Cole v Sullivan

Sounds like a marquee for a title bout in 1900, doesn't it? It certainly is a public dispute between heavyweight writers. Andrew Sullivan is more well known and more diverse in his opinion, but Juan Cole has become indispensable for comment on the Iraq situation and the Middle East in general. Both are also well sought-after for TV and print references, I've noticed.

It started when Cole said this:

Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.

That really struck Sullivan the wrong way, who made the connection as a direct equation between the two:

I read Cole, because he obviously knows a lot. But his biases are so acute I don't trust him an inch. Anyone who can write that sentence has lost whatever moral bearings he once had.

And to be fair, Sullivan's comments were on Kaus's original fisking, but he takes them a bit further. Which really, really didn't sit well with Juan. Not to be upbradied in such thorough fashion, Sullivan upped his column inches as well, and trashed Cole right back.

I have to agree that Cole is starting to get a little unbalanced at times--very likely with good reason. Don't misunderstand; I think Cole's view of the conflict is much, much closer to reality that either Sullivan's or Kaus' (Mickey seems in the middle). Lord knows some of the crap this administration has pulled, threatens embolism. But this is one of the beauties of blogging. Can you imagine Hemingway and Faulkner trading barbs over email? Or some other pair of naturally adversarial literary greats, another one of which I cannot seem to come up with right now?

This is why Nader might get some Bush votes

Pat Buchanan and the other isolationists are with the peaceniks on this one--the Iraq war sucked, didn't need to be fought, and is going to screw us for a good while. It's the strong reticence to be involved in war unless it's a direct struggle for our survival, that makes those of the hard right and the progessive persuasions sound as if they speak with one voice. And it may be counter to common sense, but if you compare the With-Nader numbers to the Without Nader numbers, you'll discover from the most recent entries that adding Nader tends to pull from both candidates, if not precisely equally. By the way--Fox now has the incumbent pulling 40% with Nader, and 42% without? It doesn't matter that Kerry is dead even with Bush; as long as Bush voters keep moving to the undecided column, that redounds to Kerry's favor.

In any case, ol' Pat's right on the button with this one, and it's a good introduction for me to the American Conservative website. Always good to keep up with what's frothing them over in paranoialand.

House GOP to Senate GOP: Shut UP!

GDub went down to the Hill to shore up the base in his own party, never a good sign in late spring for an incumbent. But as with most of the posts tonight, the central themse of the article is not really why I'm posting it. As jaw dropping as Denny Hastert lecturing John McCain on sacrifice was, this volley from House GOP to their "colleagues" in the Senate was more disturbingly ignorant:

House Republicans have become frustrated with some of their Republican colleagues in the Senate who they complain have failed to adequately stand up for Bush on TV talks shows.

"What's been causing a lot of heartburn is that some of these Senate Republicans who get on these talking head shows aren't 100 percent aligned with the president or his agenda," said LaHood. "We need House members on these shows."

Did he just suggest that the main purpose of having Republicans in the Senate, was so that they could do talk shows and back the President 100% no matter what? This virulent bleat of a sycophant has to be extremely insulting to people like John Warner, Chuck Hegel and Lindsey Graham--not to mention the original moderates like Chafee, Snow and Collins. Just for failing to put the abuse pictures behind them, hard right wingers with immaculate conservative credentials are getting hammered by their own party. And for what? Only backing Bush 85%, saving the other 15% for healthy skepticism and an interest in the truth?

CPA, Sadr's popularity meeting each other in the middle

According to a survey of Iraqis published in Reuters and repeated elswhere, just 7% of Iraqis now see the CPA as liberators, way down from the last poll. Getting less play but far more important in my view, cleric al-Sadr's popularity has more than quintupled in the last three months, now reaching heights within hailing distance of al-Sistani. That should frighten the bezeejus out of anyone who's been buying the line that Sadr is becoming increasingly marginalized and desperate. Hell, even if he is marginalized and desperate, his arrest or death would now have far greater public ramifications than before. For whatever reason, since the fighting began in earnest in Najaf and Kerbala (of which we're hearing little about, compared to other stories) there have been no protests or appeals directly to Sadr. Today's appeal from Sistani to stop the fighting was significant by its failure to discriminate between parties in the violence. There does not appear to be any significant discussion between factions, over getting Sadr to back down. Apparently everyone is content to watch and see what he does in response to the US attempting to squeeze him, before they act. Nonetheless, contrary to major media play, Sadr is getting more popular, not less.

