How many times will Congress enact a law that specificially protects unborns at the expense of the woman who bears them? The answer is "over and over". Why do the Religious Right think that a child bearing woman is nothing more than a vessel that, like a soda can, is disposable yet the contents are not? It's not a perfect analogy, but their reasoning, if there is any, is even worse.
Today a federal judge aborted the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The irony is not lost on me.
A federal judge in New York ruled today that a federal law that banned a form of abortion is unconstitutional because it does not include an exception for cases where the procedure might be necessary to protect a woman's health. The law, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, enacted in November, makes it a crime for doctors to perform any "overt act" to "kill the partially delivered living fetus."Today's ruling, by Judge Richard Conway Casey of the Federal District Court for the Southern District, came in a case brought by the National Abortion Federation and seven physicians. Judge Casey determined that a decision in 2000 by the Supreme Court required that any law limiting abortion must have a clause allowing doctors to go ahead with the procedure if they determine that the risk to a women's health is greater without it.
"While Congress and the lower courts may disagree with the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions, that does not free them from their constitutional duty to obey the Supreme Court's rulings," Judge Casey wrote. In its 2000 ruling, he said, the Supreme Court "informed us that this gruesome procedure may be outlawed only if there exists a medical consensus that there is no circumstance in which any women would potentially benefit from it."
The decision is another victory for proponents of abortion rights, and a setback for the Bush administration, which supports the law along with opponents of abortion.
If they really wanted abortions to not happen, then why do they deny human, nay all sexual beings' nature and endorse birth control?
Thirty years ago today, Richard Milhouse Nixon became the first President of the United States of America to resign.
Nixon was a man who had a twenty-point lead going into the 1972 election cycle, but who was so paranoid he paid a gang of quasi-professional thugs to break into the DNC offices in the Watergate Hotel and steal info on his competition. Nixon was a sitting President who not only broke the law but made the situation infinitely worse by trying to cover up what was "out of the bag" over at the Washinton Post. And he wasn't hiding his sex life from miscreant GOP perverts in the Congress.
If you're a Democrat, I recommend sitting down and watching Dick, a brilliant comedy about Nixon's demise which answers the nagging question, "who was 'Deep Throat' ?" If you're a Republican, I recommend self-flagulation, or if that doesn't work for you, consider how you'll feel when Bush is impeached.
The BBC has a retrospect on the whole ugly mess here.
The Chairman of the Memphis city council refused to allow them into City Hall to meet with Carol Chumney, a city council member. Elisabeth Silverman, head of the Memphis Council for International Visitors is hosting the group, and probably thought that a visit to her home town would be just peachy.
Wrong.
According to Silverman, Brown threatened to call the bomb squad, should they enter.
Is Al Gore really from this state?
Well, no doubt the Iraqis learned something about America: it's currently full of shit. But Iraqis already knew that, didn't they?
The meeting between Ms. Chumney and the delegation happened elsewhere. This incident was reported in the Seatle Post-Intelligencer.
USA Today published a list of most and least "literate" cities (measuring the quality of their reading habits and options. Here are some of the worst:
Way to go, Texas. And for the record, no Texas city made the top ten list. The list is here.
My pal, Josh Holland, is officially described as, "a student at the University of Southern California and Editor-in-Chief of the Trojan Horse, USC's 'fiercely Progressive voice of reason.'" In reality, he's just another trouble-maker. In this piece, republished with permission (I feel so unblogger-like getting actual permission), Josh foments unrest by pointing out the fact that prominent groups purporting to represent the interests of politically-conservative black, are run by politically-conservative whites.
What Josh clearly doesn't understand is something conservative whites learned hundreds of years ago: sometimes blacks need a little coaching. After all, they didn't put themselves on boats to come to this country!
"Black Conservative to Rebut NAACP Leader's Remarks in C-SPAN Interview," read the press release from Project 21, an organization of conservative African-Americans.
I had read in Reuters that Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, had called groups like Project 21 "make-believe black organizations," and a "collection of black hustlers" who have adopted a conservative agenda in return for "a few bucks a head."
So I tuned into C-SPAN with interest to hear what a leading voice in the black conservative movement had to say. But then a funny thing happened: the African-American spokesperson for Project 21 caught a flat on the way to the studio, and the group's director had to fill in. And he was white.
As the segment began there was an awkward Wizard of Oz moment as C-SPAN's Robb Harlston – himself black – turned to Project 21's Caucasian director, David Almasi, and said, "Um...Project 21... a program for conservative African Americans...you're not African American."
It was a remarkable moment. A flat tire had led to a nationally-televised peek into what lies behind a murky network of interconnected black conservative organizations that seek ostensibly to bring more African-Americans into the conservative movement. But they're not just reaching out to the community. They also speak out publicly for conservative positions that might evoke charges of racism if advocated by whites. And while that's not to say that there aren't some blacks who embrace conservative values, the groups that claim to represent them are heavily financed by business interests and often run by white Republicans.
Almasi replied defensively, "I wanted to make clear right at the beginning that I'm an employee, I'm an employee of Project 21, my bosses are the members of Project 21, the volunteers...I take my marching orders from them, not from anybody else."
Almasi told me by phone that he is Project 21's only paid staffer, and that he works part-time. He said that the approximately 400 volunteers – among whom there was a core of "a few dozen" – were simply conservative blacks "willing to do interviews, be quoted for press releases and be available to write for Project 21 publications," and that his role was simply to serve as "a syndicator, an editor and a scheduler."
