Get Real

It's late, I'm tired and I just finished watching an incredibly well done and riveting documentary on al Qaeda and 9/11 by National Geographic. And then I read this:

Bush Calls Iraq War Moral Equivalent Of Allies' WWII Fight Against the Axis. Of all the gall. Comparing the bunch of rag-tag guerillas that has the U.S. paralyzed in Iraq to the fascists and authoritarians of 1940s Germany, Japan and Italy is sophistry. "The Greatest Generation" knew what they were fighting for and knew it was right. Today, we don't know who we are fighting and we are "right" only in that we are acting as a pseudo-benevolent occupation force.

Remember that Bush vowed on 9/11 that he would hunt down those responsible and kill them. Osama bin Laden is still out there, and since 9/11 we've witnessed Madrid, London and scores of other major al Qaeda terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, Afghanistan is growing more opium than ever before and Iraq has become a new rallying call for Islamic jihad against Western "infidels."

If Bush had any real courage, he would have nuked Islamabad when he had the chance. But then, throughout American history, it's been Democrats who fight wars, and Republicans who talk but don't walk. Get real, George; you cannot make history by wishing this were World War II. It's a different time, and a different war. The problem is, Iraq is the wrong war. We should be fighting terrorists, but instead we are just sowing the seeds for inevitably more terrorism against all of Western civilization.

 Posted by glenn at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)

One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back

The insurgency in Iraq is "about where it was a year ago," in terms of attacks, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday, but he also asserted that American and Iraqi troops are "gaining ground" in the two-year-old conflict. Yeah, right (not). It was a quagmire two years ago and is worse now. $300 billion and counting (it was only $150 billion last September) and we're not out yet. "Shock and awe" has been transformed into long lines of flag-draped coffins, pictures suppressed by the military in order to avoid letting the American people know the real price of this occupation.

I am all for spreading democracy and freedom, and am overjoyed that America is finally -- after many decades of Machievallian foreign policy -- fighting against fascism and tyranny. But in Iraq we're engaged, pure and simple, in nation-building to protect the human rights of people who bascially either hate or are indifferent to us. Who cares? Let them rot in the desert. We knocked off Saddam Hussein -- a very good thing -- so let's get the hell out of there, leave Iraq to the Iraqis, and go after the real "Axis of Evil" in the world. How about Al Qaeda, you morons!!

 Posted by glenn at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

The Rules of War In Occupation?

The Department of Defense is prosecuting a Marine Lieutenant, Ilario Pantano, for murder arising out of the shooting death, at an Iraq checkpoint, of two suspected "insurgents." Allegedly, Pantano ordered other troops to remove the suspects' handcuffs and look away, and then shot the pair in the back, vandalized their vehicle and hung a sign over their corpses bearing a Marine slogan: "No better friend, no worse enemy."

Pantano protests that it's impossible to differentiate between innocent civilians and potential terrorists in the environment of "post-war" Iraq. The problem, here, hoewver, is that both sides are at least partially right. As the 1968 Mi Lai scandal in Vietnam shows, a civilized society must have rules of behavior even in warfare. But the situation in Iraq is poised precariously between war and police-state security. More than 1,700 of our troops have been killed, the majority in car bombs and other "IED" attacks, after "major combat operations" ended in May 2003. How in hell are these young men supposed to know who the bad guys are? Isn't this just second-guessing combat decisions made in the fog of war? Genocide is one thing, but in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, this prosecution strikes me as one making a scapegoat of a solitary solider in order to offer a patina of legitimacy to the atrocious inhumanity of what's really going on over there.

America decided long ago that we could not be the "world's policemen." Now the miltary is doing just that in Iraq. The "rules of engagement" need to be changed, fundamentally, so the troops can defend themselves and do their jobs without being blown up by rag-heads whose idealogy is to kill Westerners, not matter why, just because they are not Muslims. As long as America remains an occupying power in Iraq -- which is what we are in reality -- this problem will not go away by itself. Even worse, Pantano gave up a lucrative career as a New York investment banker to enlist in the Marines to defend this country. He deserves better thanks than a trumped-up murder prosecution.

 Posted by glenn at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

Small Minds

This just makes no sense. One day after concluding that breast implants remain too risky, because of lack of actual data in field trials, to permit their reintroduction, an FDA advisory panel voted 7-2 to permit a different manufacturer to resume their sale. FDA Panel OKs Implants [RedHerring.com]. Yesterday's decision was based on the rationale that the company, Mentor, had only three years' of test data. But today's approval of silicone devices from Inamed was based on only two years' testing.

BusinessWeek describes the debate as a "ball of confusion." I think it's more simple than that. Big breasts reduce men to small minds!

 Posted by glenn at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

Not Again

Will this man never just LEAVE!! Please, spare us any more agony and, if you can't gracefully wither away, die. Gore TV Network to Launch in August, Google Tie-In.

 Posted by glenn at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

Courage and Judicial Activitsm

This is Judge Stanley Birch's stirring separate opinion in the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit (Atlanta) to reject the appeal of Terry Schiavo's parents under the special statute Congress passed last Monday giving federal courts jurisdiction over that single case.

And if you think this comes from a liberal jurist, you're way wrong. Birch is from rural Georgia, was an Army lieutenant in Viet Nam from 1970-72 and was nominated to the federal bench by by George H.W. Bush on March 22, 1990. That's a conservative bio if I ever heard one. And as Ed Brayton from Dispatches from the Culture Wars cogently points out--

We need more judges like Stanley Birch, judges who have the courage to tell it like it is and not base decisions on political expediency.

 Posted by glenn at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

Over the Edge

I am skiing in Telluride, Colorado this week, so little time for posting. It should be noted, however, that once I got out of Washington, D.C., Congress in fact passed a statute on the Terry Schiavo case. So, obviously my mere presence was what alone was blocking this revolting exercise of pure partisan political power!

 Posted by glenn at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

Mercy

Thank God, it's over. The judge presiding over the Terry Schiavo case ruled in her husband's favor early Friday afternoon and rejected a request from U.S. House of Representatives attorneys to delay the removal, which he had previously ordered to take place at 1 p.m. EST. Brain-Damaged Woman's Feeding Tube Removed [ABCNews.com]. Michael Schiavo was at his wife's side when the tube was disconnected, making good on his pledge to her years ago that neither would let the other live on as a vegetable.

Love conquers politics. Mercy triumphs. And Terry gets to pass on peacefully to whatever lies beyond life. A happy ending to a tragically sad story about the right to die and political hypocrisy.

 Posted by glenn at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)

Death With Dignity

The U.S. Congress this evening made a frantic, last-ditch effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive, passing measures that call for the federal courts to prevent the removal of feeding tubes from the brain-damaged woman in Florida. President George W. Bush applauded the move, saying the courts should rule "in favor of life.''

