Category: Politics

I’m not even going to comment on this, apart from adding some highlights to the following excerpt from the script for the “Budapest: The Best of Hungary” episode from the Rick Steves’ Europe series, which I watched with my folks at lunch today.

To keep dissent to a minimum, the secret police of both the Nazis and Communists imprisoned, deported or executed anyone suspected of being an enemy of the state. Rooms feature the many bleak dimensions of life in Hungary before freedom. Gulag life — countless writers, artists and dissidents spent their best years breaking rocks in quarries. Propaganda preached wave the flag, trust your leaders…and you’ll enjoy the material fruits of your obedience.

Both Nazism and Communism celebrated a sham justice… and a sham democracy. Behind the banners were all the domestic spy tools governments use to keep a people in line. Joining the Church was a way to express dissent, and a people’s faith was one thing the totalitarian governments could not control. The basement was the grim scene of torture and executions.

At Statue Park, you’ll see the Communist All-Stars: Marx, local wannabe Stalins and Lenin in his favorite “hailing a cab” pose. In a kind demagogue’s hell, they’re left with no one to preach to but each other and stony Socialist symbols — the heroic soldier, the obedient worker, the tireless mother.

Under Soviet Communism, censorship was taken to extremes. Art was acceptable only if it promoted the ideology. The only sanctioned art form in the Eastern Block was Social Realism.

This is Social Realism. Leaders were portrayed with unquestioned authority. Individuals were idealized as cogs in the machine — strong, stoic, doing their job well and proudly for the good of the people. Distinguishing features were unimportant. People all looked the same. Unquestioning patriots trusting and serving their nation.

My friend’s planning to take his wife and son up to do some skiiing in Canada next week — celebrate the New Year, a new job — their first vacation after several years of penury. He hasn’t been across the border in a while, so he asks me if I know what you need to get across and back. Do they need passports these days? I don’t think so, but I haven’t been to Canada myself since a lovely trip to Toronto for newmedia ’98, and I can’t offer any real advice in this post-9/11 era. I decided to look things up.

Naturally, since my friend and his family (all US citizens) are entering Canada first, that’s my first stop. I vaguely remember running across the Canadian Tourism site some years ago, checking out a Flash movie that won an award, so I Google “Canadian Tourism” and right at the top is the Travel Canada site. Marked clearly on the left of the page under “Helpful Information” is a link for “Entry Requirements (Visa)”, where I find what my friend will need to get to the slopes. Pretty simple so far.

I don’t remember ever hearing about any equivalent “United States Tourism” site, but I try Googling it nonetheless. The first site is a link to the tourism pages of each of the states. There are commercial sites. The US Virgin Island Tourism page. A site called FirstGov.gov, which looks like it might have the right info, but which apparently also has the right info about many, many other things.

The second site listed, WorldWeb.com, has corresponding information to the Tourism Canada site two levels down from the main page, but nothing about US citizens re-entering (admittedly, Tourism Canada doesn’t say anything about Canadians returning home, either).

Of course, I say to myself, the place I need to check is the Department of Homeland Security, the über-department containing the folks in the Border Patrol, Immigration and Naturalization, etc. They’ll have the info my friend needs.

An integral knowledge of the organization of DHS is helpful to finding anything on the DHS website. For instance, if you choose “Travel & Transportation” instead of “Immigration & Borders” when you’re looking for what documents you need to re-enter the country from Canada, you might spend a bit of time in a personal Tora Bora of useless documentation.

However, if you start off with “Immigration and Borders”, read all the way through a bunch of jabbering explanatory text with inline links all the way to the bottom of the page, you might think that “Border Management” might be the place to go for the right info.

By this level the web people at DHS must have gotten tired, because it’s almost a model of clarity. Headings, sub-headings, bullet point links. And there, under “Inspections at U.S. Borders” might just be the pertinent link: “How Will I Be Inspected When I Come to a U.S. Port of Entry?”

Except. Except…

404 – Requested Page Not Found on Site

The page you requested, http://uscis.gov/graphics/howdoi.htm, is not on our site.

 Please look for related information at  /graphics/index.htm.

 You may also find related information by starting at  the USCIS Home Page.

Sure, these things happen. And like a good web citizen, I report items like this, by clicking on, say, the “Feedback” button on the top of the 404 page. What really boggled my mind was this:

For feedback about the USCIS Website only, you may send a letter to the USCIS Web Unit:
          U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
          Office of Communications, Web Unit
          20 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Rm. 4026
          Washington, DC 20529

There’s no other option to report any problems with the site.

Of course, as a good friend and a cranky citizen, I did find the information I was looking for on the Citizenship and Immigration Services site, but — wow — send a letter to them to get them to update their web page?

The New Republic editor Peter Beinart continues to protest that he’s not an idiot in “Lesson Plan” this week, responding to criticism of his call for a non-totalitarian liberalism (apparently he thinks those of us who were opposed to the Iraq War are totalitarian liberals).

Beinart has two points regarding his (and TNR‘s) credibility. First, he asks: “…there is a second critique, which focuses less on my argument than on my credibility–and the credibility of other liberals who supported the Iraq war. What authority do we have to propose a national security direction for our fellow liberals when we urged them to follow the Bush administration into Iraq?”

He follows this up by saying that “liberal hawks” like himself were “blinded” by the “widespread conventional wisdom” (is there ever CW that’s not widespread?). They sucked up the administration line like it was a Stephen Glass-like story, only more dangerous.

His second admission is that he made a mistake in thinking “the Bush administration would take postwar nation-building seriously”.

