Not Quite
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd usually hits on interesting issues and raises thought-provoking questions, but her conclusions are always off. In her latest, she quotes a sports columnist writing about American Olympic atheletes: "Somehow, intimidating others is motivating to them." Then, she attempts to tie this in with American foreign policy.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld thought they could change the American identity by invading Iraq, that they could toughen up our 'tude and remove the lingering post-Vietnam skittishness about force and the "blame America first" psychology.

They thought our shock-and-awe war would change America's image, adding some muscularity that would make Arab foes cower and the world bow down to the U.S. as an unassailable hyperpower.

This is no doubt an ancillary effect, but notice how she fails to mention 911. In his regular column, Fareed Zakaria hits on the more practical, material, real-world choice involved in the decision to liberate Iraq:

By the late 1990s, American policy on Iraq was becoming untenable. The U.N. sanctions had turned into a farce. Saddam was able to siphon off billions for himself, while the sanctions threw tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis into poverty every year. Their misery was broadcast daily across the Arab world, inflaming public opinion. America and Britain were bombing Iraqi military installations weekly and maintaining a large garrison in Saudi Arabia, which was also breeding trouble. Osama bin Laden's biggest charges against the United States were that it was occupying Saudi Arabia and starving the Iraqi people.

Given these realities, the United States had a choice. It could either drop all sanctions and the containment of Iraq and welcome Saddam back into the world community. Or it had to hold him to account. Given what we knew about Saddam's past (his repeated attacks on his neighbors, the gassing of the Kurds, the search for nuclear weapons) and given what we thought we knew at the time (that his search for WMD was active), conciliation looked like wishful thinking. It still does. Once out of his box, Saddam would almost certainly have jump--started his programs and ambitions.

Democrats, from President Clinton to candidate Kerry, all agree with this. Its disingenuous for partisan liberals to deny it.

Granted, Dowd no doubt agrees with Zakaria that the choice made was executed poorly to say the least, given the US's resources. But it is just more disingenuousness to complain:

Iraq is making us wring our hands over whether to blast our way into Najaf and Falluja, quavering with uncharacteristic sensitivity even as the White House fires verbal mortars at the domestic enemy, John Kerry, for suggesting that we be more sensitive.

Does she want us to behave as Russia did in Chechnya and engage in a scorched earth policy? There's sensitivity and then there's sensitivity.

The new Pew Research Center poll finds the country ever more divided. "The public takes a paradoxical view of America's place in the world," the poll reports, with 45 percent of Americans saying the U.S. plays a more important and powerful role as world leader than it did 10 years ago, and 67 percent saying the U.S. is less respected.

The president who promised a humble foreign policy ended up with a foreign policy inflated by hubris - which is, after all, a Greek idea.

Perhaps the U.S. is playing a more important role as world leader - we are the only superpower - *and* is less respected. Furthermore, the loss of respect could be undeserved or deserved. Why is this a paradox?

In 2000, Bush also promised not to engage in nation-building, nor to halt Rwandan-style genocides. Here, he was playing to his provincial, conservative isolationist base, but 911 demonstrated what a hubristic, naive philosophy that base holds.

Invisible Hand Gives Invisible Middle Finger to the Unfortunate

ORLANDO, Fla., Aug. 17 - Greg Lawrence talks about the $10 bag of ice. Kenneth Kleppach says he was clipped for nearly three times the advertised price for a hotel room. And a man with a chain saw told Jerry Olmstead that he could clear the oak tree off his roof, but it would cost $10,500.

So much for a friendly, helping hand in a time of crisis. Since the winds of Hurricane Charley subsided, officials say a wave of price gouging has swept across central and southwest Florida, putting law enforcement officials into high gear and infuriating storm victims already faced with damaged homes, shuttered workplaces and long lines for basic commodities.

"Why do people try to capitalize on other people's hardship and misery," Mr. Olmstead asked as he fumed over the tree removal. "Of course it angers me. They see an opportunity and, fine, if you want to make a little money. But there's a limit. This is ludicrous."

Charlie Crist, Florida's attorney general, said Tuesday afternoon that he had received more than 1,400 complaints of overcharging from throughout the disaster area. This morning he filed formal complaints against the Crossroads Motor Lodge in Lakeland and the Days Inn Airport Hotel in West Palm Beach, accusing them of price gouging and deceptive business practices.

This past weekend I turned 34 and celebrated Thursday, Friday and Saturday with Gen Y A.(we're sort of together again). Sunday was a day of recovery and sloth, culminating in a viewing of Under the Tuscan Sun which stars Diane Lane. The movie was surprisingly good given the plot and premise, mostly because of the intelligent, charming Lane. Her character hires some Polish laborers to fix up a Tuscan house she purchased and one of them gives her a book by Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz who coincidently died on Saturday.

When Communism was smashed in Poland, Mr. Milosz returned to what he called "the country of my first immigration." Arriving in Warsaw after an absence of three decades, he received a hero's welcome. Mr. Milosz was regarded as one of the world's literary immortals. When he chose, he walked and talked with the great men of his time, but he remained humble.

I once had the pleasure of seeing him read in college. He had some great lines, like in his poem No Way Out where he says Irony is the "glory of slaves."

The always interesting but rather sedate Josh Micah Marshall is getting a kick out of Alan Keyes, the Republican candidate for the open Illinois senate seat. He posts about him almost every day.

For those who are unfamiliar with Keyes, here's Peter Bagge's report on him from the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.

Keyes is one of those politicians who enjoys engaging in hyperbole and must drive the professional political consultants batty. For instance, in an unusual pitch to Illinois's apathatic non-voters, Keyes argued US Senate candidates shouldn't be directly elected.

Tucker Carlson had Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox on his show when they were both covering the Democrats' convention.

I'll never forget how Carlson reported that candidate Bush mocked Karla Fay Tucker, the Christian fundamentalist who was on Texas's death row at the time. Bush impersonated her saying "Please don't kill me" which Carlson found odd.

In his latest collection, he has a good piece on Dick Morris's fall from grace. Morris was caught with a prostitute and actually had a phone conversation with President Clinton while the hooker sucked his toes, according to her.

Christopher Buckley wrote a perceptive take on the Democratic convention.

On Tuesday night there was the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, on the podium saying - I wrote it down - "Americans aren't asking for special deals from Washington!" That giant snorting sound you heard was a year's worth of California chardonnay being expelled from the nasal passages of 15,000 K Street lobbyists.

He's predicting the Republicans will put on doozy of a show, too.

For the Red Team next month, I see a darkened Madison Square Garden. On the huge screen above the stage, dramatic images of American tanks roaring into Baghdad, the speakers suddenly booming Queen's "We Will Rock You!"

The Atlantic Monthly has an interview with him.

(via Bookslut)

21st Century Franz Ferdinand
In his Op-Ed, Jeffrey Goldberg reports Israel's extreme right wing are openly discussing their desire to kill Ariel Sharon.

Avi Dichter, the chief of the Israeli internal security service, has been for months running around - to borrow a phrase from George Tenet - with his hair on fire over the threat. He has warned of the potential for attacks against the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque, on the Temple Mount; such a strike, he said, would set off global war between Muslim and Jew - a goal the radical yeshivas of the West Bank share with Al Qaeda.

Here are some letters to the editor about the piece.

Scotland's Franz Ferdinand will be touring the States in September.

Amy Poehler, comic genius, was on Celebrity Poker. She's silly cubed.

The Group of 20 extracts concessions from the "Capitalist Center"

Do I detect a change of direction in the winds? Ever since the Battle of Seattle, respectable opinion has focused on American, European, and Japanese agricultural subsidies - to a tune of $300 billion a year - as the great injustice of the global economic system. Almost 5 years later, the poor nations of the world, led by Brazil, China and India, have convinced the US and EU to confront their powerful agriculture lobbies.

Although the proposed deal would only create a framework for further talks, it would for the first time commit the European Union to eliminating its controversial farm export subsidies

and

The United States yielded to pressure from developing countries on Friday and agreed to make a 20 percent cut in some of the $19 billion in subsidies it pays to American farmers each year.

This during an election year, no less.

Not everyone was satisfied with the concessions. A delegate from the Dominican Republic said the proposed framework agreement was still a betrayal of developing countries. And Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam International in Geneva, said that the rich countries could create new subsidies by using loopholes in the agreement.

Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, the Dutch economy minister and chairman of a delegation of ministers from the European Union, disagreed. He argued that the proposed agreement reflected the growing muscle of the developing world, especially of countries like Brazil, China and India.

"The world has changed; we now live in a truly global world,'' he said, adding that these developing nations had changed the geopolitical boundaries of the talks and forced the new agreement.

I thought the Bush administration was chronically unilateralist. What gives? Even the hated WTO is impinging on our beloved rogue state's sovereignty:

Since the failure of the talks in Cancún, the United States lost a case brought by Brazil that challenged its cotton subsidies as illegal. That case, before the World Trade Organization's dispute body, could force the United States to lower its cotton subsidies even without these negotiations.

The trade talks aren't a done deal, however.

But talks could run aground on such issues as how much Japan can protect its rice or Norway its dairy products. Celso Amorim, the top trade negotiator for Brazil and an important negotiator here, said there were still several disputes to be resolved.

If the talks succeed, they are expected to lead to as much as a $3 trillion gain in the world economy.

Oh, is that all?

"... rallying a nation of television viewers to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy!"

Hard to believe I was unfamiliar with this line from the orginal Manchurian Candidate until I came across it reading about the remake. It has a little more "umph" now that government officials regularly predict another atrocity on US soil before the Presidential election.

What always struck me about the original was the brainwashing sequences in the Soviet/Chinese military hospital. The white, brainwashed American soldier saw a room full of white women in place of the Chinese and Soviet brass, whereas the black soldier saw a room full of black women.

This reminded me of the Xenophanes quote about religion:

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves.

A film about Che Guevara is in development. Steven Soderbergh will direct and Benicio Del Toro is rumored to be playing Guevara, which gives me chills. Remember Del Toro's Academy Award winning performance as a Mexican cop in Traffic? He was also memorably intense in China Moon and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Not to mention 21 Grams.

The excellent actor Javier Bardem will also be in the cast. He starred in the wonderful films The Dancer Upstairs and Before Night Falls.

Mass Delusion

Francis Wheen has a new book out titled How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World.  He wrote a fascinating and entertaining biography of that great debunker and theoretician Karl Marx, so I'd be surprised if his new one isn't wonderful as well. Recently, the Guardian published his list of Top Ten Modern Delusions.

Julian Sanchez interviews Martha Nussbaum

oh well

For those keeping track, my relationship with "Generation Y gal" A. didn't work out. Must have been my mild case of Lackadasia.

Looking back, the past three months do seem like one of those too-good-to-be-true TV commercials, you know, where a couple is giddily running slo-mo through the green fields and it's a beautiful spring/summer day. Usually it's an ad for tampons or diamonds or some other non sequitur product. I believe Beck used this archetypal footage in one of his videos.

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has been one of the things cheering me up, so keep him in mind if a relationship of yours abruptly ends. Who says blogs are overrated?! They do keep your mind fairly occupied, when it might otherwise be frantically romanticizing the recent past and raking you over the coals.

The passing of Marlon Brando causes Heather Havrilesky to do a little Rabbitblogging in her Salon column.

She's sort of a younger, less-political, whackier version of Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is a guest columnist for the New York Times this month which caused Timothy Noah to start a "Draft Ehrenreich" movement amongst Times readers. She did once write for Time magazine.
 

This New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels includes a nice interactive feature.

Irony in Iraq
It's easy to forget the reptiles whose power allows them to be the cause of so much suffering and fear are merely flesh and blood like you and me, however chilly their blood is. Stripped of power, they inevitably come across as shrunken and pathetic.

Saddam Hussein and much of the former Baath leadership appeared before the Iraqi Special Tribune this past week.

During the long months that most of the defendants had been held, they appeared to have had little or no information about what was happening in Iraq. One man, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, 56, a former bodyguard and secretary to Mr. Hussein, named the Iraqi he would like as his lawyer, only to look puzzled at the chuckles about him in the court. The man in question, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, was named justice minister recently in Iraq's new interim government.

Kinky Republicans
I for one would have voted for him. Jack Ryan, the Republican candidate for Illinois's open Senate seat, has dropped out of the race. The Republican establishment withdrew support after a judge granted the request of both the Chicago Tribune and a Chicago TV station that the court documents pertaining to his divorce be unsealed. They revealed he had a penchant for "sex clubs" and that he repeatedly tried to get his wife at the time to engage in exhibitionist behavior at said clubs even though she wasn't into that sort of thing. The last straw for her occurred when he brought her to a Paris sex club (those French!) without telling her ahead of time exactly where they were going. ("Surprise!") She was reduced to tears according to the court documents. Apparently Ryan wasn't forthcoming with the Republican leadership either, or else - unlikely - they knew and doubted his divorce papers would ever be released.

Ryan defended himself in Clintonian and legalistic terms by first saying he didn't want to release the court documents in order to protect his 9-year-old son. (From what? No wonder the press took the time and energy to find out what his son needed protection from.) His peccadilloes on display, Ryan argued that, hey, he hadn't broken any laws or marriage vows. Furthermore he hadn't broken any of the Ten Commandments. Yes there is no Commandment that Thou Shalt Not Engage in Coitus in Front of Strangers, but no doubt it would encourage others to covet his attractive wife. And encouraging others to break Commandments is frowned upon amongst the faithful, so he had to go. (Painful admission: Ryan's highly covetable former wife, Jeri Ryan, played a humorless, skin-tight uniform-wearing cybernetic "Borg" named "Seven of Nine" on the TV show Star Trek. I used to affectionately refer to her as "Two by Four" when discussing with friends and family members her character's quest to find out what it means to be human.)

Ryan's real sin was that he's a paid member of the Upright Citizen's Brigade and valuing sex in front of strangers at Le Club de Sade isn't "Family Values" to your average Republican voter. Part of his campaign stump speech was a charge that his opponent didn't represent the mainstream values of Illinois voters. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's been a great week for Illinois politicos. The mainstream media picked up on a story Salon broke that Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., gave Rev. Sun Myung Moon - fruitcake extraordinaire and owner of the Washington Times and UPI wire service - a bejeweled crown at a March 23rd "coronation ceremony" held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Also in attendance were many politicians from both parties who quickly resorted to Ryan-like excuses for participating in the bizarre event.

Afterward, Moon told his bipartisan audience of Washington power players he would save everyone on Earth as he had saved the souls of Hitler and Stalin -- the murderous dictators had been born again through him, he said. In a vision, Moon said the reformed Hitler and Stalin vouched for him, calling him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

Persepolis 2
Entertainment Weekly reports:

Artist-writer Marjane Satrapi, 34, follows her debut about growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution - heraled as the most relevant comic-book memoir since Holocaust masterpiece Maus - with an equally witty graphic novel (out Aug. 31) about her stoner school years in Europe and feisty return to her homeland. HER MAUS PROBLEM "I called [author Art Spiegelman] to apologize - to tell him that's it's not me who is comparing myself to him. I said, 'If I were you, I would hate me.' That's the way we became friends." NEXT Embroideries, in which a group of women sip tea and talk about sex; directing an animated Persepolis for early '07.

Icepick to the back of the head
One concept I've struggled with is that of human rights organizations and NGOs as the medieval "mendicants" of our globalizing age. It's a charge that they really don't solve fundamental problems or get at the root of things. They just ease the pain. But is that all they do? By easing the pain, do they also keep a chaotic, Hobbesian world from fully emerging? Over forty years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in Out of Apathy:

Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay. Between them they seem to show the alternative paths for the intellectual. The one is of J. M. Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky. Both were obviously men of attractive personality and great natural gifts. The one the intellectual guardian of the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to keep our society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal fortune in the process. The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under Stalin, providing throughout his life a defense of human activity, of the powers of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. They are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies.

In St. Petersburg, Russia the other day, a 64-year-old anti-fascist received an icepick to the head, so to speak. Unlike Trotsky, Nikolai M. Girenko might have been considered an informant for the state, but like Trotsky he was a foe of Russia's "White" xenophobic, anti-Semitic tradition.

A year and a half ago, Nikolai M. Girenko wrote a booklet to guide prosecutors and police officers investigating the explosion of ethnically motivated crimes by skinheads, neo-Nazis and other hate groups. It may be needed to solve his killing.

On June 19, two young men came to his apartment here and rang the doorbell. When his daughter Katerina asked from the other side of the door what they wanted, they asked for him by name. When he approached, they shot him through the wooden door. He slumped to the floor of the apartment's small foyer and died within minutes. He was 64.

