The question, “What exactly did Neville Chamberlain do to piss off wingnuts so badly?” is on everyone’s lips, everyone being defined as “those who watched that awesome video of Hardball getting interesting for once.” Some would say that it has something to do with Hitler and Czechoslovakia, but that’s not in the talking points memo and for a good reason. After all, if merely capitulating to the demands of fascist dictators with genocidal tendencies were appeasement, then what’s arming said dictators, training them, funding them, and giving them a bevy of economists on the job to spin everything? That would be like super-appeasement, which would make the Republicans like the best most appeasingly appeasing appeasers in the world, and so that can’t be it.
It’s never a bad time for this picture.
So what did Chamberlain do to earn himself such a poor reputation, especially compared to Winston Churchill? Well, his first and most important act of appeasement was to let his parents name him “Neville Chamberlain”, a pussified commie lib name with overtones of pure frogginess that meant he was only good for a lifetime of letting Hitler force him to perform ass-to-mouth rituals.
Without defending some of Garrison Keillor’s old man grumpy asshole tendencies, I have to say this article got a wry smile out of me, probably because I’ve done a lot of flying lately,* and his descriptions of the kabuki of airport security are well-rendered. I watch all that with interest, too, because the psychology of unusual situations fascinates me. People—all people—are creatures of habit, and I don’t care how smart you are, if you’re thrust into a situation where you don’t know the protocol, you act like a puppy that just learned that its paws are effective for locomotion. But human beings are flexible and adept at learning new things pretty rapidly, so it was just a matter of time before the security lines at airports became mundane. Basically, if you’ve done it once correctly, you can repeat the process again with very little trouble or hesitation, and the delays became shorter as more and more people in the security line had flown since 9/11 and learned the ropes. Now like 95% of people in line know what to do, yet like Keillor says, the security guards still yell at you. Of course, I’ve worked service jobs myself, and that 5% of idiots out there tend to occupy 95% of your time and brainspace, so I can’t blame security guards for preemptive yelling, but still it does create this environment where you are reduced to an inmate of sorts for 10-20 minutes.
And considering that security procedures are close to useless for preventing terrorist attacks, I can’t help but think that demoralizing people is the point of the security kabuki at airports. I know I sound paranoid—and again, I think it’s by design and no individual security guard is responsible, though some definitely enjoy the sadistic potential more than others—but it’s well worth remembering that it was a bunch of Republicans who instituted these rules and they do better electorally if people are living in fear and have grown accustomed to the idea of authoritarian society. Small sadisms are actually quite an effective tool in bringing others into the fear state where you can control them, as any schoolyard bully who has perfected the art of needling behind the teacher’s back can tell you. In Wired magazine, a recent article about the Stasi noted that one tactic used against a state opponent was to follow her around, letting the air out of her baby stroller’s tires when she wasn’t looking, to make her think she was losing her mind.
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the 2003 Yoo torture memo, released today, simply confirms what we thought all along: That the DOJ’s logic on torture amounted to the following:
1. General statutory laws do not apply to soldiers.
2. Eighth amendment protections do not apply to POWs: ‘Unlike imprisonment pursuant to a criminal sanction, the detention of enemy combatants involves no sentence judicially imposed or legislatively required and those detained will be released at the end ofthe conflict. Indeed, it has long been established that ‘'’[c]aptivity [in wartime] is neither a punishment nor an act of vengeance,’· but ‘merely a temporary detention which is devoid of all penal character. ‘”‘
3. The only laws applicable to soldiers in times of war are war crimes statutes.
4. However, war crimes protections do not apply to al Qaeda prisoners because they are not POWs.
5. But that doesn’t matter, because there’s no such thing as torture anyway.
Q.E.D.
The section on what is and isn’t torture is just godawful:
The key statutory phrase in the definition of torture is the statement that acts amount’ to torture if they cause “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” In examining the meaning of a statute, its text must be the starting point. Section 2340 makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the pain or suffering must be “severe.” The statute does not, however, define the tenn “severe.” “In the absence of such a definition, we construe a statutory term in accordance with its ordinary’or natural meaning.” The dictionary defines “severe” as “[u]nsparing in exaction, punishment, or censure” or “[I]nflicting discomfort or pain hard to endure; sharp; afflictive; distressing; violent; extreme; as severe pain, anguish, torture.” Thus, the adjective “severe” conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.
