I’ve been thinking a lot about this comment Ezra made. The context is this—Christopher Hayes wrote a blog post that was a “5 years into the Iraq War” sort of thing, asking two questions:

1) How was it that all of the institutions (the mainstream media, congress, the Fed, regulators) that should have prevented disaster (war, financial crisis) failed at the same time?

2) Why is it that now, particularly as regards to the war, but more broadly on a host of issue, the majority will of the people is not being translated into policy?

1) Beats me. I was asking that at the time. The best I can figure is that the government and media appear to be made out of a bunch of wankers who are easily swept into peer pressure situations. “C’mon, support the war or we’ll call you a big baby,” was an amazingly effective rhetorical ploy, leading me to believe that you should prove that you are perfectly comfortable being called a big baby before you run for office or hold a job in the mainstream media.

2) Well, Ezra nailed this one to the ground:

On some level, isn’t Bush right about about this? When he ran in 2004, he created a campaign that was explicitly about the idea that you don’t want a president who will follow the whims and will of the people. That’s what flip-flopping supposedly was — a tendency to change your position in order to bring it into alignment with the majority of the American electorate. And that’s what Bush ran against. It was an oddly autocratic campaign message, but the people loved it. And now, just as he said, he’s totally ignoring the public’s preferences. But that’s what they elected him to do! I mean, give Bush credit, a lesser man might have flip-flopped on ignoring the public when that became an unpopular governance strategy. Not Bush, though! You may disagree with him, and your children may be dying in his failed war, and your income may be stagnating in his recession, but at least you know where he stands.

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Usually on movie reviews, I go with a still shot illustration, but with a review of “Persepolis”, I’m going with the trailer, because it’s important to see how the artwork of the book really is beautifully translated to the screen. This trailer barely gets at how innovative and interesting a job the artists did at really breathing life into the already strangely lively art of the comics. It’s a real shame that this movie will probably lose to “Ratatouille” for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, because while the art in “Ratatouille” was, as usual with Pixar, gorgeous, intricate, and top-notch, in this movie it’s just inspired. The art in the comic books draws heavily on the Persian tradition, and the movie takes it a step further, blowing up the heavy blocky art mixed in with touches of swooping, graceful lines and making it really breathe. It’s hard to imagine such a stylized movie that’s mostly black and white can be so warm and human, but there it is. They really did a fantastic job of remaking the books for the big screen.

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I was sort of hoping that BushCo would go quietly into the night instead of seeking ways to manufacture an excuse to send our already-overtaxed military into another adventure war that we’ll certainly lose in Iran. I was too optimistic—looks like there’s already attempts to manufacture a crisis like Gulf of Tonkin in the 60s and the fake WMDs that were the excuse to get us into Iraq (remember those?). The blogger at Daily Kos doesn’t hold his punches in declaring that the threatening maneuvers reported by the Navy were most likely bullshit that’s being drummed up to get some enthusiasm behind a confrontation with Iran. The Guardian is a bit more circumspect.

Doubts intensified last night over the nature of an alleged aggressive confrontation by Iranian patrol boats and American warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday, after Pentagon officials admitted that they could not confirm that a threat to blow up the US ships had been made directly by the Iranian crews involved in the incident.

Several news sources reported that senior navy officials had conceded that the voice threatening to blow up the US warships in a matter of minutes could have come from another ship in the region, or even from shore.

The concession came on the day that a formal American complaint was lodged with Iran over the incident, and just 24 hours after President George Bush, on tour in the Middle East where he will be discussing policy towards Iran, warned Tehran to desist from such aggression and said any repetition would lead to “serious consequences”.

I suspect a pattern of attempts to try to force a confrontation that would be an excuse for war.

Then Thursday came a U.S. raid on an Iranian consulate in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil. By the end of the day, rumors of war with Iran had spread to normally cautious corners of the Internet. The Washington Note wondered aloud if Bush had issued an executive order to commence military action against Iran and Syria. Was the raid a deliberate provocation and the preface to war?

