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June 30, 2005
"The new president of Iran is a terrorist"
by JeremyYou wonder how a scandal like this could have been kept secret during the heated competition of a presidential campaign:
Three Americans held hostage in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran remember Iran's president-elect as a key player in the seizure, The Washington Times reported on Thursday. In interviews with the newspaper, the former hostages recalled Iran's ultra-conservative President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad interrogating captives, the report said."As soon as I saw his picture in the paper, I knew that was the bastard," retired Army Col. Charles Scott, 73, a former hostage, told the newspaper.
"He was one of the top two or three leaders," said Scott, of Jonesboro, Georgia. "The new president of Iran is a terrorist."
Do we think this could be a bad sign? But that was more than 25 years ago.
UPDATE: By the time I was ready to hit "publish" on this, the article disappeared from the Reuters website, though they've still got a second article in which Iran denies the accusation. You'll have to take my word for the text quoted above, though it may also be carried elsewhere.
UPDATE 2: It doesn't matter -- the story's all over the place. Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post version of the story:
"This is the guy. There's no question about it," said former hostage Chuck Scott, a retired Army colonel who lives in Jonesboro, Ga. "You could make him a blond and shave his whiskers, put him in a zoot suit and I'd still spot him."
Posted by Jeremy at 08:10 AM | Comments (1)
June 28, 2005
Not Enough to Read?
by JeremyThis looks like a source for quasi primary research we bloggers can use to reference news stories against. I'm not sure how biased or unbiased this data is, but I means to find out (the site his here):
A Washington research group has created a Web site where the public can read, submit and download the difficult-to-find public policy briefs members of Congress use to get up to speed on issues.[...]
The often-coveted but elusive reports are produced by CRS, a public policy research arm of Congress. CRS, which boasts hundreds of analysts and a $100 million budget, churns out hundreds of briefs each year on a wide range of topics. It recently issued one, for example, called "U.S. Treatment of Prisoners in Iraq: Selected Legal Issues." Another was titled, "Gasoline Prices: Policies and Proposals." A third was "Immigration: Policy Considerations Related to Guest Worker Programs."
The reports have long been praised as nonpartisan, concise and readable. But they are reserved for members of Congress, committees and their staffs.
[...]
The CDT, a technology policy organization, complained that the reports are paid for with taxpayer money and ought to be readily available for free to anyone who wants one.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2005
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Hound
by Jeremy
Posted by Jeremy at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
Kick Me Hard
by JeremyCaptioning for the predisposed:
"He's defending Karl Rove in the wake of his most egregious offense yet. He's finally hit bottom."
For the rest of you:
Google News seemed to want me to read this editorial by a man named David Sarasohn in the Oregonian:
Rove launches his own 9/11 N.Y. attack
I'd actually cite passages from that editorial, but why bother. If you don't see what I mean already you never will.
Here's the most often quoted part of the Rove speech:
"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," Rove told the approving crowd, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
He was using hyperbole to rouse his audience and to piss off Democrats. Probably he figured this would put mainstream Democrats on the defensive as to their opportunistic alliance with the "Hey-Hey-Ho-Ho" crowd, which could only help Republicans. But more fundamentally I think he was talking the way edgy comedians talk. Except he's not a comedian -- he's a powerful man who half the country thinks is an evil genius. So he shouldn't feel he can say things the way Chris Rock might say them.
Without delving in line by line, he could and should have used the word "some" liberals or even the phrase "some prominent liberals." But he decided, I guess, that it would be amusing to go double barrel. And I can't say people shouldn't be offended by that.
Here's the worst thing Rove said [emphasis mine]:
"Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger," Rove oozed. "No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
Personally I agree with the first half of that statement (before the 'oozed') but I don't know what the hell he's implying in the next phrase, "No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals." That's where he loses me. I suppose he means, though he's not thinking of it this way, that Durbin's statement (which very few liberals or Democrats have distanced themselves from) seems to satisfy Chomsky's criterion for indicting American capitalists, namely that the objectively likely consequences of one's actions should be held as equal to their intentions. So if the anti-Bush screeds of American liberals are being used as anti-American propaganda then, well...if the shoe fits.
This is the part he should either clarify or apologize for. But the phenomenon he describes and which he explicitly attaches to Moveon.org strikes me as fairly well characterized. If he's thinking that Michael Moore, for instance, is objectively pro-Jihadist, then yes, it's true. And if the Democratic leadership -- who sat Moore next to Jimmy Carter at the Convention -- regrets having gotten into bed with such cartoon characters (and for having made one the head of the DNC) then they should speak up about it. So shout at Karl Rove all you want for going over the top just to piss you off, sure. But Democrats will have to recognize that Karl Rove is not the reason people are apt to think of them as having their heads up their asses when it comes to the war on terror (or whatever you'd rather call it).
