially freezing North Korea's known nuclear ambitions.
Mr. Bush preferred a "bold approach, all at once," said Pritchard, who is no longer with the State Department. Pritchard added that President Bush didn't want to get "bogged down in long negotiations."
Mr. Bush's "bold approach" was that diplomacy with North Korea needed to be all or nothing. President Bush chose nothing. The situation worsened.
Following the January speech, in April 2002, "North Koreans finally sought" to rekindle Clinton-era negotiations on its nuclear program, Pritchard said.
"At that point in time we believed we had the nuclear program under control," he added. But the policy shifted. President Bush refused senior level talks.
Official relations between the two countries ceased. In response to being diplomatically cold-shouldered, North Korea's ultimate response was that it became openly nuclear.
1. Idle Des Moines related chit-chat that no human being should be expected to tolerate. It's audio waterboarding.
2. Right-wing blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and their local former sports guy, who if they ever gathered in the same place may go all neutron-star.
3. Iowa Hawkeye masturbation.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in town for a fund-raiser for Sen. Rick Santorum, had a close encounter with a large group of anti-Republican protesters as he was making his way to the Duquesne Club, Downtown.
Protesters said Gov. Bush blew them a kiss, acknowledging the crowd of about 30 chanting pickets that was made up of United Steelworkers and members of Uprise Counter Recruitment, a tour traveling through 22 cities to support anti-war efforts.
The protesters came closer.
"Jeb, go home," they shouted.
Mr. Bush, accompanied by a security guard and a female aide, made a slow retreat toward the T-station at Wood Street...
...As a precaution, the governor was ushered into a T-station supply closet and stayed there until the crowd left.
MOSCOW - A journalist shot to death in an apparent contract killing was about to publish a story about torture and abductions in Chechnya when she was slain, her editor said Sunday, as Russia's top prosecutor took charge of the case.
Anna Politkovskaya, famed for her unsparing coverage of abuses against civilians in Chechnya in the outspoken newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was found dead Saturday in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. She had two gunshot wounds — one to the head.
Politkovskaya, 48, had collected witness accounts and photos of tortured bodies and the article had been due for publication Monday, her newspaper's editors said.
"We never got the article, but she had evidence about these (abducted) people and there were photographs," Novaya Gazeta's deputy editor, Vitaly Yerushensky, told Ekho Moskvy radio.
The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.
Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The sharp increase in American wounded -- with nearly 300 more in the first week of October -- is a grim measure of the degree to which the U.S. military has been thrust into the lead of the effort to stave off full-scale civil war in Iraq, military officials and experts say. Beyond Baghdad, Marines battling Sunni insurgents in Iraq's western province of Anbar last month also suffered their highest number of wounded in action since late 2004.
Palmer [Hastert's Chief of Staff], who shares a townhouse with Hastert when they are in town, is more powerful than all but a few House members. Members know that he speaks for Hastert.
LOSING STEAM? [Byron York]
There seems to be a general feeling that the Foley scandal is losing steam today...
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday.
The staff member said Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley's behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in November 2005 to confront Foley about troubling e-mails he had sent to a Louisiana boy.
The staff member's account buttresses the position of Foley's onetime chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham's own efforts to stop Foley's behavior had failed. Fordham said Foley and Palmer, one of the most powerful figures in the House of Representatives, met within days to discuss the allegations.
Palmer said this week that the meeting Fordham described "did not happen." Timothy J. Heaphy, Fordham's attorney, said yesterday that Fordham is prepared to testify under oath that he had arranged the meeting and that both Foley and Palmer told him the meeting had taken place. Fordham spent more than three hours with the FBI on Thursday, and Heaphy said that on Friday he contacted the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to offer his client's cooperation.
"We are not preparing to cooperate. We are affirmatively seeking to," Heaphy said...
...Palmer has resolutely said he had no earlier meeting with Foley, and other leadership aides have questioned the truthfulness of Fordham. Fordham quit his job as Reynolds's chief of staff last week after acknowledging that he had tried to persuade ABC News not to publish the salacious instant-message exchanges between Foley and two former pages.
