Zell Miller is really, really, really, really, really crazy. What a scary man.
[UPDATE: Now he's screaming at Chris Matthews. I think he just challenged him to a duel. It sounds funny, but I think he was serious.]
[UPDATE 2: I missed the speeches themselves, but I'm watching the cable news bobbleheads do their after-spin. I think the Republicans may have just lost. "Angry", "inaccurate", "negative", "pitiless", "worse than Pat Buchanan" are some phrases that I've heard. Everyone looks kind of freaked out. Did Cheney kill someone on stage or something? So much for moderation.]
[UPDATE 3:
I am inspired by George Bush's sunny optimism.]
We should never have banned Alar:
Army investigators have recommended bringing abuse-related charges against 26 soldiers stemming from a probe into the deaths of two detainees in Afghanistan in December 2002, Pentagon officials said yesterday.The cases, involving the two deaths and other incidents at the big U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan, represent an attempt to assign criminal responsibility for abuse of detainees that occurred well before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the subsequent scandal over the maltreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
No hurry, guys.
I noticed that Peter Beinart noticed someone noticing something interesting:
TNR crack reporter-researcher Marisa Katz has done a little research and found an interesting thing about John McCain and Rudy Giuliani's speeches. Neither of them, despite defending the war in Iraq in detail, mentioned the word "democracy." There were plenty of references to "freedom" and some to governments that were "accountable." But no mention of the signature phrase so central to Bush's vision of the war in Iraq, and the war on terrorism in general. It's a testament to how much Republicans have tacitly ratcheted down expectations for the Iraq war, even while claiming to believe in it more than ever.
How long until "freedom" is discarded for "the rule of law"?
Conrad Barwa discusses a couple of articles about the violence in Darfur, one in the London Review of Books, and one in the New Yorker. Like any good myopic American, I'm most interested in the questions "how does this effect the US?" and "what should the US do about this?" The New Yorker article discusses the early successes from the Bush Administration's engaged, carrot-and-stick approach to the genocide in southern Sudan (which is contrasted with the Clinton's ineffective, confrontational policy - the North Korea situation in reverse), and then spends a moment on how the war in Iraq has seriously damaged the US's ability and credibility to deal with issues of state violence against civilians:
Sudanese officials like Salah Gosh have developed two methods for deflecting American criticism. First, they meet every charge with a reference to the quagmire in Iraq. In Khartoum, when I asked Gosh about the Sudanese attacks on civilians, he told me that armies are made up of individuals. “In Abu Ghraib, there are violations by the U.S. Army,” he said. “But the violations are not from the whole Army. The violations are from individuals. You cannot generalize.” When I asked why Sudan had not complied with American demands that it disarm the janjaweed, he said, “The United States is facing those terrorist people in Iraq. Is it possible for the United States to disarm those criminals? Is it possible for the United States, with all of its equipment—it is a superpower—to disarm these people in one month, two years? [Sudan envoy John] Danforth stands there in the United States and says, ‘The government of Sudan has just a few days to control the janjaweed and to stop those attacks.’ If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it in Iraq?” ...Although the A.U. [African Union] seems likely to expand its presence, almost all the displaced Africans I spoke with in Darfur said they would trust only Western forces to bring peace. African troops were too susceptible to bribes, they said, and African governments would end up siding with Khartoum, as they had in the past. “We will not return to our homes until the white people come and make us safe,” Abdum Shogar Adem, a thirty-two-year-old father of three, told me at the Kalma camp in July, soon after his village had been attacked by government helicopter gunships. The Western powers, however, are not likely to answer Adem’s call. The United States military is overstretched, given the occupation of Iraq, and it is unwilling to contribute troops for a peacekeeping mission. It has not even offered to equip or transport A.U. troops, which lack the logistical sophistication to deploy on their own.
The Bush Administration has been admirably willing to send relief to Sudan and to condemn the janjaweed. But, having alienated many of its U.N. allies with its unilateralism and perceived moralism, it has been unable to rally other nations to the cause. Countries like Russia and France have exploited the U.S.’s loss of standing internationally to justify their own inaction on Sudan. Meanwhile, the Administration, which views the International Criminal Court with contempt, has not urged the U.N. Security Council to refer the atrocities in Darfur to the court, although no other international institution is equipped to prosecute such crimes. In the end, the U.S. has applied just enough pressure to get humanitarian relief to many Darfurians, but not enough to persuade the perpetrators of violence to lay down their arms. Meanwhile, the seasonal rains have begun to fall, reducing the reach of international aid workers and substantially increasing the risk of cholera, dysentery, and mass death.
At a closed, invitation-only Bush campaign rally for Christian conservatives yesterday, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas called for a broad social conservative agenda notably different from the televised presentations at the Republican convention, including adopting requirements that pregnant women considering abortions be offered anesthetics for their fetuses and loosening requirements on the separation of church and state."We must win this culture war," Senator Brownback urged a crowd of several hundred in a packed ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, reprising a theme of a speech by Patrick J. Buchanan from the podium of the 1992 Republican convention that many political experts say alienated moderate voters in that election.
Called "the Family, Faith and Freedom Rally" in e-mail invitations sent to Christian conservatives in New York for the convention, the event was organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign "to celebrate America and President George W. Bush," according to a copy of the invitation. The e-mail called Mr. Bush "a conservative leader who shares our values, who takes a strong stand for his faith."