Well, let's look at the real facts. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a rabid anti-abortion advocate, introduced a bill (S.539) dubbed the "Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act of 2005." Supposedly under the 14th amendment to the Constitution, which provides that`No State . . . shall deprive any person of life . . . without due process of law," the bill would deem any person (husband, wife, doctor, etc.) who is "authorized or directed by court order to withdraw or withhold food, fluids, or medical treatment" to be holding an incapacitated person in "custody" for purposes of federal court habeas corpus proceedings. In layman's terms, this means that the constitutional protection against government custodial confinement -- which is used to challenge state criminal convictions as unconstitutional -- would now be extended to anyone who obtains a state court order allowing a loved one to die. Private citizens, not the state, are now being commanded to give up their personal autonomy by the fiction that their spouses (legal guardian in all other situations) become the government because a court ratifies one's right to die.

Santorum's bill reasons that:

Bullshit. In Terry Schiavo's case, where that poor woman has been in a persistent coma, without consciousness, for 15 years, the bill would take away from those who know her best the power to let her die and allow any third-party -- not limited to her parents, but anyone -- to use the courts to contest her right to die. This is not about due process, it's about manufacturing a federal "right" out of thin air, just like Santorum piously claims the Supreme Court did in Roe v. Wade on abortion. The hypocrisy is simply astonishing. As Schiavo's husband said on Nightline, will the government now force cancer patients to take chemo against their wishes? The policy and legal logic is the same, but the result is the Big Brother government that Republicans traditionally despise. Now they're all for it, wanting to overturn 19 Florida court decisions, all of which confirmed that Terry Schiavo is brain dead, can never have any senses again, and should be allowed to be removed from artificial life support.

Bill Clinton famously declared that "the era of big government is over" in 1995. Not true. Now that the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, after lambasting Clinton, they're moving government ever more deeply into state, local and intensely personal affairs. Santorum, Dubya and the congressional Repubicans are the George Orwells of 2005, only 21 years after "1984."

Update: When the House could not pass a bill acceptable to the Senate last night, it came up with a new strategy. To subpoena Terry Schiavo's husband to testify before Congress in Washington, D.C. so that he would have to leave Florida when the order allowing disconnection of life support goes into effect this afternoon. Shameful.

 Posted by glenn at 11:05 PM | Comments (2)

Real People Aren't Welcome

So the President is getting his act together on Social Security (in a manner of speaking) and taking it on the road in a 60-day, 60-stop barnstorming tour. His advisors say they want to get Dubya in front of real people, outside the Beltway, to talk up private savings accounts. Apparently, however, real people do not include folks who don't meet the White House profile. At Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, there were no general public tickets distributed for the Bush visit.

This, IMHO, is the ultimate hypocrisy. We all know that campaign events are exquisitely stage-managed to produce the sound bites and photo ops the political operatives want to be the message of the day. And it was somewhat disconcerting when the Bush-Cheney Campaign prevented non-supporters -- those who had not contributed or volunteered -- from attending campaign rallies. (The Republican National Committee even required event-attendees to sign endorsement forms that pledged their support for the re-election of President Bush.) But now, we are talking about the President of the United States, who is supposed to represent all Americans. It is just wrong to limit the audience to sychophants, but apparently only hard-core Republican Domers get to see Dubya at old Notre Dame.

 Posted by glenn at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

People Power

In the mid-1980s in the Phillippines, Corazon Aquino's "people power" revolution swept dictator Ferdinand Marcos out of power and into exile, despite a long history of U.S. support for Marcos. Now the same thing is happening in Lebanon, as hundreds of thousands of protestors in "martyr's square" yesterday forced the resignation of the Syrian-controlled president. Managing A Mideast Revolution [washingtonpost.com]. It's already been dubbed the "Cedar Revolution," for Lebanon's famous forests.

This is a great time to be a democrat (small "d"). Here's hoping that the Bush Administration lives up to the rhetoric from Dubya's second inaugural address and doesn't leave these democractic middle eastern revolutionaries twisting slowly in the wind like Bush senior did to the Kurds in March 1991, after encouraging them to revolt against Saddam Hussein.

 Posted by glenn at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

Long Time Coming

The story is a little old, but rings very true now after last week's contested vote by a Food & Drug Administration panel (replete with conflicts-of-interest and other scandals) to keep painkillers Vioxx and Celebrex on the market. FDA to Institute Drug Safety Board [L.A. Times.com]. Isn't this what they were supposed to have been doing all along, namely overseeing drug safety?

 Posted by glenn at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

Putin's Revenge

Our intrepid President is treking all over eastern Europe, former Soviet satellites, singing the song of democracy. That's wonderful, because the U.S. was nowhere in 1968, when Russian tanks rolled across Checkoslovakia, in 1980, when Lech Walesa was leading democratic revolutionaries in Warsaw, or in 1989, when students holding Statues of Liberty confronted Chinese government tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Of course, George W. has little bad to say about his "soul-mate" Valdimir Putin of Russia, even though the latter is doing everything he can to turn back the clock on democratic reform in that beleaguered nation. Even today's headlines on their joint press conference in Bratislava, Slovakia -- where Bush again referred to Putin as "my friend" -- reveal that Dubya has morphed the "criticize in private, praise in public" principle from corporate management, where it works well, to foreign relations, where it flatly contradicts his professed objectives. On the other hand, honest Russians (there's an oxymoron for you) admit that there's no American backing of Putin's autocratic putsch.

Nothing to Celebrate [MSNBC.com]. Perhaps true, but we don't do the image of the United States any favors by sharply criticizing Iran -- indeed, implying invasion plans -- while turning a blind eye to a leader who has basically abolished the legislature, continued a civil war and tried to disrupt free elections in another sovereign country. Yes, Moscow and Putin have suffered from terrorism, too. But that doesn't mean we should remain close allies.

 Posted by glenn at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)

You've Come a Long Way

The story was about a significant constitutional case concerning private property rights and eminent domain before the U.S. Supreme Court. But buried in the text was the observation that with the absence of Chief Justice Rehnquist due to illness and another Justice (Stevens) missing due to a travel snafu, that "created an opportunity for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the most senior remaining justice, to become the first woman to preside over an oral argument at the court."

The significance of this moment was its relative insignificance. Meaning that 20 some years after she became the first woman on the Supreme Court, O'Connor's assumption of the presiding role at the Court was not treated as anything extraordinary. That illustrates the extraordinary social changes wrought by the women's rights movement, which began with Betty Friedan and blossomed in the late 1970s. When I was in law school (1978-81), it was the first time that women made up nearly 50% of the student body. I remember celebrating Myra Bradwell Day, named after the first woman who was admitted to the bar as an American lawyer (after unsuccessfully appealing her initial denial to the U.S. Supreme Court) in 1870. Now it's no big deal to have female lawyers, women judges and even women presiding at the Supreme Court. The same Supreme Court, mind you, that wrote about Bradwell, "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many occupations of civil life....The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign office of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator."