Through the peephole, Katerina saw only the shadowy silhouettes of her father's killers, but she had little doubt who they were.

"It could only be these fascists," she said.
[...]
"When I tried to talk him out of getting involved in politics, he said, `If not me, who else?' " Mr. Girenko's wife, Valentina, said in an interview in their apartment, where he was born and lived most his life.
[...]
"Nikolai," she said, "was one of the last of the Mohicans."

She said Mr. Girenko had received threats in the past, so many that he no longer bothered to report them to the police, who ignored them anyway. His other daughter, Sophia, pregnant with Mr. Girenko's fifth grandchild, said her father was always calm and understanding, rarely speaking with anger. "Even if there were threats," she said, "Father would never have told us."

Deadwood's representative

South Dakota's lone representative in the House is a 33-year-old
cutie.

(via Wonkette)

Superhuman agents of Evil
(or the Ubermensch)

It's amazing that Ahmad Chalabi, tough as he is, could have bested George "Slam Dunk" Tenet and his $400 Billion per year CIA in the recent Great Games in the Middle East. Sure he had friends in high places, but still. Chalabi and the neocons have superhuman powers according to the fevered imaginations of some conspiracy theorists.

Lyndon LaRouche and his cult followers have done nothing but given me more sympathy for Israel's cause. Osama bin Laden and his serial beheaders have had a similar effect.

This is why the New York Times's recent coverage of the final 911 Commission hearings and a Michiko Kakutani review gave me pause. The Wall Street Journal made no mention of the following, which filled me with unease:

In Afghanistan, Mr. Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, who made him the operation's leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Mr. bin al-Shibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."

and

For instance, Mr. bin Laden, Al Qaeda's top leader, initially pushed for a date of May 12, 2001, exactly seven months after terrorists attacked the American destroyer Cole in Yemen. Then, when he learned that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel would visit the White House in June or July, Mr. bin Laden pressed to amend the timetable.

And Kakutani writes:

What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Mr. Bamford contends that "the blueprint for the new Bush policy" on the Middle East "had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisers" (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was "a pretext" for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Mr. Feith, "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel," which "was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad."

Why did Netanyahu, a leader of the Greater Israel movement, reject the plan I wonder?

Realists (i.e. "Pragmatists" or running dogs
of the Status Quo) versus Dreamers (i.e. "agents of
change" or troublemakers)
or the Years of Living Dangerously

In our evolving post-Cold War world, where that mixed bag of Capitalism and globalization appears beyond challenge, oppressive regimes often face women leaders as perpetual thorns in their sides. Myanmar (Burma) is still contending with Aung San Suu Kyi. Turkey finally bent to international pressure last week and released Kurdish leader Leyla Zana from prison.

Iran's Shirin Ebadi recently gained international stature by winning the 2003 Noble Peace Prize. For years she was known as one of the "Three Musketeers." Her two other female comrades were Mehrangiz Kar, a more secular human rights and family lawyer, and Shahla Lahidji, an outspoken publisher specializing in books about women. (The Iranian regime managed to intimidate Lahidji into silence and Kar into immigrating to the US.)

Ebadi just did a tour of North America and granted an interview to a friend of mine. Along with University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, she penned an Op-Ed for the New York Times. The gist of their argument is that the World Bank should take loans away from antidemocratic countries and give them to democratic countries.

Thus the bank's "pragmatic" justification to lend money to oppressive governments is absurd. It amounts to giving secretive, frequently kleptocratic dictatorships priority — before the democracies have their fill. This handicaps both the citizens and leaders who together shoulder the hard work of sustaining democracies.

Instead, the bank should devise a kind of human rights scorecard. At a minimum, it should include the civil freedoms (of expression, of the press, of women) and the social and economic freedoms (access to health, education and property). The bank should monitor these freedoms and refuse to aid any country that violates them.

The kleptocratic dictatorship of Indonesia's Suharto finally gave way when the US withdrew its support during the Asian financial crisis. Currently, the former opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri is President.

Sukarnoputri recently reverted to Suharto-like tactics by expelling Sidney Jones, an American expert on Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesia's chief terrorist group. During the 1980s Jones was an Amnesty International activist and worked for Human Right Watch for 14 years subsequently. She developed numerous contacts with the radical Islamic opposition which was being hounded into submission by Suharto at the time.

Just goes to show, pace the hard Chomkyean left, that the successors to Cold War-era, anti-communist, Western-backed regimes aren't necessarily American puppet states. In a some ways blindly naive column critical of candidate Kerry's foreign policy "realism," David Brooks writes about Cuba dissident Oswaldo Payá:

Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners.

This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Brooks writes that Kerry said he believed the Varela Project was "counterproductive" and a provocation.

The Worse, the Better ... the Worse

Sean Rocha writes about Isarel's impending withdrawal from Gaza:

More than that, the Palestinian left fears chaos in Gaza. Where the Israelis look to Lebanon for their precedents, the Palestinians look to South Africa: To them, the Israeli policy of laying siege to the PA, on the one hand, and assassinating Hamas leaders, on the other, seems designed to ensure that no effective Palestinian administration of any type can emerge, much as the South African apartheid government covertly fuelled civil wars in Mozambique and Angola and then told scared South African whites that that was the brutal chaos they would get if they opted for black rule.

Magic Asterisk

The budgets prepared by David A. Stockman, Mr. Reagan's first budget director, adopted what was called a "rosy scenario" - impossibly optimistic predictions about future growth, inflation and interest rates. They also included what was called the "magic asterisk" - a gimmick that allowed for the budgeting of unspecified, and never intended, spending cuts.

Cousin to Business's favorite gimmick, "the fine print."

"You have over $40,000," she said, "in bar charges."

Did I? "Let me see those again," I said. Her expression softened to pity. I glanced again at the documents. Sure enough. This chick had a good eye.

"You need help," she said.

"I know," I replied. "That's why I'm here."

"You need help with your drinking," she said.

"Oh, that!" I said, finally understanding. ''No, I'm O.K. in that department. I mean, I drink a lot. But I'm in advertising, you know? And it's not like I black out -- it's more like a brownout. Besides, I never get hung over."

She became tender, which shocked me because I was unaccustomed to tenderness in any form besides sirloin steak. "Sweetie, you are hung over. Can't you see that?"

And truthfully, I just couldn't.

Bonzo goes to heaven (and is playing with your pet dog that died last year. Dave Dellinger is strumming an acoustic guitar on a nearby cloud.)

I'm writing while extremely hungover, no doubt a mistake, but I had such a doozy of a day yesterday, I had to write.

The Printer's Row Book Fair is this weekend and yesterday started at 10:00 a.m. with an Augusten Burroughs reading. (Very funny and moving). Then a few beers. At Noon, there was Aleksandar Hemon & David Bezmozgis (very moving and funny). After leaving that I ran into a favorite coworker (very beautiful and funny). A few more beers. At 1:30, Thomas Frank & Laura Kipnis tag-teamed the reigning, pompous conventional wisdom at the nearby Harold Washington library. At 4:00 I caught the charming Elizabeth Berg, whom Burroughs had recommended. Then more drinking.

I drink so much I think it might be a good idea to head out to Oak Park to try to catch Dave Sedaris, but I arrived late to discover the bookstore overflowing with people and headed to the nearest bar instead where a 40-year-old woman generously offered me some of her calamari and told me about the wonders of Deepak Choprah. (Where upon I learned Ronald Reagan had slipped this mortal coil.) Then home sweet home.

TMFTML says Roger Straus was a CIA covert operative.

Chalabi and Iraq, and then some
Newsday's take on Ahmad Chalabi, that he was (is?) working for part of the Axis of Evil, is a smear being spread by the CIA's George Tenet according to Chalabi and his supporters, like William Safire:

Since 1996, the C.I.A. has hated him with a passion. In that year, our spooks egged on Iraqi officers to overthrow Saddam. Chalabi claims to have warned that the plotters had been penetrated, and when the coup failed and a hundred heads rolled, he dared to blame the C.I.A. for bloody ineptitude. This is at the root of his detestation by Tenet & Company and the agency's subsequent rejection of most Iraqi sources of intelligence offered by Chalabi's group.

The wonderful journalist Ahmed Rashid has a great piece on the CIA's ineptitude in regards to the rise of bin Laden. However, he feels regime change in Iraq was a diversion from the project of nation-building in Afghanistan. (Rashid's two books, Taliban and Jihad are fascinating and well worth the read. Although, he tends to employ the archaic "whilst" a lot in his writing. Maybe he's just being cheeky.)