But Project 21 is a subsidiary of the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), which, according to the liberal watchdog Mediatransparency.org, was formed in the 1980s to support Reagan's military interventions in Central America. NCPPR's leadership – president, vice president, executive director – are all white. Amy Ridenour, former Deputy Director of the College Republican National Committee and the organization's president, also sits on the board of Black America's PAC, an organization that claims to be nonpartisan but whose IRS filings state that its mission is to elect Republicans.
NCPPR's directors are also all white. In fact, one of them – Jack Abramoff – is so white that he's actually a high-powered GOP lobbyist and Bush ‘Pioneer' who, according to the Washington Post, is the target of multiple investigations into alleged funny-money payments from Indian gambling concerns (along with the $45 million in fees they collected from them, Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon convinced the tribes to donate large sums to conservative organizations run by Scanlon, which then funneled the money back to Abramoff, according to the Post).
In the 1990s, NCPPR got into the business of denying that climate change warnings were based on sound science. If the connection between black conservative outreach work and environmental skepticism doesn't seem clear, that's because it's not. But it's logical considering that ExxonMobil donated $30,000 to NCPPR for "educational activities" and $15,000 for general support in 2002, and last year they hiked their operating support to $25,000 and kicked in another $30,000 for NCPPR's ‘EnviroTruth' website, according to company financial records.
Project 21 also received funding from R.J. Reynolds and "has lobbied in support of tobacco industry interests, opposing FDA regulation of the industry, excise taxes and other government policies to reduce tobacco use," according to the Center for Media and Democracy. Almasi denied that Project 21 received tobacco industry money, but said he was not sufficiently aware of the details of NCPPR's fundraising to say whether the parent organization had.
Project 21 is one small part of a broad coalition of black conservative groups that fight for issues of concern to the business community. These organizations draw their intellectual inspiration from Thomas Sowell's landmark 1975 book Race and Economics, one of the founding documents of the new black conservative movement. Just as born-again conservatives like David Horowitz and Zell Miller are showered with praise and money, black conservatives are embraced and elevated by the conservative movement as living repudiations of liberalism.
So Sowell and others — like Robert L. Woodson of the American Enterprise Institute, J.A. Parker of the Lincoln Institute, sometime presidential candidate Alan Keyes of Black America's PAC (BAMPAC), and Jackie Cissel of the Black Alliance for Educational Options — have little trouble finding cushy think-tank sinecures and generous support for their organizations. Many among this small group of prominent black conservatives are on several groups' advisory boards, adding to the appearance of a broad ideological movement. Cissel, for one, also serves as regional director for the African American Republican Leadership Council, a group whose mission "is to break the liberal democrat stranglehold over Black America," according to their web site. As Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten reported last year, 13 out of the 15 members of the AALRC's Advisory Panel are white. They include such well known minority champions as the Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, the Reverend Lou Sheldon, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
What do people like Weyrich, Norquist, Bauer and Hannity have in common with the black conservatives? It's more than a common affection for low taxes and non-existent government regulation of business. Conservative activists understand that the GOP's history of tolerating bigots in their ranks and seeking out their votes, from Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to George H.W. Bush's use of Willie Horton to George W. Bush's courting of the confederate vote in the 2000 South Carolina primary, presents a problem for moderate voters of all races. Finding African-Americans to make the conservative case goes a long way toward wiping those memories from the public mind.
But ideology starts outside of Washington, and one of the most important ideological battle grounds for the black conservative movement is on campus, where many of the faculty in the social sciences and humanities believe the silly notion that structural racism still exists in America, and aren't afraid to say so.
So in 1998, the Young America's Foundation formed the Alternative Black Speakers Program "in response to the overwhelmingly leftist bent of Black History Month on campuses," according to a press release. The program sends conservative black speakers to college campuses across the country, "giving students an alternative to the often radical and irresponsible message of black lecturers appearing on campuses as part of official university programs." One of YAF's top executives is Floyd Brown, the infamous dirty trickster responsible for creating the 1988 anti-Dukakis ads featuring Willie Horton's menacing mug shot.
Perhaps the most visible black conservative in the campus wars is Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI). Connerly was a protégé of former California Governor Pete Wilson, who appointed him to the University of California's Board of Regents. Connerly drafted Wilson's anti-affirmative action initiative Prop 209, and is now attempting to bring a similar ballot measure to Michigan.
When asked what he thought about Trent Lott's comments about segregation in 2002, Connerly told CNN: "Supporting segregation need not be racist. One can believe in segregation and believe in equality of the races."
According to the civil rights group By Any Means Necessary (disclosure: I am a member of BAMN), Connerly reportedly makes $400,000 dollars per year as the president of ACRI.
And that's what seems to unite these seemingly disparate groups — money. Every black conservative group I've mentioned — without exception — receives a significant portion of their funding (in some cases all of their funding) from at least three of four ultra-conservative foundations (the Lincoln Institute gets its share funneled indirectly through the conservative Hoover Institution).
The four are the usual suspects of the Right's political ATM: Richard Scaife's family foundations, Adolph Coors' Castle Rock Foundation, The John M. Olin Foundation, and the Linde and Harry Bradley Foundation. What's striking about these groups' underwriting of "minority organizations" is that some of them have at times displayed what many would consider a frankly racist agenda.
Scaife has gained notoriety as one of the great funders of the "New Conservative" movement. While he is best known for his anti-Clinton activities, including paying for the American Spectator's "Arkansas Project," he has plenty of unsavory grantees; the Charlotte Observer reported that he provided funding for Children Requiring A Caring Community, a scary fringe group that pays poor women to be surgically sterilized or to undergo long-term birth control.