Holy revolution, Batman! John Riggins, of Washgington Redskins fame, once drunkenly quipped to O'Connor "Loosen up, Sandy baby." I think it's more appropriate, now, to say -- like the old cigarette ad (or the newer Fatboy Slim CD) -- "Sandy, you've come a long way, baby."

 Posted by glenn at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

The Great Flip-Flopper

In a Newsweek opinion essay titled Hail to the Flip-Flopper, Fareed Zakaria writes that George W. Bush should be commended for not "staying the course" in Iraq.

Well Zakaria's right, of course. But it would be very helpful -- and certainly honest -- for the President to admit that the original Iraq war plan was a failure and that he's been forced to change his tune to accomodate reality on the ground. That's a sure sign of leadership. Pretending nothing's changed, when everything has, is just flip-flopping. Bush does it as good as any other cynical politician; his vaunted religious pieties and cowboy determination are all just for show.

 Posted by glenn at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

Brain Dead and Starving

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush of a decision overturning his efforts to force the husband of a comatose woman -- who has been in a vegitative state for 15 years -- to continue intravenous feeding. The Christian right has taken up the case of Terry Schiavo as a cause celeb, arguing that medical miracles cannot be discounted and that removing the feeding tube would be euthanasia -- murder.

What a stupid and tragic case in which to decide the rights of individuals to die. There's no dispute that this woman expressed a clear desire not to be a vegetable. There is also no question that is what she is today, unable to move any limbs, speak, respond, acknowledge vistors, register emotions, etc. Her husband, for God's sake, is the one who after 15 years wants to end her suffering, but her evangelist parents -- backed by the state -- want to take that decision away from him.

You know, the United States has prosecuted Christian Scientists for felonies when they refused medical care, on religious grounds, for children who needed emergency treatment. That's a classic instance of the right to life and the right to freedom of religion clashing. But it's been settled for decades that the right to life includes the right to end one's life -- at least by refusing "extraordinary measures" and imposing a "do not resusicate" requirement on doctors -- if done knowingly. That's what living wills ("advance medical directives") are all about.

Too bad that Terry Schiavo was not up-to-speed on that concept on Feb. 25, 1990, when a chemical imbalance possibly triggered by an eating disorder caused her heart to stop beating and cut off oxygen to her brain. She's been brain-dead ever since and is now a pawn of religious zealots trying to impose their own view of miracles on a (rightly) reluctant husband and court system.

 Posted by glenn at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

Ah, THAT Leftist Europe

If folks in the EU are so rabidly anti-American as conservatives like to claim, what's this all about? Germany Rejects Call for Rumsfeld War Crimes Probe [Yahoo!News.com]. Seems like solidarity rather than confrontation and support rather than criticism. Even now-Attorney General Gonzales was worried in 2002 about potential war crimes charges against the Administration. That was never politically possible even in "leftist" Europe, as Germany's actions demonstrate quite clearly.

 Posted by glenn at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

This is Torture?

Like many Americans, I was shocked and revolted by last Spring's revelations that detainees at the US-run prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq were subjected to attacks by dogs, naked human pyramids and other degradations. But this takes things too far, the wrong way. The Washington Post, in a front-page article titled Detainees Accuse Female Interrogators, reported yesterday that some detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba were "abused" because "women rubbed their bodies against the men, wore skimpy clothes in front of them, made sexually explicit remarks and touched them provocatively." That's not torture and it's not anything like the sort of brutality outlawed by the Geneva Convention (which the Administration refuses to apply to Iraq).

Now we all know that sexual values and mores in Muslim countries are more restrictive than in America and most Western democracies. But still, using sex to entice men to talk is the oldest game in the book of espionage. And any man, Muslim or not, who would complain that some women rubbed their bodies provocatively while wearing skimpy clothing is just out of his mind. (We can leave aside the 72 virgins that Muslim martyrs are supposed to receive in heaven -- what are they for if not sex?) I mean, this is something for which most men would LOVE to be on the receiving end. Reminds me more of the way in which the Army won the Iraq war in the first three weeks. They used bullhorns to announce loudly in contested areas that Iraqi men had small penises and could not satisfy their women. So the stupid Iraqi soildiers were so angry they stormed out of their foxholes and got machine-gunned to death instantly.

They can't have it both ways. Either Muslim men are defiantly proud of their sexual prowess, in which case provocative body rubbing by sexy girls should be no big deal, or they are sexually deficient, in which case the provocation here was as offensive as Ginger Lynn accosting a bunch of gay men. Whatever, but if this is torture, send me to Iraq!!

 Posted by glenn at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

Fair & Balanced?

Carl Frank at No Oil for Pacifists has, once again, used me as his whipping boy, this time suggesting that I am some sort of lefty pacifist who is opposed to the U.S. using military force against terrorists.

Frank says I wrote him that "I don't 'resent' Bush, I just think it's ironic that a war started to stop an imminent threat that turned out not to be imminent." NO! Carl has disingenuously ommitted the most important part of my emailed comment, without even including an elipses.... Here's what I actually wrote:

Anyone who could just edit out all the stuff after the first dash is obviously not interested in a balanced or fair discussion of the issue. And any conservative who doesn't face up to the fact that the present rationale for the Iraq war -- making Iraq safe for democracy and to save Iraqis from Saddam's oppression -- is an ultra-liberal, leftist justification (Wilsonian foreign policy at its worst) is either self-deluding or just hypocritical. Without WMDs, the only reason for this war is "human rights," Jimmy Carter's albatross. Running away from accountability while presenting a shifting, neo-Wilsonian idealization of a war that started as a way to disarm a dictator who was said to have nukes pointed at Jerusalem and dirty bombs ready for explosion in New York is worse flip-flopping even than the greatest flip-flopper of them all, John Kerry.

Lest one think this is just another liberal or elitist Democrat talking (I am neither by the way), here's what George F. Will -- certainly not a liberal, leftist or even a Democrat -- says:

Duh. Will characterized the Bush doctrine of democratic nation-building as "the stunningly anticonservative idea animating the administration's foreign policy." Bush won't say "human rights" because it would expose him as a foreign policy liberal. His inauguration address was straight from John Kennedy in 1961, i.e., "bear any burden, pay any price . . . to ensure the survival of liberty" around the world. And to make matters worse, the day after the inauguration, the Administration immediately backtracked, using anonymous "sources" to announce that the speech did not mean what it said, that America would not intervene militarily in other nations to free people from tyranny and oppression.