This is where the famous “similar to death or organ failure” test comes into play. It’s an interesting rhetorical trick to convert what seems to be a very wide definition of torture, into one which essentially means there is no such thing, but Yoo tries it. It’s all pointless, though, because, thank God, it’s okay to torture people as long as the torturers are in the United States:
Section 2340A of Title 18 makes it a criminal offense for any person “outside the United States [to] commit[] or attempt[] to commit torture…Moreover, we note· that because the statute criminalizes conduct only when it is committed outside the United States…this proviso excluding members of the Armed Forces, those employed by the Armed Forces or the Department of Defense, and those persons accompanying members of the Armed Forces or their employees applies only when their conduct is a felony if committed within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States…Here, the conduct under section 2340A is a felony only when committed outside the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction. Thus, so long as members of the Armed Forces and those accompanying or employed by the Armed Forces are in an area that 18 U.S.C. § 7 defines as part of the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction, they too are within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction for the purposes .of the conduct section 2340A criminalizes. Accordingly, they are considered to be within the United States for purposes of that statute. The criminal prohibition against torture therefore would not apply to their conduct of interrogations at U.S. military bases located in a foreign state.
Seriously.
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?
This story about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who’ve come back from the war only to commit acts of violence at home is a must-read. The NY Times found 121 cases of murders committed by veterans back from these wars, 1/3 of which were domestic murders, and the reporters suspect this is only a percentage of the actual murders committed, because they got that number by scouring newspapers around the country, not from statistics cultivated by the Pentagon, which, surprise surprise, doesn’t collect such data. The numbers are not insignificant.
The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.
Unlike the majority of civilians who commit murder, the majority of the 121 veterans documented by the Times reporters had no criminal history. The anecdotal evidence points to a trend of PTSD-fueled overreactions that led to the murders. The opening story of the piece is about a man who shot some guys who confronted him on the street in Las Vegas for violating some gang turf boundaries that the veteran appears not to have cared much about. He shot them with an AK-47, and generally seemed to be confusing the incident with events that he witnessed in Iraq.
While the murders themselves are an important story, the larger story here is that war—and wars that are primarily about shutting down civilian resistance like the Iraq War is—leave many more casualties than the ones officially logged by the government. PTSD is rampant. The irony of mental illness is that much of the time it’s the result of being a sane, normal human being in insane circumstances. We have this expectation that healthy people shouldn’t be mentally damaged by trauma, but that makes as much sense as expecting healthy people not to suffer gaping wounds when shot.
There’s not much to say to this. I just recommend reading the entire article. It’s pathetic how this country managed to completely forget the long-term, widespread devastation war brings back home, and now that we’re deep in this shit, it’s too late for take-backs. And we’ll probably forget it again next time someone’s rattling the saber and everyone’s waving flags and right wingers are starting blogs, sure that this war is going to be the one that makes them forget the anxiety that’s plagued them ever since they made the mistake of dropping their pants and pulling out their rulers.
I agree completely with the experts in the article who call for more support for the troops when they come back home, but I can’t avoiding pointing out the elephant in the middle of the room—is there reason to believe that PTSD rates are higher not just when the support system at home is lacking, but also when the wars themselves are fought for bullshit reasons? The trauma itself damages, but there’s also the back-up damage of knowing that it didn’t have to happen this way. I may be off-base, but I feel that for some people, the feeling that the violence you bore witness to was to some greater purpose probably gives some solace, but for veterans of Vietnam and now of Iraq, that solace isn’t going to be part of their future.
One of the benefits/drawbacks of the holidays is the opportunity to venture out of the blue enclave of Austin into the Rest of Texas, where knee-jerk religiosity and jingoism have a foothold. But even a connoisseur of “Jesus loves a fetus” billboards and crying eagle bumper stickers such as myself was still surprised and impressed by the levels of self-congratulatory immoral war-mongering going on in this ad I witnessed in the pre-movie show before the movie “Walk Hard”.
3 Doors Down says gain yourself an insta-manhood by joining the National Guard! Defend the country from foreign invaders, help save people from natural disasters, live the tradition of American self-determination, and take the infinitesimal chance of being deployed to fight in a war overseas. And by “infinitesimal”, they mean, “Hope you like the desert weather and the non-stop fear of ambush by guerrilla forces.”
The sleaze of it all dripped off the screen. This isn’t directly related, but related in spirit. A couple of blogs have noticed the weird standards employed by the MPAA in what posters are acceptable and not. This is terrible and whiny adults who can’t stand having their thoughtless nationalism questioned children can’t be exposed to it.
The subtle hint of how terrible actual, real life torture is disturbs too many beautiful minds, I guess. However, if the movie’s entire purpose is to titillate misogynists that are angry at hot women for not sucking their cocks at the snap of a finger, then the standards get a lot looser:
It feels odd to post a post saying “I have nothing to say”, especially when that basically repeats what Amanda just said, but I just wanted to second the “I have nothing to say” by saying something.