According to People For The American Way (PFAW), William Coors gave a speech In 1984 in which he reportedly told a largely African American audience that "one of the best things they [slave traders] did for you is to drag your ancestors over here in chains." Later in the speech, he asserted that weakness in the Zimbabwe economy was due to black Africans' "lack of intellectual capacity."
The speech drew controversy and a boycott by African American and Hispanic groups. In response, Coors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to African American and Hispanic organizations. Apparently, black conservative groups run by white Republicans count.
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is a particularly interesting case. According to PFAW, Bradley, whose recipients list "reads like a Who's Who of the U.S. Right," is a major funding source for the Center for Individual Rights, which brought the Hopwood v. Texas case that ended affirmative action at the University of Texas law school. Bradley played a major role in financing Pete Wilson and Ward Connerly's Prop 209, and, through the Pacific Legal Foundation, Bradley "provided pro bono representation to ...Wilson in his challenge to five state statutes dealing with affirmative action ..." Clint Bolick, vice president of the Institute for Justice, another recipient of Bradley money, "played a pivotal role in attacks on Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Bolick's Wall Street Journal opinion piece headlined ‘Clinton's Quota Queen' dredged up the worst racist and sexist stereotypes and helped throw the Guinier nomination on the defensive."
Even more striking is that Bradley grants supported Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein while they wrote The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. According to PFAW, "the book was widely seen as a piece of profoundly racist and classist pseudo-science, and was denounced by the American Psychological Association. It had relied heavily on studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, a neo-Nazi organization that promoted eugenicist research. Immediately after its publication, Bradley raised Murray's annual grant to $163,000."
The boards of these foundations aren't exactly "multicultural," if you know what I mean. But they have a message to get out: they're coming after affirmative action, the minimum wage, social welfare programs, pre- and after-school programs and, indeed, multiculturalism itself. And when that's the message, it's good to have it delivered by an African-American.
So there you have it, the leading lights of the black conservative movement. If you believe that the most pressing problems facing the African-American community today are the minimum wage, too many regulations on energy companies and too many people trying to get kids to quit smoking, then maybe you should join the black conservative movement yourself. You don't have to be black, or even know anyone who is. And heck, if you are black and you leave the house early enough, they may even put you on TV to "rebut" the NAACP.
Do you have plastic sheeting and duct tape ready to deploy? Have you been eyeing the patrons at the falafel stand, looking for Usama bin Laden? How about preventing high-school students from aiding the terrorists by writing poems? Most importantly, do you know whether the terror level is Ernie, Bert or Elmo?
If you're a good American, then you've been staying on top of all the vague, unsubstatiated warnings and silly, useless advisories that have been streaming from the Department of Homeland Security like curse words from the Vice President.
Sadly, no matter how much duct tape and plastic sheeting you put up, there's a chance that the terrorists will find a way to harm you anyway, like maybe a car bomb or crashing airplanes into your building. If that happens, there's always the old standby: blame Bill Clinton. It doesn't matter what for, there's no ill in America that can't be traced to a few blowjobs in the Oval Office! Let the professionals like Ann Coulter fill in the blanks.
But something weird happened today: The Department of Homeland Security blamed Bill for something, and it was an actual threat to ordinary Americans! The key factor is that they weren't blaming Bill Clinton, they were blaming Bill Gates.
US-CERT, an Internet security monitoring and response team, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, has issued an advisory urging users to stop using Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Usually agencies such as CERT don't issue advisories until there is a patch available, but the latest security hole in Internet Explorer has already been widely exploited. We know it's really bad, because we don't know how bad it is. Yes, I meant that. US-CERT has quantified the magnitude of the security failure as a massive breach that has affected popular web sites, but none of those site have been identified. The reason is that the exploits were serious enough, that public admission that a company web site was compromised could leave the forthcoming corporation open for a fatal deluge of liability lawsuits.
When the lawyers swoop in on a computer hack and people stop talking, that's really serious.
Me, I've been using Mozilla since it came out. I love it. I don't know what anyone still uses I.E., except possibly that they're a complete idiot. I can say that with much more certainty now.
I wonder how Microsoft's trial would have gone if they're monopoly had been identified as aiding terrorists when it was going on.
God I love blogging. I don't have to worry about editorial or journalistic issues. Not like the "liberal media" which wrung its hands over whether or not to publish Dick "Go Fuck Yourself" Cheney's reply to Sen. Patrick Leahy's passing "hello". Amazingly, some media outlets (print only, of course, since Colin Powell's son has made it expensive to say "fuck" on TV) had the balls to print Cheney's comment, verbatim. I think if that's what he said, under those circumstances, then it's both news and quotable.
The Washington Post actually printed the word today for the first time since publishing the Starr report in 1998. And that set the town buzzing."When the vice president of the United States says it to a senator in the way in which he said it on the Senate floor," says Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "readers need to judge for themselves what the word is because we don't play games at The Washington Post and use dashes."
Oddly, the same article recalled that in 2000 President Bush made an off-mike comment about Adam Clymer, then a New York Times reporter, calling him a "major-league [expletive]." Cheney responded, "big time." Downie said the paper used the derogatory term for backside at the time and that he saw no reason to repeat it in today's newspaper.
In fact, I think we should all refer to June 24th as "Go Fuck Yourself" day in honor of the GOP, and they should offer free tubes of K-Y jelly for self-use.
So, what was going wrong in Grenada that made it a compelling case for the application of military force?