Bush wants it both ways and so does his lapdog Frank. But reality has a way of intruding on idealism, which is what we have here. There needs to be an asterisk after the inauguration speech's stirring rehtoric about defense of freedom and liberty, namely "unless your country has lots of oil (e.g., Saudi Arabia) or supports the U.S. in the war on terrorism (e.g., Russia, Pakistan)." The rest of the world has long thought that American foreign policy was hypocritical because for decades this country supported dictators and repressive regimes out of Kissingerian realpolitik concerns. That caused the Iranian revolution in 1978 which started the whole Shiite Muslim backlash against America and the West.

Now we're finally at least fighting one war on the side of the oppressed, but our government is still caught in the same hypocritical trap. Putin and Musharef are oppressive, anti-democratic depots -- no need even to mention the House of Saud -- yet we support them without even a word of criticism. Oppressed people in other nations will rightly look at this, once again, as cynical, in turn devaluaing American ideals and the strength of our foreign policy. As Jonathan Alter observed, calling the liberty justification "a suspiciously convenient, third-string rationale for war:"

Two more things. First, Frank implies that I am opposed to preemptive war and American unilateralism. Not true. As I blogged 18 months ago, well before the 2004 presidential race even really began, "Unilateralism is one thing -- something I most definitely can approve of -- but ginning up fake rationales is quite another." Second, Frank ends his ranting post with this admonition to me: "My recommendation, Glenn: courage" (which he links to a Wikipedia entry on Dan Rather, whom I have always detested). Well, that was also the name of Walter Cronkite's sailboat (his old one, before retirement). The same Cronkite, liberal and all, who by coming out against Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam war changed the course of history. And it's the heart of JFK's book Profiles in Courage, from another liberal Democrat. So yes, Carl, "courage" indeed. Like the president you admire so much, you too are a closet liberal.

Oh, and my 13-year old son says "Don't mess with my dad." He's bigger than you, Carl (in so many ways, including character), so watch out!

 Posted by glenn at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

Liberal Bias or Alzheimer's?

Conservatives and Republicans love to rant about the supposed "liberal bias" in America media. I think it's the opposite -- that the right has so intimidated journalists that they afraid to do real reporting and point out the obvious.

Take today's story in the Washington Post about the President's new budget, which includes a record $427 billion deficit. A big part of that is another $80 billion for the Iraq war, bringing the total from 2003-2005 to $277 billion. "That $80 billion would come on top of $25 billion already appropriated for the war this year, pushing the total cost of fighting to $105 billion, up from $88 billion in 2004 and $78.6 billion in 2003." Record '05 Deficit Forecast.

That's not so bad. What is astounding, however, is that nowhere in the news story or the commentary does the Post point out that in the 2004 election debates, Bush-Cheney excoriated the Kerry-Edwards ticket for saying that the war would cost "$200 million." VP Cheney roundly chastized Edwards on October 5, 2004:

Same thing in the last (October 13) presidential debate.

Well, the facts were NOT wrong. The United States spent $166.6 billion on the Iraq war in '03-'04 and is spending another $125 billion this year. That's way more than $200 billion, but no one in the "liberal" media has the cohones or gray matter to point it out. They're not biased liberals, they're forgetful cowards.

 Posted by glenn at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

Dove of Democracy

This photo of Ukraine's Victor Yushekno releasing a white dove as part of the celebration of his election as president -- and the "Orange Revolution" behind it -- is poignant and moving.

.

Now if only Russia and Vladimir Putin can keep their mitts off long enough to permit democracy to triumph over czarist despotisim, then the dove might actually signify something other than false hopes.

 Posted by glenn at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

Banana Republic

Last evening on ABC's World News Tonight, commentator George F. Will said that the unprecedented security surrounding the presidential inauguration made America "look like a banana republic worried about a restive tank regiment at the edge of town. It was unworthy of the occasion." (Too bad they don't post transcripts on the ABC Web site.) It is really scary not only what 9/11 has done to liberty in America, but also that Will and I (once again) agree.

 Posted by glenn at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

Police State Security

The media reports predicted that the security precautions for today's 55th presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. would be "unprecedented." Well, one had to be there -- as I was this morning and afternoon -- to appreciate what 9/11 and the like have done to America.

Whole sections of downtown were locked off, blocked by buses and guarded by SWAT teams with high-powered rifles. Iron barricades lined all of Pennsylvania Avenue, so spectators were crammed together into small cordoned-off areas, and police and military personnel formed a human barrier for 1 1/2 miles down the entire parade route. In the skies surveillance aircraft hovered constantly, riot police with billy clubs in hand were everywhere, snipers positioned on every rooftop and it seemed like every other person in the crowd had a Secret Service radio ear-piece. (The photo below -- click for the full-sized shot -- is the presidential motorcade passing by on its way back to the White House. Note the salutes from the sailors on the right and across the street at the Justice Department.) Unbelievable. And scary.

All of this contrasts sharply with Dubya's attempt at stirring rhetoric of freedom and liberty. I remarked months ago that 9/11 was making D.C. look like Beirut. Today it looked more like the "Green Zone" in Baghdad. The ideals of America and our Constitution are indeed a beacon of hope. But while most of the country and the world will see only the photo op of Bush walking, smiling and waving for 1/2 block in front of the White House, the reality is that this Administration is so spooked it is afraid of its own citizens. Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy are turning over in their graves. It's just hard to understand how a president can pretend to represent the people when he governs inside a fortress, walled off from those who wait hours in the cold just for a glance. We now have a president and a government of the FBI, by the Secret Service and for the military -- not the people.

So the question is, does Bush "put up" with this like Clinton, or does he really like the sterility of a capitol city and political culture in which the citizenry and its leaders are separated by guns, military squadrons and miles of barriers? I hope it is not the latter, but fear that's exactly what is going on here.

 Posted by glenn at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

Growing Into the Job

David Ignatius of the Washington Post, hardly a paragon of conservatism, says that George W. Bush has grown into his role as president. Bush's Next Test [washingtonpost.com].

I disagree strongly with a lot of his positions, but agree that Bush has indeed grown into the post over the past four years. Now if only, like the rest of us mere mortals, he could admit error from time to time.

 Posted by glenn at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

Comet-Blasting

So our NASA engineers have design a comet probe -- dubbed Deep Impact -- that will smash into the Comet Tempel 1 millions of miles away near Jupiter at about 23,000 miles an hour on July 4, snapping images until the last minute. The probe is designed to give researchers their closest look yet at a comet's surface and help decipher the origins of the universe, as comets are remnants of the beginnings of solar systems after the Big Bang. Comet-Blasting Mission is 'Go' for Launch [MSNBC.com].