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Dammit, I was going to avoid blogging this whole “Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia” brouhaha because other bloggers are handling the manufactured controversy so beautifully, but now I feel I must. There are only three reasons that I can think of, after really putting some thought to it, why you might genuinely fear an act of political speech.*

1. It’s inciting.
2. It’s convincing.
3. It’s so boring it could cause everyone to pass out and start drooling on themselves.

I’m not talking legitimate fears necessarily (they might or might not be) or making excuses for censorship. And well, the last one was something of a joke. Sort of. But I’m talking about real reasons that you might have a fear of an act of speech. For instance, I can find anti-choice speech scary for being convincing—it might not convince me, but it’s frightening to think it might convince enough to swing an election or something like that. I might find a KKK rally inciting, and that’s frightening. I don’t think in either case there’s a legitimate reason to deprive people making these kinds of speech their freedom of speech, especially when they’ve been invited somewhere. I do think there’s small, controlled situations where you might want to limit the kinds of speech (like in a blog comments) because it’s inciting and unproductive. But I’d never say that people who leave the “Faggots die!” comments that I’d delete here should be deprived of a right to leave those comments on blogs where they’re welcome or blogs where the moderator feels that the value of mocking those assholes outweighs the value of limiting trolling.

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Jonathan suggested, in this post about ABC reporting that the Bush administration has authorized the CIA to take covert actions to destabilize the Iranian government, not to read the comments at ABC. But because everyone was joking at Drinking Liberally last night at the fact that Bush’s poll ratings stubbornly stay between 25-30%, I thought this would be a good exercise in reminding everyone that there’s a steady 1/4 of the population that’s basically fascist and won’t be budged. So, I mined the comments so you don’t have to.

If it was a secret, it isn’t any longer. I will turn off ABC News and never watch again.

I consider ABC News Traders to the United States

What’s really beautiful about that comment is that without the constant drumbeat from semi-fascist Bush supporters about the dire need for everyone at all points in time to abandon our free and open society, I’d have thought he mistook ABC for a trading corporation instead of a media outlet.

You should be ashamed of yourselves for broadcasting the report on the CIA covert action against IRAN. The key word here is SECRET. The report should be considered traitorous…..

Why, if it is covert, are you airing it and telling the Iranians what we are doing? Do you want more war and more killings of Americans? Let them do their job’s and keep your mouths shut…..

Do you people believe in some things being important to the security of the United States of America? Do you even care that some of your reporting is putting our troops our citizens in foreign countries and even our way of life in danger? YOu can take care of things you don’t like without telling the whole world. Why don’t you help our country stay alive.

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This ain’t good;

An Iranian-American academic who works at a Washington-based institute is being held in a notorious Iran prison after being prohibited from leaving the Mideast country for more than four months, the institute and her husband said yesterday.

Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, was sent Tuesday to the Evin prison after she arrived at Iran’s Intelligence Ministry for questioning, the center said in statement. Iran has not confirmed that it is detaining Esfandiari, and officials in Tehran could not be reached for comment yesterday. “This is extremely disturbing news,” said Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, in a telephone interview from their home in Maryland. “I never expected they would jail a 67-year-old woman for no reason whatsoever.”

Esfandiari is an Iranian-American feminist scholar who left Iran when the mullahs took over. She documented the near-immediate subsequent denial of women’s rights in her Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Hat Tip: Eric.

Bush will have his surge even though it’s a stupid idea.

Bush will have his surge even though everyone with two brain cells to rub together opposes it.

Bush will flout the Geneva Convention.

Bush will react to a democratic election lifting a party into power by deciding that he can have all the wars he wants, and he does not care about what the people who he supposedly works for think.

Bush decided that if the American people aren’t going to let him have his war on Iran, he would make sure that we have no choice.

By flouting all common rules of diplomacy and attacking the Iranian consulate in Iraq, BushCo is clearly trying to provoke another terrorist attack or even worse, military retaliation from Iran. There’s a number of reasons this probably seems like a really good idea to them. The primary one that Marc points to is that they quite likely think that this is the only way to stop the terrible, horrible predicament of having to pay the piper in a democracy. Bush barely got elected, acted like a tyrant, and had the American people, in an act of massive ingratitude for his tyranny, vote for the opposing party. How else to undermine the Democrats than to have another terrorist attack or an act from a foreign country to make people rally around Dear Leader?