Rashid is based in Lahore, Pakistan, and must be encouraged by the recent election in neighboring India. India's stock market, though, took a dive on news that a less globalization-friendly government was taking power. (It's Thomas Friedman's "golden straightjacket" in action.) India's poor, rural voters mobilized and tossed out the Hindu nationalist, foreign investment friendly governing coalition. Another theory is that India's voters tend to vote out incumbents on a regular basis, but there is little doubt that the fruits of India's growing economy weren't trickling down to the lower classes. Back here in our own secular, multicultural, gigantic democracy, Thomas Geoghegan suggests ways to mobilize voters. Perhaps India's impressive election overseers can help out the Iraqis with their first election in years.

Not just another brick in the wall

Buried in his report earlier this year on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba praised the actions of three men who tried to stop the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees. They are nowhere to be seen in the portraits of brutality that have touched off outrage around the world.

Although details of their actions are sketchy, it is known that one soldier, Lt. David O. Sutton, put an end to one incident and alerted his commanders. William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, "refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure" from military intelligence, according to the report. And Specialist Joseph M. Darby gave military police the evidence that sounded the alarm.
...

"It is sometimes the case that they themselves have been scapegoated or turned on by the crowd,"said Dr. John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. "If you go back into the lives of these people you can often find some incident that has made very vivid to them the pressures of conformity working on the others in the group."

People who break from the crowd to blow the whistle, history shows, are often the most psychologically distanced from the situation. In 1968, Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot, was flying over Vietnam as G.I.'s were killing civilians. The soldiers on the ground had been told that the vilage, My Lai, was a Vietcong stronghold. But from above Mr. Thompson could see there was no enemy fire. He landed his helicopter, rescued some villagers, and told his commanders about the massacre.

Rum Sodomy & the Lash*

When Winston Churchill was at the Admiralty, he was reported to have said that "the traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash." The MPs who tortured Iraqi detainees in order to soften them up for the interrogators from MI and "OGA" were often drunk during the insanity. The Taguba Report found credible evidence of MPs "Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick." No doubt you've read or heard about or have seen photos of the other instances of torture, rape, humiliation and abuse. (Did you read that the prison was being hit constantly by mortar fire? I'd resort to drink too.)

I watched Major General Antonio Taguba testify in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning. You could tell he was a "straight shooter" and he spoke well of the team who helped him compile the report. I agree with the Times here:

Under the scope set by his superiors, the inquiry was limited to the conduct of a military police brigade. But General Taguba used it to deliver a much broader indictment.

Among the findings laid out in the report was what General Taguba described as his strong suspicion that military intelligence officers and private contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses."

(General Fay's report on this will come out at end of this month or perhaps the first part of June.) The choice of General Taguba reflects well on General McKiernan, who assigned Taguba to the case.

Then there's Joseph Darby, the lower-class reservist who was working at Wendy's before being shipped off to Iraq. (Darby was an average student who started at tackle on the football team in high school and had done a stint in Bosnia.) The 24-year-old was the one who blew the whole thing open with the photos, first anonymously, then by testifying. Men like Taguba and Darby keep hope alive - to use a shopworn phrase - that America can help Iraq and hence the Middle East move in the direction of democracy and justice. (Darby still believes the cause in Iraq is a just one, even though he wasn't convinced at first.) Not surprisingly, Taguba received a shit reassignment and Darby and his wife are afraid of retaliation from other military families. Both knew what would happen, no doubt, but did what they felt was right no matter the consequences.

* Three Pogues albums became available again last month as imports. One is titled Rum Sodomy & the Lash and features Gericault's Le Radeau De La Medusa as its cover art. I recently saw the excellent documentary "If I Should Fall from Grace - The Shane MacGowan Story" which came out last year. It features Nick Cave and a Pogues video which stars a Johnny Depp during his drinking days, before he had kids.

Fucking Goddamn Cocksuckers
Heather Havrilesky finally writes about HBO's Deadwood:

What really sets "Deadwood" apart, though, is that unlike other dramas on TV, which introduce a few compelling figures or satisfying scenarios then repeat them episode after episode, "Deadwood" expands in every direction like a well-written novel. Somehow, even as the scope of the show widens with more characters and more complicated story lines, instead of losing us, the writers keep drawing us in deeper.

Here's a fun drinking game: take a swig each time someone cusses during the show.


Adam Michnik interview
(Via Norman Geras via Matt Welch)


Fulan Gong Show

Yet Chang supplies welcome detail about the religious roots of Falun Gong -- and this, in an indirect way, helps explain both the Bush administration's silence and the comparative indifference of the Western human-rights community. It is, as it turns out, an extraordinary belief system. Li Hongzhi, a one-time junior government official in a provincial grain bureau, began practicing Qigong when he was a park police officer in Jilin province in the 1980s. Within less than a decade, he had devised his own take on the universe -- including the belief that all matter is essentially water, that human beings trace their origins to "the highest levels of the universe" and that aliens came to Earth around 1900, some of whom look like humans and others -- "most frightening!" he says -- live inside our bodies. Li claims to have divine powers to cure the sick, to fly and to walk through walls. Chang's explanation of Li's teachings is a salvation of sorts, both sober and unsentimental. Her book is written with welcome detachment. More valuable still is her attempt to place Falun Gong in the long history of cults and sects in China. The comparisons with the Boxers, the Taiping rebellion and, in particular, the White Lotus Society -- each in its own way a messianic sect that was a harbinger of dynastic instability -- will prompt anyone interested in the future of China to take Falun Gong more seriously

Dancing, dancing in the street / Way down in LA, everyday
Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko is that rare film which can induce nostalgia for the late 1980s when I was a teenager.

Kelly has a new project, Southland Tales, in pre-production. It's "a musical/comedy set in 2008 where a three-day heatwave in Los Angeles culminates in a huge Fourth of July party." The cast includes Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Lee, Janeane Garofalo, Ali Larter, Tim Blake Nelson, Amy Poehler, and Kevin Smith. It will either be genius or uncomfortably bad. I'd bank on the former.

Why they hate us
The other day I rewatched Whit Stillman's Barcelona, which is now 10 years old, and it has held up remarkably well. In view of the recent elections in Spain and the growing anti-American sentiment worldwide, the comedy is as prescient a film as I can think of.

The movie is set during the waning days of the Cold War. Two cousins - one, a sales representative from Chicago, and the other, a naval attache - explore Barcelona's nightlife and have to deal with their fair share of anti-Americanism. Neither can understand why they're repeatedly called fascists (fasche) by the locals and therefore get into a few arguments.

The movie's dialogue makes it seem like a precursor to Wes Anderson's Rushmore, but that's just a guess.

SNAFU*
Michelle Cottle reports on the 911 Commission. She complains that since the Commission was partly carried out in public, it led to political posturing and grandstanding. She suggests closed-door hearings would have been better, but that sounds anti-democratic to me. Her fatalism regarding another attack resonates, unfortunately.

Ms. Cottle and I shared a creative writing class back in college and she was one of those reticent charmers who reflect well on the "New South."

* Situation Normal All Fucked Up

The worse, the better
Some misguided factions on the Left have used this slogan which indicates support for chaos to heighten the contradictions of politics. Dan Drezner points out the apparently worsening situation in Iraq is helping Bush in the polls. (via Andy Sullivan)

At this point, Kerry has to wonder whether he's in a parallel political universe. It seems neither logical nor fair that problems in Iraq should boost the president who sent U.S. troops there in the first place, while imperiling the challenger who voiced qualms about the invasion before it happened. But odd as this will sound, it's worth considering the possibility that failure in Iraq is helping Bush's reelection chances--and that immediate U.S. success in Iraq is Kerry's only chance to win.

"We begin bombing in five minutes"
Michael Kinsley once said a Washington gaffe is when a politician utters something everyone knows to be true. Laura Kipnis writes about politicians' parapraxes and uses Condi Rice's recent DC dinnertime faux pas as a spring board:

What Rice reportedly said was this: "As I was telling my husb—" before abruptly breaking off and correcting herself: "As I was telling President Bush." Jaws dropped, we're told. And though nobody thinks Bush and Rice are "actually an item," we were nevertheless reminded that the unmarried Condi does regularly spend weekends with the president and first lady.

