Happy New Year (if I might make that wish without the Red State Thought Police whining about the obvious dissing of Christmas that entails) from Bora Bora, which may well be what the ancients envisioned when they thought of Paradise. The highlight of the trip so far: the feeding of the land crabs !!

There's something about 120,000 dead that concentrates the mind. I noted just a few days ago that this was likely going to be a story that would have little effect in the West, particularly America, back when the death toll was less than ten percent of what it now is. The President, comfortably ensconced at his villa for the holidays, didn't even think it was important enough to make a public statement until three days had passed. Not even he could stay silent for that long, and our nation's long tradition of stinginess when it comes to the less fortunate, whether it be in our own country or in the Third World, and public pressure to do something will even force Tom Delay and the Red State Crackerocracy to spend a non-trivial amount.

I think it's safe to say that this is going to be THE STORY for awhile; all others, including the "war on terrorism", will have to take a back seat. If it takes a disproportionate focus on the dead and missing among Western tourists in Thailand to get Americans concerned about the miasma of plagues that afflict the Third World, if we need stories about movie producers searching for missing grandchildren, or supermodels hanging on to trees for eight hours, so be it. Our interest in the lives of people outside our continent and Europe tends to focus on how much they are like us (or unlike us), what the late Edward Said called Orientalism. Understanding that it is entirely possible that more Americans may well have died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami than died on 9/11 may be the first step towards understanding that the First Principle of human existence is not Freedom, Liberty, or Democracy, but to simply live.

Our objective should always be how we can create a global community where the simple act of living is not threatened by hunger, eradicable diseases, filthy water, inadequate medical care, and plain ignorance and superstition. How people choose who governs them (if at all) is a secondary, or even tertiary, matter. It reminds me of the controversial moment in Fahrenheit 9/11, the one that pissed off so many Michael Moore's critics on the Right: the scene where the kid is flying a kite before our invasion. Moore was criticized for implying that Iraq was some sort of idyllic society under Saddam, when in fact he was pointing out that even in one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the history of humankind, a normality could exist where children could play in the streets and vendors could sell their wares, without bombs falling and insurgents battling Marines for control of the cities. It wasn't perfect, and it would have been intolerable for almost every American, but in many ways, it beat the alternative we imposed on them.

It was clear when Bush attacked Iraq that the concerns of the Iraqi people were of no concern to him, or else he wouldn't have picked an arbitrary fight with a nation not threatening us and killed tens of thousands of its civilians. Even now, the upcoming elections in that country seem likely to simply substitute the despotism of a strongman with the oligarchy of an elite, without improving the daily lives of its people in any material way. The basic wants of Iraqis, though, are no different than our own, or those of the people of Sri Lanka: to be able to be reasonably assured that we can survive another day.

The horror in the Indian Ocean this past week should remind us that everybody, Americans and Thais, Africans and Indonesians, are interconnected, and that no matter what unimportant differences in our politics, religions, and cultures we might have, our common humanity binds us. When any part of our world suffers, it should impact us as well.

I'm beginning to think that a cruise ship is the wrong way to visit a tropical paradise. The whole point, I think, of going to a place like the Marquesas is to enjoy the beauty and splendid isolation, and to do that requires spending a few days there. Just stopping for a few hours, when the most an honest tourist can do is walk around the pier and (maybe) buy a few odds and ends, just doesn't cut it.

About a year ago, I commented on another site that many more people would die of starvation and diseases that were eradicated years ago in the U.S. than would die of terrorism. The author of that site responded by claiming that people like myself were of the "nothing to see here, just keep moving past the World Trade Center" wing of the Democratic Party. It is remarkable that, at least on a superficial level, our country can change so dramatically (and for the worse) over the death three years ago of 3,000 people, but an event that has killed at least four times as many people will cause barely a ripple. No wonder the rest of the world feels so little amity towards our cause, whatever that may be.

Merry Christmas: A very surreal cruise, so far. After a nine-hour flight, we decamped in Papeete, exhausted and a bit staggered to go from an air conditioned airplane to the tropical humidity of Tahiti. There's usually a ceremonial bit at the beginning, where a band plays "Margaritaville" and we wave farewell, but since the ship didn't sail until 4:00 a.m., that just wasn't practical. Not much life so far.

The first stop was the island of Moorea, which is quite beautiful if you are into that sort of thing, but since I don't snorkel or sunbathe, I made only a perfunctory walk off the pier, realized there wasn't a resort within walking distance, and returned to the ship. Also, this is French Polynesia, so good luck watching the NFL.