Implausible deniability

The Gaza story has turned really ugly and really sad in the last couple of days, so much so that the Bush administration has turned over its 3rd or 4th leaf on the question, and went so far as to abstain on a UN resolution condemning Israel's venture into Rafah. But sometimes in even the most horrible of stories, you come upon something that makes you laugh:

Amid the Israeli sweep, troops knocked down a small zoo, a rare place of amusement for refugee children, residents said. The army, which has demolished dozens of Rafah homes during the raid, denied flattening the zoo as Palestinian boys were seen chasing a bewildered-looking ostrich through the streets.

The more I read it the more I think the two events (denial and ostrich) were not entirely contemporaneous, but I still like to think it was, and imagine the look on the IDF's guy's face as the ostrich gallops past.

I recommend a king sacrifice

We've all been waiting for Garry Kasparov's take on the situation in Iraq, and the Wall Street Journal finally got around to picking up the mail from Russia. I'm tempted to make further lame chess jokes about his predictable perspective, but I'll just link. As usual with WSJ, you may have to do a bit of a registration dance for this article.

In support of empty symbolism

The House voted overwhelmingly today to order Abu Ghraib destroyed. Of course it's a too little, too late empty gesture to pander to both Arab anger and US sensitivities, but sometimes foolish pandering is also good policy. On the strength of Saddam's abuses alone, we should have never even used it as a detentional facility, much less a place for interrogations. Maybe before our misdeeds you could have made it a museum and given it some perspective. Now though, in the words of David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap, there's too much fucking perspective. Get rid of it.

Candid cameral

This is from an article on the budget bill's being postponed in the Senate, but I linked it for good quote material. I really can't abide many of the things McCain stands and votes for, but he is so politically unfraid that you just have to love his forthrightness in a sea of semiotics:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and other Republicans expressed hope that the chamber would approve the compromise spending plan after Congress' weeklong Memorial Day recess, which begins Friday.

"It's premature to bring it to a vote tonight," Frist told reporters. "I don't want to shut the door by forcing people to vote when I still have other options," such as trying to persuade them to change their minds.

But that could be a tall order: Four moderate GOP senators and moderate Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska have all resisted weeks of entreaties to support the budget, leaving GOP leaders two votes shy of passage.

[b]Asked what might make them change their minds, one of the moderates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said, "Some of us could get killed in tragic accidents."[/b]

Deaniacs work a little 'net magic for Kerry

I'm still on the Dean mailing list, long after I determined that John Edwards was my favorite candidate. Given his appearance yesterday in Portland with Kerry, I can't say I was surprised to receive an appeal from the guv to support Kerry, but I noted with interest the smooth way in which he has effortlessly changed over his fundraising tricks to benefit the presumptive nominee. Today was "Swing the bat for Kerry day," and sure enough, the Deaniacs came through with over $500,000 in pledges, not bad for a single subconstituency.
Howard is naturally rough on Bush in his email, but has this to (briefly) say about that whole primary thing:

We had a spirited primary season this year. But differences between Democrats are nothing compared the fundamental difference between our agenda and that of the right-wing ideologues who are destroying this country.

Our campaign was based on the idea that the power to change this country is in the hands of the American people. Right now, we must come together not only as Democrats, but as Americans, to support the campaign to beat George W. Bush.

Cynical conservative wags might note that the campaign is to beat George Bush, not elect the best Democrat. But that's water under the bridge, right? Blood pacts of mutiny are definitely the rage on the left this year.

Fahrenheit $$$

You have to wonder how much longer Michael Moore will be able to maintain his populist appeal with a straight face, if he keeps up his success at marketing himself and his ideas. Apparently an Oscar and dozens of millions in pure profit for his last film wasn't enough; Moore is shooting for the bigtime now, personally standing by noted mom-n-pop business owner Harvey Weinstein as they take on Disney.

Of course, they had already taken them on a year ago, and failed to persuade. So this long-"delayed" distribution brouhaha was simply an advertisement for whoever else wanted to buy the rights from Mike and the Weinsteins. A well-timed advertisement, immediately preceding the film's appearance at Cannes. I suppose even he could not have hoped for the reception he received, nor the presumption that F911 would be the odds-on favorite for Palme D'Or, but surely he saw the appeal in screening a film critical of the US and Bush in particular in front of French and Hollywood audiences. Let there be no mistake that Moore has orchestrated his own high notoriety, and at precisely the moment where I'm sure he imagines he can be as much of an influential as possible. It's clear how conscious he is of it when he boasts, "this will be seen before the election, have no fear of that." In Greene County, AR, they're envisioning Moore as the Kingbreaker of Election '04--we'll have to see about that, but no doubt this angle will be prominent every time his name comes up in the news: if the film wins, when it opens in the US, on the talk shows and junkets...we may see more of Moore than either Kerry OR Bush. [I ask, what other blog links you to the Paragould Daily Press?]