Resistance is futile (or Sheena is a punk rocker)

Dear Reader, (all 0-2 of you)

Should you notice a change in tone or sudden drop off in the number of postings, it's because of a young lady. Let's call her A. for the purposes of discussion.

It doesn't look good on paper, I'll admit, but we have fun together. A. is a tattooed, streetwise yet kind, midriff-baring "Generation Y" gal who can hold her liquor like none other I have seen. Your humble servant is a jaded "Gen Xer", as you can probably tell. We do share a fondness for David Sedaris.

Still, I'm wary. But I've had a sip of the Kool-Aid and it tastes good.

19 tornadoes touched down way out in the Chicago suburbs, south of where my parents live.


The reason the President's Daily Briefings are classified (by Tim Cavanaugh)

There there
Reason's Hit & Run noticed how George Will is getting all gloomy on us. This presents me with an opportunity to clarify what the name of this site means to me. In his piece, Will quotes James Q. Wilson:

"So common have despotic regimes been that some scholars have argued that they are, unhappily, the natural state of human rule. This tendency raises a profound question: Does human nature lend itself to freedom? It is not difficult to make arguments for personal freedom, but the history of mankind suggests that human autonomy usually will be subordinated to political control. If that is true, then our effort to increase individual freedom is an evolutionary oddity, a weak and probably vain effort to equip people with an opportunity some do not want and many will readily sacrifice."

This is the typical conservative argument about "wasting money" on trying to change "human nature." To me this is too pessimistic - and stinks of racism - in regards to the average person, whatever nationality. This is a rationalization, pure and simple.

Granted, like anyone I'll have moments of doubt. In Ian McEwan's novel The Child in Time, there's a character so demoralized by tragedy and loss that he's reduced to gaping at daytime TV talkshows - think Jerry Springer. Seeing his fellow humans so eager to humiliate and embarrass themselves, he coins a name for watching the proceedings: "the democrat's pornography."

"Negative Outlook?" is not meant to refer to conservative rationalizations and pessimism. Keeping with the often adolescent-level tone, subject matter, and grammar, the title is taken from a song's lyrics, the Transplants's Diamonds and Guns:

Every last soul must pay the last toll
In the dice game of life, who gets the last roll?
Is it the one with the suit? The one with the sack?
The one who hides behind his fuckin' gun and his badge?
Negative outlook? Well that's how I'm livin'
And like he said, it's a wicked world we live in
It's a wicked world we live in

It's directed at the authority figure or sell-out who's telling you, condescendingly, "quit complaining, stop being such a downer, get with the program, consider how lucky you are." Etc.

For instance, Hitchens has a negative outlook and bucks the herd of independent minds.

Ana Marie Cox chillin' on the porch.

Last month, a party celebrating the start of her site was packed. Held at the Dupont Circle town house of Peter Bergen, the CNN terrorism expert, the party's heavily mediacentric guest list included Michael Isikoff of Newsweek; a former Clinton mouthpiece, Joe Lockhart; the political blogger Mickey Kaus; and a former Howard Dean spokeswoman, Tricia Enright. This is her devoted fan base: Wonkette registered 55,000 page views on its startup date in January, and over a million for the month of March. (The Drudge Report averages over seven million page views a day.)

The Times reports her curriculum vitae as such: "She was writing her own satirical blog, theanticmuse.com, after bouncing from editing jobs at The Chronicle of Higher Education, America Online and National Geographic. She was fired from The American Prospect magazine after six weeks (during which she playfully called its co-editor, Robert Kuttner, "Crazy Bob" behind his back) and was required to sign a confidentiality agreement about the terms of her dismissal." It should have read "She was writing her own satirical blog, theanticmuse.com, after bouncing from editing jobs at The Chronicle of Higher Education, America Online, National Geographic, and Suck..." but that might have given people pause.

The New Deal's Shock Troops
The White Whale for the American Right ever since the 1930s is that collection of institutions and legislation, dare we say "philosophy"?, known as the New Deal. Erected in response to the Great Depression, the New Deal is the source of countless evils and a "Wall" or barrier to greater prosperity, according to the Right .

Today's New York Times has a Michael Beschloss review of a book about the New Dealers who labored in the trenches.

''The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power From FDR to LBJ'' shows why [President] Carter felt free to ignore an event that his three Democratic predecessors would have considered mandatory. In keeping with its scholarly subtitle, Michael Janeway dutifully navigates the ideological differences that developed among the New Dealers and the ways in which the Democratic Party later moved away from their crowd. But his book is far more interesting and original as a biographical study of what human beings will do to acquire great power and try to hold onto it -- especially after their time has passed. (Full disclosure: Janeway writes in his acknowledgments that during his 10-year writing process I helped him with a research question, although I don't recollect doing so.)

Beschloss notes how, perhaps counterintuitively, many New Dealers sought not only to do good, but to "do well":

Janeway observes that in his sometimes reckless determination to become rich, his father resembled others he knew well. Long after the New Deal, Fortas had to resign from the Supreme Court when his secret cash payments by a foundation were revealed. Corcoran was scarred by charges that he had lobbied the Supreme Court on behalf of his client El Paso Natural Gas. The onetime Truman aide Clark Clifford went down in the flames of a banking scandal. Janeway sardonically notes that these same people had once inveighed against Wall Street's ''unconstrained license and greed'' and the abuse of ''other people's money.'' As he describes it, part of the problem was that they were greedy themselves. More than that, by the end of their lives, ''the Rooseveltians' great chain of dealing had become its own end.'' These once powerful men did not know ''how to leave their active association with power.''

There is no need for us to end the story on such a sour note. Under Franklin Roosevelt, these New Dealers built a lasting monument, showing how government could be made to improve people's lives. But Michael Janeway's book is a reminder that even monument makers can have feet of clay.

Beschloss is an impressive historian. He's deceptively mild-mannered in his TV appearances, but his work demonstrates an eye for the telling detail and a sense of the important grander themes which the equally mild-mannered mainstream rarely confronts.

Heather Havrilesky reminds us of why Chris Rock is still around after all these years. Rock on affirmative action:

But let's keep it fucking real, OK? A black C student can't run no fucking company. A black C student can't even be the manager of Burger King. Meanwhile, a white C student just happens to be the president of the United States of America!

Even partisan conservatives admit Bush's recent combo speech/press conference was C level at most however much they agreed with the content.

I'll never forget when Rock had Cornel West as a guest on his cable show and Rock was visibly amused by West's high-falutant vocabulary. His questions and give and take with the academic/actor demonstrated respect, though.

"Would-be Martyr's" Wish Granted
Abdel Aziz Rantisi killed.

During the mourning period for [Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed] Yassin, Rantisi was defiant about Israel's threats against him. "We will all die one day. Nothing will change. If by Apache or by cardiac arrest, I prefer Apache," he said.

Divide and conquer
The always informative Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which won a Bloggie recently) is exasperated at the media's highlighting of Bin Laden's attempt to further divide America and Europe.

Marshall wonders:
"Why are we giving this al Qaida PR stunt so much credence?

Why does CNN report the news like the public is made up of a bunch of circus idiots?

And will Emmanuel Goldstein also be in on the negotiations?"

As polls and elections show, a majority of Europeans are against greater involvement by the West in the Muslim world. They want to back off. (No doubt some of the voters in Spain's recent election felt that way.) Given Europe's bloody colonial history and large Muslim population, it's understandable.

Bin Laden and al-Qaida are just playing upon that fact. My guess is that Marshall is irritated that this news highlights the fact that one of Bin Laden's goals is the same as the Democrats': a less aggressive U.S. and Western foreign policy. Let the Muslim and Arab regions be. Argue for pulling the troops out more quickly than the Republicans would (although Bush did give in to Bin Laden, with good reason in my opinion, by pulling all of the troops out of Saudi Arabia).

His frustration is demonstrated by the mention of Emmanuel Goldstein. In George Orwell's 1984, Goldstein was a fictitious saboteur employed by the state to keep the citizenry fear-stricken and thereby distracted and more accepting of repressive laws.

I doubt Marshall is being literal here - al Qaida exists of course - but his view that Bin Laden is being employed like a Goldstein is common for some (most?) of the Left. They view 911 as an aberration, a one in a million incident that is unlikely to be repeated (like, say, the assassination of JFK). After the next catastrophic attack, fairly likely given the National Security Apparatus's dysfunction, I wonder if Goldstein's name will be bandied about as much.