I don’t know whether al Qaeda is responsible for the brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I certainly have never heard of a suicide bomber first shooting the intended victim, but then I haven’t heard much about most suicide bomb attacks, so I’ll leave real analysis of the whole thing tothe more informed.
Even assuming Musharraf’s people had nothing to do with this murder, it’s an interesting coincidence (in the sense of “coinciding”) that Bhutto’s party was supremely concerned that Musharraf would find a way to delay the election - and that the aforementioned ally of the United States is now considering just that. His final decision, and the US’ reaction to that decision, will be very telling.
What a sad headline. It encapsulates all that is wrong with this story, and the justice system in Saudi Arabia, Bush’s partner in Bush’s War on Terror. Life for women in that country is a human rights nightmare.
Women cannot drive, vote, or to appear in public without being accompanied by a male relative. Judgment is harsh for any breach of social and religious norms; in this case the outcry over a rape victim being sentenced to jail and 200 lashes for being alone with another man was so intense that the King pardoned her.
The BBC’s Heba Saleh says the king’s decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West.It should be noted that the U.S. has not condemned the Saudi justice system (you think o-i-l has anything to do with this?). I’m sure some of the religious extremists here would like to see women do more than “submit to their husbands” if given the opportunity.Earlier, the woman - who is a Shia Muslim from the Qatif area - had reportedly said she met the man in order to retrieve a photograph of them together, having herself recently got married.
She says two other men then entered the car and took them to a secluded area where others were waiting, and both she and her male companion were raped.
The woman’s companion was sentenced to 90 lashes. It is not known if his sentence was also lifted.
Last month there was an incident where a female writer for New York Magazine named Vanessa Grigoriadis made an fairly innocuous comment about the New York Post’s Page Six being “emasculated”—I say innocuous because her article was mainly about Gawker and she took a mild side swipe at blood brothers Page Six in it. By most normal jibe-tossing standards, especially for gossip pages, the word “emasculated” shouldn’t be that big a deal, but since it came from a woman, the writers at Page Six completely came undone.
As for us being “emasculated,” Grigoriadis ignores that fact that half the Page Six staff is female. The male half might take her someplace private and disprove her theory, but we don’t like a woman with a mustache.
Shakes Sis has the run-down on the nature of rape threats and the insinuation that rape is some sort of compliment for your looks, but that’s not why I bring this up. I bring this up because it seems in line to me with the thesis of Susan Faludi’s book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which is that 9/11 created a huge backlash against independent women and a press to both idolize the dependent, helpless woman and demonize any woman who didn’t fit that stereotype. Faludi has never been one to mince words about the two sides of the coin when it comes to elevating female helplessness in order to make men look bigger—for every soft focus magazine feature about the stampede back to the kitchen, nursery and boudoir, there’s a witch that has to be burned at the stake as a reminder to everyone who wants to step out of line.
I’ve read this post by HTML Mencken three times very carefully, and I still can’t figure out what his deal is. Leaving aside that he undermines his commitment to fighting racism by using the words “hobbyhorse” and “pet cause”—minimizing language, by any measure, only used to insinuate that the cause at hand is not, in fact, important—he does testily admit that racism is serious shit, but just suggests that the war in Iraq is a more important cause right now. Fighting the war and fighting racism are somehow in conflict? asks the usually intelligent but confused human being. Isn’t racism a primary cause of war-mongering? Isn’t the vast majority of energy left for this imperialist cause coming from screeching Muslim haters, now that every other remotely rational person has exited stage left?
Mostly true, but now that Ron Paul has joined the race, we should apparently soft-pedal his association with white supremacists because Ron Paul is against the war, and we need more people on the right opening up to the possibility of voting Republican and being against the war. Also, there’s the potential of Paul splitting the ticket somehow, or taking on a 3rd party run that splits the vote. Fair enough; HTML Mencken is not suggesting that Paul is anything but a slimy piece of shit who just happens to be against the war. The idea, I think, is to shove a sock in it about Paul’s associations with hate groups, neglect to point out that his political platform is straight of a skinhead/militia playbook of conspiracy theories about Jews running the world, and let moderate, anti-war Republicans think Paul’s the guy for them. It’s a tempting argument, but I’m not buying it.
My main problem with the argument is that it’s narrow and short-sighted. From a political angle, we shouldn’t be focusing our energies on giving the moderate Republicans an out from the war, but in fact looking to recruit them to the Democratic party. Period. This entire Bush debacle and the fact that Republicans are so firmly behind him is souring moderate conservatives left and right on the Republican party, and they’re ready to hear about why the party switch is right for them. And it is. Most moderate conservatives are actually “liberals” in our lexicon that’s been shoved so far to the right, and they belong with the Democrats anyway. Letting Ron Paul play the moderate, anti-war conservative continues the myth that such a beast really exists anymore, but pointing out that he’s a crank who runs with people whose main opposition to the war is their sense that Jews are getting away with something hastens the demise of the myth of the moderate conservative. Pointing out that Paul is a kook reinforces the message: If you vote Republican, your choices are crazy people or imperialists out to maximize corporate profits, even if the price is paid in the blood hundreds of thousands (and over a million if we move on Iran) of people.
