Saturday, July 31, 2004
What a lovely letter...
What a lovely letter... let us fisk it!
The RNC is happening in 33 days,
Wow, you can actually count that far?
and I've talked to a lot of you about going down to NYC,
9/11 happened there, did you forget? You remember the 2000 election quite well, but do you remember 9/11?
joining the protests,
Did you run out and protest Al Qaeda when they slammed planes into our office buildings and vaporized 3000 people?
making or voices heard,
Are you capable of proofreading?
and basically stirring shit up.
Please wash your hands afterwards.
The Bush administration seems
Seems? You're insinuating because you have no solid facts. You've got no choice but to use weasel words like "seems."
to be actively hostile towards democracy,
Yeah, that's why he brought democracy to 50 million people on the other side of the planet -- or do those 50 million people mean nothing to you?
towards our basic freedoms,
Yes, of course, he's trampling over our basic freedoms. That's why we're now living in a police state, right?
and toward what America has meant since it was founded.
Whereas the flip-flopper John F. Kerry and the rich trial lawyer John Edwards perfectly embody the American tradition....
They walked all over our votes in 2000,
Yes, the vast right-wing conspiracy fixed the national elections... go on thinking that.
they disregarded and dismantled 4th amendment protections,
You're referring to PATRIOT, right? Notice how many terrorist attacks we've had on American soil since PATRIOT... that's right: none.
they've failed us on national security,
Yup, that's why we're having terrorist attacks on American soil, day after day...
and now they're talking of possibly postponing our elections?!?!?
No, actually, you're the one who's talking about that.
I'm fucking sick of it,
You took the words right outta my mouth.
and I'm fucking sick of them thinking they can silence America's conscience
The only people who are being silenced are terrorists. If you think America's conscience is the same thing as Al Qaeda, well then I guess you're right.
with bullshit like "free speech" zones and empty terrorist warnings.
Empty terrorist warnings? You've actually got access to our nation's top-secret intelligence reports on a daily basis? No you don't. You're pulling that clever turn of phrase, "empty terrorist warnings," out of your ass.
I want my fucking country back
Dude, where's my country?
before I don't have one,
You could always move to Canada... or France....
and protesting, while not direct action,
So what is direct action? Joining the Taliban?
will let everyone else in America know how we feel,
Did you ever get that feeling that no one cares? That you're nothing more than the whispering winds of irrelevancy?
and make them ask themselves how they feel.
Inflation is low, unemployment is low, the economy is good, the nation and the world is much safer than it was on 9/10/01... I don't know about you, but I feel pretty damn good.
So, if you've gotten this far in my email, you're probably not a Bush supporter.
You know what they say: when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME. Except in this case, you're the jackass, I'm the elephant.
You probably want him to hear America stand up against him, and to get him out of office as much as I do.
See: French Revolution, 1789, guillotine, beheadings.
And you probably want to come down to NYC to protest against what he has done in our names as much as I do.
Mmmh hmmm... sure... we're all as psycho as you.
Email me back if you want in.
Sure you're ready to handle the unexpected deluge of emails?
The RNC takes place August 29-September 2.
Same time as the Yale freshmen orientation and the first two days of classes. We've got our priorities straight, haven't we?
You won't be missing classes, but you will be back in New Haven.
Just like those "missing" WMD....
I want to get as many people down to New York as possible,
Swing by Ground Zero while you're in NY and inhale the air there. It contains the vaporized bodies of 3000 people killed due to your failed policies of national security.
and I'm going to try to coordinate events, housing, travel, etc.
Try. We'll be right here, cheering you on.
I'd really appreciate anyone willing to help with this, anyone who has a car, or a place to stay, or any suggestions or ideas.
People like you have ideas besides new ways of bashing Bush? Who'd've thunk it?
Again, let me know if you want in. Hope your summer's going well. For all you out on the campaign trail, keep up the good work.
Cheers!
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
The New McCarthy
Mr. Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, explains how Michael Moore is "more McCarthy than Murrow."
Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired.
Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler. Some journalists and critics have acted as if his wrenching of facts is no more serious than a movie continuity problem, like showing a 1963 Chevy in 1956 Santa Monica.
A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate. It can certainly be pointed and opinionated. But it should not knowingly misrepresent the truth. Much of Michael Moore's films and books, however entertaining to his fans and enraging to his critics, seems to regard facts as mere nuisances to the story he wants to tell.
Back in 1991 that sharpest of film critics, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, blunted some of the raves for Mr. Moore's "Roger and Me" by pointing out how the film misrepresented many facts about plant closings in Flint, Mich., and caricatured people it purported to feel for. "The film I saw was shallow and facetious," said Kael, "a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing."
His methods remain unrefined in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Mr. Moore ignores or misrepresents the truth, prefers innuendo to fact, edits with poetic license rather than accuracy, and strips existing news footage of its context to make events and real people say what he wants, even if they don't. As Kael observed back then, Mr. Moore's method is no more high-minded than "the work of a slick ad exec."