Sen Brownback wouldn't really want to mix church and state, of course. He's just a huge fan of MTV's "The Real World":
WASHINGTON — Six members of Congress live in a million-dollar Capitol Hill townhouse that is subsidized by a secretive religious organization, tax records show.The lawmakers, all of whom are Christian, pay low rent to live in the stately red brick, three-story house on C Street, two blocks from the Capitol. It is maintained by a group, alternately known as the ''Fellowship'' and the ''Foundation,'' that brings together world leaders and elected officials through religion.
The Fellowship is host of receptions, luncheons and prayer meetings on the first two floors of the house, which is registered with the IRS as a church. The six lawmakers — U.S. Reps. Zach Wamp, R-Chattanooga; Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; and Mike Doyle, D-Pa.; and U.S. Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev.; and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. — live in private rooms upstairs.
I wonder which one's gay.
I can't really make any sense of the AIPAC-Israel-Pentagon mole investigation thing. Usually, when I can't make sense of a thing, I try to write some absolute horseshit about how it's all part of Iranian infiltration of our policy process, but Jim Henley beat me to it. So I'll just add that, no, our actions in the War on Terror are not specifically designed to strengthen Tehran's hand, although it is not clear how things would be different if they were. Also, it would be irresponsible to treat as proven fact the notion that Michael Ledeen is an agent in the employ of the hard-line mullahs in Iran, no matter how well such a hypothesis might explain his otherwise inexplicable behavior.
Speaking of Ledeen, he has a simple explanation for what this is all about, namely that the entire FBI has gone bonkers, or is all hopped up on goofballs and pep pills, or something. This theory is explained as a Socratic dialogue between Ledeen and his handler friend Grand Ayatollah James Jesus Angleton. If Socrates were a fucking idiot NRO hack blowing smoke up the world's ass in a desperate bid to avoid prison.
Please use this thread to discuss how I'm boring, how I don't post enough, how I think I'm so funny but guess what I'm not, how much better other weblogs are, how I'm derivative, how I'm a plagerist, how I'm a crappy web designer, how all the Poor Man inside jokes are played out, how I can't spell, how I make up words, how I over-use the semicolon, how I'm a crypto-bigot, how I'm shrill, how much you hate the word "shrill", how much you hate everything else I do, and how you hate the picture of the guy with mustache.
Can we win [the War on Terror]? I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the -- those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.
President George W. Bush 8/30/2004
In this different kind of war, we may never sit down at a peace table. But make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win. We will win by staying on the offensive, we will win by spreading liberty.
President George W. Bush 8/31/2004
I want justice [for Osama bin Laden]. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.
President George W. Bush 9/17/2001
Terror is bigger than one person. And he's [Osama bin Laden's] just -- he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network is -- his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. He is -- as I've mentioned in my speeches, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death, and he himself tries to hide -- if, in fact, he's hiding at all.So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him.
President George W. Bush
3/13/2002
The President is getting beaten up a bit over his "flip-flopping" on the winnability of the War on Terror. This isn't really a fair criticism, because one of (if not the) defining features of the War on Terror is its abstruseness. Wars qua war - with armies, battles, bombs and so on - are at least potentially winnable; a "different kind of war", of course, would not share all of the usual characteristics of proper war, and, so, might well not have a well-defined end point at which winning and losing can be assessed. So it really depends on what you are talking about. As it is, I don't know what we're talking about, and neither, apparently, does the President. Sometimes we are fighting against terrorism generally, sometimes against "Islamic" terrorism against the US, and sometimes against "terrorist states", which often don't have all that much to do with actual "terrorism", as the word is usually used. There's also the fight to "spread liberty" and free Olympic teams like a sunrise through the use of precision-guided explosives; the discarded struggle to prevent the spread of WMD; and, currently, the fight to make sure that Iraq's next dictatorship has more of our Mr. Allawi, and not so much of Muqtada al-Sadr, for reasons which are probably obvious to somebody. So, depending on what you mean, this war is either winnable or unending, being won or lost, and making us safer or quite the opposite. One may legitimately criticize the President for not consistently specifying what he means by "War on Terror" - not spelling out who it is we are fighting, exactly; or why, or how; or towards what eventual goal, if any - to which his supporters would rightly point out that he is a "big picture" guy, and this sort of detail work has been delegated. The big picture is that he is very steady and resolute in the War on Terror, whatever that is.
The most literal interpretation of "War on Terror", the one which actually includes both actual "war" and actual "terror", would refer to the war in Afghanistan, such as it was, and so would place us two and a half years into the post-War on Terror era. This is not acceptable. This is not acceptable because once a war is over, there is no more need for a war-time President. It is also not acceptable for the war to be definitely unwinnable, because that might imply that the fight is futile; but it is not completely acceptable for the war to winnable, because that would invite questions about when victory might be expected, what percentage of victory has been achieved, and what exactly constitutes "victory". The vagueness is intentional. Failure isn't good, but neither is too much success. The Bush campaign and the government of Pervez Musharraf are in a similar position in this way. Their appeal to America is the promise that they will fight the War on Terror; but if the war were to end, so would their appeal.
Oft ... imitated, never "equalled":
Democrats acted as though they had lost their capacity to speak — when many were confronted with the 59 lies presented so transparently in Michael Moore's "pathetic" President Bush bashing documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. To them it was just good entertainment. In fact, Moore received preferential treatment at the Democratic National Convention which brought out the Democrats true colors, and they weren't red, white, and blue either.Now the battle lines have been drawn, and a scathing documentary is scheduled to air, bashing John Kerry by former Viet Nam POWs — only chances are very good this documentary is not going to be fictional or lathered up in lies.