Democrats on the 911 Commission damn the Bush administration for not taking the pre-911 Emmanuel Goldstein threat seriously, which it in fact did not. But Democrats like Marshall then go on to argue that Republicans are playing up the threat of al-Qaida for political advantage. Republicans, they argue, were too complacent then and are too aggressive now.

"He gave me a look, a kind of wide-eyed, reproachful look, such as a dying newt might have given me, if I had forgotten to change its water regularly." P.G.Wodehouse.

What's your favorite sentence(s) from a novel? (that's not my favorite but it's pretty good. Via Maud Newton)

Que Sera Sera lists a couple of the Universal Laws of Nature.

those hang-overs where it feels like you've been through chemo

He manages to get up to his bedroom, where he has a final cigarette before turning in.Then comes the next morning.

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

He feels worse when he discovers that a cigarette had burned 1) a large part of a bed sheet; 2) a smaller but still large part of a blanket; 3) a not inconsiderable bit of a “valuable-looking rug”; and 4) part of the top of his bedside table. It took a few moments for the full horror to sink in: “had a wayfarer, a burglar camped out in his room? Or was he the victim of some Horla fond of tobacco? He thought on the whole he must have done it himself, and wished he hadn’t.

Tax and Spend
Rabbit blog is, metaphorically speaking, throwing gasoline on the fire raging in Blogistan. So, here it goes.

After years in the big city, living beyond my means and spending like a drunken sailor on impulse-purchased books and rounds for the bar, I've finally found religion, like the Democrats, and have given in to fiscal discipline. I've forced a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) upon myself, like what the IMF does to hapless third world countries whose treasuries have been looted by corrupt Western-backed dictators.

What's the first thing I do? I join the 21st century by purchasing a cell phone and offset the increase in my telecommunications bill by getting rid of my Caller-ID and telemarketer blocking service on my old-timey phone line.

Now, when people call at 2:30 on a Tuesday morning I don't know whether it was a wrong number or what. I get to lie in bed and stew about who could have possibly woken me up. And then I get to free associate ... but now I can write my free-associations down and post it on the Internet ...

"Soak the fat boys" was Robert Penn Warren's advice in All the King's Men. And if you think about, when travel writers and "hot spot" correspondents constantly relate how embarrassingly friendly and overly-generous folks often are in poverty stricken parts of the world and how often - but not always - the stinking rich people you come across, say, like Leona Helmsly or the Enron gang, are complete assholes, why not tax the shit out of them and redistribute a la Robin Hood? Yes, the rub lies in the redistributors and the pork and corruption which is why "good government" is essential. When Republicans and some Democrats demagogue the issue by saying "they want to raise YOUR taxes" the YOU they're addressing is 1% of the population, but that's not immediately apparent, is it?

Rabbit Blog says "sanity is overrated." I have to disagree, but I guess it depends on your definition of sanity. For instance, she's so sane and articulate, it's crazy. (By the way, the four most overrated things of all time? Champaign, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.)

Throw the Bums Out
Adam Cohen writes about the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens whose book "The Shame of the Cities" turns 100 this spring.

In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, 63 percent of those surveyed said President Bush is more concerned with corporations than workers, and it is not hard to see why. He has raised more than $180 million in campaign funds, much of it from corporate-minded contributors who want something from government — weaker environmental laws, lower taxes, government contracts — or have already gotten it. John Kerry and the Democrats, of course, raise money from many of the same sources.

Steffens would not be surprised by the extent of the alliance between business and government today. But he would be disheartened if the American people did not start to follow his simple electoral prescription. "Vote in mass on the more promising ticket," he urged, adding that if the choices are equally bad, "throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in." If the voters did that, Steffens promised, "the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it."

PDB PDF
Sometimes I'll watch the Fox News Network - because they're fun in a goofy, gung-ho way - and today they had a panel awaiting the White House's PDF file of the August 6th, 2001 President's Daily Briefing which came up in the 911 Commission hearings.

The panel included a woman who reminded me of a go-go, chubby sorority gal, a charming, nerdy, young Republican/national security expert guy, and, alas, Geraldo Rivera. The fake-looking-in-a-TV-news-anchor-way moderator let the audience know that he'd read the page and half PDB as soon as the PDF hit his monitor, which would be any minute. So everyone was speculating on its contents, except for Geraldo who was pontificating in dramatic fashion. All the while old glory flies up in the corner of tube.

Mr. young Republican made an interesting point which I had heard before. The "muscle" of the group that hijacked the planes weren't aware they were on a suicide mission according to a captured al-Qaida heavy. There may be other sources for that, I don't know. So, obviously only a very few people knew what was coming.

Still, as Ms. chubby, sorority gal pointed out, mistakes were made which is why the 911 Commission was a good idea however partisan it becomes. The moderator receives the PDF and reads it out loud. Apparently, Bush, who was aware of al-Qaida's numerous attacks overseas, wanted a briefing on a possible attack on the "homeland." The PDB said "Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US.'' Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America.'' Al-Qaida members, some of them American citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, the memo said. Also, bin Laden wanted to retaliate for Clinton's attempt to assassinate him with cruise missiles in 1998.

So, something was coming and National Security Advisor Rice told the 911 Commission that protecting "the homeland" from al-Qaida was delegated to the FBI. (They were "tasked" with it. The Democratic Commissioners argued there are no records of the FBI being "tasked.") The CIA was following foreign leads. She was working on a plan to get Pakistan to crack down on Afghanistan, al-Qaida's base. It seems to me the fault lies with both the Clinton and Bush administrations, specifically and obviously the National Security Apparatus in both, for not gauging the severity of the coming threat.

Later, I caught The McGlaughlin Group on PBS. The wonderful James Warren of the Chicago Tribune happened to be on and said he didn't think the PDB/Condi vs. Richard Clarke drama would register with people outside the Beltway. Who they'll vote for will depend on the state of the economy and Iraq.

Perhaps Attorney General John Aschroft, who testifies next week, will get the axe over this. That would be great if they dumped the Christian Right's guy because of some right-wing Islamic nutjobs.

Separated at Birth
911 Commissioner and former Illinois Governor James Thompson and former Illinois Governor George Ryan look as if they could be related. Both are ruddy, jowly and tend to scowl (except when posing for photos). Both also have a reputation for corruption. Must be something in the water.

Another gruff, jowly fellow, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, seems to have taken a page from George Ryan's playbook. Facing possible indictment for corruption, the general who was ultimately responsible for the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila has now proposed unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, thereby infuriating the right wing and the settler movement he helped found. His supporters will argue that the law enforcement bureaucracy, which is generally more dovish, should not indict him during this critical time.

The conservative George Ryan was facing an ever-expanding corruption probe while governor and decided to make a play for the state's liberals by declaring a moratorium on the death penalty and emptying the state's death row. He was recently indicted anyway which might not bode well for Sharon.

Foreign Hordes
Looks like xenophobia will play an important part in the Presidential election "drama." (Apologies for the following geeky, strained analogy).

Capital, or if you like, the elite who gather annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos, scours the globe for cheap labor like Sauron's red, searchlight Eye in Lord of the Rings.

America's economy, a besieged fortress like Helm's Deep or Minas Tirith, frantically attempts to ward off wave attacks of Orc-like darkies, i.e. Latino immigrants and white collar job-stealing Indians.

And, a stretch I know, when told the dusky Iraqis desperately need help shedding tyranny and building anew, many Americans give the same answer a bitter, war-weary King Theoden spits at Aragorn after his plea that Gondor urgently needs Rohan's assistance, "They need our help?! What have they ever done for us?!"

Meanwhile, the Naz-ghoul-like Al Qaeda circle overhead.

Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm (which you should read if you haven't), gets into the weeds to write about the X-factor of the political season, outsourcing.

I'm not sure of this, but I believe J.R.R. Tolkein used South Africa as a model for his Middle Earth. Elves were a stand-in for the British, Humans for the less-cultivated Boer/Afrikaners, and Orcs, of course, for the surrounding sea of African natives. The wizard Sauramon, perhaps, was a stand-in for "Uncle Joe" Slovo and the Commie provocateurs.

In our world, obviously, the Orcs were victorious; shed tyranny and oppression; and now work to build anew in a South Africa where politics, as in Iraq, has returned for good. (No doubt, smarty-pantses will point to the recent violence in Iraq as evidence of the absence of politics. My rejoinder: "In a split between U.S.-picked Iraqi leaders and American administrators, the Governing Council demanded an immediate cease-fire across the country Friday and a halt to military operations that punish civilians." And a cease-fire was declared.)