In addition, this attempt to make war with Iran inevitable demonstrates what true believers the Bushies are. When it turned out that we weren’t being greeted in Iraq with parades and flowers as predicted, the finger-pointing and excuse-seeking began. And one favorite excuse as for why the Iraqi people aren’t behaving as predicted is that the Iranians are a bad influence, pouring impure “terrorist” elements over the border. So, from their perspective, if this is true, the key to getting the parades and flowers from the Iraqis is to stomp out the bad influence of Iran. So, in a weird, simple, sick way, the insistence that we attack Iran that persists in the face of all sane indications that we couldn’t and, more importantly, we shouldn’t, is persisting because it’s the last thread of hope that BushCo has of being right about Iraq.

These two motivations are not mutually exclusive. The Iraq War was cherished from the get-go as the key to securing the oil in the Middle East, the solution to terrorism, a permanent solution to the persistent problem of democracy and particularly of having an oppositional party, and the very thing that would make George Bush feel like he’s got one on his daddy. It’s not beyond reckoning that the magic bullet they thought they’d found in Iraq is what they are hoping is going to be under a pile of corpses in Iran.

George W. Bush is a traitor to our country and should be impeached, and tried for his war crimes and crimes against this nation. People who continue to support this war criminal are either in denial or hate this country. Sorry if y’all thought that your man wasn’t such lowly son of a bitch as to deliberately court violence against this country in a temper tantrum over the Democrats winning. You put your money on a man who hates democracy, and it’s time to wake the fuck up to that.

Sorry about the lack of substantial posting tonight; I’ve been busy. But to make up for it, I figured I could review the book I finished today that had me thinking about current events–Persepolis 2.

I read the first book awhile ago and was profoundly moved by it and surprised at how insightful it was into the various motivations of the different characters in Satrapi’s personal and political story of growing up in the wake of the Iranian revolution. In this story she moves to Austria for high school, fails miserably to get her shit together there, and returns to Iran in hopes that being home will help give her guidance. The personal story is interesting, and the amazing thing about it is it pulls you in so you don’t even realize how much you’re really absorbing of Satrapi’s ideas about politics and her insights into her culture until you finish the book. I won’t spoil the various autobiographical twists and turns but I will say that the book left me percolating on two major thoughts after I finished it.

First of all, Satrapi is amazingly insightful into how tyrants put on a huge show of conflicting with each other when a more accurate view of how they work is that they have symbiotic relationships with each other that help them gain power over their real enemies, which are ordinary people. The war with Iraq comes to an end in this book, and the toll of war weariness on everyday Iranians is obvious–the willingness to actively fight against the oppressive government has drained out of everyday people who might have been more willing to resist in the past. And what becomes obvious is that despite the outrageous casulty rate, the war with Iraq actually helped empower the tyrannical leaders of Iran. If people are fighting an outside force they don’t have the energy left to fight for justice on the inside.

The part that hit closest to home for me was how constantly the government officials in Iran would invoke the martyrs as an attempt to guilt people into obeying their authority. The martyrs are invoked to justify everything, up to and including telling people that they have no right to socialize with friends, as it’s wrong to have pleasure when the martyrs are dead. I was strongly reminded of how the phrase “9/11″ is used to shut down any and all debate about the direction of our country’s political landscape. And just as Osama bin Laden did Bush a favor by shoring up his authority over the American people, then Saddam Hussein did the Iranian mullahs a favor by massacring hundreds of thousands of people who could then be used to beat the still-living into submission.

Needless to say, the escalation of misogyny and fear of sex that attends growing political tyranny that Satrapi chronicles also set off alarm bells of recognition.