The main premise of Mr. Moore's recent work is that both Presidents Bush have been what amounts to Manchurian Candidates of the Saudi royal family. Mr. Moore suggests (he depends so much on innuendo that a simple, declarative verb like "says" is usually impossible) the Saudi government, having soured on their pawns for unstated reasons, launched the attacks of Sept. 11.
"What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed onto a suicide mission?" Moore asks in the best-selling "Dude, Where's My Country?" "What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family?" Central to Mr. Moore's indictment of the current President Bush is his charge that the U.S. government secretly assisted the evacuation of bin Laden family members from the U.S. in the hours following the Sept. 11 attacks, when all other flights nationwide were grounded. He supports this with grainy images of indecipherable documents.
But on our show on Saturday, Richard Clarke, the government's former counter-terrorism adviser and no apologist for the Bush administration, told us that he had authorized those flights, but only after air travel had been restored and all the Saudis had been questioned. "I think Moore's making a mountain of a molehill," he said. Moreover, said Mr. Clarke, "He never interviewed me." Instead, Mr. Moore had simply lifted a clip from an ABC interview. Perhaps Mr. Moore just didn't want to get an answer that he didn't want to hear. (See how useful innuendoes can be?)
In what is perhaps the most wrenching scene in the film, an Iraqi woman is shown wailing amid the rubble caused by a bomb that killed members of her family. I do not doubt her account, or her sorrow. I have interviewed Iraqis about U.S. bombs that killed civilians. People who agree to wars should see the human damage bombs can do.
But reporters who were taken around to see the sites of civilian deaths during the bombing of Baghdad also observed that some of those errant bombs were fired by Iraqi anti-aircraft crews. Mr. Moore doesn't let the audience know when and where this bomb was dropped, or otherwise try to identify the culprit of the tragedy.
Mr. Moore tries hard to identify himself with U.S. troops and their concerns. But he spends an awful lot of effort depicting them as dupes and brutes. At one point in "Fahrenheit 9/11," someone off-camera prods a U.S. soldier into singing a favorite hip-hop song with profane lyrics. Mr. Moore then runs the soldier's voice over combat footage, to make it seem as if the soldier were insensitively singing along with the destruction.
In another scene, U.S. soldiers make savage jokes about the awkward effects of rigor mortis on one part of the corpse of an Iraqi soldier. I do not doubt the authenticity of those pictures. But I also have no particular reason to trust it. A few basic details, like where and when the video was shot, are considered traditional reporting techniques (especially after the front-page photos of British soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners turned out to be frauds). A few other basic facts might have informed the audience. Was the Iraqi killed in battle? By a suicide bomb? Moore says the U.S. soldiers are good boys turned coarse in an immoral war. But I have also heard those kind of ugly and anxious jokes about corpses from overstressed emergency room physicians.
In the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote that, "Viewers may come away from Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true," and that he "uses association and innuendo to create false impressions." Try to imagine those phrases on a marquee. But that is his rave review! He lauds "Fahrenheit 9/11" for its "appeal to working-class Americans." Do we really want to believe that only innuendo, untruths, and conspiracy theories can reach working-class Americans?
Governments of both parties have assuaged Saudi interests for more than 50 years. (I wonder if Mr. Moore grasps how much the jobs of auto workers in Flint depended on cheap oil.) Sound questions about the course, costs, and grounds for the war in Iraq have been raised by voices across the political spectrum.
But when 9/11 Commission Chairman Kean has to take a minute at a press conference, as he did last Thursday, to knock down a proven falsehood like the secret flights of the bin Laden family, you wonder if those who urge people to see Moore's film are informing or contaminating the debate. I see more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore. No matter how hot a blowtorch burns, it doesn't shed much light.
Friday, July 23, 2004
The Democrats are dead -- long live the Republicans!
Mahmoud, the Weasel requested that I post the following on his behalf, as he's away for a couple of days:
On the eve of the Democratic convention, Matt Bai delivers a Sunday New York Times Magazine must-read on the demise of the Democratic party and those wealthy individuals looking far beyond November investing in the future of the party.
Bai explores the electoral trends for the Democrats in recent decades and declares the party all but dead.
Here's a sneak preview of what will be tucked inside your Sunday New York Times: "As the old union bosses and factional leaders who dominated the Democratic Party in the 20th century file into the FleetCenter this week, waving signs and hooting for their heroes, be sure to take a long, last look. The Democratic Party of the machine age, so long dominant in American politics, could be holding its own Irish wake near Boston's North End. The power is already shifting -- not just within the party, but away from it altogether."
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
New links!
While wandering through the blogosphere, I happened upon the fourth rail, from where I decided to shamelessly steal a small selection of links to include in our links menu:
Blogroll
- Democrats for Bush
- Election Projection
- the fourth rail
- InstaPundit
- little green footballs
- Rantburg
- USS Clueless
- Winds of Change
Think Tanks
PDWatch: Day 6
As I've been extremely busy the past few days, I totally forgot about PDWatch. But this damning editorial reminded me of the issue...