Hastert's office contends that the first confrontation with Foley occurred in November 2005, when Shimkus, the head of the House Page Board, and then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl took Foley aside to discuss what they termed "over-friendly" e-mails that Foley had sent to a Louisiana boy. Fordham's account not only pushed the matter back at least two years but also indicated that alarms over Foley's behavior had gone well beyond bland e-mails.
Sources close to Fordham say Trandahl repeatedly urged the longtime aide and close family friend to confront Foley about his inappropriate advances on pages. Each time, Foley pledged to no longer socialize with the teenagers, but, weeks later, Trandahl would again alert Fordham about more contacts. Out of frustration, the sources said, Fordham contacted Palmer, hoping that an intervention from such a powerful figure in the House would persuade Foley to stop.
- Abu Ghraib just a bunch of fraternity pranks
- Terrorism is the fault of pussy liberals
- I'm fat because of Democrats
- I became addicted to oxycontin because of illegal immigrants
- I only had viagra because of those taunting, fourteen year old Haitian prostitutes
THURSDAY, Oct. 5 (HealthDay News) -- Civil society may hinge on a tiny piece of tissue at the front of the human brain, a new study suggests.
Experiments involving a "fairness" game show that the right side of this region -- called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- helps people suppress selfish urges in obviously unjust situations, even at their own expense.
When researchers used a mild electric current to temporarily short-circuit this area, the law of the jungle quickly reasserted itself.
People with disabled right-side dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes grabbed whatever money they could from lopsided transactions -- even when they knew the deal they were getting was grossly unfair.
I don't get it?
1. Why didn't you tell Bush, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.?"
2. Why didn't you tell Bush that pretzels are as dangerous as they are tasty?
3. Why did you not tell him what a Shiite & a Sunni are?
4. Why did you hide the Iraqi WMD's?
5. Why did you encourage him to reform Social Security?
6. Why didn't you warn Bush about your super hurricane machine in the Summer of 2005?
7. And finally, why did you tell Denny Hastert that he can have your pork chops and ham sandwiches...as least those you didn't offer George Allen?
Q: If somebody masturbates during the month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?
A: if he do not intend masturbation and discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct even though he has done a ḥarām act. But, if he intends masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this process and semen really comes out, it is a ḥarām intentional breaking fasting.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Democratic sex scandals have been far worse than the suggestive Internet messages sent to teenage congressional pages by former Rep. Mark Foley.
Gingrich said Democrats have wanted to punish their offenders less than the GOP.
"What we don't have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on morality," Gingrich said at a party fundraiser in Greenville. "There's a certain stench of hypocrisy."
From Bill O'Reilly's interview with Bob Woodward, October 3, 2006:
O'REILLY: Continuing now with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, author of the brand new book and big bestseller, "State of Denial." You know, I'm mad at you, because my book is probably going to be knocked out of the No. 1 by your book. I'm just kidding.
WOODWARD: I apologize.
O'REILLY: Couldn't you just kind of -- two weeks later?
1 I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK, by Nora Ephron.
2 THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD, by Frank Rich.
3 THE CONFESSION, by James E. McGreevey.
4 MARLEY & ME, by John Grogan.
5 THE WORLD IS FLAT, by Thomas L. Friedman.
6 STATE OF EMERGENCY, by Patrick J. Buchanan.
7 LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION, by Sam Harris.
8 I SHOULDN'T EVEN BE DOING THIS! by Bob Newhart.
9 FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
10 THE LOOMING TOWER, by Lawrence Wright.
11 THE GOD DELUSION, by Richard Dawkins.
12 HUBRIS, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.
13 FIASCO, by Thomas E. Ricks.
14 AIR AMERICA: THE PLAYBOOK, by David Bender, Chuck D, Thom Hartmann et al.
15 THE WAY WE WERE, by Paul Burrell.
16* THE LOST, by Daniel Mendelsohn.
31 WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, by Keith Olbermann
ABC correspondent Brian] Ross dismissed suggestions by some Republicans that the news was disseminated as part of a smear campaign against Mr. Foley.
“I hate to give up sources, but to the extent that I know the political parties of any of the people who helped us, it would be the same party,” Mr. Ross said, referring to Republicans.
