July 31
I hand out this "Take the Red Pill Award" to some particularly nasty people in an unfortunate follow up to my entry of July 25 about the death in Iraq of a marine my wife knew in high school, Sgt. Bryan Opskar. The deranged people of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, who make me think maybe there is evil in the world and they're it, have taken to picketing the funerals of people killed in Iraq by IED (improvised explosive devices) on the grounds the United States attacked the church with such a device in 1995. I don't know if by "United States" they mean the government, the army, or all of us who aren't them. They plan to picket Opskar's funeral in Moorhead. They previously picketed the funeral of Army Spc. Jared "Jed" D. Hartley in Newkirk, OK. They believe the IEDs are God's vengeance for the attack on them and punishment for tolerating homosexuality. What strikes me as bizarre is that next to Christian fundamentalists, the most homophobic part of American society is probably the military (and sometimes the fundamentalists and the military are the same people). If there's a silver lining, maybe this picketing with extreme prejudice will make some lesser homophobes realize no homosexual ever acted like this at a soldier's funeral, so maybe they need to rethink who the bad guys are. Hopefully they'll think about how these funeral picketers could stay in the armed forces if they were discovered, but homosexuals get kicked out. Meanwhile, the lunatics at Westboro Baptist can celebrate being the first two-time winner of the "Take the Red Pill Award."
July 27
There is a special election for a US House seat in Ohio Tuesday, with possibly (without knowing the poll numbers) a chance to pick up a seat that has been safely Republican for decades, plus an example of why that is so important. A veteran of Iraq War II, Paul Hackett, is the Democratic candidate. He went despite opposing the war, and he's upfront about how badly it's been run. He wants affordable health care for everyone, an increase in the wage cap on Social Security to eliminate the projected shortfall, and I like this statement on our reliance on oil: "A few months back, when the gas topped out at $2.40 or $2.50, I didn't pay that price. I was in Iraq. I saw how high the price really was." His opponent, Jean Schmidt, has hired one of her challengers in the Republican primary as a consultant, Eric Minamyer, who has resorted to Swift Boat Veterans For Smears tactics by challenging Hackett's war record. His evidence: he sent a list of stupid questions to Hackett, and when Hackett didn't feel obligated to help his opponent's consultant with finding a blog entry, Minamyer proclaimed this as proof Hackett lied about being in combat. Today, he did say, "I therefore correct my earlier incorrect opinion that he was not in combat, which was based solely on a lack of a reply." But how can anyone not know that a lack of a reply to the opponent's consultant proves nothing (except maybe good taste)? Despite Minamyer's retraction, the baseles charge is being repeated by right wing media according to the Swing State Project. The old Big Lie propaganda technique: repeat a lie often enough and it gets believed. It's exactly what the Swift Boat Vets did. The sheer volume of the repeating of the lie drowns out the debunking for those who don't dig into it. So don't believe me. Just look into it yourself.
I haven't gone into Schmidt's positions, but I shouldn't have to. The fact she resorts to this says everything.
If you need another example of why we need to get back the majority in the House, Joe Barton is demanding every document he can think of from climate researchers with the temerity to contradict his energy company donors about global warming. Even another Republican said he was trying to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them. The point I haven't seen made is that even allowing he's merely making the most in-depth congressional investigation of scientific research and ethics ever, notice only scientists who claim global warming is real and man-made are being investigated, not the few who support his donors' position. Considering almost every scientist on the planet agrees global warming is real and man-made, and among the few who don't, it's very tough to find one not on an energy company payroll, this seems, oh, dishonest? Unethical? How about corrupt?
July 25
Iraq War II got a little more personal today. It was in the news today that someone my wife knew in high school was killed by a roadside bomb. Sgt. Bryan James Opskar was a year behind her at Princeton High School in Princeton, Minnesota. He had been married a year and half. His father was my wife's shop teacher and helped her build a bow. My wife thinks Sgt. Opskar was his father's only child. This death stands out not for being particularly sad, because everyone killed in the war, soldier or civilian, any nationality, had friends and family. It stands out for being someone she knew, and though there may not be a rational reason that should matter, it does. I'm not sure exactly what that says, but I think it says something about how for most of us the war is distant and doesn't entail sacrifice by anyone other than the people who fight it the those who happen to be close to them. My wife shed some tears for someone she knew a long time ago and for his father who were both good people who didn't deserve this. Most of us can only imagine how greater is the grief in the Opskar household. I'm reminded of one aspect of the first Iraq War, when there were "Desert Storm" t-shirts like it was a rock band concert tour, and film of smart weapons hitting targets precisely (a much rarer event than we were led to believe at the time) giving the appearance of a video game. I always wondered if this disconnect from war's horrors would haunt us sometime, and I believe it has, judging from the surprise of many Americans, especially the neocons, at how awful it turned out to be. Even know, most of the awfulness is described rather than seen, and all that's asked of citizens by their government is stay the course on tax cuts for the wealthy and go shopping to prop up the economy. Oh, and would the children of the commoners please join the army.