Jennifer Abrahamson writes in Slate about how the Orcs and Goblins are faring 10 years after overthrowing apartheid:

Rapping Against the ANC

Truth and Reconciliation on Robben Island

From the Frontline to the Bottom Line

Saving Grace

This Land is Our Land

Switched On!
It's been a good month, personally. In the realm of the written word, Lorrie Moore passsed through town which was completely mind-blowing..

Then Stereolab decides to tour, absent Mary Hansen who was hit by a car while riding her bicycle in London about a year and half ago.

Their show tonight was completely mind-blowing, even sans Mary, who was the most friendly, out-going member of the group. They played a song that was quintessentially Mary, "Nihilist Assault Group." One of the many wonderful things about Stereolab is their creative song titles, like "Exploding Head Movie" and "International Coloring Contest."

Distinction with a difference
Reason republished a piece Jonathan Rauch wrote for the National Journal about how "Like it or not, Israel's war with Hamas is America's, too."

I'm not an expert on the Middle East, but my impression is it isn't our war even if we give Israel a ton in foreign aid and Bush gives Sharon a free hand.

Says Rauch, "... America's terror war and Israel's are not separable, however much we might wish they were."

And later he contradicts himself, "Although Hamas has concentrated on Israeli interests while Al Qaeda concentrated on American ones, even that gap is narrowing—inevitably, now that America is making a priority of bringing secular democracy to the Middle East." Secular democracy? Afghanistan, a guide here, has Islam written into its new constitution and Iraq's will certainly have references to Islam as well, given Ayattolah Ali Sistani's pull and the majority Shia population.

Ask yourself which American interests Al Qaeda is concentrating on and why. Compare the experience of the Palestinians, who are fighting the Israelis over contested land, as described by a Middle East expert:

During the first intifada, in the late 1980s, the Palestinians denied themselves the recourse to arms, mounted a civil resistance, produced voices like Hanan Ashrawi and greatly stirred world opinion. For this they were offered some noncontiguous enclaves within an Israeli-controlled and Israeli-settled condominium. Better than nothing, you might say. But it's the very deal the Israeli settlers reject in their own case, and they do not even live in Israel "proper." (They just have the support of the armed forces of Israel "proper.") So now things are not so nice and many Palestinians have turned violent and even--whatever next?--religious and fanatical. Naughty, naughty. No self-determination for you. And this from those who achieved statehood not by making nice but as a consequence of some very ruthless behavior indeed.

The Bad Old Days
Gordon Wood, the historian Will Hunting name drops in Good Will Hunting, writes about the letters between Founding Father John Adams and his wife Abigail. The two had a special thing compared to the other Founding Fathers' marriages and most marriages of the time.

It is difficult for us today to appreciate how different that patriarchal eighteenth century was, not just in its general acceptance of slavery but also in its treatment of women. Women rarely had an independent existence, at least in law. In public records they were usually referred to as the "wife of," or the "daughter of," or the "sister of," a man. Before marriage, women legally belonged to their fathers, and after marriage they belonged to their husbands. A married woman was a femme covert: she could not sue or be sued, make contracts, draft wills, or buy and sell property. It went without saying that women could not hold political office or vote. They were considered to be dependent like children, and their husbands often treated them like children. A husband might address his wife as "dear Child" or by her Christian name, but he would be addressed in return as "Mr."

Nader vs. Kerry
Dan Johnson-Weinberger was Nader's Illinois manager during the 2000 election but is now pulling for Kerry.

His blog links to Eric Zorn's Notebook (registration required). Zorn is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and exemplifies everything wrong with the official Left. Maybe I'm being unfair and Zorn is a smart, knowledgable guy, but his columns almost always cause my eyes to glaze over.

Still, no doubt he helped in a small way to get Illinois to raise its minimum wage.

Advance ticket sales
Tickets go on sale Saturday at noon for the November 13th(!) Pixies show at the Scare-agon Brawlroom here in Chicago.

There's no denying it, I've fallen for Drea de Matteo. (What's a weblog for, but to list your crushes for the world to see). I'm not made of wood. In the latest episode of the Sopranos, her character Adrianna almost hooks up with the mob boss Tony, even though she's engaged to his #2, Chris-tuh-fuh, as she calls him.

Tony is recently separated but nonetheless, the plot line reminded me of something from Martin Amis's novel "Yellow Dog." Joseph Andrews is a high-end porno producer and - sorta like Tony - a semi-retired London crime boss.

'Crazy 'Jo', it turns out, was in the habit of 'doing' his favourite lieutenants' 'birds', and if the lieutenants complained he'd 'do' them as well, though in a different sense. 'Hey Jo. You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you're me?' suggests Keith the Snake, the most favoured lieutenant of all. 'You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you're her?' Earlier on, there's an allusion to the scene in Blue Velvet in which the sex-crazed villain, Frank Booth, shows that he's in love with his disturbing associate Ben. But the movie never spells it out, unlike Yellow Dog. 'He wants to have them so he does them,' Xan says. 'And has their wives.' 'Mm,' his interlocutor says. 'Hence the love of pain: he's correcting himself for it.'

I'll never forget a dinner where activist professor Rashid Khalidi confessed he couldn't understand what his son saw in the The Sopranos. The encyclopedic polymath Christopher Hitchens added he didn't like it either, but then he doesn't watch TV. He does go to movies and didn't care for Tom Cruise's Last Samurai.

Give 'Em Hell
Hellboy deserves the accolades it's been receiving. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie even though it hit a little too close to home and I was slightly hung-over at the time.

Hellboy is a demon from Hell who was discovered when he was a small kid by a British paranormal specialist and raised to fight on the side of good. Now (mostly) grown up, he works for a secret government agency and has a bit of an attitude problem. (Understandable seeing as how he's freaky-looking demon with a tail. He does try to "fit in" by sanding down his horns and cracking wise with his fellow human agents.) His coworker freaks include a psychic fish-person and Liz, a Sylvia Plath-like firestarter played by Selma Blair. Hellboy has a crush on Liz and only lets down his macho cheekiness guard when she's around.

Will Liz try to be more "normal" and date the new team member/FBI agent John Myers or will she walk on the wild side and embrace her "outsiderness" by taking a chance on Hellboy? Can the team stop German and Russian fascists from bringing on a H.P. Lovecraftian apocalypse? I won't ruin it for you.

Peter Bergen, who often appears on CNN, and Scott Armstrong, founder of the indispensible National Security Archive, suggest questions for Dr. Rice.

They are particularly hawkish in regards to Afghanistan and the Taliban. Bergen suggests we should have invaded immediately instead of waiting for a couple of months (can you imagine the resulting outcry from the anti-war people?). Armstrong wants to ask Dr. Rice why we don't have more troops in Afghanistan. Maybe because they're all in Iraq?

Cup of Chicha attended a Q & A with Lorrie Moore. Maybe Moore isn't that much of a recluse.

Survivor's Guilt
This past Thursday, PBS's Frontline ran a two-hour long documentary about the Rwandan genocide which occurred 10 years ago this month. The clips with General Romeo Dallaire, head of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda at the time, are particularly heartbreaking. You just want to hug the guy, tell him it wasn't his fault and he did the best he could do under the hellish circumstances.

If you're suffering from survivor's guilt such words don't really do much for you. All you can do is muddle on with the essential help of family and friends.

My suicidal attempts were based on booze. I starting falling into these depressions, and I'd just drink and drink and then I'd cut myself or try to jump off things, but more often than not that was totally ineffective because I was pissed to the gills. It's only that and people checking up on me that prevented me from killing myself. … I'm not the man I was, and never will become [him again], but hopefully with some drugs or medication that I take, just like someone who's got diabetes takes insulin, to keep me stable … -- that will be my life.

Having read Philip Gourevitch's We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families and Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell" I knew a bit about the genocide but I wasn't aware of the heroism of Capt. Mbaye Diagne, a young Senegalese U.N. military observer and "Cool Hand Luke" character. A devout Muslim, he'd go out on solo rescue missions and charm his way past the genocidaires' checkpoints. From the video you can tell he's a grade A badass with a sense of humor that would put bloodthirsty killers in stitches and would keep up the morale of comrades like General Dallaire and the others the U.N. abandoned.