The other thing that really struck home to me and is relevant as we hold our breath waiting to see if BushCo is crazy enough to start yet another war on Iran is that it’s likely that this war they’re agitating for–the colonial takeover of Iran after such a takeover in Iraq–was probably planned all the way back until the start of the Iranian revolution.  At one point in the book, Satrapi has her father cursing the West for deliberately escalating the conflict by arming both sides to the teeth.  This, coupled with the heavy sense of nihilism that settles over the characters as everyone seems to forget why they were warring in the first place, gave me the definite impression that the real reason that the neocon-run U.S. government in the 80s was playing both sides of the conflict against each other was that they sincerely hoped that Iran and Iraq would do so much damage to each other that they’d clear a path for an easier U.S. invasion.

Once again, tyrants work together against the people, then, with the U.S. power-mongerers feeding the weapons caches of the Iranian and Iraqi power-mongerers, and all three groups win by gaining power over their own people.  And it would’ve worked if it wasn’t for those darn Clintons!

This doesn’t bode well for Americans who cherish peace when thinking upon the BushCo desire to conquer Iran.  The neocons have invested too much time and money into this long term plan to just give up because it didn’t work out the way they planned it, where both Iraq and Iran were to be easy targets.  Clutching at straws, hollering for nuclear attacks, anything but admit they weren’t the clever Machavallians they thought they were–it’s come this far and they still haven’t seen reason, so why should they now?

Anyway, the book comes highly recommended.  Satrapi is a deceptively simple artist who can convey quite a bit of emotion in a few bold lines.  And she comes across as highly likeable in a cantankerous way, and I don’t think she succumbs to undue self-flattery, which is poison to a memoir.

The other day I blogged about Holy Joe doing the shuffle and jive for the White House as it rumbles toward military action in Iran. One has to wonder where are they going to find soldiers if it comes to on-the-ground efforts. The military is having a difficult enough time maintaining forces as it is.

One answer: lowering admissions standards, including raising the age of recruits…

A U.S. military advisor and former combat officer is troubled by recent reports that the Army has had to lower recruiting standards to meet its quotas.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Bob Maginnis says after missing last year’s goal by 7,000 recruits, the Army is going to have a tough time reaching is fiscal year 2006 goal of 80,000 new soldiers. Still, he is not happy about what the branch has had to do to fill its ranks. “It means that 2,500 of the people this year that we’ll recruit are getting in basically with waivers of the old standards,” the Pentagon advisor says. “However, in order to fill the ranks of 80,000 this year, it’s become necessary to take some action. We’re also recruiting an older population — bringing in people in their early 40s to basic training. I don’t understand why this nation has to revert to that.”

Although these older recruits are “probably reasonably healthy,” Maginnis notes, “by the time you’re that old, you’re older than most of the drill sergeants that are trying to run you through basic training, and the idea that we’re going to be fighting wars with 45-year-old infantry privates just seems to be a bit ludicrous to me.” It is unfortunate that the U.S. Army has had to “change the standards in order to get the numbers,” the Lt. Colonel says, “but that’s what happens in a volunteer force.” Maginnis also points out that, besides accepting older recruits, the Army has lately been issuing recruits more waivers for criminal convictions, drug use, and medical conditions.

I quit reading Stanley Kurtz again after I realized he was going to disappoint me by failing to argue that South Dakota is the state to watch for fabulous new gains in the white population, but I’m thinking I might have to start again after reading what Lindsay caught him saying at the Corner. It’s so insane I had no choice but to footnote it.

Jonah(1), I agree with you that Iraq is no longer having any deterrent effect(2). My point (a variant of your own) is that Iraq does have a deterrent effect as long as the American public sees the venture as worthwhile(3). I agree that the key is for America to perceive Iraq as a success(4). My point is that the quick democratization standard was mistaken. We created a false standard for success, and that is our problem(5). Once we focus on the big picture, and off of the false standard of quick democratization, the public will see Iraq in a new way(6). It will take a debate about Iran to make that change(7), and it won’t be easy, but that is what’s needed. We need to see peace and democracy in Iraq is icing on the cake(8). The real goal is the proof of resolve against Iran and others(9). If the public sees that, it might change its view of what’s important and what success means(10).

Iran and North Korea were working on bombs well before Iraq(11). Iraq didn’t make them get nukes(12). Our problem is that technological advance has intervened to make the nuclear option widely available. That was happening independently(13). It’s just that 9/11 woke us up to the real implications(14).