What world were “liberal hawks” living in? Bush and his cronies were obviously bat-shit drunk with power after they managed to scuzz their way into office in 2001. And their ramp-up for all-out conservative jihad after 9/11 wasn’t exactly a secret (see: PATRIOT Act, plans for extraordinary rendition, evasion of Geneva Accords). It was all being reported on during the eighteen-month interval between the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Did Beinart and his buddies think someone new was going to be running the show?

It’s the “Yeah, I wanted Fast Freddy dead, see, so I gave the gat to Rocco the Retard. How was I gonna know he was gonna shoot all those people with it?” defense. Beinart’s got no credibility.

Thanks to a late-night diary on Beinart’s new piece by Descrates for riling me up.

Before he gave up the ghost as the designated Homeland Security chief last Friday, a team looked into updating the color-coded alert system Tom Ridge spent months working on. Apparently, they needn’t have rushed to finish this off, but they were proud enough of their hard work last week that they felt DHS should get some cred for being on the ball about something.

At the end of an anti-Michael Moore screed in The American Spectator, Barbara Bernstein writes:

How can anything he states as truth be accepted with this manner of gathering facts? Yet, he was entertaining in his position as a Leninist masquerading as a man of the people He reminds me of an essay my son Danny wrote in first year French in high school, in which the question was, “Which type of government is best?” His answer was, “A tyranny, as long as I am the tyrant.”

Which, of course begs the question: “You got a problem with that, Barbara?”

"You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier."
    Describing what it’s like to be governor of Texas.
    (Governing Magazine 7/98)
    From Paul Begala’s "Is Our Children Learning?"

"I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator," Bush joked.
    — CNN.com, December 18, 2000

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it, " [Bush] said.
    — Business Week, July 30, 2001

From “If Only I Were A Dictator, by George W. Bush”, a Buzzflash news analysis

The “Rush said ‘dick'” threads have been hot and heavy, and I’ll do my part to get my letter out (although I’m tempted to use the PTC complaint form, as suggested by one Atrios commenter). But I noticed (as have others) that Rush’s own listings for Oregon stations subvert his listeners. It correctly lists KEX as the Portland station’s call letters, but gives the signal frequency as 620, which (coincidentally?) is the frequency of KPOJ, the Portland Air America station.

Wow. I didn’t know Oregon Representative Darlene Hooley was a “knee-jerk liberal.” But Media Matters quotes Robert Novak in a story today:

Novak wrong on Rep. Hooley’s record, wrongly accused her of hypocrisy

Syndicated columnist and CNN host Robert D. Novak accused Representative Darlene Hooley (D-OR) of hypocrisy for expressing concern about the lack of armor for U.S. troops in Iraq after — as he claimed falsely — she voted against funding the war. On the December 11 edition of CNN’s The Capital Gang, regular panel member Novak called Hooley “a knee-jerk liberal and professional politician” and stated: “It’s a definition of hypocrisy to complain about lack of armor on trucks after voting against giving the troops any trucks at all.” But Novak was wrong on Hooley’s record.

In the Oregonian on Saturday (11 December 2004), a teacher from the American International School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Erik Ortman, wrote an essay about how Americans abroad are posing as Canadians rather than defend their own country’s foreign policies. Then he made a startling assertion. My letter to the editor below.

I haven’t spent any time outside of the country since early 2001, but I do participate in a number of online professional forums with an international (largely European) membership, many of whom have no compunction about sharing their opinions on U.S. foreign policy when the topic strays to world events. So it surprises me that Erik W. Ortman’s Dec. 11 “In My Opinion” makes its case that Americans abroad should provide “a few more clear voices explaining U.S. foreign policy and a few less assumed identities” solely on the basis of protecting themselves from citizens of other countries who “suggest the invasion of Afghanistan was anything other than an imperialist power grab.”

Ortman’s disingenuous thesis — that Americans are pretending to be Canadians when they’re away from home because they’re trying to avoid conflict over Afghanistan — somehow glosses over the entire Iraq conflict, which is the only foreign policy issue over which I’ve witnessed harsh words between my colleagues for the past two-and-a-half years. To pretend — as Ortman does by not even mentioning Iraq in his piece — that the invasion of Afghanistan is the primary issue an American is likely to be asked to defend abroad is simply misleading.

Peter Beinart’s advocating for a “terrorism-based” agenda for the Democrats in “A Fighting Faith,” the December 13 cover story for The New Republic. But aside from making a dumb argument, could the editors have chosen a stupider-looking donkey — complete with armor and buckteeth — than their cover image (detail below)? Shades of Dukakis in a tank! Save us from Beinart and company!

Josh Marshall responds to Peter Beinart’s shriek about Islamic fundamentalists coming to take our women with some agreement and disagreement. But I must admit I’m puzzled by one comment Marshall makes: “The problem is not principally dovishness but rather — as Peter notes — that Democrats are by and large simply not sufficiently interested in national security policy, as such.”

Anyone who was against the war in Iraq was expressing an interest in national security. More importantly, those of us who were informed enough about the global security situation and didn’t find the administration claims of WMD production and stockpiles to be credible were — unlike Beinart and the editorial staff at TNR — correct in our assessment.

That’s not a “dovish” (or as Beinart terms it, “soft”) viewpoint, it was just common sense. Sure, there are wacko peaceniks in the Democratic party, but there are Republicans advocating dropping nuclear weapons on Iraq and the French on the other side. For every Democratic lawmaker Beinart could point to who might be uninformed about national security, I bet you can find a Republican who is just as ill-informed, starting right at the top.

Personally, given how many things he’s been wrong about in his tenure at TNR, I’m astounded that Beinart has the chutzpah to lecture anyone about how Democrats can rebound. He’s the Condoleeza Rice of the the Democratic party.