Well, after being granted independence by Britain, Grenada experience a military coup, in which a pro-Castro government took over. Naturally, a military build-up followed, including ominous plans for a new airport that could accommodate Soviet Long-Range Bombers. Of course, a country whose largest source of revenue is tourism could greatly benefit from an airport accessible to large passenger jets, but well... Soviet Long-Range Bombers!
Since this spooky state of affairs had been in place since 1979, it didn't really work as a reason to divert resources from dealing with Beirut. Luckily, there was a development: another military coup. Despite the fact that this happened on October 12th — just two weeks before the American invasion — Reagan confidently described the new regime as:
[The new government is], if anything, more radical and more devoted to Castro's Cuba than [the previous one] had been.
The violence of the coup gave rise to the ultimate justification for the assault on Grenada: the safety of 1,000 medical students — 80% of them American citizens — studying at the University of I-Couldn't-Get-In-Anywhere-Else School of Medicine. Reagan emphasized the need to do this, by invoking the specter of the Iranian hostages — who, we would learn later, were held longer than necessary as a result of a deal Reagan's campaign made with Iran.
I believe our government has a responsibility to go to the aid of its citizens, if their right to life and liberty is threatened. The nightmare of our hostages in Iran must never be repeated.
This somewhat reasonable motivation was undermined when interviews with students arriving home showed them to be genuinely puzzled by the U.S. rescue; none of them reported having been threatened at all by the new government.
Nevertheless, Reagan dispatched 1,200 elite military troops — mostly Army Rangers and Navy SEALs — to topple the new government of Grenada and save the students from whatever it was that they were in danger of. The initial force encountered a little more resistance than expected, in the form of Cuban troops:
We had to assume that several hundred Cubans working on the airport could be military reserves. Well, as it turned out, the number was much larger, and they were a military force.
The presence of a substantial number of Cuban soldiers forced the U.S. to increase its troop strength to 7,000 meaning that there was about one U.S. soldier for every 15 people in Grenada. Surprise, surprise, we won.
Whether or not we knew about the Cuban presence before the invasion, Reagan played it for more than it was worth:
Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.
Terrorism? What's terrorism got to do with Grenada? Reagan clarifies:
The events in Lebanon and Grenada, though oceans apart, are closely related. Not only has Moscow assisted and encouraged the violence in both countries, but it provides direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists.
It should be clear implication that the Soviets were a significant force behind world terrorism was absurd. Long after the demise of the Soviet Union, we are still dealing with terrorism is the same places we found it in 1983. Reagan's bizarre conflation of communism with terrorism provided more than a rationale for invading Grenada in the wake of Beirut, it provided an excuse for the Reagan Administration to maniacally focus on the one conflict they understood — the Cold War — while ignoring the complex politics underlying terrorism.
In his speech, Reagan asked this important question:
If we were to leave Lebanon now, what message would that send to those who foment instability and terrorism?
After dealing his blow to terrorism by invading Grenada, Reagan did exactly that; he picked up and left Lebanon, and it would be another 10 years before the U.S. government — under new management — finally addressed the issue of terrorism seriously.
So here we are, again under Republican rule, and guess what? We we attacked by terrorists and responded by attacking an unrelated country. The terrorist attack was bigger, as was the country we invaded. It would have been nice if Bush had learned from Reagan's cautionary example, not to address terrorist threats with black-and-white ideology. Having failed to absorb that lesson, at least he could have learned something else from Reagan: when you invade the unrelated country, win.
Are we done with Ronald Wilson Reagan appreciation week? Or is it a month? Actually, let's face facts: citing the "never speak ill of the dead" rule of etiquette, the Rabid Right is going to make the it Ronald Wilson Reagan appreciation day for the rest of eternity.
In a purely rational perspective, Reagan's death heralds an era of unrestrained criticism of Reagan, since he's no longer here to personally insult, but that won't stop the apostles of St. Reagan from issuing withering admonitions to blasphemers.
No matter how nice a guy he could be, Reagan did some questionable things, and — depending on your personal outlook — some downright evil things. My outlook is heavily influenced by Hanlon's Razor which impels me to view most of what Reagan and his cohorts did as the result of stupidity.
I've spent a great deal of time over the last year and a half producing a voluminous collection of essays and Internet forum posts all supporting the same general thesis: George W. Bush's actions following the "9-11" Al Qaeda attack have been supremely inept, dishonest, and possibly even criminal.
Most infuriating is that the Bush Administration has made this series of abysmal decisions in spite of vigorous efforts to promote more promising alternatives. These efforts have come from informed, thoughtful and experienced factions in the public, private and government sectors. It would be a mistake, however, to deem these efforts as having failed; the resistance to Bush's purely-idealogical plans has certainly blunted their capacity for harm.
We have to realize that there is nothing we can do to stop Republicans from doing stupid things, so it's important to examine great moments of idiocy to see how much worse it would be if we weren't trying so hard. There are few better illustrations of this adage than the contrast between George W. Bush's and Ronald Reagan's response to Al Qaeda.
On October 23rd, 1983 a suicide bomber rammed into a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, with a vanload of high explosives; 241 Marines were killed and America was in shock. It was the worst in a series of increasingly deadly attacks and it removed all doubt that America had not only become the target of an aggressive and hostile Arab faction, but that this faction was growing in strength and sophistication.
Let's take a look at key excerpts from the Gipper's October 27th speech, a masterpiece in incoherence:
My fellow Americans, Some 2 months ago we were shocked by the brutal massacre of 269 men, women, and children, more than 60 of them Americans, in the shooting down of a Korean airliner.