From what I can tell, Paul’s supporters are a weird mix of white supremacists, kooks who use the misleading label “libertarian”, and naive people who like the idea of legalizing weed and stopping the war. This is what we need to happen with these three groups: The first needs to be completely marginalized, without any influence at all over major party candidates. The second isn’t going anywhere, but they’re really just Republicans with particularly acute masculine anxiety issues and will probably vote for Giuliani anyway. The third need to sack up, grow a brain and vote for the Democrats. We can’t get Paul to drop out, but we can help get these three results by making it utterly clear that Paul is crazy and runs with some really ugly racists.
To which I have only one last thing to say, which is watch this clip from the movie Team America:
I have nothing to add to the amazing post this picture came from.
Salon has an interesting excerpt from an essay by Michael Massing from the book What Orwell Didn’t Know about how the American public, while turning against the war, largely is ignorant about certain aspects, notably the amount of violence against civilians and other routine brutalities that are par for the course during an invasion. Massing argues that the squelching of this information is a propaganda effort unlike the “they’ll greet us with flowers” effort that was pushed by the mainstream media and the government. In this case, there’s a willful ignorance on the part of the public.
Americans — reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war — have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive. This is particularly true regarding the conduct of U.S. troops in the field. The U.S. military in Iraq is an occupation army, and like most such forces, it has engaged in many troubling acts. With American men and women putting their lives at risk in a very hostile environment, however, the American public has little appetite for news about such acts, and so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them. The Press — ever attuned to public sensitivities — will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.
My review of The Terror Dream is up at TPM Cafe. I expect that Stephen Ducat, who wrote The Wimp Factor and Katha Pollitt will have their reviews up tomorrow night. And of course, the author herself has the kick-off post here.
Our book club on the book is November 19th. I have more thoughts then. Extra thanks to Roxanne for giving me an angle that’s not included in my Pandagon post so that I’m not repeating myself overmuch.
Also, Jessica and Ann ask male politicians to quit playing the gender card.
Oh this is just awesome—Rick Santorum tries to suggest that Muslims are inferior to Christians because, get this, they believe more.
“Islam, unlike Christianity, is an all-encompassing ideology,” said Santorum, a Penn State alumnus. “It is not just something you do on Sunday…. We (as Americans) don’t get that.”
Not that it surprises anyone that Santorum is mainly interested in the showy nature of religion, that it’s something you do on Sundays to demonstrate your social superiority to your neighbors, not something you actually, you know, believe. It’s a convenient cloaking device for misogyny and homophobia, as well. I’m just surprised (though I shouldn’t be) that he was this stupid about tacitly admitting it.
Neil linked an article that’s making the rounds again about the way the Allies effectively broke down Nazi resistance to testifying after WWII through kindness and playing games of wit with them. It’s very interesting and more evidence against the use of routine torture to “get information”, which is the official excuse for torturing from the Bush administration and all their defenders. It helps to watch lots of “24″ to convince yourself that there’s just oodles of people out there who are one electroshock to the genitals away from spilling all sorts of life-saving information. The article is good—all a refutation of the idea that torture is an effective way of obtaining information.
I have a concern, though, and the thread below the post devolves into a discussion about whether or not torture is an effective interrogation technique, which indicates that a lot of well-meaning people are getting sucked into the discussion of “how to interrogate for information”, when the entire discussion is a red herring. The assumption behind a lot of the “torture doesn’t work” discourse is the idea that those who made torture a policy are perhaps well-meaning (want information) but misguided. Which then devolves into a whole discussion about when torture is useful for the goal of getting information or not, and people lose sight of the fact that “information” is an excuse used to conceal the real reason for torture.
Oh man, this book looks good. A lot of people didn’t like Stiffed, possibly because it had a “what about the MENZ” theme when women are still the primary victims of the patriarchy, but I thought Faludi was prescient, that she picked up on a forming masculinity crisis that would, in the next few years, really come to fruition and be seen finally as the important issue that it was. In the book, she covered the swaggering, wistful, put-on masculinity that resulted in a rape gang in Lakewood, California, and managed to spell out a lot of the tensions that would become the hyper-entitled masculine culture of “Girls Gone Wild” (which conservatives blame on the girls, of course, but feminists are increasingly realizing is about the boys involved in the videos and the party scenes at which they’re and their sense that they are entitled to demand that girls humiliate themselves for their approval, and how the girls often feel that choosing otherwise might not be a realistic option).