The Tahitian Princess is a relatively small cruise ship. The cruiseline purchased the beast from the Renaissance cruiseline after that company went under in the aftermath of 9/11, and have pretty much left the ship intact; even the on-board dining rooms have the same names they did. Still, as anybody who has cruised before will tell you, the larger the ship, the less enjoyable the cruise. On a ship this size, you get to know a lot more people in a shorter time, and all the amenities that one comes to expect are delivered, but in a smaller, more accessible space.

We sail for a couple of days, which, of course, means two days of the social event of any cruise, Bingo. So once again, Merry Christmas to believer and infidel alike.

Gone to South Pacific for long overdue vacation. Will be blogging even more sporadically than normal. Bush lied.

Ten Votes: How would you like to have been the 2004 GOTV director for the Washington Republican Party today?

Not even Nat Hentoff, who is usually willing to roll over when it comes to the Senate asserting its "advise and consent" function with judicial nominees, can stomach the Bush Administration's architect of torture, Alberto Gonzalez.

The terrorists won:

F.B.I. memorandums portray abuse of prisoners by American military personnel in Iraq that included detainees' being beaten and choked and having lit cigarettes placed in their ears, according to newly released government documents.

The documents, released Monday in connection with a lawsuit accusing the government of being complicit in torture, also include accounts by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who said they had seen detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, being chained in uncomfortable positions for up to 24 hours and left to urinate and defecate on themselves. An agent wrote that in one case a detainee who was nearly unconscious had pulled out much of his hair during the night.

(snip)

Another message sent to F.B.I. officials including Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau's top lawyer, recounted witnessing detainees chained in interrogation rooms at Guantánamo, where about 550 prisoners are being held in a detention camp on the edge of a naval base.

The agent, whose name was deleted from the document, wrote on July 29, 2004: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more."

The agent said that on another occasion, the air-conditioning had been turned up so high that a chained detainee was shivering. The agent said the military police had explained what was happening by saying that interrogators from the previous day had ordered the treatment and "that the detainee was not to be moved."

The agent also wrote: "On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

N.Y. Times, 12-21-2004

In all the talk about the President's propasal to abolish Social Security in favor of private accounts, the elephant in the room, the issue the media seems to be avoiding, is Iraq. Bush is asking the American people to take an enormous risk in abandoning a program that has worked successfully for almost seventy years, because there is a possibility, in a worst-case-scenario, that it might have trouble making full payments to retirees forty (or fifty, depending on who's doing the estimate) years from now. Most of us aren't policy wonks on the issue, so we pretty much have to make assumptions as to who is giving us reliable information about the problem. Even if you don't believe the President lied about Iraq's possession of WMD's, you have to admit his statements leading into war were reckless, and for the most part, untrue, and he didn't go out of his way to avail himself of differing viewpoints. And it's also safe to say that his handling of the economy has not been reassuring; if anything, he won reelection in spite of his economic policies, not because of them.

So what, if anything, has changed since March, 2003 that would give us any reason to trust him now?

Were he alive today, Josef Goebbels would have a blog, linked to approvingly (and even feted) by Instapundit, Roger Simon and Hugh Hewitt for his scathing attacks on liberals, Democrats, Hollywood, and, of course, the "MSM". His anti-Semitism would be explained away, or perhaps tidied up a bit, in the same way that the fundamentalist base of the Republican Party is excused for its politically incorrect view that non-believers in Jesus will spend eternity in hell. Come to think of it, as long as the former Minister of Propaganda can find it in his heart to support Israel, and to transfer his invective from Jews to A-rabs, he might find himself profiled in Time Magazine as its "Blogger of the Year".


Which brings me to the news that Powerline, the website that was instrumental in publicizing the discredited tale of the "Swift Boat Vets", has been named "Blog of the Year" by Time Magazine (Red State president George Bush was named "Man" of the year by the weekly). Considering how 2004 will be seen as the year in which the early promise of the blogosphere to produce "journalism of the individual" was perverted into a medium of lies, gossip and parroted talking points for whatever ideological agenda you follow, the award is well-deserved. Even the story profiled in the magazine, the exposure of the fake TANG documents used on 60 Minutes II, was fitting: a trivial scandal ginned up by the Internet (Bush's non-service in the National Guard in the waning days of the Vietnam War), reported on breathlessly by the leading TV news mag, only to have the producers suckered by obviously forged documents that dealt with a relatively minor point (and one that, to this day, Bush has not denied). The very thing that gives blogs credibility, that they originate outside of the mainstream of media commerce, from the individual, writing alone at his computer, is what makes them such an indispensible tool for the powerful.