This is the actual opening line of Reagan's speech.
Note that is has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. It's just there to introduce the general topic of Americans getting killed in large numbers by spooky brown foreigners. Reagan says nothing specific about this topic again.
Before exploring what immediately follows that auspicious start, I'd also like to highlight this detail buried in the speech:
At almost the same instant, another vehicle on a suicide and murder mission crashed into the headquarters of the French peacekeeping force, an eight-story building, destroying it and killing more than 50 French soldiers.
This was the first time that terrorists had staged multiple, simultaneous attacks, but as time passed, this tactic would become recognized as signature characteristic of attacks by a group called Al Qaeda. Few Americans are aware of this, but the attacks in Lebanon were the first identifiable Al Qaeda operations.
One of the main reasons why few Americans are aware of Al Qaeda's role in this attack is that no one in the U.S. government bothered to investigate Al Qaeda until Clinton Administration conducted an investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing. For 10 years and two Presidents, Al Qaeda evolved without drawing any interest from the Whitehouse. Naturally, Conservatives will tell you that Bill Clinton did nothing to stop Al Qaeda — at least he knew about it.
Anyway, back to Ronnie's screed.
The speech abruptly leaps from KAL 007 to the Beirut bombing. By the fourth paragraph, the President is describing the circumstances surrounding the attack.
The truck smashed through the doors of the headquarters building in which our Marines were sleeping and instantly exploded. The four-story concrete building collapsed in a pile of rubble.
Let's see... vehicle crashes into building, people die, building collapses... sound familiar? Of course, it wasn't the fault of Reagan or his subordinates, as no one could have predicted it!
Reagan's asserted that the attack was a complete surprise and "there was no way our Marine guards" could have known this truck was a threat. I could elucidate the stunning fatuity of this claim, but Reagan spared me the effort. Below is Reagan's assertion of a surprise attack, immediately followed by a statement that occurred much later in the speech. Can you spot the continuity problem?
The truck carried some 2,000 pounds of explosives, but there was no way our Marine guards could know this.
...We have strong circumstantial evidence that the attack on the Marines was directed by terrorists who used the same method to destroy our Embassy in Beirut.
Let me add a little more detail: the Marine barracks was the fourth car bombing in a year. In fact, the attack against the American Embassy — the one Reagan is referring to in the second line of the quote — cemented our decision to send the Marines to Beirut in the first place. In other words, the Marines were in Beirut because of a carbombing of an American target. You'd have to be an imbecile to believe that we couldn't have foreseen — you following this? — a carbombing of an American target.
Of course, Reagan knew damn well that leaving the Marine base susceptible to a car bomb attack was an inexcusable oversight. Inexplicably, Reagan attempted to deflect attention from the inadequate perimeter defense at the compound by providing a detailed description of the inadequate perimeter defense at the compound. Here is some detail I removed from the description of the attack above:
Their first warning that something was wrong came when the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed wire entanglements.
Seriously, who would have erected "a chain-link fence and barbed wire entanglements" in a city where car-bombing was a known problem? Again, policies and procedures for preventing further successful attacks were finally formulated by the Clinton Administration — over a decade later. When the Khobar towers bombing occurred, these new risk-reduction procedures were just being put in place. Had recent security recommendation been fully implemented, there might have been no casualties from the bombing. It's tragic that 19 men died, and about 500 others were wounded, but it is a vast improvement from 241 killed — every single person in the targeted building — in the 1983 Beirut blast.
In addition to having significantly fewer fatalities, the Khobar towers attack had another advantage that seems to only occur under Democratic Presidents: there was a clear purpose for our troops to be where they were. They were there cleaning up a military mess left by a Republican administration in the 1991 Gulf War which the American people largely supported.
In 1983, most Americans were only vaguely aware that we had troops in Beirut and now that 241 of them had been killed, Reagan had to explain what the hell they were doing in harm's way. The Great Communicator™; didn't hesitate to state the obvious:
And now many of you are asking: Why should our young men be dying in Lebanon? Why is Lebanon important to us?
Well, you know, the usual reasons — do we even need them recited any more? Oh, what the hell!
Syria has become a home for 7,000 Soviet advisers and technicians...
Soviets?! More like Axis of Evil!...who man a massive amount of Soviet weaponry, including SS-21 ground-to-ground missiles ...
Uh oh! Weapons of Mass Destruction!... capable of reaching vital areas of Israel. ... Since 1948 our Nation has recognized and accepted a moral obligation to assure the continued existence of Israel as a nation.
Israel, our staunch ally and regional underdog! It's a moral imperative!...U.N. resolutions 242 and 338...
U.N. Resolutions! Two of 'em!Lebanon has formed a government under the leadership of President Gemayal, and that government, with our assistance and training ...
Nation building! One of those things that Republicans supposedly don't do!The clear intent of the terrorists was to eliminate our support of the Lebanese Government and to destroy the ability of the Lebanese people to determine their own destiny.
We can't let the terrorists win![The multinational force] is accomplishing its mission.
Mission (almost) Accomplished!If America were to walk away from Lebanon, what chance would there be for a negotiated settlement, producing a unified democratic Lebanon?
We're planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East! We can't possible fail!
Anything else?
What of Western Europe and Japan's dependence on Middle East oil for the energy to fuel their industries? The Middle East is, as I've said. vital to our national security and economic well-being.
Oh baby! Oil!
Now there's a word you don't hear come out of Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld when they talk about why we're in Iraq. You'd almost have to give Ronnie some credit for mentioning oil, except for on thing: Lebanon has no oil.
