Why conservatives assume the nuns were Democrats
May 7

Conservatives were angry that the nuns turned away in Indiana planned to vote Democratic. Only in an update did it occur to Kathryn Lopez that the nuns might have planned to vote Republican. That link came from Glenn Greenwald, who found other examples. What did they have to go on to assume the nuns were Democrats? Only that they were turned away by the photo ID law. This indicates that Republicans know, on a high subconscious level if not consciously, that the law was intended to disenfranchise Democrats. Uh oh, Republicans weren't supposed to be stopped from voting --- so they must have been Democrats! Don't they know Catholics aren't allowed to vote Democratic?!

We obviously don't know who the nuns would have voted for, but the real difference between Republicans and Democrats on this is Democrats try to protect the voting rights of people targeted by these laws, while Republicans do the targeting. Republicans assume the targeted voters are Democrats, while Democrats don't care. I'll accept the premise that the nuns, being nuns, are almost surely religious conservatives with intentions of voting Republican. It would still be difficult to find a Democrat who wouldn't protect their voting rights. Yes, poor elderly women tend to vote Democratic, as do the other groups disenfranchised by these ID laws. Hasn't it occurred to Republicans that maybe their targeting of suspected Democrats is why those suspected Democrats vote Democratic?

Dead Polar Bear Award for "the conference to nowhere"
May 5

You assume when you hold a scientific conference that you invite experts in their field and see what their research came up with. According to some Republican state legislators in Alaska, you would be wrong. They propose a conference to highlight climate change deniers. Yes, before finding scientists, they've come up with the conclusion, and now they're looking for scientists to fit. House Speaker John Harris showed he doesn't quite get the idea when he said, "You know as well as I do that scientists are like lawyers." Apparently he comes from the Richard Viguerie school of conservatism, which holds that in journalism there's no such thing as fact, just opinion. Harris must think this applies to science too.

"This truly is the conference to nowhere," said University of Alaska researcher Rick Steiner. Steiner told the reporter that he has been trying to get the Palin administration to reveal this sound science they claim to have. Surprise surprise, they won't release it. If they have anything, they're holding onto it tightly. Likewise, they are free to hold tightly to their Dead Polar Bear Award.

Isn't this the smoking gun?
May 1

Recently, the acting president told ABC reporter Martha Raddatz, "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Hmm, protecting the American people ... was he talking about finally fixing our neglected roads and bridges? No. Perhaps he meant finally protecting us from bankruptcy and needless suffering from lousy or absent medical insurance. Maybe he was referring to restoring lapsed consumer protections, or workplace safety laws to reduce workplace deaths. No. The rest of the quote is, "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

"This issue" is the news that his top national security officials, including Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, and Tenant directly approved the use of torture, including methods for individual detainees. If someone had told me two years ago, when the acting president was less than halfway through his second term and a Democratic Congress was just a good possibility, that he would admit approving torture and a Democratic Congress wouldn't jump to impeach, I'd have thought that person crazy. On second thought, no I wouldn't, since one can never be too cynical where Bush is concerned, but it should have been crazy. Crazy or not, Bush's admission was hardly a blip. Other than maybe Countdown, I don't know if a single national TV news program has mentioned it. Must have been busy waiting for Obama to go bowling again (fortunately Obama figured out he needs to let the cameras show him playing basketball, where he passed out of a doubleteam by much younger and bigger players, and this is what parentheses were invented for). Of course, again besides Countdown, no TV has covered the revelation that former military officers acting as TV analysts since the sales campaign for Iraq started have been working for contractors who benefitted from the war, meaning these former officers made money too besides their network fees, and they knowing followed Pentagon talking points. Of course, neither the "analysts", the news channels, nor the Pentagon saw fit to tell the public these shills weren't objective. Nor did the networks see fit to put anti-war voices on TV except Phil Donohue, who was fired for it, and Bill Moyers, who was nearly run of TV for it. Though mainstream media thinks anyone who has a minor criticism of how the invasion was done qualifies as a critic, the real critics were saying "DON'T DO THIS", and took to the streets to try to get the media to listen. They didn't. Other than Phil Donohue and Bill Moyers, who were fired and nearly fired for it, no one on TV included war opponents.

How I got it right
April 21

There was a recent series in Slate, Why Did We Get It Wrong, in which writers described as "liberal hawks" tried to explain how they could make such a terrible mistake as lending their reputations to the sales campaign for the invasion of Iraq. There's certainly nothing shameful in some honest introspection after such a serious error. I congratulate these writers for being willing to answer this question publicly. Then again, much of the writing was so shallow as to illustrate the real source of the error. Perhaps there's as much to be learned from those of us who got it right, the roughly one-quarter to one-third of Americans who never backed the invasion. OK, let's be presumptuous and say there's even more to learned from how we got it right --- or at least how some of us got it right. After all, there were 80-100 million Americans who never fell for the sales pitch and while I won't pretend I speak for all of them, I can say what I was thinking.