Birth of a Nation: To no one's surprise, California was one of the Bluest of Blue States in the last election, a point that was confirmed by the official election tally released this week. In spite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Golden State remains one of the ripest of targets for potential terrorists, Kerry defeated Bush by just under 10%, or 1,235,000 votes. Although the margin narrowed for the third straight Presidential election, Bush's pick-up in the vote total only amounted to 1.8%, or less than 58,000 votes from his 2000 performance. In fact, outside of the five counties abutting Los Angeles County, where Bush picked up close to a quarter million votes on his Democratic rival, Kerry dramatically improved on Gore's performance last time. Critically, Bush failed to provide much competition, or make up significant ground, in Los Angeles County, which provided Kerry his third largest margin in the country (behind only Cook County, Illinois, and the District of Columbia).

Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact of 2004: NaziPundit hams it up with Nuke LaLoosh.

With only a couple of states waiting to be certified, the final score is...Bush 50.73%, Kerry 48.26%. Just under 2 1/2%, or three million votes on the dot. Argh.

Bush Lied?: Howard Owens has returned to the blogosphere, at a new address.

C'mon, if the CIA was behind a pro-occupation blog in Iraq, do you honestly suppose they would use sub-literate morons as their front?

UPDATE: One of the "sub-literate morons" responds, in kind. The battle is joined !!

I'm with Atrios on this one. What, exactly, is supposed to be the outrage? I would assume that the whole point of his using a pseudonym was so that he could maintain some segregation between his comings and goings and those of "Atrios"; once Duncan Black began to take more of an open role with the other blog, he "outed" himself. I don't see that as being ethically comparable to a blogger secretly being on the payroll of a political campaign, although even that isn't really a big deal, either.

When I first started this site back in April of '02, one of the reasons blogging was so attractive to me was my frustration with the lazy, sloppy, predictable thinking of so many of the people who got paid for pontificating about politics. Case in point: this article, which has received much publicity in the blogosphere, calling for the Democrats to "purge" certain elements, including Michael Moore and Move-On, from the party. The "Moore Wing", the argument goes, cost the Democrats this election by creating the appearance that the party was soft-on-terror, giving Bush the 3+% boost in the electorate necessary for him to prevail. Using the creation of the A.D.A. in 1947 as the inspiration, the Democratic Party should boot out the offending elements, just as Truman, Humphrey, et al. did the same sixty years ago to the Wallacites.

Several things are wrong with that prescription, even if we put aside the merits of the writer's position on fighting terrorism. One, the so-called Michael Moore/Move-On Wing of the party doesn't exist, since neither is part of the party in the first place. Moore, for example, famously supported Ralph Nader four years ago, and as far as I can tell, didn't go out of his way to campaign for Democrats down the ticket this time; if he went out and made speeches for Brad Carson or Tony Knowles during the campaign, the public record is pretty silent. Moore has a following today because he makes entertaining, provocative movies that lots and lots of people watch, and for all the talk about the mistakes and questionable assertions he sometimes throws into his documentaries, he is still, compared with much of the media and blogosphere, an honest voice. When he loses that, the party won't need to "purge" him, since he will no longer have a following to worry about.

Even if we are to assume, as the writer does, that the exit polls indicated that Bush's improvement over his performance in 2000 resulted from the perception that he was "tougher" on the terrorists than Kerry, that Kerry would have won back that segment with a more "serious" view towards the problem, and that Michael Moore and Move-On don't take the problem seriously (and anyone who has seen F9/11 knows that's not the case), you still run into the problem that the "wing" of the party you are trying to purge is at least as large as the aforementioned segment of the voters that voted for Bush last month, ie., 3+ percent. So we can call that a draw.

The most telling thing about the article is that it's clear the writer would have come to the same conclusion if John Kerry had done marginally better in Ohio. Clearly, the writer isn't attempting to formulate an objective analysis of what happened November 2, but trying instead to use the results to justify his desire to marginalize those who disagree with him. To put it another way, if Kerry was busy right now selecting his Cabinet, does anyone believe that the writer would have advocated rewarding the Moore Wing of the party for the victory they had just provided the Democrats? Of course not; he would be calling it a test of Kerry's leadership for him to defy his base, and exclude from counsel those, like Michael Moore and Move-On, who opposed the invasion of Iraq (and, as this writer notes, a stance for which history has already vindicated them).

Secondly, the writer may not be old enough or historically aware enough to understand this, but asking the Democrats to emulate what its governing wing did in 1947 is not exactly the most propitious historical precedent to follow. First, a history lesson: in 1944, the party bosses, realizing the FDR was ailing and that he had no obvious heir other than the Vice President, maneuvered the then-Number Two, Henry Wallace, off the ticket in favor of Harry Truman. Wallace, however, still a powerful figure within the party, remained in the Cabinet after Roosevelt's reelection that fall.