Remember a few days ago I criticized the factual accuracy of Mark Yost, who said he learned his journalism at the Wall Street Journal editorials department? One of their current editorial writers, John Fund, was on MPR's Midmorning today (scroll down to "A conservative take on politics"). The stream cut out after 40 minutes (and wasn't working when I retried it), but he got a couple whoppers in before that. Right in the first few minutes, commenting on the London bombings, he said the British never negotiated with the IRA, and the IRA eventually gave up. The IRA was actually about as strong as ever in the mid 90's when all sides declared a cease fire and negotiated the current peace agreements. That's about as wrong as it's possible to be. Not the way to establish credibility at the start. Now, maybe he just forgot, but his next bit of misinformation is a lie.
About 20 minutes in, he said the war in Iraq had damaged Al Qaida by disrupting their central operations and exposing a lot of the organization. The problem is Al Qaida wasn't in Iraq. There was nothing to disrupt or learn about. Lies like this are why still a large minority of Americans and most Bush supporters think Iraq and Al Qaida were connected.
Later, responding to a question about the charge that Iraq had been a diversion from Al Qaida, Fund said we'd had 40,000 troops in Afghanistan so it wasn't realistic to think we could have counted on catching Bin Laden if we hadn't invaded Iraq. That last part is true, but a year ago we had 17,900 troops in Afghanistan, which is more than during the invasion. I suspect it would have made the news if it had doubled since then. So maybe 40,000 wouldn't have helped, but we'll never know thanks to resources being pulled away from Afghanistan and having conservative propagandists making up numbers doesn't help.
Finally, there's a reappearance of a lie I thought had gone away after Condoleeza Rice got called on it during the 2004 campaign. Fund repeated the lie that 2/3 of Al Qaida leaders had been caught or killed. It's a lie because no one knows how many Al Qaida leaders there were. I wish the host, Kerri Miller, had called him on it like Wolf Blitzer called Rice:
To be clear, we are after Osama bin Laden. He is being chased by Pakistani forces and Afghan forces and American and other forces. We have broken up 75 percent of the al Qaeda known leadership. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia fully...I'd wager Fund has no more idea than Rice.BLITZER: Well, when you say 75 percent, of how many leaders are we talking -- 75 percent of a quantity of what? 30, 25?
RICE: Of its known leadership.
BLITZER: But how many...
RICE: I would suspect that that's in the tens to hundreds -- tens to 100.
July 24
Today, another example of someone swallowing the propaganda. This time it's a letter to the editor in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Iraq war is strong defense of U.S.. The letter writer, Richard Swan, believes Iraq and Afghanistan are both instances of fighting Al Qaida, and believes the acting president's line that we're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here, despite the spate of bombings outside Iraq and Afghanistan that would seem to prove otherwise. His premise is Al Qaida has limited resources, therefore the wars, by forcing them to use those resources, make it much more difficult for them to launch attacks. He unfortunately draws this notion from a lesson history does not teach, that Reagan spent the Soviet Union into submission, therefore we can do the same to Al Qaida. However, this assumption about the Reagan administration hardly belongs to just this one writer. It has become so far spread as to perhaps be turning into conventional wisdom, even if it is nonsense.
Let's start with the mistaken history. The problems with saying Reagan defeated communism by outspending it are two: 1, that wasn't Reagan's policy; 2, simple logic shows how absurd the policy would have been, which is probably why Reagan didn't try it.
To take the first problem, Reagan campaigned for president in 1976 and 1980 on the claim that the Soviets had gotten far ahead of us militarily, and massive spending was needed to catch up. This would seem the opposite of saying we were ahead of the Soviets and we could outspend them as they tried to catch up. Those of you old enough to have lived through (I think of it as "survived") the Reagan era remember this was a time when the notion of Soviet superiority was so ingrained that "Firefox" and "Amerika" could be taken seriously. You don't think haughtily about outspending someone when you think he's about to walk all over you. Later in the 80's, when it became apparent the Soviets were nowhere near as strong as we'd been told, and we had these record deficits that were embarrassing for a president who campaigned on his ability to balance the budget, then we got this spin that Reagan meant to spend the USSR into submission, as if there had never been claims of a "window of vulnerability". Imagine, changing the rationale after the fact -- sound a little Bush-like?