Today is the sixth day of the PDWatch, set up to remind ProgressiveDecision that they must apologize for being part of the crowd that lied to us about the Yellowcake Con.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Thursday, July 15, 2004
PDWatch: Day 1
Today is the first day of the PDWatch, set up to remind ProgressiveDecision that they must apologize for being part of the crowd that lied to us about the Yellowcake Con.
The Yellowcake Con
The Wilson-Plame "scandal" was political pulp fiction.
So now the British government has published its own inquiry into the intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq, with equally devastating implications for the credibility of the Bush-Blair "lied" crowd. Like last week's 511-page document from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the exhaustive British study found some flawed intelligence but no evidence of "deliberate distortion." Inquiry leader Lord Butler told reporters that Prime Minister Tony Blair had "acted in good faith."
What's more, Lord Butler was not ready to dismiss Saddam Hussein as a threat merely because no large "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction have been found. The report concludes that Saddam probably intended to pursue his banned programs, including the nuclear one, if and when U.N. sanctions were lifted; that research, development and procurement continued so WMD capabilities could be sustained; and that he was pursuing the development of WMD delivery systems--missiles--of longer range than the U.N. permitted.
But the part that may prove most salient in the U.S. is that, like the Senate Intelligence findings, the Butler report vindicates President Bush on the allegedly misleading "16 words" regarding uranium from Africa: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."
We're awaiting apologies from former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and all those who championed him....
...
All of this matters because Mr. Wilson's disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's credibility. The political goal was to portray the President as a "liar," regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are.
And those liars owe their audience an apology.... Thus, I am starting the PDWatch: every day, until ProgressiveDecision admits on their blog that they lied about the facts vis-a-vis the Yellowcake Con, I will be posting daily reminders that the folks at ProgressiveDecision are liars.
Monday, July 12, 2004
A Local Name on the National News
MSNBC has an exclusive report on Election Day Worries... and while the article itself is quite interesting, I was particularly intrigued by the mention of DeForest B. Soaries Jr., who is now the chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Reverend "Buster" Soaries ran for Representative (NJ, 12th district) against Rush Holt two years ago... and unfortunately lost.
Plamegate: Another DEMOCRATIC Scandal
Looks like Plamegate is another Democratic scandal:
In fact, the [bipartisan Senate] report shows that one of the first allegations of false intelligence was itself a distortion: Mr. Bush's allegedly misleading claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Africa. The Senate report notes that Presidential accuser and former CIA consultant Joe Wilson returned from his trip to Africa with no information that cast serious doubt on such a claim; and that, contrary to Mr. Wilson's public claims, his wife (a CIA employee) was involved in helping arrange his mission.
...
"When coordinating the State of the Union, no Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts or officials told the National Security Council (NSC) to remove the '16 words' or that there were concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger Uranium reporting," the report says. In short, Joe Wilson is a partisan fraud whose trip disproved nothing, and what CIA doubts there were on Niger weren't shared with the White House.
There's more:
"The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."
So reads Conclusion 83 of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. The Committee likewise found no evidence of pressure to link Iraq to al Qaeda. So it appears that some of the claims about WMD used by the Bush Administration and others to argue for war in Iraq were mistaken because they were based on erroneous information provided by the CIA.
A few apologies would seem to be in order. Allegations of lying or misleading the nation to war are about the most serious charge that can be leveled against a President. But according to this unanimous study, signed by Jay Rockefeller and seven other Democrats, those frequent charges from prominent Democrats and the media are without merit.
Or to put it more directly, if President Bush was "lying" about WMD, then so was Mr. Rockefeller when he relied on CIA evidence to claim in October 2002 that Saddam Hussein's weapons "pose a very real threat to America." Also lying at the time were John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and so on.
Thursday, July 08, 2004
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Senator Sizzle
Why did Kerry pick Edwards? Not for his experience and depth.
"As an articulate Southerner, Mr. Edwards also reminds many nostalgic Democrats/reporters of Bill Clinton without the character flaws.
"But to continue that comparison, Mr. Edwards is also Mr. Clinton without the experience and depth. By the time he ran for national office, Mr. Clinton could drill down several levels into education, welfare, trade and other policy debates. Mr. Edwards is known around the Senate as a smooth talker of no particular expertise. He is smart enough to quickly grasp talking points, but the doubt is whether he knows enough to be an asset in White House counsels if the ticket is elected.
"Among recent Vice Presidential candidates, Mr. Edwards compares in experience to Geraldine Ferraro (1984) and Spiro Agnew (1968) but knows much less about defense than Dan Quayle (1988). Compared to Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt or Dick Cheney, Mr. Edwards will require on-the-job training, especially in foreign policy. In a year when national security is once more at the top of voter concerns, this strikes us as a mistake in judgment by Mr. Kerry, and perhaps also a political error.
...
"If a ticket composed of a rich trial lawyer and a rich Senator who married the Heinz fortune can make this faux populism sound credible, they're bound to win. If they can't, Mr. Kerry may regret he chose sizzle in a year when the voters are looking for substance."
Kerry-Edwards 2004: Make America Nice.