OK, so what the hell were we doing in Lebanon?
It's hard to say, really. Basically, we were getting involved in Middle-East affairs, and honestly, even internal documents from the Reagan Whitehouse don't really go into much more detail about our goals in Lebanon. That is to say, I don't know, and apparently, neither did the people who decided to send the Marines.
Suffice to say, whatever we were doing in Lebanon, we weren't doing a very good job of it. The problems could be traced to two particular misconceptions, both of which are indelible element of the far-right-wing conservative worldview.
The first neocon misconception is that the value of a culture can be accurately measured by its success in resembling suburban middle-America. Looking at the region through this lens, the American Neoconservatives concluded — and remain convinced — that Arabs are simpleminded camel-jockeys who ride around the desert menacing nice white people like Indiana Jones. Granted, like all other humans, Arabs have as little hope of being particularly bright on a case-by-case basis. Still, despite enduring stereotypes, the Arab culture — and, in fact, the larger realm of Islamic culture — has produced more than its share of advancement in art, academia and commerce.
The second neocon misconception is that the post-WWII era, particularly the 1950's — or some idealized version of them — was a Utopian age. Not only was everything so much better in the 1950's, but the only thing holding us back from returning to that bliss are hippies and other liberals whose crazy ideas about personal freedom screwed everything up in the 1960's. The belief that we could relive the 1950's had particularly unfortunate effects on the Reagan Administration's expectations of what the Marines could accomplish in Beirut.
Back in 1958, President Eisenhower was drunk with power after a decade of reshaping the region using a one-two combo of CIA subterfuge and military force — starting with Iran in 1953. When civil unrest threatened to completely destabilize Lebanon, Ike dispatched 14,000 Marines to clean up Beirut. In only three months, the soldiers restored order, supported the installation of a new U.S.-appointed President, packed up and went home. During this operation, a sum total of one Marine was killed; he was hit by sniper fire.
Blissfully ignorant of any other history, the current political climate or the culture of the region, the Reagan Administration sent about 1,600 Marines to Lebanon to fix it — again. Once again, things failed to be like they were in the 1950's, and, once again, the neo-conservatives reacted to this fact with militant disbelief and brazen denial.
Among the things that were different was that Israel — you might remember that protecting our ally was a moral imperative — was busy invading Lebanon. Israel's justification for this was the need to wage a counterattack against a force of over 10,000 Palestinian paramilitary fighters who had established a base of operations in southern Lebanon.
With the stated goal of supporting the Palestinians — and to see what they could get out the situation — the Syrians had deployed expeditionary forces into the country from the north.
Finally, there were the actually Lebanese fighters. Not to be outdone by the warring foreigners, the Lebanese had split into dozens of conflicting factions.
All tolled, the Lebanon of 1983 was an environment where there was a near certainty of being attacked by a terrorist group, and a high risk of being attacked by several different terrorist groups. Although the Reagan Administration appears to have been completely clueless about this situation when they began the ill-fated Marine deployment, as of October, 1983, they were fully apprised of the reality of terrorist violence in Lebanon.
After Reagan provided his pitifully specious justification for having placed our Marines in such immediate and grave danger in the first place, he faced his next leadership challenge: figuring out how to respond to this outrageous attack, and explaining the merits of his plan to the American people.
It is extremely difficult to formulate an effective response to such an insidious threat — especially in region marked by millenia of political turmoil — but there are a few plans that should be pretty trivial to cross off the list. Then there are the plans you wouldn't expect to see on the list in the first place — and yet, there they are.
On October 25th, 1983 — two days after the bombing in Beirut, and two days before vowing to bring the bombers to justice — the U.S. invaded Grenada, a Caribbean nation roughly comparable in area and population to a sprawling middle-American suburb. This inexplicable move and the absurd justification laid out in Reagan's speech make George W. Bush look like Machiavelli.
In the context of Reagan's initiatives, it's oddly comforting to realize that Bush's conquest of Babylon was motivated by simple greed. Any rational speculation as to how the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government could even notice Grenada — much less make it a priority — in the wake of the Beirut bombing, inevitably hinges on an escalating series of bar bets, or the National Security Counsel huffing a considerable quantity of Scotch Guard™.
Time magazine has a piece on Texas Representative Chris Bell's ethics charge against Tom "The Hammer" DeLay in the House.
Relations between Republicans and Democrats in Congress have rarely been worse. But leaders in both parties hope an even bigger fight won't erupt after a Democratic Congressman last week lodged a complaint with the House Ethics Committee against majority leader Tom DeLay. Texas Representative Chris Bell — who lost his seat in a primary last March in a district that had been redrawn by a Republican redistricting plan DeLay helped engineer — charges that one of DeLay's political-action committees illegally funneled corporate money into the 2002 Texas state house races, an allegation that an Austin grand jury is investigating. Bell also accuses DeLay of putting a special provision into a House energy bill for a Kansas utility company in exchange for a $25,000 contribution to that PAC. DeLay insisted "there is no substance" to the charges and dismissed Bell as "a disgruntled member of the House" out for revenge.Bell's complaint breaks an informal seven-year truce between parties on members of Congress filing such actions against one another, an agreement dating back to the nasty battle that led to the unseating of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Now the gloves may come off. One DeLay ally has threatened to file retaliatory complaints against Democrats, though DeLay told reporters, "I do not encourage anyone to file complaints." Democratic leaders, who claim they had no role in Bell's action, also were eager to keep the conflict contained. Meanwhile, G.O.P. Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois says he will try to attach an amendment to a funding bill that would retroactively prohibit Bell or any other departing House member from filing an ethics complaint. Says LaHood: "I don't think we should be allowing members to throw a Molotov cocktail as they walk out the door."
This from the party of Newt Gingrich. Is there nothing they did that they're willing to own up to? Anything?
The New York Times is running a story about grumblings within the GOP in Congress that the Bush Administration is not being watched closely enough (horrors!). Naturally, Democrats in Congress have been harshly critical of the almost complete rubber-stamp that GOP Congressional Leaders have given Bush/Cheney, but now it appears that some moderate GOP members are getting queasy about the "Don't Ask, Don't Look" policies of DeLay and Frist.
To other lawmakers and outside experts, the feud over how far to go in examining the scandal is symptomatic of the deeper question of whether the Republican Congress is being aggressive enough in monitoring the administration when their political fortunes are so closely linked."The Republican dominance of Congress and the White House has led to an attitude of 'We can keep it within the fold; it is our team and our team will understand us,' " said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Armed Services Committee.
Democrats and others say Congress should have looked more closely at the administration's failure to provide full estimates of the cost of the new Medicare drug law and the leak of the identity of a covert C.I.A. worker, among other matters.
"Party has trumped institutional responsibility," said Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The sense of shared political stakes bridging either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has overwhelmed any sense of institutional responsibility."
From where I stand, this last Congress has dropped the ball so many times I want it to forever be known as the Lucy Van Pelt Congress. For you kids out there ... Lucy Van Pelt is the girl in Peanuts who always, but always, pulled the ball away when Charlie Brown went to kick it.
It's official: For the sixth year in a row, Dallas has the highest crime rate among U.S. cities with more than a million people.
Six years in a row! Woo Hoo! We are sooo much more criminal than y'all!
Is it just me, or does Shrub seem to be 'channelling' former President Gerald Ford?
First he's nearly killed by a pretzel (no doubt the Secret Service "took it out" in their usual brutal manner), and now he's tumbling off his bike (presumably after setting an example to Iraq by removing the training wheels). This guy is either plagued by a dexterity of 1 or 2 (speaking D&D here), or there's another, more ugly truth.
Like, say, he's still drinking.
This theory has been put on the table before, so I won't rehash it in any detail. But it sure seems like the problems he's had would be explained by hitting the sauce behind the curtain. No doubt this is the same curtain that Cheney and Rove use to cover their direct control of Shrub. I'm fairly confident that he's back in his cups (or bottles) and the pressure of "leading" is driving him insane with desire for booze.
I almost feel sorry for him, until I remember the thousands he's killed, the trillions he's squandered, and the horrors that will be carried out in his name for the next fifty years.
From Salon:
The first time I noticed an indication of a radio frequency bouncing between the brains of Bush and Hughes was during Gov. Bush's initial State of the State speech in Texas. Still a simple press hack, Hughes did not take to the riser in the Texas House of Representatives, instead standing off to the side, behind the shiny brass railing rimming the chamber's floor."Look at Karen," I said, nudging a colleague.
"Oh, my God. You've got to be kidding me."
As Gov. Bush read the text of his speech from a teleprompter, his communications director was silently mouthing the words along with him. The synchronized delivery suggested a parent sitting in the audience of an elementary school pageant while mouthing forgotten lines as her child stood dumbstruck onstage.
This thing between Bush and Hughes just has a weird vibe to it, similar to his unusually close relationship to Condi Rice.
According to The New York Times, "The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals."
All of you out it the Red States (I like to think of you as "Bushylvanians") are going to benefit immensely from the drop in science ... just like Europe did during it's Dark Ages. Just keep teaching Creationism, er, "Intelligent Design" and don't let the Bible get tossed out of school, or your children might accidentally increase their awareness of the real world in all it's infinite complexity and wonder.
Golly, there sure are a lot of revelations in Woodward's latest book, especially, if you're amount the 45%-50% of Americans who give a damn about Bush Administration lies. Finally, the Dallas Morning News has decided to spare some of their precious ink discussing one of those lies, this one from Colin Powell.
In the DMN story we discover that Colin Powell distorted — are you sitting down? — Pottery Barn policy. Read on, if you dare:
Mr. Woodward quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell as warning President Bush that invading Iraq would produce a "Pottery Barn rule" – which Mr. Powell defined as "you break it, you own it."The term was news to Williams-Sonoma, the San Francisco-based retailer that owns Pottery Barn.
"The policy is completely incorrectly represented by the secretary of state," said Leigh Oshirak, director of public relations for the company. "I can't imagine you would ever hear that at any retailer at our level."
Take that, Colin Powell! Liar, liar, pants on fire! Let's praise the Dallas Morning News for taking a high-level Bush Administration official to task!
Thanks to Skates for the link to the video of Bush sitting on his ass on 9/11. Watch it. Then read this New York Post story in which the teacher of the class Bush was visiting recounts the events. These are Bush-quality lies:
Really? Then why did she says this for a report in the London Times?
Now, that's the President Bush we all know and love. I wrote in greater detail about Bush's deer-in-the-headlights routine and what it means about his "leadership" in one of the chapters of my essay comparing Hitler and Bush: The Terrorists Win.
A year ago today, Marines staged a night-time operation in which they stormed a heavily-unarmed hospital to rescue Private First Class Jessica Lynch from the clutches of Iraqi doctors and nurses. Lynch had been captured on March 23rd of last year, after her unit took a wrong turn in Nasiriyah. The Washington Post regurgitated the official account of her capture:
Today, Jessica Lynch is still recovering from her injuries, and can feel safe from any future ordeals with medical treatment. The Bush Administration is slashing budgets for veteran benefits and she has pretty much no chance of getting a job with health benefits — she's from West Virginia for cryin' out loud.
Some of the details promoted by Pentagon spokestrolls and jingoistic made-for-TV-movies have turned out to be... er... a little... y'know... "not true." As reported in this AP News Story:
"I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. . . ."
Yeah, that's the "Morals Presidency" and its characteristic devotion to the truth... at work again.
Still puzzling is the fact that on March 17th, two days before the war even started, someone registered jessicalynch.net:
Registrar Name....: Register.com
Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.register.com
Domain Name: JESSICALYNCH.NET
Created on..............: Mon, Mar 17, 2003
Expires on..............: Thu, Mar 17, 2005
Record last updated on..: Wed, Mar 24, 2004
Administrative Contact:
Self
My Self
21 Elcrest Lane
Madison, WI 78345
US
Phone: 867-893-9832
Email: notyourbusiness@hotmail.com
notyourbusiness@hotmail.com? That's in no way weird.
C'mon, everybody sing!
The New York Times reports today that President Bush campaigned in Wisconsin on Tuesday, saying he was optimistic about the economy and urging Americans to have faith in their ability to compete with the rest of the world rather than taking refuge behind what he called "economic isolationism."
With another member of the Staton Jones Report editorial board facing unemployment, we have to express the greatest disdane for Bush's continued ignorance of the plight of middle-class, college educated worker. The simple fact is that Bush is promoting foreign trade that is hopelessly unbalanced, and then ranting about "socialism" and "unions" as if government-based attempts to provide minimum standards for workers of all stripes is somehow inhuman, or at least, not-profit enhancing.
He's dead wrong.
This nation's greatest growth period coincided with massive improvements in manufacturing job safety conditions and wage increases, and only took a nose dive when forced to compete with nations that have no intention of doing the same for their workers. The same thing is now happening in the white-collar economy, and it will result in the U.S. losing almost all it's edge in high-tech, a drought of "brain power", and ultimately, 2nd or 3rd world status, just so EDS can offshore more jobs.
The Bushies are selling their finest fertillizer — and it's on special lately. While there is some value in what you get out of the back end of a bull, the stuff that comes out of the back end of Karl Rove is only likely to grow the deficit. But enough about the supply-side, what are people buying?
As of now, the #1 and #2 books on Amazon.com are:
#1: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
Geez! What are George W. Bush and his cronies going to do about that pesky American People?! They're ruining all the fun. Game's over in November, boys.
Brainless right-wing mouthpieces are rejoicing as Libya steps up to the plate to fight Al Qaeda. As one cheering Freeper puts it:
Apparently, "The Bush Doctrine" is so persuasive, that it affected Libya's anti-Al-Qaeda stance before Bush even took office. In 1998, Libya became the first country to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on charges of terrorism. This warrant may have been ignored because MI6 was working with Al Qaeda at the time. If you look at OBL's record at Interpol, you'll notice that the last — therefore, the oldest — warrant listed is attributed to "Tripoli/Libya."
Bush has a distinct advantage over Clinton when it comes to recovering from credibility gaps: people readily believe that Bush was too stupid to know better.
For example, a steady trickle of evidence suggesting that the Bush Administration ignored clear warnings of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was met with claims of ignorance. Either the warnings didn't exist, or they weren't that clear. Oh, and, no, you can't see them.
FreeRepublic — the home planet of "Freepers" — serves as a bottomless repository of strident support for everything the Bush Administration says or does. For a couple of years, this meant parrotting the party line that the FBI and CIA failed to alert the executive team of the threat, denying Bush and his staff the opportunity to respond to it.
Then came Richard Clarke.
Clarke documented strenuous efforts to get the attention of the Oval Office and the clueless, "eyes glazed over" response those efforts garnered. The frenzy of Clarke-bashing from the likes of the Freepers has caused — as do many of their frenzies — a rip in the fabric of Logic and Reason.
In an effort to prove how clued in the Bush Administration was, a Freeper posted an AP Newswire Story from July 25th, 2001. This news item features bin Laden bragging about a big surprise due in the coming weeks, and describes the U.S. reaction:
See! The Bush Administration knew everything! In fact, John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines the very next day, July 26th, 2001. Well, now we know why, but we're still left with Dan Rather's question as to why the American public wasn't similarly protected.
If you haven't seen this video clip of Rummy on Face the Nation last weekend trying to spin the old "we never said Iraq was an imminent threat" line, you should check it out.
On CNN this morning, Bill McCaffery was loudly declaring that "the terrorists have won" in the elections in Spain, which went against the hardline government that joined Bush's coalition.
It's certainly likely that the terror bombing had an effect on the voting populace, but not the way that the wingnut pundits are calling it. Far from joining al-Qaeda in rejecting the Aznar government, the voters rejected the Aznar government for participating in the war that 90 percent of the population opposed. The protests for the war and the protests against the bombing were striking in that so many citizens showed up in both cases, and the people responsible for these protests are so unswayed by the events. At least the Aznar government paid a price for their choice -- but so did hundreds ordinary people.
This is a warning to the Dems. in the general election -- the GOP will declare a win for Kerry to be "a win for the terrorists", which is exactly the kind of below-the-belt tactic Karl Rove is famous for. If we can't vote against Bush (or, let's all say it together, "the ... terrorists ... win") they why have an election? My guess is that is Rove's greatest wish.