I'm tempted to say Rove shouldn't have used the word 'liberal.' But that's exactly his point -- that liberals have been making noises that sound very similar to the noises being made by all those college student protestors (who normally don't vote) and that these noises are music to the ears of Jihadist propagandists.
If Rove said that liberals and Democrats are traitors (I can't quite see where he says that) then he sucks. But the worst harm to the Democratic party, if that's the concern, is being done by the Democratic party themselves.
And to those comparing Rove's foul mouth to Durbin's, remember that I suggested that Rove could have made it better by inserting the single word "some" in one or two spots.
Where might Durbin have inserted the word "some" to fix his little impropriety? Might he have suggested that 'some' American troops had behaved as badly as 'some' Nazis and were as bad as Pol Pot to 'some' degree, that Guantanamo resembles 'some' Soviet gulags? Er, I guess that would have helped (some?).
UPDATE: Somewhere up above I have a very confused paragraph in which I mention Chomsky. If you have had trouble figuring out what the hell I mean it's due to my mental laziness. I suppose I could clarify a bit, but the upshot is that I thought Rove might be using a kind of dubious logic in accusing 'liberals' that Chomsky likes to use when accusing American 'imperialists' of various things. The difference is that Chomsky isn't just talking trash: he damn well means it literally. But in searching for examples of what Chomsky has written about 'expectations' (and other such shit) I found a blog by a former leftist Israelly whose entire blog is devoted to refuting Chomsky. You gotta love that. I guess I could have simply told you that it's called, "diary of an anti-chomskyite."
Posted by Jeremy at 07:12 PM | Comments (3)
To Each According to His Gizzard
by JeremyI break my silence with some news about our backyard bird feeder where once upon a time the birdies, squirrels, and chipmunks enjoyed an Eden of peace and snackery.
Then things started to get ugly.
Red Squirrel and Chickadee, Bluejay and Robin, Chipmunk and tufted titmouse, Grey Squirrel and Nut-hatch, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Or at the very least a great deal of fucking noise.
In the end I had to intervene on behalf of the two parent family of Robbins that had just moved into a cozy little pad between the twinned beam of Southern Yellow Pine and the White Cedar five-quarter board of our lovely cantilevered deck. They moved into the neighborhood for the kids, no doubt. Then I put the feeder up just fifteen feet away from them at the edge of the wooded wetland that occupies the bulk of our property. This border separates the sunlit greenery of our little back yard from the dark and dangerous swamp where the frogs, snakes, and mosquitoes conduct their gruesome ceremonies. There exists a strange energy at this crossroads, at this last stopping place before the heart of darkness, that tends to decivilize the dryland creatures.
There was an expectant Robin mother to think of. Were her gape-mouthed babes to be raised in this corrupting atmosphere in which her parents were forced to ward off the bacchanalian cries of foul mouthed rodents with profane oaths such as one would not have thought could emerge from the pointy lips of fair Robins? "No" I figured.
So I intervened with a program of agrarian reform as bold and ingenious as it was unpopular amongst the squealing and screeching classes.
I moved the feeder from the backyard to the front yard.
It's nice there. All the shy birdies -- Chickadees, Nut-hatches, even Cardinals (who seldom dare to perch on feeders but who perch on ours) visit in safety and comfort. And Mother and Father Robin, who prefer worms and caterpillars to seeds anyway, are much happier with me now.
Even the chipmunk who had screamed outrageous obscenities at me as I took the feeder down, has forgiven me. He has come to understand that in taking down that feeder I had lifted the very yoke that had opressed his fuwwy wittle neck. The poor little dude has been freed from the slavery of his own avaricious lust for seedies and can now understand what it truly means to just be a cute little critter again. No more fighting.
And it's all thanks to me. I would step down from my role as emperor for life and let the birdies and critters rule their own domain, but I don't think they're ready yet. The new way is a little fragile still. But I'll crush anyone who stands in the way of the realization of their new order (or who might stand in the way), so there shouldn't really be any problem.
Here are a couple of the principal actors in the history I have just narrated:
Posted by Jeremy at 02:33 PM | Comments (2)
June 21, 2005
You Will Marvel at the Presticogitation of Mentalo, Master Logician
by JeremyThis post is a link to a new blog, but first a few subjective references and impressions...