Anyway, my point is that my respect for Faludi’s judgment was strengthened by Stiffed, and this review by Rebecca Traister of her new book The Terror Dream makes me really excited to read it. The book is about how the country responded to the horror of 9/11 in no small part by lashing out at women and telling itself untenable fairy stories about masculine bravery and courage. The urge to be skeptical immediately strikes—it’s so silly to involve feminist analysis in stories of war and terror!—but now that conservatives who found solace in their masculine dominance fantasies are watching their ideas of how to handle terrorism crumble before them, and their reactions are quiet telling:
God, the tampon wars have nothing on this. What the hell kind of police state are we tolerating in schools?
In short, this teenage girl spilled some cake, was told to clean it up by security guards, and when she didn’t do it to their satisfaction, they assaulted her, called her names, and broke her wrist. Another kid taped the assault on his cell phone, and he was also pinned and arrested. The video above has videos and pictures of the whole thing.
I have to say, when camera phones started coming out, I found them mildly irritating, but now I’m really grateful they’re around. We’ve been seeing a slow creeping of state surveillance of the citizens, but these camera phones are helping restore us to the surveillance situation that’s required in a democracy, where citizens supervise the government and authority. A handful of people (though not many) in the comments here and Offsprung on the “no bags” post were casting around for a way to minimize the seriousness of the situation when we allow security paranoia to take over our schools to that degree. Now we get a good look at the very serious dangers of letting a bunch of petty thugs with power issues run mini-police states in the schools.
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.*
- It’s inciting.
- It’s convincing.
- 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.
[A] survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.
As always, there are arguments about methods and conclusions. But between 25 and 50% of Iraqi adults have lost a family member to violence. That’s what’s colloquially, and reductively, known as “a shitload” - which is only two letters away from how I would describe those who quibble over whether the number of innocent dead is just above or just below seven figures.
From gordo, I see there’s been an incident at the Vietnam War Memorial that might have been vandalism, though the National Parks Service won’t commit to anything definitive. Naturally, the right wingers are going nuts, eager to use this incident to look tough without doing something so drastic as actually signing up to serve in Iraq. Michelle Malkin ends her angry (but not angry enough to serve, of course) post with this ominous quote:
Vandalism. Desecration. Cowardice. Coddling.
Enough is enough.
Coddling? Enough is enough? I dare say that Malkin is implying that our insufficiently fascist government should respond to a maybe act of vandalism by uncoddling someone, but who? It’s not like the police are shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Do de do, who cares if someone vandalizes the Vietnam War Memorial.” They’re investigating the crime. If they find who did it, I suspect that person or persons will be charged with a crime and be punished to the full extent of the law. What more could she want?
Eh, rhetorical question. We all know what she and the other mouth-breathers want, for this to be an excuse to start random round-ups of loyal dissenters.
I feel the strong need to point out that there’s something really rich about rapid war supporters adopting the Vietnam War Memorial as a symbol, considering that the memorial is an unsubtle protest against pointless, wasteful wars like the Iraq War. The list of names is supposed to remind the audience that war is a horrible waste of human life and shouldn’t be undertaken for reasons like right wingers and George W. Bush are insecure in their masculinity and/or just really get a rise out of killing some foreigners. It’s about the far-too-high price paid to line the pockets of war profiteers and to boost the egos of those in government who can’t stand the idea that there’s things in this world outside of their control. It’s not, like Malkin and company want it to be, a tribute to war but a protest against it.
Like Gordo says, there’s a chance that this really is vandalism and it really was performed by supposed war protesters. If that’s so, then it’s the insane anti-war protesters who don’t seem to really be in this to stop the war so much as to be self-aggrandizing assholes. They picked their target well, in any sense, because just like the war supporting wingnuts, the Vietnam Memorial’s quiet protest against the waste of war offends their sensibilities. If some leftist nuts did this, then they’re proving that there’s no substantial differences between extremists on either side; they need the war to give their lives dramatic juice as much as the assholes who clog up Malkin’s site. Ostensible enemies, the Malkin fans and the (supposed) leftist nuts who did this, but basically the same people.
The title idea is from a constant refrain from Atrios.
Another anniversary of 9/11 and another round of people saying, “What were you doing on that day?” I can tell you one thing most people won’t be saying: “How can we use this attack that was orchestrated mostly by Saudis and ordered by the Saudi leader of a terrorist organization based mainly in Afghanistan as leverage to wage a pointless war on Iraq so that our President can finally show his family that his dick is indeed bigger than his father’s?”