But if that's the case, why can't our Pentagon engineers make a suborbital rocket that can hit an inbound nuclear missile? "Star Wars" for comets, but not people. Food for thought.

 Posted by glenn at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

Rooney's Ass

Fox is refusing to air a commercial on the SuperBowl in which octagenarian Mickey Rooney -- in an ad for an over-the-counter cold remedy -- briefly shows his ass while in a sauna. Fox says that its "standards and development department" concluded that the commercial should be "deemed inappropriate for broadcast television." But that euphamism does nothing to disguise the simple fact that Fox is afraid of the FCC's unprincipled "indecency" campaign that started a year ago with Janet Jackson's "nipplegate" affair. That a major national broadcast television network cannot distinguish a breast from buttocks and titilation from advertisement is a sad testament to the terribly coercive media self-censorship resulting from the lack of any predictability to the FCC's politically motivated enforcement policies.

 Posted by glenn at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

Look at His Face!

Ukraine's security service has denied any involvement in the dioxin poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, the country's top opposition leader and leading candidate in Sunday's rerun for the presidency. Meanwhile, Russia's Putin says that Ukraine will remain an "eternal" Russian ally. Of course, someone poisoned this democratic candidate, since he's the one threatening the cozy, repressive relationship between Ukraine and Russia. The whole affair is a sorry spectacle of reform gone bad, as the power oligarchs position themselves to return to dictatorship.

 Posted by glenn at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

Gay Marriage Without Dissent

Today the U.S. Supreme Court -- without any dissent, even from the most conservative justices -- refused to accept review of the Massachusetts decision requiring state officials there to recognize same-sex marriage. Although Supreme Court decisions in such certiorari proceedings are not precedential, it seems to me that this pretty much puts a nail into the coffin about whether the Court thinks the equal protection argument advanced in favor of gay marriage is invalid.

Just as the Court reached out in 2000 to decide Bush v. Gore, because it wanted to end the Florida recount, it could have done so with this case even though Massachusetts decided on state consitutional grounds. As the Court recognized in 2000:

That same logic would obviously work to federalize same-sex marriage as a constitutional issue. But the Supremes said no, meaning there are still (believe it or not) some political questions in which the Court wants to avoid meddling. Glory be, a real conservative decision from a Supreme Court that is in actuality as activist as they come.

 Posted by glenn at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

What Is a Conservative?

Carl Frank, blogging under the pseudonym No Oil for Pacifists, says that liberals are "unable to understand" conservatives. Liberals "view Pat Buchanan as 'pillar' of the right rather than a pro-union, almost leftist, nativist," Frank opines.

This is just hogwash. First, smart liberals understand conservatives all too well; they just loathe them and yet cannot match their pragmatic, unprincipled approach to electoral politics. Second, Pat Buchanan -- he of the "culture war" in America -- is plainly even more conservative than most conservatives on the "moral values" questions that have dominated post-election debate in the U.S. Third, in 2000 Buchanan attacked George W. Bush, in a Blue Book his campaign published, arguing that Dubya was a closet liberal on such issues as abortion, muiltilateralism, and the like.

Indeed, just a glance at Buchanan's new book, titled Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, is enough to show that he's way to the right of the folks in the White House today. To say that Buchanan is "almost leftist" is precisely what Frank insists the left does -- "abandon[ing] politics and morality. They're just a sick and sinister mob." Take your own medicine, Carl.

Update: I've turned off HTML entries in comments on this blog, so you can read Carl's responses at Letter to Blogger Turning Blue and You Can Have Him. And I view this characterization as the ultimate compliment a conservative can laud on one who does not share their politicial religiosity -- "Glenn's no far-left extremist." Backhanded, but I'll take it. Thanks, Carl!

 Posted by glenn at 04:56 PM | Comments (2)

The Dead Kennedys

The folks at JFK Reloaded say their new PC game takes as a given that the Warren Commission's conclusion was right -- that the shots killing John F. Kennedy in November 1963 all came from the Texas School Book Depository building. Kennedy Assassination Re-Created in Video Game [CNN.com]. I don't think that's correct. When millions of players, like the CBS re-enactment in 1966, can't reproduce the supposed three shots, they'll have a little better appreciation for Oswad's repeated insistence that he was "just a patsy."

 Posted by glenn at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

The War Room

"Inside the Bush re-election 'Strategery Room' (named after a famous Bush malapropism), a sign above the door read: IT'S THE HYPOCRISY, STUPID, a reference to Mr. Kerry's constantly shifting positions" [timesonline.co.uk].

Cute, but turn-around is fair play. Enigmas get beaten, especially when they pull their punches and don't counter-attack. Kerry forgot the lesson of the Clinton '92 election, repeated the mistakes of Mike Dukakis in '88, and never learned the wisdom of running from the center. Johnny, we hardly knew 'ye -- or maybe the country knew all too well.

 Posted by glenn at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

The End of Arafat

One cannot begrudge Palestinians their desire to form a homeland state, but the demise of Yassar Arafat will be a welcome change. Arafat Hovers Between Life, Death in Coma. Arafat has single-handedly obstructed opportunities for Middle East peace for 20 years and is the force most responsible for terrorism, suicide bombings and related civilian atrocities in Israel. Good riddance.

 Posted by glenn at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)

Reliving the '60s

I've been convinced for a while that the neocons who dreamed up what has turned into a fiasco in Iraq -- Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice and that entire crowd -- really want to refight the Vietnam War and the counterculture of the 1960s. Well, they lost then and simply can't turn back the clock. While Hugh Hewitt of the Weekly Standard essentially concedes that the real fight in this election was about the '60s, his contention that Kerry's defeat "ends" the '60s is just whacko.

The End of the Sixties. Sorry, Hugh. The '60s ended with Watergate and Nixon's resignation. Those "mistakes" of 1974 and 1975 were the very victory of the left that you still can't accept. The mistakes made then were by the establishment, not the anti-war movement. The counterculture won and Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rice missed out. They never grew their hair long, supported one president (Nixon) who broke the constitution and another (Ford) who couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time, and now are doing it again.

So for 150,000 votes in a few counties in Ohio we've got to put up with this pious, contemptuous revisiontist history? Bullshit! To all those conservatives who still refuse to admit defeat in the '60s, I say get over it. You won Tuesday, fair and square, but only Chairman Mao could change history. America ain't Red China and thank God for that!!

 Posted by glenn at 02:39 PM | Comments (1)

Spinning the Ground War

The conservative take on Tuesday's election is based on the poular vote returns for President Bush. Like this argument from the Wall Street Journal's blog, OpinionJournal:

Yes, but it is equally true that more people voted against Bush than had ever voted against a sitting president in American history. And Kerry's 55.6 million votes were also "the most ever for a presidential candidate" and about four million more than had voted for Al Gore in 2000. So the glass is both half full and half empty.