1. This is supposed to remind everyone we’re in the presence of deep thinkers.
2. On the Dixie Chicks.
3. As long as some redneck is still willing to yell at the long-hairs, we’re still gold.
4. One strategy to do this is to show Britney Spears giving Kurtz a blow job in the streets of Baghdad–see, perfectly safe!
5. We should have stuck with Bush’s original idea that “success” could be safely defined as “penetrating Iraq deeper and longer than Daddy did”.
6. If we just speak a lot of important sounding nonsense for long enough, Americans will give up giving two shits about Iraq.
7. By invading a whole new country, we can get Iraq off the news and focus on the new bad guys.  There’s a lot of countries in the world to make war on, so this particular strategy has an endless amount of potential.
8. Made of corpses, sure, but still, icing!
9. Maybe 50% of Americans will think that we must have won in Iraq and pulled out if we invade Iran, due to the fact that only crazy people would invade one country when your military is bogged down in another.  Surely 50% of Americans are still pretending that the White House isn’t crazy.
10. After they realize they basically let democracy go and don’t have any power over what their Republican tyrants choose to do, they might decide to give up following politics altogether and maybe watch more movies.
11. Technically, so were the Hobbits.
12. Rove is finding a way to pin it on the Hobbits, though.
13. The nuclear option became one during the 2000 election debacle, which was indeed independent of anything Iran, Iraq or Hobbits were doing.
14. Voldemort said he’d kill him if he didn’t mention 9/11. (15)
15. It’s okay to mix up pop culture references when you’re addressing Jonah Goldberg.

I loved Lindsay’s description of the neocons as compulsive gamblers and nuking Iran as essentially them betting double or nothing, so I’m stealing it for this title post. I had to add an “Iran” category today, so that’s basically a weird little admission of defeat to the forces of the media and BushCo gunning for another war. Just when you have that knee jerk reaction to say, “He’s not crazy enough to do it,” please remember all the people saying, “He’s not crazy enough to lie about WMD in Iraq.”

Anyway, Ezra has a really good post up today I recommend highly where he argues against saber rattling (if that is indeed all BushCo is doing). Like I’ve said earlier, it’s asinine for a nation that came together to lose its mind after 9/11 to think that threatening people with utter destruction is a good way to break them apart instead of pull them together under their leaders, no matter how crazy those leaders are.

Not to misuse the holidays here, but think of the Exodus tale: The decidedly public, impressive plagues are repeatedly visited on the Egyptians, but each time Moses returns to the Pharaoh’s antechamber, the wannabe demigod’s heart is hardened (depending on how you interpret the passages, by God or by pride) and he ignores the latest plague, preferring to pit his society against divine wrath yet again. The end result, of course, is massive slaughter.

Ezra handles the rational dismantling of the right’s delusionary justifications and I point out what I would hope is obvious–the neocons probably are quite aware that people get defensive when you threaten them, and odds are they just don’t care. “Avoiding war” is just a sales tactic to escalate tensions so they get to have another war and this time maybe, just maybe, they’re actually not going to screw it up horribly. Well, in their fevered dreams.

I think about BushCo contemplating nuking Iran in an effort to get back the glory days when they were treated like saviors by America because they strutted the hardest, back before incompetence exposed them for the fools they are and I think of this.

Without skiing or bike racing as an outlet, he took to exposing himself in public. He is very matter-of-fact about it. “It’s the possibility of being caught or discovered, the thrill of doing something crazy,� Hoyt says, comparing the feeling to one he had many years ago, when he was skiing Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon and abruptly veered from the trail, flying off a 40-foot cliff for no reason. “I’ve raced motorcycles, raced bicycles, skied competitively. I’ve hit trees at 60 miles an hour. Been run over by a motorcycle. I’ve broken arms, broken my leg, tore cartilage in my knee.�

That’s right–in BushCo’s mind, The Bomb is the ideal way to regain that long-lost sense of Hollywood-esque masculinity, but to the rest of us, they’re pulling out their weiners and showing them to schoolgirls.