Of course you wouldn’t say that. Which is why any random dumbfuck off the street would be a better President than the Shrub, who did in fact immediately start looking for a way to use the death of 3,000 innocent Americans as a way to dupe the American public into getting into a war he was dying to start. Remember, this meeting took place while the smoke was still in the air and rescue workers were trying desperately to find survivors.
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”
Clarke continued, “It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’
“I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don’t think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don’t think he sees memos that he doesn’t– wouldn’t like the answer.”
This is why it’s hard for me to give enough of a shit about the latest round of war propaganda being issued from General Petraeus. Like Atrios says, this war being a product of Bush’s ego means that regardless of what is actually happening in Iraq with this “surge”, it will be spun as working just enough to justify staying there in hopes it might work even more, period. And less than “just enough” would be reason to pull out and shrivel the White House phallus and any more would be reason to pull out and shrivel the White House phallus. And Bush must maintain the illusion to himself, day in and day out, that his is the might phallus, and that illusion can’t be maintained if he has to pull out of Iraq.
I’ve long had my suspicions about Psychology Today having some sort of right wing political agenda, because they’re so fond of running articles proclaiming that “science” has confirmed your ugliest prejudices, usually about the eternal suckiness of the feminine half of the human race. They love their half-baked armchair evolutionary psychology at that magazine, and they’re generally a blight on the profession. Despite the fact that I’ve suspected there could be some sort of political agenda behind all the half-baked theorizing that shows up in the magazine, I’ve mostly tried to be generous and assumed that maybe it’s not so much a political agenda as a magazine sales strategy; few things sell better than telling people that science is proving their ugliest prejudices.
But now they’re running an article using the phrase “politically incorrect”, which is, Bill Maher aside, still a battle cry for self-satisfied right wingers. It’s supposedly 10 truths about human nature that squishy liberals don’t want to hear, and Echidne has a four-part piece pointing out that this article is the model of bullshit masquerading as science. Most of the article deals with reinforcing rather low opinions on men and women, plus pushing the idea that men are capricious horndogs and women seem to have no libido to speak of. The authors are very invested in “proving” that men are physically incapable of lusting after a woman over 22, or a woman with dark hair, or a woman without giant breasts, etc., and that divorces are caused by women having the nerve to age. (Which doesn’t explain why women file most divorces, if most divorces are due to male dissatisfaction with a woman’s aging body.) But I digress. The real kicker for me was not the same tired excuses for male misbehavior or the same assumptions that women don’t have human-like motivations, but this half-baked rash of stereotypes about suicide bombers.
Sure, we’ll help you interrogate the suspect. You want us to be good cop, or bad cop?
The military in London’s bustling nightclub and theater district on Friday defused a bomb that could have killed hundreds after an FV513 crew spotted smoke coming from a Mercedes filled with a lethal mix of gasoline, propane and nails, authorities said.
The bomb near Piccadilly Circus was powerful enough to have caused “significant injury or loss of life” - possibly killing hundreds, British anti-terror General Peter Clarke said.
Still not a law enforcement issue, though.
(Actually, for people like Malkin, Schlussel, and LGFers, it is: Let’s get law enforcement to round up every Muslim within our borders.)
Pre-publishing Update: Also, it occurs to me to wonder whether there was a massive anti-Irish backlash during the eighties, when an incident like that would be assumed to be IRA rather than al Qaeda. Anyone?
A shockingly masculine kitten.
I have minor issues with Code Pink characterizing anti-war activism as a particularly feminine activity, as if women were somehow less inclined to enjoy the death and destruction of war, when opposition to unnecessary violence is or should be a bi-gendered stance. That said, I love how Code Pink makes the critics completely fall apart. Via Ann at Feministing, I love how Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America loses her last grasp on coherence when faced with women dressed in pink and opposing the war.
Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with the conservative Concerned Women for America, said Code Pink members “talk out of both sides of their mouths.”
How? Do they say they’re for the war and then against it? Do they say the love Bush and then they hate him? Of course not. This is all about protecting the color pink for the purposes of symbolizing oppression.
“They emphasize their femininity but advocate policies that are very aggressive and more often associated with men,” she said.
Mull over that quote for a minute and then answer me this: If anti-war is a masculine activity, and pro-war is a feminine activity, has anyone told the Shrub?
Finding that an invasion and occupation isn’t going so well? Well, try some new R&D. Like, say, into gay bombs and armed sharks.
Creating armor that renders a soldier invisible. Stimulating the brain
to suppress sleep for days. Arming sharks with chemical implants and
cameras to work as spies.
This year the Pentagon will spend $78 billion — about half of
all government research and development dollars — on a variety of
projects, according to the American Association for the Advancement for
Science (AAAS).