 Posted by glenn at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

Dirty Dean Dozen

Apparently the most important character trait for being a politician is having the ability to look into the camera (or in this case, the blog) and lie through your teeth. Howard Dean's Democracy for America blog this afternoon carried a statement saying:

Ah, Howard, the Dems got trounced for the exact reasons you said in November they would. If there's a choice between two Republicans, this country goes for the real one every time. That was true even during the "liberal" years of Adlai Stevenson (i.e., President Eisenhower). And in my own backyard -- where Kerry carried Fairfax County, VA by 53%-47% -- the Democratic congressional candidate lost to a hugely unpopular incumbent by a whopping 64%-36%. That's not even a dent into the traditional incumbent winning margin and was almost the largest losing margin in the entire state.

Nothing has changed. Democractic politics are as bankrupt of ideas and principles as ever. One cannot lead this vast and diverse country just by being against things. Kerry and the Democratic ticket only made the case for why Bush was flawed, but provided little or no positive reasons to vote for them. They got exactly what they deserved.

Even worse, they won't even fight about it. Kerry's pablum position that he was conceding to "bring the country together" is hogwash. We're about to enter into a real culture war in America -- not the trumped-up one Pat Buchanan warned of in 1992 -- and it's not going to be pretty. So Kerry won't fight, while Bush is coming out swinging. Deja vue all over again.

 Posted by glenn at 06:23 PM | Comments (0)

Four Dead in Ohio

Although readers of this blog know I am not enamored of either George W. Bush or John Kerry, last night's oddessy -- and the continued uncertainty of the electoral college resuilts -- kept me awake until the wee hour of 5:00 a.m. But regardless of who wins, nothing much seems to have changed. Indeed, because Dubya won the nationwide popular vote by about 3%, Republicans are now claiming a "mandate" for the President.

Bush was elected in 2000 by campaigning from the center ("compassionate conservative") but governed from the right. Seems like he's even more convinced to do so again, judging from what the Rs are saying on FoxNews and in other friendly forums. Todd Purdum gets it just right in this news analysis. President Seems Poised to Claim a New Mandate [NYTimes.com]:

Meanwhile, as Rudy Giuliani and other major Republican figures insisted this morning that Kerry could not possibly pulll out Ohio, the Republican secretary of state there was a refreshing paradigm of nonpartisan statesmanship. J. Kenneth Blackwell said that Ohio law requires all "provisional" ballots to be counted 11 days after the election, and that's what should and would be done. The mantra he repeated on all the TV networks at 3:00 a.m. was that "everybody should take a deep breath and relax." Provisional Ballots Could Decide Election [Cincinnati Enquirer]. "What we're going to give you is a solid tabulation when we give it to you ... if it takes two hours, two days, or two weeks, the result we give you will be a good result that the voters of the state of Ohio can have confidence in," Blackwell calmly said.

Amen. A courageous man and someone who puts citizenship above partisanship. The election may be all over except for the counting, but the counting is what it's all about. Even though Kerry has almost surely lost, the efforts to force him to concede based on statistical probabilities are unseemly. We should all follow Blackwell's advice and relax.

 Posted by glenn at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

Long Live the Digital Divide

This has been a long-standing pet peeve of mine about telecom regulation. Home Tech Study Reveals "Digital Divide," But Not Necessarily The One You'd Think It Is [MediaDailyNews].

So, we know that the government does not subsidize VCRs, yet in 20 years they have penetrated to 95% of the marketplace. Every welfare mom (and this I know from persoal experience representing formerly homeless families) has one. On the other hand, America has subsidized POTS (regular telephone service) to low-income and rural users for 70 years and we're still at 94% penetration -- and falling. Now we find that the poor are actually earlier adopters of some communications technologies, like cell phones, without any subsidies. So I say it's time to abandon the "universal service" shibboleth and let the market work. If it's good enough for VCRs, it's good enough for telephones and computers, too.

 Posted by glenn at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)

They've Got Better Hair

One of the really distinguishing differences between the Republican and Democratic tickets in this year's presidential election is hair. The Ds have it; the President and Veep Cheney don't. Indeed, John Kerry boasted in July in Dayton, Ohio that "This is the dream team. We have better ideas, better vision, a better sense of the difficulties in the lives of average Americans. . . . And we have better hair.''

Of course, as JFK quipped on that fateful morning in Dallas 40 years ago, it takes a long time for girls to get ready for public appearances, but when they do, they're stunning. This video of John Edwards working on his hair at this Slate link is hilarious. The Silence of the Domes [Slate.msn.com]. A makeup technician approaches with a comb, but the Edwards likes it just so and does the combing himself. He signals he's ready for hair spray by closing his eyes expectantly, like a child. Please don't tell me that thing in his hand is a compact. Oh, dear, it is.

Laura Bush thinks Edwards is "pretty cute," but I bet she hasn't seen his behind-the-scenes preparations on video!

 Posted by glenn at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

Pablum Politics

I generally detest George Will, politically and for his obsession with baseball, but he can be surprising. A Lethal Idea Still Lives [MSNBC].

So here we are, in the final stretch of the campign, post-debates, and prominent Reagan-era conservatives have had it both with George Bush and with the pablum dished out in American politics today. Will says that more forces were and are needed in Iraq if the task can hope to be accomplished. "How do the administration's nation-builders think elections are going to be held in this maelstrom." Yet he correctly observes that:

According to WIll, Kerry "seems incapable of mounting what the nation needs -- a root-and-branch critique of the stunningly anticonservative idea animating the administration's policy." This is scary. Not just because there are so many people in our politically polarized country who like Stepford citizens are hypnotized by the caricatures of policy presented by the candidates, but also that Will and I agree -- a pox on both their houses.

Neither the Democrats nor Republicans have any integrity on the most fundamental issues facing the country, So we're stuck either with a second Bush term in which arrogant idealogs run amok with our foreign policy, making the United States more hated in the world than at any time since "The Ugly American," or a Kerry administration that has over-promised and lacks the courage to execute the dramatic policy reversals necessary to extricate America from the quagmire of Iraq and smash terrorism, rather than catalyze it. This is not a choice, it's a tragedy.

 Posted by glenn at 02:57 AM | Comments (0)

Shock Jocks and Free Speech

"When Howard Stern is the nation's leading defender of the First Amendment, you know something has gone horribly wrong." That's what Brian Chin says about the FCC's indecency rules in arguing that the agency has outlived his usefulness. Buzzworthy: Fadeout for FCC? [seattlepi.com].