I was listening to the Classic Radio channel on my Sirius Satellite radio this morning and I was enjoying the fairly well written crime drama, "Night Beat." Today's episode told the story of an 'answer man' who toured the country astounding audiences with his knowledge of all subjects. His stage name was Mentalo. All you worldly readers will want to pronounce that as if it were an Italian name or a Marvel Comics Villain, namely with the emphasis on the second syllable. But they pronounced it like this: Mental-O, with the emphasis on the first syllable. The drama was somewhat diluted by my idiot internal monologuist infinitely repeating, "Barry Mentalo, Barry Mentalo, Barry Mentalo..." in my head.
The other thing here is that I've always thought it nifty that a person who does clever tricks that play on our shared desire to believe in magic can be referred to as a magician and a person who might purport to despise that sort of hocus pocus, preferring instead to play upon another shared human propensity to engage in the empirical mapping of the world as it really, truly is, can be called a logician. The fact that those are two similar words is just a lexical wink since if you think enough about it you'll realize that the two types I describe in this paragraph are exactly the same type of person except that one is celebrating the clarity, precision, and power of human thought as served by perception (logician) while the other (magician) is celebrating how easily and delightfully human cognition can be persuaded to take an evening off so that perception might have a couple of hours to itself to toss popcorn into its mouth and clap its hands like a little girl.
Anyway, this guy is a logician worth reading. He describes himself as a guy trying to make a career in Hollywood. I take the title of his blog both as an indication that he has a sense of humor about how he comes across to people and as fair warning to not let his seemingly unassailable logic actually convince you of anything. He's the type of writer who can make stuff compelling to read even if the rabbits, hats, saws, canes and handkerchieves of his subject matter might not normally grab you. Strangely, though, the site is not accessible as I write this. Does it really exist?
Posted by Jeremy at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
Milk, Bread, Coffee, Butter, Eggs, Sugar, Cool-Aid
by JeremyI'm not clear on whether the guy in this little story is really a holocaust survivor or was simply living in Germany during the rise of Hitler. But anyway, he is not one to miss the rise of a fascist, anti-Semitic movement in the world today:
"I'm going back [to Germany] because I've seen this before." He then commenced to explain that when he was a kid, he watched with his family in fear as Hitler's government committed atrocity after atrocity, and no one was willing to say anything. He said the news refused to question the government, and the ones who did were not in the newspaper business much longer. He said good neighbors, people he had known all his life, turned against his family and other Jews, grabbing on to the hate and superiority "as if they were starved for it" (his words).He said he was too old to see it happen right in front of his eyes again, and too old to do anything about it, so he was taking his family back to Europe on Thursday where they would be safe from George W. Bush and his neocons.
[...]
When a man who survived the fruits of fascism decides its time to leave THIS country because he's seeing the same patterns that led to the Holocaust and other Nazi horrors beginning to form here, it is time for us to recognize the underlying evil inherent in the actions of those who claim they work for all Americans, and for all mankind.
Gee thanks. I guess you have to appreciate the thought, anyway. I don't want another holocaust to happen here in the States either. 'Course it'd be nice for it not to happen elsewhere in the world either, but that's for another post.
At least there are some Americans who are brave enough to say no to Nazism:
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings."
And if I didn't tell you that it was members of congress who were criticizing Senator Durbin you'd naturally assume these words to have come from, like, Vlad the Impaler:
Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Thursday: "I feel apologies are in order to the men and women of the Armed Forces. I do not ask it for myself."
Here's Durbin's response to this sort of comment:
"I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood.
Well at least he learned something in the end (i.e. that everyone who has criticized him is either a bastard or an idiot).
Posted by Jeremy at 12:24 PM | Comments (1)
June 17, 2005
What's My Excuse?
by JeremyI haven't been feeling very well these past few days, thus my failure to keep up the posting.
But today, I am proud to say, I have a happier excuse: Cara and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary (which is to say our first wedding, but the tenth year since it). The best decision I ever made merits some celebration I think! I'll be back tomorrow.
Posted by Jeremy at 04:06 PM | Comments (5)
June 14, 2005
Blurring the Line Between Church and State
by JeremyIf one of these was -- somehow or other -- flushed down a toilet then I demand a tax rebate, since it was purchased with my hard earned money:
In releasing those details in a final report on Friday, General Hood emphasized that any abuse of the Koran was unusual and that the military had gone to great lengths to be sensitive to the detainees' religious faiths, including issuing more than 1,600 Korans at the detention center.