When FDR died in April, 1945, followed shortly thereafter by the Allied victory in Europe, Truman became President, and a split developed as to how to deal with the fact that our erstwhile friend, the Soviet Union, had effectively seized all of Eastern Europe in the aftermath. Wallace supported a more accomodationist position, spoke out against the Truman Doctrine, and was cashiered in 1946. The Democrats took a shellacking in the mid-term elections, fell out of power in Congress for the first time in a generation, and, divided between two different factions that claimed to be the inheritors of FDR's mantle, looked around for a way to regroup.

Hence, in 1948, the faction supporting Henry Wallace formed the Progressive Party to challenge Harry Truman, while another group, claiming to be liberal anti-communists, founded the Americans for Democratic Action (A.D.A.), and tried to dump Harry Truman from the ticket and replace him with Dwight Eisenhower. When that went nowhere, and Truman's renomination was assured, they tried a different tack: co-opt the Progressives on another issue on which they had broken with the national Democratic Party, civil rights. The Democrats had begun to make inroads in the North with the growing black vote during the Roosevelt Administration, in no small part due to Henry Wallace, but after FDR's death the party's position was tenuous, what with a large regional bloc devoted to the principles of apartheid. So a series of small but significant steps were taken, culminating in the passage of a pro-civil rights plank at the 1948 Convention.

The Democrats, of course, won in 1948, thanks to a worse-than-expected performance by Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, which was due in large part to Truman's historical breakthrough in capturing a significant chunk of the black vote. Here, though, the story starts to get rather grim. The decade following that election saw not the rise of A.D.A.-style liberalism, but of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, as well as names long-forgotten to history, like Karl Mundt, Carl Curtis, William Knowland, and Strom Thurmond. Eisenhower was elected, as a Republican, for two terms, and the Republican Party controlled the Presidency, pretty much unabated, until 1992. The breakthough with black voters, so important in the 1948 victory, and so vital in giving the Democratic Party its greatest accomplishments in changing the face of America, would have its own political consequences down the road.

In fact, it's hard to see that period as being anything other than an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic Party, at least in its role as electoral mechanism for candidates. After 1954, the Democrats were resigned to controlling Congress, with its unwieldy and ultimately unworkeable coalition of Southern Dixiecrats and Northern liberals, until even that began to break down in 1980. When a Democrat won the Presidency, it was due either to running a novelty candidate (JFK, Jimmy Carter) or to a freakish historical event (assasination of JFK boosting LBJ, or Nixon's resignation and subsequent pardon leading to Carter's victory). And whether it was Tailgunner Joe denouncing the Truman Administration as a Communist front, or Bush the Elder using a veto of a bill requiring students to pledge allegiance to the flag as an excuse to challenge his patriotism, the Democrats were consistently, and successfully, portrayed as the "weaker" of the two parties when it came time to defend America. As far as capturing swing voters is concerned, making the party inhospitable to Henry Wallace failed miserably.

So clearly, the long-term fortunes of the Democratic Party are not necessarily served best by "purging" anyone. Nor should they be, since the whole notion of a political party in America purging someone for a politically-incorrect position is a noxious one, to say the least. It should be noted, in fact, that Henry Wallace wasn't "purged" by anyone; he left the Democratic Party, after it became clear that his position on issues pertaining to the Soviet Union would no longer advance his fortunes. If anything, one of the reasons we "fought" the Cold War in the first place was to repudiate the notion that some Central Committee or Party Directorate could have a monopoly on the truth. American political parties allow for grass roots participation and influence over their direction in ways unimagined in totalitarian states.

American political parties are often frustratingly cumbersome, but one of the ways in which they have made this country great is by being inclusive. In the end, that inclusiveness is empowering, since it puts the individual in a much better position in our democracy than members of more traditional political parties have.

This actually happened: Sitting in my neighborhood sports bar, nursing a buzz and trying to get over the fact that my alma mater got screwed by the BCS, I happened to notice my favorite bartendress was carrying a heavy table from one room into another, at the request of one of the patrons. I asked if she "needed a hand", and when she said yes, I politely applauded (sorry, it's an old Bob Newhart joke). Anyways, the patron she was doing that for turns around, laughing, and it's none other than...Flavor Flav. He turned around, wearing the trademark clock around his neck, complimented me on my bon mot, and gave me a soul handshake before sitting down and holding court with his friends (no Brigitte Nelson, though). The blessings of living in a celebrity haven....

I don't know what's worse, the fact that a majority of voters in Alabama voted to keep language in the state constitution upholding segregation, or that one of the reasons they did so was to avoid paying higher taxes improving the school system there. One of the saddest things about the Blue State-Red State divide is that my taxes go to supporting those racist leaches. Where we live, we have to worry about a replay of 9/11, largely because the President has decided that the terrorists who attacked really aren't as important as installing a puppet government in Iraq, while they have the small comfort that a good Christian man is in the White House.