So I'd be willing to bet that Michael Moore's fame and riches are just beginning. Rush Limbaugh is rich and famous, so I'm not going to put any value judgements on that; it just seems inevitable for Moore at this point, especially if what the positive critics say about his film becomes the majority opinion. But a rich and famous Moore just doesn't compute. Notwithstanding their unfortunate detour into crappy dance-concept TV garbage, for me it just got harder and harder to take Bono seriously as U2 became more and more popular. Here's a kid who grew up in the thick of The Troubles, and translated that dismally hopeful energy with his mates into evocatively polemical songs. But 10 years later, wearing $5,000 wraparound sunglasses and a chinchilla coat, riding first class between villas, how do you keep up that Earnest Dubliner vibe that made you who you are today? And thus do I ask the same question of Michael Moore: can you withstand becoming an incorporated product of yourself, and maintain your appeal as just a sloppy, overweight filmmaking comedian? Maybe with his newfound selling power they'll give him his TV Nation show back. That's still the best stuff he's ever done, IMO--and I suspect because it was relentlessly populist, and the least serious.

Kerry in Pioneer Square

I got off work a few minutes early to wander down to Portland's Living Room That Only Resembles a Living Room if Yours Has a Powell's, a Starbuck's, and a Large Fountain. I got word yesterday that John Kerry would be rallying the faithful at 6pm, with "doors to open at 4:30." Still pondering how Pioneer Square suddenly developed doors, much less ones that were open, I hopped off a random bus (32 to Oatfield, I think) down by Taylor and had to walk back up to the square because of stop closures. Quite a few stops have been closed or moved the last few weeks due to work on the Courthouse and other areas of the transit mall, so I wasn't sure whether it was for the rally or just more of the recent snarl. More on that later.

Along 5th Avenue headed south from Morrison, folks were lined up in front of the boarded-up Courthouse, wrapped around Morrison and moving slowly along Yamhill up to the square. These people were standing in line like they were waiting for a movie premiere, and the movie wasn't going to start for another hour, and they were a block and a half back in line. They stood there, rather silently for a political rally I thought, and I moved on up to 6th. The MAX trains were both still running at the time (more on that later too), but all vehicle traffic was halted up 6th Ave. for at least a block north and south. Police tape created a cops-and-trains only lane, from which I assume the assembled Johnny Law figured they could take the crowd if it sought blood or perhaps bumper stickers without paying. (I could have made a fortune in Bush/Cheney: You're Fired bumper stickers if I'd thought ahead).

Unfortunately I had to return home before the rally started, but I did catch the live reports at six pm from both KGW and KOIN. KGW led with the story, had at least two reporters covering the event live, and stayed with it for the first 15 minutes exclusively. They ran about 4 minutes or so of Kerry's actual speech, I felt like, and then cut to their first commercial. KOIN ran longer than KGW and thus caught somewhat more of Kerry's speech, but appeared to have less overall coverage. KATU (ABC) was running the national news in that slot as usual while KPTV (Fox) was showing its normal afternoon lineup, as was OPB television.

Once 10 o'clock hit, I was curious to see the reaction given by the Fox anchors as they waded through their evening diet of carjackings, fires, gang shootings and bank robberies. I do admit I arrived to the broadcast perhaps two minutes late, but if it led, it led for precious few seconds. Otherwise the above litany ensued for a full 15 minutes, teased to several boilerplate "news of the weird" stories from around the country, and at this point it appeared that whatever news value Kerry's visit commanded, it did not command it for very long at all.

Out of curiosity I ran through the websites to see which of the local TV stations gave it any play. Once again, local leaders KGW provided the most thorough coverage of the event, and were nearly glowing in their features on the multiple thousands gathered, including a sidebar on the Deaniacs won over. From there it was all downhill. KATU made it the top story, referring to hundreds who appeared, and that was about it. KOIN mentioned the rally, but in the future tense--apparently web updating is another place where poor KOIN seems to lag behind the competition. Since it was still a yet-to-happen piece at the time, it makes more sense, but the article was headed "Kerry Visit Disrupts Bus, MAX Service." They probably won't be passing that URL around at the campaign very soon.

KPTV also ran the story as their lead on the website, but the article also quoted the "hundreds" figure, was about four paragraphs long, and contained no sidebar. Wheher by omission or commission, I'm not entirely sure anybody from KPTV showed up. Too many cabjackings and teen runaway confession videos to air, I guess. And there may have been hundreds in the proper square, but there were clearly thousands thronged around it, even at 5pm. OPB had the most hard to find coverage of all; linked from another Kerry story, both of which ran out of Reuters' service. They too had the phrase "thousands" rather than "hundreds," and in fact put a number on it--4,000.

If nothing else, dispatching a camera crew to catch a Vietnam vet, a hobbit, Bowtie Blumenauer, and a new rock dinosaur standing together on a stage behind John Kerry would have been magical footage for any network. When again would these titans' paths cross? History is fickle, so fickle. Carpe dais!

From what I heard of Kerry's speech, it was somewhat low-key, earnest and appealing although still lacking some kind of electoral fervency that makes you sit up and say, "Damn STRAIGHT, Holmes!" I think he's doing a pretty good job campaigning and a dynamite job fundraising, and he is smart to ride the wave while Bush flounders to historic lows.

Make Portland the Beer Hall of Fame

Communique drops the tip--a beer Hall of Fame has been proposed, and sites are being recruited. B!x helpfully notes all the reasons why Stumptown is the One True place for a beer hall of fame. Seventeen percent of the country's hops! More breweries per capita than any place in the country, possibly the world! What better place to drink beer than during a Portland summer, or a Portland winter when there's nothing else to do because it's raining! It's perfect! Counting the ones in b!x, I've now used an exclamation point six times! That's amazing! Eight now! Nine! I can't stop! Eleven!

Googlewhack!

For anybody who does a fair bit of web searching, Google is still the tool of choice. Apparently not content to just use the thing to find resources he wanted, Gary Stock developed a pasttime: finding single-hit bullseyes for two word combinations, known as Googlewhacking. They're not very easy to come up with, but you're best off seeking entirely unrelated words, preferably ones that don't get much use. Find a pair that yield only a few hits, and try to figure out which of the words is the one that does the most filtering.

What's fascinating about the game after a while is the absurd number of hits some of your more outlandish guesses return. You'd figure blotch and eggplant would return fewer than 949 hits, but there it is. Give it a try. It took about 10 minutes for my first, which I think was beginner's luck: pissoir bifurcate.

What's a little creepy about Stock is that he's a former cryptanalyst with the NSA. You wonder if he doesn't send coded messages by including a multi-word code that yields a googlewhack, with a hidden message on the resulting link. Sci-fi writers, get to it!

Buried bombshell

I must confess I knew the quote I'm about to reprint was already in this Newsweek piece somewhere, because I had seen it paired with Seymour Hersh's work in The New Yorker--but I'm flabbergasted as to where it actually ended up, lede-wise. Here's what must be called a fairly smoky gun, referring as it does to the presence of internal White House documents:

By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." [emph. Torrid]

Translation: humane treatment is for appeasing pussies.

So what do John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff lead with? Several stage setting paragraphs of Congressional post-picture revulsion, and more paragraphs on the prior circumstances that appear to have led to Gonzalez's shift. Now granted, the DoJ legal determination preceded his memo--and it too discusses the preference for remaining outside of the Geneva Conventions, lest any US personnel be put at risk for prosecution. And it's certainly interesting (although not surprising) to learn that Colin Powell and the rest of State blew their stacks upon reading the memos. In fact it's utterly fascinating to me how Powell and his staff somehow managed to be strenuously opposed to almost every foreign policy decision emanating from the White House, yet were mostly powerless either to do something about it, or notify the media or public that it was being done. Perhaps they did, and collectively we did not want to hear.

But really, what's the story? Newsweek holds a copy of official counsel to the President that says, in effect, "screw it! These are tough times, and we need info more than we need to uphold the traditions of American ideals of prisoner treatment." And as we have learned by now, rarely does George Bush do anything decisive without being told to do so. Which would make Gonzalez's memo the starting point, in my view, of the paradigm shift that took place in the White House after 9/11 that being the victim of a terrorist act changed all the rules by which not only they--but WE--should abide.

As much as Seymour Hersh's article will put Donald Rumsfeld in the hotseat, if Congresspeople and the public can take a few moments to read through the generous intro of this Newsweek article, they'll find that Rumsfeld was merely the conduit through which the new thinking would disastrously pass. Why the confirmation that George Bush received legal advice to dismiss the Geneva Conventions is not first-sentence type of news even for a weekly magazine, is completely beyond me.

So much for that meme

I assume we can all stop discussing how the problems for the President don't seem to be hurting Bush's chances for re-election now, right? It's been a baaaaad week for Mr. Bush. Several new polls have been released recently, and they are almost universally dismal in terms of Bush's approval of just about everything, and also items like direction of the country, and deserved re-election. PollingReport has a good cross-section of the most recent ones, which all show worsening numbers across the board for the president. Specific to job approval, RealClearPolitics summarizes the latest, and they portend doom: 49% approval. 46%. 44%.