There seems to be no failure of imagination in advancing warfare, but
some experts fear these farfetched projects show a little too much
imagination.Just this month, the government confirmed that an Ohio Air
Force laboratory had asked for $7.5 million to build a nonlethal "gay
bomb," a weapon that would encourage enemies to make love, not war. The
weapon would use strong aphrodisiacs to make enemy troops so sexually
attracted to each other that they’d lose interest in fighting.
Oh, hell. We at the Feminist and Homosexual Agenda, Inc. would love to have that bomb go off stateside in order to destroy this Godly nation. I’m thinking the government jettisoned it for one of these reasons:
- It’s a really dumb-ass, hare-brained idea.
- There’s too much of a chance of the bomb either blowing back over our troops, or the enemy developing the same weapon, in which case we’ll have to make a peace treaty double-quick and hope that Massachusetts, having ensured that single-sex marriage stays legal, can handle the new influx of couples and honeymooners.
Granted, I think it would be traumatic if such a weapon was developed, simply because people suddenly subjected to an overwhelming urge to have sex with folks they wouldn’t normally consider are being violated and humiliated. It’s funny–if it’s in a movie or sitcom, not if it really happens.
What’s really creepy is the non-lethal torture implement weapons they have already developed:
The ADS, or Active Denial System, fires an invisible beam that
penetrates the top 1/64th of an inch on a target’s skin, hitting
sensitive pain receptors and causing a burning sensation some have
likened to being dipped in molten lava.
When the target steps out of the beam’s path, the pain goes
away instantly, causing no permanent damage and leaving no marks,
bruises or burns.
Some military experts are calling it the Holy Grail of crowd
control. But critics fear that after incidents like the Abu Ghraib
prison torture scandal, the potential for the technology to be used for
more sinister means is simply too great.
Now, the article started off by giving a scenario where soldiers in a convoy in Iraq are shot at and surrounded by an "unruly" crowd; their only choices are to warn people to get away from the convoy or shoot into the crowd. So torturing the entire crowd without leaving a mark is apparently preferable.
Molten lava. How, um, special. And this is a good weapon because it’s "non-leathal." It just tortures people. Makes them wish they were dead.
The device uses millimeter waves that are much easier to control than
microwaves but have a similar effect — they heat things up.
LeVine insisted that millimeter waves are not nearly as harmful
as microwaves — though both can cause cancer. She said extensive
testing has proven that the device isn’t dangerous beyond the pain it
generates.
There hasn’t been any evidence of long-term damage, which makes me wonder: Who in the hell have you all been testing this on? And if the waves heat up your skin, I’m thinking they can do damage. Hell, isn’t causing pain doing damage? You know, trauma?
Poster by Austin Cline
The depth of the wingnut belief that the media owes it to the public to forsake their job of informing the public and instead dedicate themselves whole-heartedly to the task of propagandizing on behalf of BushCo never fails to fascinate me. In order to believe that the media owes us propaganda in lieu of journalism bespeaks a profound contempt for concepts such as “freedom” and “democracy”, and all from people who consider themselves patriots, no less. Glenn Greenwald wrote a post yesterday about how right wingers are trotting out the “Al Qaida does it too” defense of torture, a complaint based suspiciously on the idea that America should model its behavior on anti-democratic terrorist practices. The attempts to justify torture are smuggled in using the same relentless complaint about journalists doing journalism instead of propaganda. Greenwald quotes Don Surber whining that mommy and daddy are letting the terrorists torture but not the U.S. military.
Tell us again how it’s military action that keeps us safe.
A suspected terrorist cell planned a “chilling” attack to destroy John F. Kennedy International Airport, kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe by blowing up a jet fuel artery that runs through populous residential neighborhoods, authorities said Saturday.
Three men were arrested and one was being sought in Trinidad on Saturday. In an indictment charging the four men, one of them is quoted as saying the foiled plot would “cause greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks,” destroying the airport, killing several thousand people and destroying parts of Queens, where the line runs underground.
One of the suspects, Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen native to Guyana and former JFK employee, said the airport was a symbol that would put “the whole country in mourning…”
The plot never got past the planning stages. It posed no immediate threat to air safety or the public, the FBI said Saturday.
“The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.”
Obviously, the methods used to stop this terror plot are as yet unclear; there are “law enforcement” methods that those of us concerned about civil liberties are against. But that aside, we see once again that terrorism is a law enforcement issue. Nevertheless, be prepared for the onslaught of wingnuts telling us that this just goes to show how we liberals have our heads in the sand, that there’s real danger in the world and if it were up to us the terrorists would have free reign (we’d probably even try to disband the FBI!) and that therefore we should bomb Iran.