Here’s something else U.S. Reps. Mark Foley and Robert Wexler can disagree on: Foley says he has no intention of letting Stephen Colbert make a fool of him on national television.
The Fort Pierce Republican says he has turned down repeated requests to do an interview with Colbert, the host of Comedy Central’s popular faux-talk show “The Colbert Report.”...
...Foley says he doesn’t understand why representatives keep appearing on the show.
“It trivializes the job,” he says, adding of Colbert: “You can’t outsmart him. He’s a very funny guy.”
Asked by a reporter to complete the sentence “I enjoy cocaine because …,” Foley responded: “I don’t.”
Foley always seems to have the best instincts. Our Congressmen have better things to do than waste their time on shows like the Colbert Report. Don’t we have a war in Iraq, high gas prices, an illegal immigration problem and many other issues to deal with? Thankfully, Foley is focusing on his job instead of this sillyness.
...[W]hat we do know, and what the American public now knows, is that the party that has spent the past few years demagoguing safety and security and law and order is now known as the party that has screwed up the Iraq war, that has codified torture, that has been filled to the rim with criminals and crooks fleecing the treasury (and who knows what else), and is now known as the party that at its most basic can’t be trusted, because they are the party that has middle age perverts trying to bugger your kids. And even better, the Republican House Leadership didn’t give enough of a shit to do anything about it because it might get messy or it might get in the way of their desires for power and actively hid the information form the oppostion party and the pulic (or, as we might say, PEOPLE WHO MIGHT HAVE DONE THE RIGHT THING).
And that matters. People understand that. You can’t get around it, like you can the other issues. Iraq is compliacted, and there can be some leeway for mistakes. National security is important, and you can talk away some of the distastrous decisions made by the GOP as simple disagreements. People are jaded and cynical, and when you point to Abramoff and Cunningham and other crooks, people are inclined to throw up their hands and say “All politicans are crooks.”
But when it comes to messing with people’s kids, it is a whole different ball game. It is hard for voters to get past the idea that their kid might be upstairs on his computer getting perved on by middle-aged Republicans while the leadership of the party (the party of values, mind you), informed of this man’s predilections, was just too busy to be bothered. Ask your neighbor what they think of the party that harbors a man who, in his spare time, spends hours IMing teenagers to measure their penis.
People understand that, and it should scare the shit out of the GOP.
But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?
From: Jack Abramoff
To: 'octagon1'
Monday, March 18, 2002 8:31 AM
Subject: RE: Sunday
I was sitting yesterday with Karl Rove, Bush's top advisor, at the NCAA basketball game, discussing Israel when this email came in. I showed it to him. It seems that the President was very sad to have to come out negatively regarding Israel, but that they needed to mollify the Arabs for the upcoming war on Iraq. That did not seem to work anyway. Bush seems to love Sharon and Israel, and thinks Arabfat [sic], is nothing but a liar. I thought I'd pass that on.
Antiwar liberals last week got to savor the four most satisfying words in the English language: "I told you so."
This was after a declassified National Intelligence Estimate asserted that the war in Iraq was creating more terrorists than it was eliminating. For millions of people who opposed President Bush's mission in Iraq from the start, this was proof positive that they had been right all along. Yes, they told themselves, we saw this disaster coming.
Only . . . that isn't quite true.
One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.
This is not to say that no one predicted the war in Iraq would go badly, or that the insurgency would last so long. Many did. But where people might once have called such scenarios possible, or even likely, many will now be certain that they had known for sure that this was the only possible outcome.
"Liberals' assertion that they 'knew all along' that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias," agreed Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied the hindsight bias and how to overcome it. "This is not to say that they didn't always think that the war was a bad idea."
Added to that, especially on say, September 12, 2001, we have supreme moral influence. We could very well have joined with our allies and even the ambivalent and come up with a global approach to dealing with the scourge of terrorism. The board was set for a long-term approach, philosophically, politically and militarily. We had a chance to really follow the Hans Morgenthau rules of international relations and create a better, more stable, safer world out of the ashes of this horrible tragedy. AND THEY F**KING BLEW IT, FROM THE START. As has been alleged by others and now reaffirmed by Richard Clarke a National Security, counter-terrorism expert during the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II Administrations, they wanted to bomb the crap out of Saddam and Iraq from the very first. Damn them, damn them all to hell
SHANNON, Ireland (AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.