Well, he's right and he's wrong. What is horribly wrong is that the FCC's indecency campaign is a transparently political effort to legislate morality on a steadily declining segment -- broadcasting -- of the media market. Hence Stern's move to the satellite-radio provider Sirius to escape government censorhip. But what is perfectly right is that it has always been folks like Stern -- and Lenny Bruce and many others before him -- who pushed the envelope of political speech.

Civil liberties in America exist to protect everyone, but it is only a few bold people among us, sometimes vulgar, who actually have the nerve to test the limits of the First Amendment. America has relied on the Howard Sterns of this world for more than two centuries to maintain the principles of free speech. Like him or not, his battle with the FCC is a classic paradigm of civil liberties. Nothing wrong with that at all. It's precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

 Posted by glenn at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

We Don't Need No WMDs

Well this just proves not only that the Bush Administration never accepts responsibility for its mistakes, but refuses even to acknowledge when it screws up. Bush, Cheney Concede Saddam Had No WMDs [YahooNews.com]. As I've blogged previously, without weapons of mass destruction, the only reason to go to war in Iraq was to topple Saddam Hussein because he was a tyrant -- to protect the human rights of Iraquis. That's the most liberal rationale for war imaginable, even if the whole notion of "nation building" (which is what the United States is indeed engaged in in Iraq these days) had not been so firmly rejected by George W. before the 2000 elections.

The President likes to say that "9/11 shanged everything." Yes, it did. But one thing it did not change is that using American military power to build democracy in the Third World is both quixotic and short-sighted. Liberty is only gained by revolution. Revolution has to come from within, not abroad. If the American Revolution were to have been imposed by the French -- George Washington's ally during the Reolutionary War -- there would be no America today. One only says "give me liberty or give me death" if one is fighting for one's own liberty. Foreigners cannot create liberty at the point of a gun.

 Posted by glenn at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

Politics is a Dirty Game

You know you're either getting old, or just have worked too long "inside the Beltway," when your friends are forced to resign in a political scandal. Phone Group Head Resigns After Uproar [washingtonpost.com]. This is a first for me. Maybe time to reconsider priorities.

Disclosure: I have represented ALTS, the trade group in question, in the past but had nothing to do with this fiasco.

 Posted by glenn at 07:18 PM | Comments (0)

The Great Debate

I am not going to wade into the raging debate over the first Presidential Debate of 2004 last night, but it is illuminating that even my 13-year old son thought President Bush sounded "lame" when protesting that John Kerry forgot about Poland as part of the "coalition" fighting in Iraq. This is going to make some great late-night TV fodder.

 Posted by glenn at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

The Costs of War

For years near Madison Square Garden in New York there was a large, digital billboard showing the size (increasing) of America's national debt. Now the liberal Center for American Progress has done the same thing for the War in Iraq, with an Internet billboard showing the costs of the war, dubbed "Project Billboard." It's well worth a look. As of this post, $140.7 billion and rising. (They've put up a real-world billboard in Times Square, but it sadly doesn't have the digital cost figures.)

 Posted by glenn at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)

Howard Dean Reprise

If John McCain can do campaign appearances for George Dubya Bush and not be a hypocrite, then I guess Howard Dean can campaign for John Kerry. That's what he did on Wednesday evening in D.C. at an event I attended. Lots of boring political rhetoric, very green/lefty folks in Bierkenstocks, and a little bit of sharp political calculus from Dr. Dean. And with 300 people jammed into one small bar, it was hot as Hell, too. (My wife and I are standing near the flag....but we're not visible.)

 Posted by glenn at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)

Costly Nipple

It's bullshit, of course, but today the FCC levied a fine on CBS and its owned-and-operated stations of $550,000 for the Janet Jackson "nipplegate" affair during the Super Bowl. TV Stations Fined for Janet Jackson Breast Flash [Reuters.com]. (You can see the not-very-indecent photo here.) So if one breast is worth half a million, how much would a Full Monty of Miss Janet cost? With her hot new bod, it's most likely very expensive -- but well worth the price.

 Posted by glenn at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

Hold Them Accounable

I have blogged frequently on the lack of responsibility and accountability in American politcs today and its application to the Bush Administration's approach to the War on Terrorism -- more specifically the Administration's rather inept handling of the post-invasion occupation and nation-building in Iraq and the defensive, obfuscating, equivocating and evasive response to the 9/11 Commission. Here's a site that captures and develops a lot more of these thoughts, from a partisan perspective by The Fight Back Campaign, Inc. at HoldThemAccountable2004.org.

Now I would like to ask Lee at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast and Carl from No Oil For Pacifists -- both of whom I read, link and generally (well, maybe grudingly) respct -- to explain why these are not legitimate questions and why Dubya is runnning far away from them. That Kerry is a flip-flopper who idiotically has not counter-attacked with the same claims for Bush is not an answer, by the way. But it is hypocritical for Bush to maintain that he has been consistent or thoughtful in his Iraq policy and that "standing tall" merits relection. Real leaders accept responsbility, especially for errors, instead of painting a rose-colored indifference to reality in sound bite rhetoric. George W. wouldn't -- or worse, perhaps couldn't -- even answer a question about whether he would concede "any mistakes" at his one and only news conferece on the subject.

 Posted by glenn at 03:43 AM | Comments (1)

21st Century Foxes

By a lopsided vote of 356 to 166, the British House of Commons today decided to outlaw the centuries-old tradition of fox hunting in the UK. Tally-No to Fox Hunting [IHT.com]. The vote followed an emotional debate between supporters, who called fox hunting barbaric, elitist and hopelessly outmoded, and opponents who accused the government of intruding on people's civil liberties and trampling on their rural way of life.

Well I for one think this is just stupid. It's not like foxes are an endangered species. I am not a hunter, but it is indisputable that hunting is mankind's principal occupation -- that which distinguished us from the apes and led to all of human evolution -- so what's the difference between hunting deer with high-powered rifles and hunting foxes with dogs? (None, actually, and so the British IFAW animal welfare group crows about polls showing that 76% of people said they wanted hunting with dogs to be banned and 82% said deer hunting should also be illegal.) Societies everywhere raise domesticated animals (cattle, sheep, etc.) solely for the purposes of killing and eating them. Isn't it just as barbaric to raise animals that are destined never to live and only to be slaughtered, in cold blood, so human beings can eat? At least the foxes have a sporting chance, which is more than one can say for cows.

Meanwhile, the whole controversy has spawned threats of civil disobedience by hunters, security breaches by protesters in Parliment, and a looming constitutional crisis -- since the House of Lords has repeatedly rejected bans on fox hunting. As Frank Furedi of spiked.com puts it well:

 Posted by glenn at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

Russian Democrat or Autocrat?

Today the Christian Science Monitor's lead editorial, titled Back To The USSR, cautions that "Vladimir Putin's announced changes to better secure Russia in the wake of the Beslan hostage tragedy work more to secure his own power than his country." Well, nothing new here, except the sophistry that Putin is a democrat (small "d").