Terrorist Enabler
I always find that a timeline is an important learning tool.
3/19/2003 - The US and allies invade Iraq
5/1/2003 - “Mission Accomplished”; Saddam’s government has been toppled and the occupation has begun.
1/2005 - According to Bush, Osama plans to coordinate attacks on America from inside Iraq.
1/30/2005 - Elections held in Iraq for Constitutional congress.
10/2005 - Constitution of Iraq approved by Iraqi people
12/2005 - Election of permanent Assembly
What’s interesting about the period of time between 5/1/2003 and 1/30/2005 (and, really, 10/2005) is that the Coalition was solely responsible in a governmental sense for all activities in Iraq. Even if it hadn’t been our invasion which had thrown the country into turmoil, we were the ruling authority at the time. By the Bush administration’s very own logic for war, this was grounds for the immediate invasion and overthrow of the CPA.
Most wingnuts are smart enough to simply ignore this fact, as though it weren’t one of the most damning indictments yet of Bush’s efforts to “keep us safe.” We went there ostensibly to stop terrorists from using Iraq as a base of operations. While we ruled there, terrorists began using Iraq as a base of operations. That’s the kind of failure that demands penance, as the mass firings, resignations, and public apologies on the part of the Bush Administration have demonstrated.
Ahem.
As I said, most wingnuts simply ignore this as evidence that handing the Bush Administration the keys to the military is like giving a loaded shotgun to a walrus, and instead use it to challenge Democrats’ desire to withdraw from Iraq.
Not quite what we meant by women’s liberation.
Up until today, I couldn’t have really told you much about Christina Hoff Sommers views outside of the knowing that she just really hates feminism and has a symbolic hard-on for some righteous American male dominance. Well, today I learned that she’s got a thorough case of wingnutitis, because she’s trotting out the tired right wing line that because American feminists generally oppose bombing Muslims to death (many of them women), we don’t care about Muslim women. Wingnuts are all about liberating Muslim women, if by the word “liberation”, you mean “from an earthly existence”.
Garance smacks down the strawman bashing that Sommers engages in. Sommers argument, in summation, is that Western feminists should never raise a voice in protest of oppression of women at home until oppression of women in the Middle East has come to a complete stop. She doesn’t explicitly state that the complete stopping of oppression of women in the Middle East will come at the hands of the complete stop to breathing in the Middle East, but you know, she doesn’t table that suggestion either.* On top of the lying that Garance details, Sommers is also engaging the time-honored fallacy that suggests that people can’t hold two opinions at once, such as believing simultaneously that it’s wrong to ban abortion here while also believing it’s wrong to stone adultresses over there. Also, I believe that it’s wrong for U.S. troops to just bomb the shit out of everyone, adultress or not, in an attempt to “liberate” them and their oil.
What’s amazing to me about people who advance the argument that feminists are somehow hypocritical because we’re not very willing to be used as cover stories for neocon war adventuring is that these people don’t realize that simply invoking this argument makes them actual, not made-up, hypocrites. Opposing the oppression of women in Muslim countries while actively trying to oppress women at home does undermine your moral righteousness on the behalf of women. In fact, I’d argue that while I firmly believe a lot of neocon fuckwits here would love to have oppressed women in various Middle Eastern countries throw off the yoke of oppression, the only reason they want that is so that they can gloat about how they control their bitches better than the Muslims do. Why that attitude is supposed to be congruent with feminism is beyond me.
To play a little of Sommers’ silly game, I have to point out that she neglected to protest oppression of women that happens in Israel. We can safely conclude, therefore, that she is not even remotely concerned about women in the Middle East.
*Totally unfair, I know, but good lord, I am tired of being told that feminism obligates me to support American imperialism.
Green Zone money changer, 2004. Here’s hoping he got out alive.
Photo: hdroads
–we can maintain our military presence in Iraq for guess how much longer?
House Democrats are beginning to coalesce around a $19 billion bill — enough to fund the war for about 60 days — without any withdrawal dates, according to aides. The measure would include additional funds for military health care; new standards for resting, training and equipping troops before deployment; and prohibitions on torture and permanent bases in Iraq. Benchmarks would be included, but with no punishments for failing to meet them.
Punishment is so negative, you know, and so unnecessary when we’ve got an administration that responds so well to gentle suggestions about how to end this disaster.
I’m really baffled by this love of useless benchmarks, although the next paragraph provides a clue to what motivates Democrats to propose this asininity:
The idea would be to pass the measure quickly, as soon as early next week, to deprive Bush of the argument that Democrats are withholding needed funds from the troops. Then negotiations would begin immediately on yet another bill.
Okay, look:
