Tristero

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Paranoia Strikes Deep  

Via Digby comes an article on the strange death, from friendly fire, of sports star and soldier Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Bottom line: the article implies and Digby explicitly conjectures that Tillman, a vocal opponent of both the Iraq war and Bush, could have been fragged because his fame made him too dangerous to the powers that be.

Personally, I doubt it. I seriously doubt Tillman was fragged; the article makes a very slim case for believing anyone proactively caused Tillman's death.* But if more evidence accumulates and the case fattens up, it would come as no surprise. To believe that some Bush supporters would resort to cold-blooded murder of a fellow American if they thought it would serve their cause takes very little imagination.

Not after seeing "joke" hunting licenses targeting liberals. Not after Coulter said the only problem she had with McVeigh is that he didn't target the NY Times building. Not after opponents of the Iraq war were repeatedly labelled "objectively pro Saddam." Not after Bush opponents were labelled apologists for terrorism by some of the most prominent politicians, media sources, and pundits in this country.

And certainly not after "extraordinary rendition," Abu Ghraib, and all the other tortures, murders and Bush-perpetrated horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan.



*True, what concerns Digby and led to his speculation of fragging is far more substantive than the nonsense that caused Falwell and others to accuse Clinton of murder, drug running, and the like. But it still falls short, as I read it, of leading to plausible suspicions of deliberate murder. One more reason to marvel at how outrageous the rightwing charges against Clinton actually were.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:36 PM

Friday, September 23, 2005

Living In An F State  

Surprise, surprise.

U.S. BARS ROBERT FISK FROM ENTERING COUNTRY


posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:54 PM

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Michael Totten Needs His Real Friends. NOW.  

(Links added, content slightly revised.)

Michael Totten is, to be sure, not a man I either like or whose judgment I respect. But now, he is about to do something incredibly stupid and his clueless supporters are more than prepared to let him go ahead and do it.

According to his blog, Michael intends to move to Beirut soon, ignore State Department warnings, see what he can see amongst the Hezbollah and the Palestinians, go inside Syria, and tell us all about it on Tech Central Station. I kid you not. Needless to say, Michael has no real experience as a foreign correspondent, no real knowledge of the area outside his reading of neocon fantasies, and no idea of how to judge the character of the people he encounters.

Michael's real friends need to talk sense to him. Immediately.

Let's be up front about this. Michael Totten is trying to get himself killed. Why, I have no idea. While I don't like Michael's politics in the slightest, I have no desire to wish him personally ill. No way should he go to Beirut.

It is difficult to paraphrase the sheer madness of Michael's plans, so here is some of what he wrote:

The first places I’m going to visit after I secure my apartment are the very places the State Department tells me not to go anywhere near: Hezbollah’s militarized state-within-a-state in Beirut’s southern suburbs, and the wretched Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Then I’m going to Damascus so I can experience a real live Baath Party police state up close and in person.

A "real live Baath Party police state..." What the hell is he thinking? This is not how a knowledgeable man describes his interest in observing up close a dangerously repressive government.

Perhaps Michael believes he is 10 years old and he's going to the circus and he'll get to hold a real live boa constrictor which will provide a suitably controlled frisson of danger. Or maybe he's consciously echoing Tom Friedman's notoriously idiotic lede from a column penned in the early months of the Iraq fiasco: "It isn’t often you get to see a live political science experiment." Did Michael think he was being cute, or funny, or maybe hip and cynical when he wrote this? Whatever, dude. What he lets slip, as Friedman did, is that he has no idea whatsoever what he is fantasizing about.

Michael continues:

I am not an unbiased observer, and I have no intention to write bloodlessly neutral 'he said, she said' AP-style wire pieces.

Indeed he won't. There very well will be plenty of blood around. His own.

Why on earth is Michael doing this? He explains:

I’ve had enough of opinionated bloviating for a while...

In other words, he's going off to get himself killed because he's tired of talking. That is simply nuts.

And then he immediately continues:

... and I’m looking forward to adding to the world’s knowledge, even if ever so slightly, rather than merely adding to the world’s noise. "

Riiiiiiiiight.

As if a blogger, with no experience as a foreign reporter in a war zone, with no deep knowledge of the area he will be covering, a man who cannot speak the languages he encounters, who knows almost no one in the area, is in a position to impart anything resembling knowledge. That is equally deluded.

Now here's what will happen to poor Michael if someone he respects doesn't shake some sense into him.

The best case scenario is that Michael lands in Beirut and, using connections from his neo-con online buddies (and who knows, maybe a CIA agent or two), merrily goes about interviewing third rate bureaucrats and attending embassy parties, naively reporting middle east propaganda as if it is really deep insight into a country's soul. Occasionally, he'll exchange deeply felt passionate expressions of peace with those ubiquitous paragons of street wisdom, the cabbies who drive him back and forth to his flat. Michael will learn nothing he couldn't learn from a trip to the local library, see nothing dangerous, and come back to the US with exotic stories, some great hummus recipes and little else to mark his time in the Middle East except perhaps a bad case of the runs.

But if Michael actually decides to do what he says - ignore State Department warnings, and go about his biased ways into the heart of the Hezbollah - even money says he will end like poor Danny Pearl. Because let's not forget, Pearl was smart as a whip, talented, knew what he was doing, had experience, and while a committed reporter, was no idealistic fool. Michael Totten has none of Pearl's obvious advantages. And Michael is going into an area just as dangerous as Pakistan.

Perhaps Michael thinks he can pull off a cynical career breakthrough, reasoning that if he can hobnob with mediocrities and merely appear to do something bold and dangerous rather than actually do it, he will come back to the US with a rep that he can parlay into a role as a genuine expert, a true TV-ready pundit. He can't. His chances of meeting anyone important, unless he has serious connections, are zero. Even if he has those connections, the chances that anyone important will tell him, a total novice, anything interesting are also zero.

But really, I hear the romantics riposte, who knows? Maybe Michael's naivete will work to his advantage and he will really do something important to help advance our knowledge of the Middle East,

Well, I know. And I am telling you that if you are a friend of Michael Totten's, you should stop reading this, call him up, and talk some sense into him.

If Michael wants to learn something and do some good, he should go to school, learn Arabic or Persian, get a degree in poli-sci, and join State. Or join the Army. Or just simply keep on blogging.

Okay, I've done my bit. I urged Michael in his comments to his post to stop his foolishness. He deleted my comments. I sent him a letter urging him to find an excuse and not go. No response.

I repeat, I don't like him very much, but I see no reason why he should go blithely off in search of some faux-Hemingway epiphany, urged on by brain-dead sycophants. If you are his friend, please contact him and talk him out of this incredibly bad idea.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:28 PM

Friday, September 02, 2005

The Global War On Nature  

What now? Is he going to pray to God to come and part the waters? Declare a Global War On Nature and pre-emptively attack the Atlantic winds in order to end all natural disasters in our lifetime? Why not? It makes as much sense as the End of Evil his advisers talked about for some four years.

And so finally, the scales are starting to fall. Unfortunately many of us were right: it took the tragic deaths of thousands of Americans before the country would start to get it. Little did we know, however, that those deaths would come not in war, or from terrorism, but from an utterly pointless, utterly avoidable, utterly inexcusable neglect of his oath in the aftermath of a predicted and well-tracked natural disaster.

But there he now stands in the harsh light of the Louisiana afternoon, smirking and joking his way through his photo-ops tour, his treasured vacation tragically cut short. But this time, no one except his paid acolytes have a kind word left for him.

Some of the reporters seem shell-shocked, not only by the horrors they witnessed but by the sheer awful failure of the Bush government to meet this huge, yet manageable, crisis before it descended into hell. As he swaggers and blinks and mugs for the cameras in the hot sun, hardly anyone's buying his cheap act for a second. And to many, who are seeing him as he really is for the first time, the sight of the real George W. Bush is as horrible and as grotesque as the rotting corpse of a poor lady in a wheelchair abandoned in a ruined city once known for its proud, joyful zest for living, its music, and its charm. The newly awakened shake their heads and wonder aloud:

The safety of my children and my country depend on this man?

Welcome to reality in the late summer of 2005.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:52 PM

Friday, May 20, 2005

There Is No Compromise Possible  

Jeralyn over at Talk Left urges all liberal bloggers to speak out against a compromise that would permit the likes of Patricia Owen to get confirmed by the Congress. So I am breaking my blog silence to say that I fully agree that no compromise is possible on this issue.

The Republicans have framed this in the typically fascistic manner that they've used since Bush entered the White House. They are prepared to tear up the Constitution in order to appoint mediocrities, incompetents, and extremists to the courts without opposition from anyone who is not a party member.

There is no conceivable compromise with such tactics, as it would no longer permit the United States to have a government of the kind that Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin -to name just three- had in mind. Regardless of whether the Republicans succeed at this one, however, the restoration of any kind of genuine democracy after the havoc Bush has wreaked on our system will take years to repair, if it happens at all.

Two predictions: If they lose now, they will surely try again -and probably succeed- when Bush nominates someone far to the right of Scalia to the Supreme Court. While I don't know his health, but assuming it's ok, I suspect Bush may try to nominate Bork, even if he is 78 or so.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 2:59 PM

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

The F Word - Day Two  

In a spirited discussion of my previous post at Majikthise's terrific blog, Robert M. Jeffers recognized the serious nature of the Schiavo ruling but urged a retreat from hyperbole, "It's not judicial Armageddon, but it is as poor a law as can be imagined."

While today's ruling by Judge Whittemore might lend support to Jeffers' point, I must note that this disgusting circus is far from over.

I'm struck that many on the left blogosphere have focused on the details of the Schiavo case rather than its larger meaning. That meaning is stark and disturbing: The Bush administration demonstrated in public - not in secret, as with the Gonzales torture memos - that they have the will and the means to overturn any law they disagree with. Regardless of what happens now to the Schiavo case, the right wing extremists who control our government have made their point. Openly, they have asserted, and proven, that they are literally above the law of the United States. They are now unequivocably beyond any judicial control. Only a fool would believe that they won't do this again on a different issue. And again. And again.

It is equally striking that two major newspapers, often chided by the left blogosphere as slow to the punch and timid, hit the nail pretty darn close to the head. The Los Angeles Times wrote:

[Repulican leaders] brushed aside our federalist system of government, which assigns the resolution of such disputes to state law, and state judges. Even President Bush flew back from his ranch to Washington on Sunday to be in on what amounts to a constitutional coup d'etat. [Emphasis added.]

The New York Times editorial on the bill was equally outraged:

The new law tramples on the principle that this is "a nation of laws, not of men," and it guts the power of the states. When the commotion over this one tragic woman is over, Congress and the president will have done real damage to the founders' careful plan for American democracy...

...President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.

A coup d'etat. The rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the results they want...There's no reason to be coy about it.

This is fascism.

Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to write and comment on The F Word both pro, con, or otherwise. There is much to think over now. I am not used to the idea of living in an openly fascist state. In a very real sense I don't know what moral behavior under such a regime could be. Nevertheless, I don't feel a need to comment on this issue further -the position I hold is as clear as I can make it. I've carefully considered numerous alternate views but I see no reason to temper my conclusion. And I need to resume my life which, fortunately, demands considerable distance from the madness of this administration's actions.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:50 AM

Monday, March 21, 2005

The F Word  

Well, it happened.

On March 21, 2005 12:44 am, the extremists in charge of the US Government showed the world that when they don't like a law or a legally valid court decision - ANY law, ANY court decision, for ANY reason, no matter how carefully adjudicated - they are prepared to rip it up. There is a word for this.

The word is fascism.

As of early this morning, America can no longer maintain the slightest shadow of an illusion that it is a Republic with a flexible and somewhat benign, albeit hegemonic and imperialist, stance towards the world while enjoying a modicum of democratically established liberties for its citizens. Today, my fellow Americans, we woke up in a new United States, a fascist America in which a citizen's rights and liberties are inscribed not in a set of laws but are entirely subject to the whims of the extremists running the Federal legislative and executive branches. A fascist America which barely tries to disguise either its thirst for oil or its demands that all countries must kowtow to its leaders' demands.

Oh, c'mon! They can't DO that, they can't take away our rights without hearings, without extended open discussions, can they? We have laws! They can't just ignore them!

Well guess what? They just can ignore them and they just did. That's what the awful personal tragedy of the Schiavos mutated into: the perfect excuse for extremists to come out of the closet and swagger about, smirking, basking in the full extent of their fascist glory.

Nineteen judges examined the details of a heartwrenching medical case, numerous expert witnesses on all sides were called. The judgment was affirmed and unequivocal. No matter. In an entirely unprecedented move, and merely to demonstrate its overwhelming power, the extremists in this government told the American judiciary to take a hike. We're doing it our way from now on.

