Month: July 2007

From an interview with Prospect magazine foreign editor Bartle Breese Bull (who wrote a June opinion piece on Moktada al-Sadr for The New York Times) by Robin Young, host of WBUR’s Here & Now (this segment begins at 4:39 in the Real Audio stream):

ROBIN YOUNG: You do say he’s smart. You say, in fact, he’s one of the canniest politicians in Iraq, but previously we’ve heard that he wasn’t that bright. In fact, that maybe he was maybe kind of dumb and had sort of inherited inherited this mantle from fathers (sic) and uncles but didn’t deserve it.

BARTLE BREESE BULL: Yeah. You know, I think he seems very dumb too and when he speaks and so on. He’s not a great speaker. He’s at the very lowest rung of the Shiite clerical heirarchy — the equivalent of a village preacher, officially — but we have to look at his actions, Robin.

Perhaps she was thinking of a different leader.

photo from Dakota Wesleyan University’s McGovern Center

George S. McGovern, a World War II bomber pilot, history and political science professor, political activist, U.S. Representative and Senator from South Dakota, John F. Kennedy’s Food for Peace director, and 1972 Democratic nominee for President of the United States turns 85 today.

From 1965 on, McGovern was one of the earliest and most consistent voices in government advocating an end to the Vietnam War, opposing not only the policy of Republican Richard Nixon but also Democrat Lyndon Johnson. He advocated opening talks with Communist China years before Nixon was lavishly praised for doing so. McGovern’s first speech on the Senate floor, in March 1963 was titled “Our Castro Fixation versus the Alliance for Progress” which addressed how — as he puts it in his biography Grassroots:

…the [Kennedy] Administration and the Congress were so absorbed in their fears of Fidel Castro that they were overlooking the real challenge to the United States in Latin America — “the economic, political and social ills” of the nations to the south if us. I described the misery and political instability of Latin America as “a smoldering blockbuster on our doorstep … a continent cursed by a social system that concentrates enormous wealth in the hands of a few and consigns the many to lives of desperate poverty.”

That was a newly-minted US Senator from South Dakota, on the floor of the Senate, just five months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 44 years ago. Know anybody there now who could do the same?

From the Huffington Post, 18 July 2007, 11PM:

The second story describes how the US has searched for more than a year for “the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq”, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

On Wednesday, the chief United States military spokesman here, Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, provided a new explanation for Mr. Baghdadi’s ability to escape attack: he never existed.

General Bergner told reporters that a senior Iraqi insurgent captured this month said that the elusive Mr. Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose declarations on audiotape were read by a man named Abu Abdullah al-Naima.

The first story explains how that enabled US forces to move the goalposts, retroactively:

BAGHDAD — The U.S. command said Wednesday the highest-ranking Iraqi in the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq has been arrested, adding that information from him indicates the group’s foreign-based leadership wields considerable influence over the Iraqi chapter.

Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, also known as Abu Shahid, was captured in Mosul on July 4, said Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a military spokesman.

…

Bergner said al-Mashhadani had told interrogators that al-Baghdadi is a “fictional role” created by al-Masri and that an actor is used for audio recordings of speeches posted on the Web.

Of course, al-Baghdadi’s non-existence has been vetted as thoroughly as his original existence.

Being that traffic here is negligable, I don’t usually just point people to more-travelled sites because I figure if you’re paying enough attention to things to get this far, you’ve probably seen most of the stuff I look at already.

But let me just mention Dennis Perrin’s latest post in which he indulges his admiration for the short-lived long-ago sketch comedy show Fridays — which I never saw back when it aired — by posting their 1980 post-election, pre-inaguration parody The Ronnie Horror Show. As someone who saw a lot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show back in the era, this wasn’t funny solely because of the political content.

Slow learner and White House Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, at a press conference today:

And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet’s nest they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn’t suggest to me that we shouldn’t be doing it.

In most cases, hornet “push back” consists of them pushing their stingers into your skin. And for most people — those who are not masochistic to the point that they enjoy the sting of a good hornet or those mentally incapable of learning a fairly simple lesson — there is a body of historical evidence and advice that supports the idea that you shouldn’t poke hornet nests.

How Not to Get Stung

If you do happen to see a nest, there are few things you can do to avoid being stung:

• Do not disturb the nest in anyway.
• Do not make any loud noises.
• Stay back from the nest.
• Do not bother a hornet who is trying to go to its nest.
• Do not disturb the air by moving your hands or arms around.
• Do not breathe on the nest or on a hornet.
• Never kill a hornet near its nest.
• Do not break a hornet’s nest. It is much safer in one piece.
• Do not attempt to remove a hornet’s nest in the middle of the day. Wait until it is cooler outside.

Now it’s just getting ridiculous.

The run to the center begins, with people like Rick Perlstein enabling the right wing in their demonization of leftists and “the left” by stepping up their campaign to get SIRIUS to change the name of the liberal talk channel on their satellite radio network from “SIRIUS Left” because the conservative channel is called “SIRIUS Patriot”.

So now — assuming anyone on the right is paying attention — they’ll be able to claim that Democrats and liberals are running away from the idea of being associated with the left. Because we all know that the left is a bad thing.

As a marketing plan, it might not have been a bad idea to work to get them to change the name. Although, if I was given the choice of listening to channels I didn’t know anything about labeled “Patriot” and “Liberty”, I’d probably leave the radio off, thinking that the former was a bunch of right-wing talkers who find that kind of ostentation necessary the way they need to drive Hummers to show they’re big men, and that the latter was a 24-hour loop of George W. Bush speeches about “our liberties”.

Stop being so scared people. People who disagree with you are going to call you leftists and communists and socialists and un-American. Hell, they’re starting to call George W. Bush a liberal.If it isn’t true, refute it or ignore it. If it is true, you can say: “Yes, I’m a leftist. Let me tell you about the wonders of socialized medicine.”

SIRIUS Satellite Radio apparently has named their liberal and conservative channels “SIRIUS Left” and “SIRIUS Patriot”, which has a number of people upset.

I have no problem with “Left”. Not that I’m subscribing to SIRIUS. I’m a leftist. A patriotic leftist, but a leftist.

However, I do have some suggestions for those who are offended:

• SIRIUS Blue
• SIRIUS Good
• SIRIUS Better

And some for the other side:

1. SIRIUS Red (that ought to go over well)
2. SIRIUS 27% (or whatever)

Letter to Sen. Ron Wyden:

Dear Sen. Wyden:

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has proposed S. 185, the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, which repeals portions of the 2006 Military Commissions Act that eliminated the a basic constitutional provision from our country’s legal system.

More than half of the Democratic Senators have signed on to the bill as co-sponsors since it was put forward, as has one of the independents. I would like to know if you intend to co-sponsor or otherwise support the bill, if you feel there is some flaw in its implementation, or if you do not believe habeas corpus applies to persons covered by the Military Commissions Act and that it should not go through.

On an unrelated note, I’d like to express my profound disgust for the vote you and your colleagues made on the Lieberman amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. You’ve green-lighted the way for the administration to use cherry-picked intelligence as a reason for air strikes in Iran. One of the Republican presidential hopefuls — who didn’t even vote on the amendment — said he was ready to preemptively strike Iran within hours of the resolution’s passage, long before any of the reports have been churned out.

It’s baffling to me that any of you think the administration can be trusted on even the smallest issues at this point, given their record. I hope you know what you’re doing, but the past several months haven’t exactly given me the impression that that’s the case.

Aaaaaand, cue the missiles:

On Heels Of Senate’s Iran Vote, Brownback Declared I’m Ready To Strike Iran

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 97-0 to pass a resolution sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to censure Iran “for what it said was complicity in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.” The resolution required the Bush administration to regularly report to Congress on Iran’s role in Iraq.

…

Validating the concern many felt, Sen. Sam Brownback appeared on Fox News shortly after the vote and declared he was ready to preemptively strike Iran. Host Sean Hannity asked Brownback, “There’s probably going to come a point for the next president that they’re going to have to determine whether to go out and have that preemptive strike. And you’re ready and would be ready to do that?”

“Yes, I am, and I think we have to be,” Brownback answered. “Sean, if we’re going to be serious about this fight, and we’re in this fight, and probably for a generation. We’re probably in this fight for a generation.”

Even before the first report! And Brownback sat out the vote!