And that list hasn't even included today's new polling from Newsweek that puts Bush's approvals at 42%, a number that is shockingly, dangerously close to point-of-no-return territory, and by far the lowest of both Newsweek's polling, or anyone else's I've seen. And those numbers are following him to specific issues; on both Iraq and the economy, he's pulling low 40s or even worse, high 30s.

There is some movement recently in these polls to put Kerry in a more positive horse race position, as if he's coming up a little bit to meet Bush as he's going down. I think the state polling is showing more of this than the national numbers. The Kerry bus trip appears to have been quite successful in places like Ohio, and it is now being reflected in places like the Electoral Polling calculator put together by Blogging Caesar. As an ardent supporter of Bush, BC lets the numbers do the talking, only occassionally making mention that he still believes his predicitions of a comfortable Bush win. The numbers, if you believe them, are staggering: places like Ohio and Florida are now considered safely blue, and others such as Missouri, Nevada and Virginia are considered highly competitive. That's why this latest go-round imputes a whopping 327 EV total, a 116 vote gap over the incumbent.

Bush has got to do something, anything, if he wants to recapture the mojo in this election. Based on the way things are going in Iraq, I sure wouldn't be counting on it being a straight positive by the fall, and really Bush doesn't have a whole lot else. He is totally hamstrung from being on message by the prison scandals and insurgency, and while it's overshadowing Kerry's expensive ad buy as well, for Bush the time is much more critical. Andrew Kohut has an excellent explanation of why Kerry's numbers didn't seem to be responding--the attention is naturally all on Bush. He doesn't have a whole lot of wiggle room left before the perceptions of him settle like concrete, and the only remaining task for voters is to make sure that he's relatively up for the challenge. And you thought "soft bigotry of low expectations" was a one-election trick pony!

Hersh drops the bomb

If you've been following the Abu Ghraib story at all, you know that Seymour Hersh--by name an unlikely candidate to wield the hammer of the press against hegemony in the Middle East--is in fact responsible for many of the bomblets in this clusterf...bomb of a story, including the first damaging report that led off the month. Or perhaps you don't know; Hersh is only mildly out in front of the cameras hawking his story. When Richard Clarke had something to say, by God every two-bit political studio host had him booked at least once. Perhaps because of the salience of the photos, the textual information has been comparatively ignored by the mass of both media and populace, and Hersh's reports are not household lingua franca...yet.

If the first article set the pot to boiling, and the second turned up the heat, his most recent article posted today is the rabbit being dropped in to scald and then stew. Hersh seems to be getting at something in the lead, but I can't quite make out what it is:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

Not the criminal inclinations of a few reservists? You mean they didn't bring leashes and plastic hoods with them to theater?

For my view of the Arab street, I seek out Juan Cole's latest. In times where the functions of the military are in question, I turn to Phil Carter, who has been a great resource over the last year or two. Here's his basic take on Hersh's piece:

If this is all true, then the responsibility for Abu Ghraib belongs to the Secretary of Defense and his top assistants who directed and controlled this problem. Just as we would hold field commanders vicariously liable for their subordinates' criminal actions under the "command responsibility" doctrine, so too should hold the SecDef accountable if it turns out that he did direct these things to be done. Indeed, we send a very dangerous message by not holding these top officials accountable in the same way that these junior soldiers are by a court martial this week. That message is: senior leaders are not responsible for their actions, and soldiers will hang for the actions of their superiors. Suffice to say, that message does not support a good command climate for America's military.

One has to imagine that sodomy with a chemical light was probably not on the list of approved or encouraged items, but what is clear is that whatever abuses occurred on the ground, there was an open-ended mandate coming from above that at best sought to turn a blind eye from such conduct in order to spare the black ops.

I hasten to mention Carter's "if this is all true" caveat; certainly the DoD is semi-denying the article. Actually, the one specific denial they do give concerns Undersecretary Cambone, who in my mind is looking more and more like the "faceless but senior guy we need to fire soon." So offering up Cambone for the denial almost seems like a signal flare: "here, take the Undersecretary, but please just go away!"

I can only presume that the inquiries into the SAP and Rumsfeld's connection to it will begin bright and early during Monday's pressgaggle. Usually weekend news gets passed over for whatever's fresh to the start the week, but something like this may do the reverse: give the press time to read it and come up with questions.

Well, maybe I'm giving the media too much credit. But certainly the blogosphere and people like Hardball and Olbermann are going to pick it up. They damn well better, too--this is exactly the function the press is supposed to provide: find out what they're hiding that's wrong, and expose it so we can evaluate the depth of the transgression.