The extremists said to the courts and state legislatures of the land, "For heaven's sakes, there's a war on, don't you know? Give up those quaint, naive, too-subtle-for-my-mind notions of "Justice" and take a break, don't bother judging anymore, that's not your job, never really should have been, frankly. From now on, we'll simply tell you what justice has to be. It'll be easier on everyone."

When you're the fascist...Oh, the usefulness of those "just this one time" vital intrusions into cultural, political, issues!

Information about the identity of the traitor who leaked Valerie Plame's name getting uncomfortably close to disclosure? Convene an emergency session in the dead of night; authorize "just this once" a pre-emptive enemy combatant arrest or two for the good of the country. Mission accomplished. Are you a whistle-blower with important information that the CIA has far two few decent Arabic translators and that some of them are paid operatives of foreign governments? Convene Congress, amend the PATRIOT act, and you'll disappear like Padilla for several years.

Think fascism can't happen here? It already has. That's right. It already has. Today was just the first, truly normative display of the amount of control this fascist regime has. One party, fully in power that can, on a whim, overturn any law of the land. Without limit or control.

But since Bush first took his oath in 2001, American and foreign citizens have been held without trial or communication so many times it's almost routine. Torture is ubiquitous, all but official US policy; one well-respected pundit even suggested amending the Constitution to allow retributive torture of those convicted of capital crimes.

Meanwhile, the traitors who outed a CIA agent evade the law; and dollars to donuts at least one of those traitors is still working in the White House. "Open government" is a laughable oxymoron (remember Cheney's energy hearings?) And everywhere, fake news telling us George Bush knows all, is almost a holy force for good. And everywhere, a media so corrupt and incompetent it took something like a year for anyone to learn that a "reporter" who was a regular attendee at numerous White House briefings was not just a media whore, but an actual whore, and nothing but a whore who'd done a little typing, a whore with an explicit web site advertising his charms at the same time he was addressing a question to the president of the United States. Christ...

Now what?

Well, we can't sue them in court 'cause the courts are rapidly being packed with extremists and anyway, even if we managed to sue, they'd just pass a law giving us no standing ("just this once" as in Schiavo) and we're back to square one. We can't elect anyone to oppose them because they are busy gerrymandering district after district to make it all but impossible for anyone except a right wing kook to get elected. We can't make our views public in any coherent way because they own the best microphones and cameras and carefully ban effective spokesmen opposed to right wing extremism from important media appearances and events.

Oh, and by the way, don't bother with those "living wills" as some have suggested. Did you actually listen last night to what the crazies were saying? They couldn't have been clearer. Their goal is is to ban living wills if they request a do not resuscitate under conditions they don't happen to like. So sure, pay the 15 bucks for a LW and pretend your last wishes will be respected by Tom Delay and his fellow fascists, one of the most corrupt and stupid men in the history of Congress, quite an achievement. You never know, he could change into an honest, compassionate man (joke).

So,

Should we move to another country and watch safely from afar as the nation we grew up in and love so much disintegrates before our eyes, as it surely will from the behavior of such extremists? I'm sure it will tempt many, but few will actually do it, for logistical, personal, and/or political reasons.

Should we work within the Democratic Party? Oh, please. Did you read Lieberman and Biden in the New Yorker, on the meaning of Dean as chair? Said with a sneer: "It never made a damn bit of difference who was Democratic chairman." Ok, maybe Dean can knock heads together enough to make a difference someday. But we're confronting real, genuine, fascism -the ugly kind- today. The incompetent clods who are still in charge of the Democrats not only let a genuine war hero and exemplary patriot get tarred as a lying traitor. They also permitted a drunken, stupid, ignornant and amoral WAR DESERTER be portrayed as a man of courage, stern conviction, and military mien. They should have raised holy hell. But they didn't.

Nah, the Democrats got a long, long way to go until anyone could even pretend with a straight face they're a nationally important party again.


Revolution and radical struggle? A second Civil War? The very notion sickens me. First, I'm a liberal. Political extremism and absolutism, of all sorts, revolts me. It is anti-liberal, ie anti-freedom. Furthermore, no sane American who truly thought about the consequences of the revolutionary overthrow of an American government, even a fascist one, could support such madness. The human consequences would make the first Civil War look like a collegiate wrestling tournament in comparison.

And guess who would win? Hint: Ken Lay's on their side. No. When you talk about destruction, you can count me out. (Where have I heard that before?)

So.

Now what?
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:31 AM