Fact is that this is an ex-KGB fellow who longs for the good old days of the Politburo, has had his political opponents kidnapped and executed, and otherwise sought to subvert direct presidential and legislative elections in Russia. So the sad irony is that Mikhael Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin -- both graduates of the hard-line Soviet school -- were better democrats in the old USSR than the only democratically elected president in the new Russian Federation. As Yeltsin prophectically said in 1995, "We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it."

Putin came to power on a specific pledge to destroy the power of the "oligarch," the mafia gangs that control most Russian business. Yet four years later, behind the smooth facade of a president firmly in control, oligarchs, obstinate regional leaders and corrupt ministers still obstruct efforts at modernization and reform. Now Putin is reversing course on the democratic reforms, first unleashed when Yeltsin stood on that tank in front of the Kremlin in 1991, by which he took power in the first place. Much more like Lenin than Lennon. National Public Radio asks whether Putin is "using incidents of terrorism as a pretext to finish what his opponents say has long been his plan, to become a dictator even as he claims Russia is building a new democracy?" The answer is obvious.

 Posted by glenn at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

Guns Don't Kill Elections, People Do

Flip-flopping twice in seven days, democratic presidential candidate John Kerry this week proudly held up a deer-hunting rifle in Western Pennsylvania and than lit into President Bush for not extending the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons. Kerry Says al Qaeda Benefits from Bush's Gun Ban Stance [SFGate.com].

This is way over the top. It was box cutters, you fool!! Automatic rilfes have little if anything to do with terrorism and nothing at all to do wth al Qaeda's attacks on 9/11, in Madrid and the like. Vulnerability of domestic police forces to drug-gang violence, yes. But the jihadists use suicide bombers, IEDs and the like. It's the sure sign of a dying campaign when its leader -- who ignores the real political and international defects of Bush's terorism policies -- is reduced to making such a transparently idiotic and pandering charge. No wonder that Bush is trouncing Kerrry 56-29 in polls for "taking a clear stand on the issues."

 Posted by glenn at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

Accounting for Abuse

I've posted previously on the subject of the lack of accountability and responsibility in American politics in general and relative to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in particular. Today's New York Times editorial, No Accountability on Abu Ghraib, gets it precisely right. "After months of Senate hearings and eight Pentagon investigations, it is obvious that the administration does not intend to hold any high-ranking official accountable for the nightmare at Abu Ghraib."

Donald Rumsfeld today defended the military's actions, despite internal investigations laying the blame suarely on his shoulders, by asking "Does it rank up there with chopping off someone's head off on television? It doesn't." This is correct but just dumb, internationally devastating and a farce. And unfortunately par for the course from these Bushie bozos.

 Posted by glenn at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

Good for the Goose

The Bush campaign, in concert with the self-titled "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," started the sordid debate now raging over the presidential candidates' respective military service -- or lack thereof -- during the Vietnam War 30 years ago. But today the tables were turned, with new Freedom of Information Act requests resulting in the tardy release of Pentagon documents suggesting that Dubya did not report for duty to the Alabama National Guard, failed to take a required physical, and used political pressure to get into and stay in the Guard, thus avoiding the draft. Memos Say Bush Was AWOL While Vietnam War was Waged [Independent.co.uk].

Kerry never counter-attacked, but Bush can't complain, since his own supporters initiated this unseemly war of innuendos. You can't have it both ways. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

 Posted by glenn at 07:13 PM | Comments (1)

Lucky Man

This is the lead to an article in Xinhuanet, a Chinese online publication from the Xinhua News Agency, the official state and worldwide news agency in China.

Probably the most sympathetic, informative and human coverage of this story in any media outlet. This heart disease stuff really can and does strike without warning. Bill is indeed a lucky man. And even communists have a sense of humanity from time to time. Maybe it's the flip-side of their political cult of personality, but they do care about people in a way that the mercenaries in U.S. media don't. Most media here just wondered whether Clinton's recuperation and inability to campaign for John Kerry woud change the presidential elections. But wonder of wonders, even Dick Cheney has a heart.

 Posted by glenn at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

Straight Talk Express

"Straight Talk Express" was the name of John McCain's campaign bus during the 2000 Republican primaries. He's known as a straight-shooter. And now McCain has proved it again.

When asked this week on CNN how long the U.S. military is likely to remain in Iraq, Senator McCain replied "probably" 10 or 20 years. "That's not so bad," he said, adding, "We've been in Korea for 50 years. We've been in West Germany for 50 years." Heads in the Sand [NYTimes.com].

I don't agree that 10-20 years in Iraq is a good thing, but McCain's continually refreshing candor certainly is.

 Posted by glenn at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

A Vulnerable President

John F. Harris and Mike Allen of the Washington Post ask:

Series of Misjudgments Cost President His Lead. It's a good question. They say its because Bush is running on the War in Iraq and is perceived to be more partisan than presidential. I think it's because folks are figuring out he's as much an opportunist as any other politician -- for instance, resisting the 9/11 Commission and then refusing its recommendations until suddenly reversing himself.

But in this election, I still believe that in a choice between two flip-floppers, the electorate will "dance with the one that brung 'em." Kerry is much more of a chameleon than Bush, and despite anger at Bush he won't translate that into a winning margin unless he makes a stand on principle. Unlikely, but sadly not unexpected.

 Posted by glenn at 09:06 PM | Comments (0)

The Buck Stops At the Top

The Bush Administration has long claimed that the embarassing and internationally harmful abuse of detainees in Iraq by the U.S. Army resulted from a few low-level and over-enthusiastic enlisted personnel. But Long Island's Newsday, hardly a bastion of liberalism, editorialized today about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, laying out the case for why the Bushies are just plain wrong.

Bush set the stage for abuse in February 2002 when he declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al Qaeda prisoners and the Taliban were unlawful combatants unqualified for prisoner of war status. "When the man at the top says the rules don't apply, abusive excesses are a predictable result," says Newsday. The conclusion is unremarkable. What is striking is that, once again, no one in the White House or the Pentagon will admit to mistakes or accept responsibility.

In other cultures, government officials would have resigned immediately, perhaps even comitted hari kari. But not in the Bush Administration. No nothing, hear nothing, see nothing for these leaders. Rumsfeld even denies that there were any abuses during interrogations. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution concludes that "Rumsfeld refuses to admit it, but the horrors of Abu Ghraib lead right back to his doorstep." The guy's funny, but he's got to go.

 Posted by glenn at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

The Truth About Swift Boats

Earlier this week, outspoken Sen. John McCain, who lost the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush, blasted the ad campaign run by the self-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, saying he is "sick and ti