I once stole a Gideons bible from a motel and then threw it away a few years later when it got mildewy after a pipe burst in my basement. So I guess in a way we're even. Never mind.
Posted by Jeremy at 07:40 PM | Comments (1)
June 12, 2005
Funny Face
by JeremyI photographed this annoyed looking little dog -- I think it's just that the sun was in his eyes -- in New Paltz, New York. I really don't know anything about him. I don't even know his name. Let's just call him R. Pooperminster Fuller. That might be his name. Who knows? I didn't ask.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)
June 11, 2005
Rethinking the 'Memorial'
by Jeremy
Spotlight on the Week's News
With so much attention being paid the latest plans for the 9/11 memorial at the site of Manhattan's former 'World Trade Center,' it is interesting to note how little controversy has sorrounded the recent modernization of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. We asked the director of the Freedom and Democracy Unity Partnership, charged with restoring the Lincoln Memorial, whether they handn't taken this restoration a bit far.
"Well, who's to say what "too far" means. Yes, we could have 'cleaned' the dirt, the patina from the folds of Abraham Lincoln's skin. We could have, to put it another way, suffered from the kind of failure of imagination that usually characterizes these projects. But we wanted to take this as an opportunity to grow the envelope a little, you know, to get Americans into an intellectual debate for a change. We saw a memorial to a White, Republican president as if that somehow said something about the 'liberation' of the slave peoples. And we though, gee, wouldn't this just be a wonderful opportunity to take an outdated memorial and take it into the twenty first century in the form of a vibrant statement on the possibility of different races tolerating each other."
Above is the Lincoln Memorial prior to its recent restoration. Click the image to see the restored memorial. You may continue to click the image to toggle back and forth so as to pick up the subtle differences between the before and after pictures.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:14 PM | Comments (2)
June 09, 2005
Delivery Needed
by JeremyWould one of the other UK bloggers be kind enough to pay Norm a visit to discuss this post with him? It looks to me like you can Hop right on the M1 and then zip up the M6. You'll have to ask directions when you get nearer. And don't forget to bring a cooler for the pie and seltzer bottle.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2005
Again with the Book Tag
by JeremyThe last book tag was a different version, so I will gratefully accept the honor bestowed upon me by Pieter -- also I am given to understand that there are no backs, no backs and, further, no penny tax. So I'm it:
Number of Books I Own: A sore subject. We have been unburdening the house of the things. It's surprising how many useless books I had hanging around(Peter Norton's Guide to DOS? Buh-Bye.) Anyway, a hundred now, two hundred...three, four, five...I don't know.
Last Book I Bought: Downloaded to my Palm Pilot for free, actually: "Green Mansions" by W. H. Hudson.
Last Book I Read: "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth.
Five Books that mean a lot to me:
I'll try to omit the desert Island books from the last book game. This is really a different question anyway...
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
I read this book about twelve years ago while I was in graduate school. I was a teaching assistant (freshman composition) and very stressed out and lonely. Cara and I had not yet started our long distance relationship, though we were friends and there was growing 'tension.' I had still not woken up to the fact that she and I would be spending our lives together. I think she'd figured it out, though, via some sort of divination. All I could tell was that I couldn't muster much interest in other women. One day a very pretty woman in one of my seminars flirted with me, and it didn't move me (any straight men reading this will marvel at such a claim). She leaned toward me, placed her elbows on top of my copy of Anna Karenina that lay on the tablet arm of my chair-desk, and nestled her chin on her interlaced fingers. She asked me softly, in a southern accent, why I always carried around that copy of Anna Karenina. I told her -- and you might want to imagine Woody Allen saying this -- that being a teaching assistant made me a bundle of nerves and that the novel was 'like my security blanket.' 'Oh, that's so sweeeeeeet!' she said, melodiously. She might as well have said, 'go spend your life with Cara' because this encounter only increased my desire to do just that. I'm not sure how Anna Karenina fits into all this. But the novel is charged with that kind of energy for me.
April Morning by Howard Fast.
This is one of the very first novels I can remember reading. It's a story told through the eyes of a 17 year old boy (I think) who takes up his musket to fight in the Revolutionary War (American, that is). I'm not sure what Fast's intention was, but I think this book probably planted the demon seed of patriotism into the fertile soil of my consciousness. It soaked in the word 'revolution' from the air around me and converted it into something more substantial, because that revolution had actually happened and people generally seemed please about that, whereas no one seemed to be jumping up and down about the Russian one.