Picture found here.
BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least 50 corpses were discovered scattered around Baghdad overnight, police have said.
The bodies all bore bullet wounds and are most likely the victims of the sectarian dirty war raging in the capital between rival Sunni and Shiite armed groups, a police official said.
The daily count of corpses showed a brief lull during a total curfew imposed on Baghdad on Saturday, but since it was lifted early Sunday levels of violence, including bombings, have returned to their previous levels.
You'll recall that he is the Republican member of Congress who runs the Page Board, the group in charge of the pages. You'll also recall that tonight we learned on ABC News that GOP House staff warned the page class of 2001-2002 to stay away from ex-Rep. Mark Foley.
Then why is it that on June 6, 2002, well after the kids were warned to stay away from Foley, Shimkus notes approvingly that Foley has spent a lot of time with the Page Class of 2001-2002? This is Shimkus speaking at the page's goodbye ceremony,
MR. SHIMKUS: I thank my colleague. Now someone who spends a lot of time with you also, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Foley), would like to say a thank you.
FOLEY: John [one of the pages] was the highest bidder on lunch with Mark Foley. Maybe you all do not know this story, but John had paid considerable sums to dine with me. I had offered to take the winning bidder to lunch in the Members' dining room. Then I heard how much John Eunice paid. And I said, ``John, there is no way in the world after you committed so much money to have lunch with me that I would dare take you downstairs to eat in the Members' dining room.'' I said, ``Where do you want to go?'' He says, without reservation, ``Morton's.'' I said, ``Morton's? Like in Morton's Steakhouse?'' He said, ``Oh, would that be too much?'' I said, ``Oh, no, we'll go.'' I said, ``Call your mother, get permission, make sure she notifies the Clerk and we will go to Morton's.'' And so we proceeded to cruise down in my BMW to Morton's.
I have written a lot about the right's stubborn obsessions. They just can't seem to get out of their intellectual ruts, insisting forever that they were right about things they have been proven wrong about and carrying on for years disputing facts and evidence that nobody else disputes. It's an odd affliction that you can see even today when people too young to have been born at the time, like Ann Coulter or Michele Malkin, take up ancient arguments of their rightwing forebears and carry on as if it is a matter of tribal pride to win the point even after the facts are long settled everyone else has ceased to care.
Dick Cheney's single-minded insistence on reconstituting Nixon's doctrine of the extremely powerful executive branch has long been seen in that light. But I have to admit that even though I knew all this, I failed to see that Iraq was consciously and literally motivated by the Vietnam experience among many of those who had been associated with the "defeat" in ways they psychologically couldn't reconcile. It rings true. It simply didn't occur to me that anyone would knowingly go down that road again so soon. Indeed, I thought it was impossible that the post-Vietnam military would ever let it happen. (That's where Rummy came in...)
Security in Iraq has collapsed so dramatically that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour.
The huge project to build the barrier, which will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire, will snake across the vast and remote desert frontier between the countries.
The fence will be built despite the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Saudi kingdom has spent in the past two years to beef up patrols on its border with Iraq, with officials saying the crisis in Iraq is now so dangerous it must be physically shut out.
"Surveillance has already been stepped up over the past 18 months," said Nawaf Obaid, the director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an institute that advises the government on security affairs.
"But the feeling in Saudi is that Iraq is way out of control with no possibility of stability. The urgency now is to get that border sealed: physically sealed."
1. It was not strategically as important as we convinced ourselves it was.
2. We assumed the refuse of another country's failed imperialist policy.
3. It was sold through a lie and perpetuated through black & white homilies.
4. We could never have deployed sufficient resources to such a location to stem the tide of an internal civil war.
5. Consecutive Administration's had no real idea what they were doing, but hoped they got lucky.
6. It was the very definition of the limits of strategic bombing of all kinds.
7. The over-active hubris of Kennedy replaced the perceived "old laziness" of Eisenhower in ratcheting up Vietnam, and then when Kennedy seemed to be learning his lesson, he was assassinated.