The Staggering Sunshine of the Heartbreaking Mind
The word on the street was right again, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind makes you think and laugh. Plus, it's got David Cross and Mark Ruffalo who at one point goes off on a digression about the Clash, "the only band that matters." And if a smiley Kate Winslet flashing her pantied crotch at you won't put a smile on your face, I don't know what will.

Still, it seems to be a film directed more at the ladies. It's a relationship movie which tells us we should "hang in there" because "it's worth it." A nice sentiment, but if I were Joel (Jim Carrey) I wouldn't have tried to get back together with Clementine (Kate Winslet) because she's too high maintenance and bitchy. Joel can be a neurotic dick so maybe he doesn't have grounds for complaint.

Ill context
Garofalo and co-host Sam Seder had Dave Chappelle on as one of their guests on the first show which made it really funny and "edgy." One of the funniest things on TV in recent years, and many others agree, was a Chappelle Show parody of MTV's Real World. Setting up the segment, Chappelle pointed how the Real World always puts one black person with a bunch of crazy whites and the black would end up going crazy and getting voted off the island. So he took a naive, suburban white guy and stuck him with a bunch of crazy black roommates. His comedy special that was done in DC a few years back is hilarious if you can get your hands on a copy.

Chappelle admitted he never voted before, but he's planning on voting this time around. He added he's not partisan which caused Garofalo to chime in and say being partisan is not necessarily a bad thing which Chappelle agreed with. I don't know anything about Seder, but he said Chappelle and a friend wrote "Half Baked" in Seder's apartment or house.

They talked a bit about how fucked-up the media and Entertainment Complex is. "Fear driven" was the consensus. Everyone's too afraid of getting fired to be risky. Chappelle had a post-911 airport anecdote and talked seriously about the "ill context" of these strange days and how everything's politicized and crazy. He ended sincerely by saying that Garofalo is the bravest celebrity out there "because she says what she believes!" Both of them come off as honest and sincere in their edgy comedy which shows respect for the audience and makes for good radio.

Positive developments
The oh-so-dreamy and whip-smart Janeane Garofalo will preside over her very own radio show, starting today (7-10 p.m. CST, 950 AM, here in Chicago). The show's name "The Majority Report" is inspired by Al Gore's victory in the popular election of 2000. I can't help but wonder if it is based on the name of a column Christopher Hitchens once wrote for the Nation. Hitchens admited to stealing the name for his column, "Minority Report" from a column H.L. Mencken wrote back in the bad-old days. Garofalo once said she admired Hitchens, however these days the two disagree on much. For example, he penned a trademark takedown of Howard Dean for the Wall Street Journal and "Ms. Garofalo was in the audience on the night of the Iowa caucus, before [Dean] gave what she described as his "so-called 'I have a scream' speech.""

In other E! Channel news, the next Wilco record, "A Ghost Is Born," is due out this summer and Jack Black and Naomi Watts signed to star in the "King Kong" remake which will be directed by Peter Jackson. Finally, good news for male masturbators who are into sci-fi: Charlize Theron has signed to star in Aeon Flux.

Never Again* (or depends on what the meaning of "genocide" is)
President Clinton lied. Surprise, surprise. Clinton claimed he didn't know genocide was occurring in Rwanda before it was too late, but the Guardian reports otherwise.

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington DC, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that the CIA's national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which ... is spreading south".

Three days later the state department's intelligence briefing for former secretary of state Warren Christopher and other officials noted "genocide and partition" and reported declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".

Ms Des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act. It was a very pragmatic determination."

Here's another case where Clinton wasn't a "leader." They were right to fear the morally superior public. It's not for nothing the Democrats are often known as the lesser evil.

* Except in Africa. I doubt a black president, as supporters called Clinton, would have been so complacent.

Didn't you know, fiscal discipline is hip
And Neal Pollack is back in Blogistan once again hawking his book and shilling for the Democratic National Committee. A Nader satire should be coming any day.

Nader is hurting Kerry in Pennsylvania, where he's polling at 7%, and conceivably could keep the Democrats out of the White House again. Not surprisingly, liberals aren't taking it too well (click on Naderite Nursery Rhymes. If Bush is reelected, I imagine some liberals' heads will explode like the fembots in Austin Powers. Nader will certainly be a persona non grata.)

Learning from Gore's mistake, Kerry has agreed to a sit-down. Who knows what they'll discuss, but maybe Nader can convince Kerry not to pull the Democrats too far to the right on economic policy as Clinton did.

For Kerry's four main economic advisors are all Clintonoids according to a New York Times article by Louis Uchitelle. Robert C. Altman and Gene Sperling were both high ranking officials while 33-year-old Jason Furman worked as an aide and 31-year-old Sarah Bianchi was an intern....

Above all, the restored tax rates would finance Mr. Kerry's pledge to cut the budget deficit to $250 billion by the end of his first term from roughly $500 billion now, most of it a result of the Bush tax cuts.

"It is a credible, enforceable pledge that will position Kerry to the right of Bush on fiscal policy," Mr. Altman declared.

THAT sort of thinking does not appear to sit so well with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who played a central role in Mr. Kerry's primary victories. The two senators are political allies and speak often to each other, although Mr. Kennedy is not officially on the Kerry economic team. Still, he is arguing in his speeches for what amounts to a bigger role for the government in job creation, a position clearly to the left of the Kerry team.

Kerry has little reason to listen to Kennedy, while Nader has a bargaining chip - the 5% who say they'll vote for him rather than Kerry. See MaxSpeak, You Listen! for the politics of deficit spending.

Coincidence?
Both Bookslut and Cup of Chicha link to a Guardian piece about the McSweeney's/Believer constellation.

There was an elaborate chart tracing the international provenance of magic realism. (Many McSweeney's regulars - Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, William Vollmann, Jonathan Safran Foer, George Saunders - made it on to this list). Small ink drawings of animal skulls were dropped randomly into the text.

As recently as five years ago, such a winsome, even kittenish, tone, and such graphic and typographic interventions were rare in mainstreams novels. Now they are so common almost to have become a convention; signs of a highbrow endeavour whose (possibly off-putting) serious tone is cut with doodling examples of author-graffiti and liberal doses of high irony. It could be argued that, in this way, Eggers's influence on young writers coming out of the creative writing departments of the universities (and posting things on the McSweeney's website in their hundreds) is as pervasive as Raymond Carver's was in the austere, cut-to-the-marrow, sackcloth-and-ashes, "dirty realist" years of the 1980s.

When McSweeney's first came out, the old-timey design and cutesy graphics dispersed within the serious prose immediately reminded me of The Baffler. The Baffler first appeared in the early 90s and the look was created by Daniel Raeburn, The Baffler's Typographer who happens to have a brilliant piece on H.L. Mencken in the current issue. Mencken is sort of the Patron Saint of the Baffler crowd, gruff and cranky yet funny as hell. (If The Baffler were a Bad News Bear, it'd be scrappy Tanner). In his piece, Raeburn acknowledges he stole the Baffler's look from the Mencken-era magazines the Smart Set and The American Mercury.

I don't know if Eggers pilfered from The Baffler, but he has blurbed Baffler editor Tom Frank and has given readings with him.

Put your game face back on
A couple things stuck in my mind about the Al Qaeda attacks on 9.11.01 and recently in Madrid. Both involve the horror of eye-witness accounts. The New York Times Magazine published one by a Spaniard who witnessed the Madrid bombing. It reminded me of something I heard about the rescue workers at the Madrid scene. What really got to them was the sounds of cell phones ringing amidst the carnage.

Perhaps it's all a little morbid, but I imagine the look on the rescue workers' faces was similar to the facial expressions of the firefighters in the French documentary 9/11 (narrated by Robert De Niro and Steve Buscemi). On that day, two French brothers happened to be making a documentary about the NYFD - tough, tough boys, the firefighters. After the World Trade Center had been hit and the firemen received the call, they allowed the filmmakers to tag along. At one point, the firemen are inside the first floor of one of the towers and they're standing around waiting for a strategy to be hashed out. You can hear bodies periodically hitting the ground outside the blown-out windows nearby - people jumping to escape being burnt alive - and you can see it's really messing with the firefighters who are trying to keep their composure.

In a recently published book about the Bush dynasty by a married conservative couple, there's a quote from an unnamed source: "[President Bush] doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this war is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know." If Kerry's elected, I hope he agrees with this except for the religious stuff. Dean certainly didn't.