...I think I'm going to have to finish this in a second post tomorrow. I didn't know I was going to get so carried away. I'll nominate three other suckers in that post.
Posted by Jeremy at 07:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2005
Two Views on Human Rights
by JeremyWhile reading through my favorite blogs this past weekend I noticed a fascinating juxtaposition. Did you see it too? First I read the faux-progressive words of Irene Khan:
'If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues.'
And then I saw this written by a friend of Michael Totten on the occasion of the murder of a pro democracy activist they both knew in Lebanon:
We're not asking for bread on every plate. We're not asking for the oligarchs to give back their money. We just want the shadow authorities to take their boots off of our necks.
And if you want to read a brilliant response to Irene Khan's statement, please see what Nick Cohen has to say about it.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
No Percentage in Legal Reefer
by JeremyThe following is what I imagine to be the real reason we'll probably never have reliably legal medical marijuana:
Thalidomide? Go ahead, take a little -- what's it gonna hurt you.
Marinol? Hmm. Yes, well that's hard to make and very expensive. Knock yourself out.
Marijuana? Legal and thus cheap and no monopoly potential. And you want us to lay all that grease on the feds and do combat with the Ladies' Temperance League? Where's the percentage? There's no price on that particular handle.
Well, something like that.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2005
If Only We Could Blame Bush
by JeremyPrison abuse needs to be stopped. It's not a difficult concept to get the head around.
Unfortunately, prison abuse is not an invention of the Bush Administration, so we shouldn't expect it to become a popular issue among 'progressives.' But there is information about prisoner abuse in the United States and (if you have the stomach) elsewhere in the world, should anyone find themselves sincerely interested in the subject.
Check here, to find out more about the ongoing prison rape crisis here in the U.S. Of course the articles on that website give one the sense that prison abuse is a uniquely American problem. In one of the staff biographies prison abuse in Cuba is mentioned in passing, but it turned out they were referring to Guantanamo. Still, we have to get our information where we can.
If you were interested in prison abuses in Cuba, for instance, you could skim through this page.
UPDATE: Here is a piece by a woman who thinks the Cuban prison system is really very nice. But there is one very disturbing detail. It's at the very end, between brackets.
Posted by Jeremy at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)
3
by JeremyLet me begin with an observation that our brains help us sort out reality in at least two contradictory ways. One way our brains help us is by formulating an endlessly readjusting aggregate conception of reality as a single multidimensional image. This will change every second. One example of what I'm referring to is this.
The other way our brains help us is by taking the amorphous blob of meaningless chaotic junk that reality might otherwise appear, at times, to be, and parsing it out into discreet logical symbolic doohickies. The number 'three' would be a good example of that.
And it is the number three that I wish to discuss.
Also the phenomenon of synaesthesia (not the poetic device, but the neurological process). I don't experience clinical synaethesia like this, but I think we all know this phenomenon to a limited degree.
One of my little synaesthetic whispers is that the number '3', when I think of it apart from any specific context, just on its own terms, has always seemed to want to be a deep red color.
And now, I think because I'm taking Zoloft (because it makes random stored memories easier to recall and because it gives me a clearer awareness of things that are lurking in my subconscious, such as the reasons for the color of the number '3'), I have figured out why.
When I was about 5 years old I was playing with a stapler. I accidentally shot a staple under my fingernail. The injury wasn't as bad as you're thinking, though the force was enough to crumple the staple just a bit so that its two shrugged shoulders were sticking up just beyond the tip of the nail on my left index finger. There were also two growing drops of -- you guessed it -- deep red blood coming from (gee whiz) the same points where the staple's shafts had dug in.
The number '3', if you look at it turned 90 degrees counter-clockwise so that its dark red humps are facing up, looks a lot like my finger did for the couple of seconds following impact.
Epilogue: When this happened my mother was on the phone with my father at work and she was waiting because he had to talk to a guy there named "Sidney." So now, of course, I associate all of this -- the '3', the stapler, the blood -- with cinnamon, I guess because it's reddish and there's a certain assonance it has with the name 'Sidney.' Sydney Australia never made it into this mess somehow.
Oh, and the album "American Pie" fits in somehow because the background is a dark reddish, cinnamony color and because Don McLean is holding up his painted thumb, which looks just like a public service ad in the early 1970's for hemophilia, in which a guy vaguely resembling Don McLean holds up a finger to show a drop of blood beginning to drip down from where he pricked himself with a pin.
And, for the record: Yes. I know this post is a little 'out there.' So, no: you don't have to worry about my sanity. Just sharing a bit of a semiotic head trip.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
Just Get the Damn Sneakers
by JeremyThis was a very sweet dog, so my title is unfair. But we had difficulty engaging him in conversation because he needed to keep his attention fixed on the interior of the Amherst shoestore in which his human was taking too long picking through the shoes. I think he has an excellent profile.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)
Dems' Heart Still Beating?
by JeremyI honestly do wish the Democratic party were not as drained of blood as it has been these past few years.
In 2004 Howard Dean put aside his centrist political career to tour the country banging a Left wing kettle in front of any camera willing to record his latest embarrassing ad lib. He talks a bold game. I think people like to use the word 'strident' (which, by the way, I think should be the official chewing gum of pseudo-Leftist professionals with big bright smiles that will never bite, though they bark and bark).
This is how Dean is trying to woo, for instance, working class voters who held their noses and voted for Bush last time around:
While discussing the hardship of working all day and then standing in line for eight hours to vote, Dean had said, `Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.'
That kind of crap is the rhetoric of a complacent opposition party. It's the sound of a party trying to raise money rather than a party working to improve the lot of, for instance, working class voters who held their noses and voted for Bush last time around.
But two prominent Democrats who have previously shown themselves to be interested in, you know, public service, have expressed some unhappiness with Dean's attitude. It bodes well for the Democratic party (via Instapundit):
Asked about recent comments where Dean trashed Republicans as "evil" and said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay belongs in jail, Biden told ABC's "This Week": "He doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats."[...]
Edwards also disagreed with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean's controversial comment in a speech to liberal activists Thursday that many Republicans "have never made an honest living in their lives."
"The chairman of the DNC is not the spokesman for the party," Edwards said. "He's a voice. I don't agree with it."
These guys sound like real grownups.
Posted by Jeremy at 01:31 PM | Comments (1)
June 03, 2005
Summer Blockbusters
by JeremyYou've heard the buzz about that new political assassination film slated for release this Summer. We don't know too much just yet, but we can share this from the press release:
"This important film dares to explore the politically motivated slaying of a great revolutionary leader. The single bullet theory is debunked and disturbing evidence of a conspiracy involving the U.S. military and certain foreign intelligence officials is revealed."
Sounds like a winner. Intrigued? You can view the web ad here
Posted by Jeremy at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2005
Bush = Nixon + Power
by JeremySomething like the title to this post would be the formula derived from Josh Marshall's recent analysis of the outing of Deep Throat and the Newsweek controversy. Here's Marshall on the Whitehouse's role in the Newsweek retraction:
In this case, two reporters authored a story that seems not to have been as solidly sourced as the reporters and their editors apparently thought. After several days of delay, the Pentagon issued an emphatic denial. The reporters then went back to the key source and found him second-guessing his original assertion. Newsweek first conceded errors in the story and then -- apparently in response to continued White House prodding -- retracted it entirely.
Chilling stuff indeed. Only the unfettered hubris of a Republican administration in a blood orgy of power could have squeezed a full retraction from what should have been no more than a concession of errors resulting from a source who would not stand by his statements when asked a second time.
How did Bush pull off this phenomenal coup? By demanding an apology:
Perhaps the Pentagon could demand an apology if the story turns out to be false. Or the Army. But not the White House. It is only involved here inasmuch as the story is bad for it politically.
Is there no abomination this president won't attempt to justify?
And here's Marshall, after criticizing Peggy Noonan -- rightly -- for defending Nixon vis a vis Watergate, thanking her for her honesty:
I guess, though, we owe Peggy et al. thanks for stipulating for the record that they don't think anyting of any consequence was done wrong in Watergate because that provides a helpful context for understanding why they keep carrying the water of this administration, knowing as they do that many of the same things are happening.
If only Nixon had been ingenious enough to deny accusations made against him and demand an apology from the Washington Post he'd have been fine, and we'd all remember Deep Throat as just a dumbass porn flick.
You will note, by the way, that I'm not defending Nixon. I am glad he was forced to resign. I am glad he was exposed by the Washington Post, which is a very good newspaper. Clinton was a lousy president but nowhere near as bad a guy as Nixon. Bush is nowhere near as bad as Nixon.
There. I've fully inoculated myself against feeling the need to defend myself when a commenter accuses me of kissing Nixon's ass. Let's call that a 'troll vaccine.'
Posted by Jeremy at 02:41 PM | Comments (5)