So here are some thought processes that avoided the biggest mistake of the century, so far anyway (Iran anybody?). Take note that none of this required hindsight, and can be applied to future sales pitches for new wars (really, think Iran):

• Don't accept the assumption that the government knows things they can't tell us or has wisdom we don't have.
• The Bush administration did hold things back from the public. They fed the assumption that they couldn't tell us more without compromising intelligence sources. Instead, it turned out they gave us everything that helped the case, withheld anything they could that undercut it. All we could reasonably decide upon was what presented to the public. The people presenting the information in support of their policy were also the only source of information. How convenient. The way I like to put it is "The government knows less than what it's telling us."
  


• Charges weren't proven, and need to be before inflicting war. They don't need to be disproven, just not proven.
• If an administration wants to inflict the horrors of war, the reasons for war should be proven to a high standard. To oppose the war, I didn't need Bush's charges against Iraq disproven, just for them to be not proven.
  


• The evidence of WMD and Al Qaida didn't hold up. Lots of assertion, but not much presented to the public.
• Several of Slate's writers mentioned Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council. What I noticed at the time was Powell's repeated statement these these were facts, not assertions. The first time he said that, I wondered why he would need to say that. After a few repetitions, I suspected no one would keep repeating that these are facts and not assertions unless these were really assertions and not facts. Powell's speech was about the only time we ever got specifics instead of unbacked --- but oft-repeated --- assertions. That this was the best case the bushies could make shows just how weak the case was.


• History shows those who start wars are rarely right about how they'll go.
• Pick a war, any war, and almost guaranteed the side that started it was wrong about how it would go. Examples where the aggressor was right are hard to find. That was enough to tell me the bushies and neocons were almost surely wrong about their "candy and flowers" predictions, even before looking at any specifics about Iraq.


• Not every war is WWII or Vietnam.
• Most Americans know something about only these two wars. They don't know much about even other American wars, let only wars not involving the US, so if a war isn't like one of these wars, then we're going to work off bad analogies. So Saddam was Hitler even if he wasn't, because all dictators we come into conflict with are Hitler. Maybe another war is more instructive, like Britain's war in Iraq in 1920, which indicates certain bad things could happen, like those things that did happen. Now we're staying in Iraq because the lesson conservatives took from Vietnam was "don't leave".


• Don't start one war while still fighting another.
• Even if invading Iraq otherwise looked like a sound idea, history teaches that it's foolish to start one war before finishing another. Even if the threat from Iraq was real, it clearly wasn't immediate, but the war in Afghanistan had just begun when attention and resources were transferred to preparing the invasion of Iraq. The chance to finish off Al Qaida and the Taliban was blown, fighting in Afghanistan continues, and reconstruction languishes. So instead of having one war after another, there are two disasters simultaneously.


• Few dictators have been overthrown through foreign invasion. WWII is an exception, not an example.
• Here's that "all wars are WWII" thinking. Outside of WWII, how many dictators have been overthrown through foreign invasion? Contrast that with how dictators generally are overthrown, and it appears foreign invasion is perhaps the least effective means of removing them. It's at least not a common one.


• Iraq was not the only brutal regime, so why did Iraq require an invasion while others didn't?
• I wrote enough letters at the behest of Amnesty International to know that Saddam was brutal without needing Bush to tell me. However, he wasn't the only brutal dictator. The Myanmar junta was already in power. The Chinese leaders who massacred protesters in Tiananmen Square were still in power. The Sudanese regime that has killed so many in Darfur was killing in southern Sudan at the time. So why did only Iraq merit an invasion? No war supporter answered that question. To my knowledge, none has yet.


• Don't trust Bush.
• OK, that sounds like a reflex, but before it was reflexive it had to be proven as a reliable guideline, and the fact the sales campaign to invade Iraq was coming from Bush was reason enough to be suspicious. The "liberal hawks" and Democratic congressmen should have shared that suspicion since they had already seen the way Bush seized power in 2000, the connections to the corporate scandals that broke in 2001 and 2002 (remember those, the ones driven out of the news by the sudden need to vote RIGHT NOW on Iraq?), and the infringements of civil liberties and human rights. No American wants to believe any president would lie about something as serious as war, but looking at Bush's history and the people around him, could that possibility really be dismissed? That wasn't reason enough to oppose the war, but it was reason enough to look at the evidence thoroughly and take nothing on its face.

Finally, war has to be the last option. Everyone who resorts to war says they do so only as the last option, but that hardly means they're telling the truth. Too often, it means something more like, "We won't resort to war --- until we think other means won't work," or, to be more cynical, which is normally a safe position dealing with modern conservatism, the "last option" can mean, "We won't resort to war --- until we're ready to attack." No hindsight was needed since even before the invasion, the inspectors were finding nothing and were receiving cooperation from the Iraqi government. So perhaps the main lesson I would ask war supporters to learn is that "last option" really has to mean only after all other methods of resolving a dispute are exhausted. That alone would have been enough to stop them making the mistake that got them confessing their error five years later.