8. There was NO real internal dissent within either party at the time of the ratcheting up of the war in the early and mid-1960s.
We are militarily engaged in Vietnam by virtue of a basic principle of our foreign policy that was implicit in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and was put into practice by John Foster Dulies from 1954 onward. This principle is the military containment of Communism. Containment had its origins in Europe; Dulles applied it to the Middle East and Asia through a series of bilateral and multilateral alliances. Yet what was an outstanding success In Europe turned out to be a dismal failure elsewhere. The reasons for that failure are twofold.
First, the threat that faced the nations of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War was primarily military. It was the threat of the Red Army marching westward. Behind the line of military demarcation of 1945 which the policy of containment declared to be the westernmost limits of the Soviet empire there was an ancient civilization, only temporarily weak and able to maintain itself against the threat of Communist subversion.
The situation is different in the Middle East and Asia. The threat there is not primarily military but political in nature. Weak governments and societies provide opportunities for Communist subversion. Military containment is irrelevant to that threat and may even be counter-productive. Thus the Baghdad Pact did not protect Egypt from Soviet influence and SEATO has had no bearing on Chinese influence in Indonesia and Pakistan.
Second and more important, even If China were threatening her neighbors primarily by military means, it would be impossible to contain her by erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire. For China is, even in her present underdeveloped state, the dominant power in Asia. She is this by virtue of the quality and quantity of her population, her geographic position, her civilization, her past power remembered and her future power anticipated. Anybody who has traveled in Asia with his eyes and ears open must have been impressed by the enormous impact which the resurgence of China has made upon all manner of men, regardless of class and political conviction, from Japan to Pakistan.
The issue China poses is politicaI and cultural predominance. The United States can no more contain Chinese influence in Asia by arming South Vietnam and Thailand than China could contain American influence in the Western Hemisphere by arming, say, Nicaragua and Costa Rica...
...Why do we support the Saigon Government in the Civil War against the Viet Cong? Because the Saigon Government is "free” and the Viet Cong are "Communist." By containing Vietnamese Communism, we assume that we are really containing the Communism of China.
Yet this assumption is at odds with the historic experience of a millennium and is unsupported by contemporary evidence. China is the hereditary enemy of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh will become the leader of a Chinese satellite only if the United States forces him to become one...*
... Until the end of last February [1965], the Government of the United States started from the assumption that the war in South Vietnam was a civil war, aided and abetted—but not created from abroad, and spokesmen for the Government have made time and again the point that the key to winning the war was political and not military and was to be found in South Vietnam itself. It was supposed to lie in transforming the indifference or hostility of the great mass of the South Vietnamese people into positive loyalty to the Government.
To that end, a new theory of warfare called “counterinsurgency" was put into practice. Strategic hamlets were established, massive propaganda campaigns were embarked upon, social and economic measures were at least sporadically taken. But all was to no avail. The mass of the population remained indifferent, if not hostile, and large units of the army ran away or went over to the enemy.
The reasons for this failure are of general significance, for they stem from a deeply ingrained habit of the American mind, We like to think of social problems as technically self-sufficient and susceptible of simple, clear-cut solutions. We tend to think of foreign aid as a kind of self-sufficient, economic enterprise subject to the laws of economics and divorced from politics, and of war as a similarly self-sufficient, technical enterprise, to be won as quickly, as cheaply. as thoroughly as possible and divorced from the foreign policy that preceded and is to follow it. Thus our military theoreticians and practitioners conceive of counterinsurgency as though it were just another branch of warfare, to be taught in special schools and applied with technical proficiency wherever the occasion arises.
This view derives of course from a complete misconception of the nature of civil war. People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.
Magsaysay could subdue the Huk rebellion in the Philippines because his charisma, proven in action, aroused a faith superior to that of his opponents. In South Vietnam there is nothing to oppose the faith of the Viet Cong and, In consequence, the Saigon Government and we are losing the civil war.
And another quote that sums up the disaster of Bushworld:
"The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman’s thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil."
- Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson, Politics Among Nations, 6th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), p. 165
On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."
Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.
Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year...
...On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."
There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.
Rising Hegemon