Let's look at problem two, the logic problem. When you think about nuclear weapons, remember how we used to talk about "bang for the buck". Nukes are cheap relative to their destructive capacity. Even if you build enough bombs to destroy the world 100 times over, that's no advantage over someone who can destroy it only 50 times over. So outspending the USSR didn't matter when it came to our nuclear arsenals. It might matter with conventional arsenals, except it was always understood that if one side faced total defeat, they could haul out the nukes. Even under economic collapse, they had lots of nukes and the ability to launch them. That's why outspending the Soviets was a hopeless strategy. What ultimately caused the USSR to disintegrate was peace with us. There was no longer an enemy to hold it together, and attempted economic reforms were inadequate. The USSR was an empire of people who didn't want to be part of it, not an empire of people who said, "Oh dear, they're richer than us, let's quit". Let me simplify this: the disintegration was the result of peace, not the cause of it. Reagan did do something smart, though it wasn't the race to spend each other into the poorhouse. It was his decision to negotiate with Gorbachev, which led during his presidency and again to give credit, under Bush Sr., to the arms control agreements, or to follow a common metaphor of the time, the people standing in gasoline decided to put away the matches.
Now that's the historical part. The premise that Al Qaida is expending limited resources is easily refuted by current events, including the aforementioned recent bombings. Just a week ago, the Saudis and Israelis released research indicating that the foreign insurgents in Iraq are almost all new to the cause, not Al Qaida's limited manpower redeployed from Afghanistan or from cells elsewhere. Moreover, in that same linked article, our own intelligence says the insurgents are 90% Iraqis. We weren't fighting Iraqis before invading Iraq. Rather than stretching limited manpower, the invasion of Iraq has been the best recruiting tool Al Qaida could hope for. I'll go so far as to say it's likely the sort of thing Bin Laden was hoping Bush would be stupid enough to do. Besides looking at the ample manpower, we might notice there seems to be no shortage of ammunition. Saddam's munitions depots were ignored. Well, by us anyway. The insurgents cleaned them out. So while that might make for a limited supply, it seems a pretty big limit.
July 23
It's sad when someone has so incorporated the propaganda that they can pass it on using the same technique and probably not even realize that they're doing. I'm referring to a guest column in Sunday's Pioneer Press by Joe Repya, a local conservative activist and to give him credit, not a chickenhawk, but someone who is helping with the war he supports. In his column, Repya confuses the wars in Iraq and against Al Qaida by using the Bush technique of not saying directly Iraq was involved with Al Qaida, but by mentioning them together so the reader who isn't being alert can put them together in his own mind. This is exactly the technique that has a large minority of Americans, and the majority of Bush supporters, still thinking Iraq was part of 911. Repya put these two paragraphs consecutively:
"As a soldier stationed in Baghdad, I have seen some of the estimated 35 new palaces Saddam built after 1991 at the cost of hundred of millions of dollars while starving and murdering thousands of the Shia and Kurdish minorities. Just this month we found another mass grave site.The evil that is al-Qaida will continue to attack innocent men, women and children worldwide until they succeed in their goal to replace all forms of religion with their demented version of Islam. Only when all Islamic nations stand up in a loud and unified voice and demand an end to this terrorist ideology will this form of terror end."
Neither statement by itself is false. The first is his account of his own experience. The second is opinion, but a defensible opinion, and one I expect all Americans share at least in part. However, next to each other, one would think them aspects of the same war without knowing Bush has admitted Iraq wasn't involved in 911, the 911 commission said there was no Iraq-Al Qaida connection, etc.
Another example of how Repya is writing from inside an ideological haze is opening paragraph: "London, like Madrid last year and New York on 9/11, has been attacked by radical Islamic terrorists. Yet, on the day of the attack we hear the never-ending whine of 'blame America.'" We do? I'm sure if I went searching I could find something that constitutes blaming America, but just what constitutes a "never-ending whine"? Could he not mention one actual example, some media outlet that had a "never-ending whine"? I ask readers, did you see a "never-ending whine" anywhere, one of the TV channels that covered it all day, some talk radio programs, the newspaper that published his column? Come one Joe, where? If it was in Arabic media, that one might expect, but say that's what you were watching. Your implication is all media, which plainly isn't true. Likewise, Repya later says "the anti-American crowd". Who is this? Is there some psychological benefit to thinking everybody is against you? Or is "anti-American crowd" a pejorative for everyone who opposed the invasion? I respect what Repya is doing over there, but not his promotion of the idea that anyone who disagrees with Bush is anti-American. That's a variation of the old tactic of saying there is no difference between a difference of opinion and treason.
Let me reiterate I give Repya credit for being willing to go to Iraq, an all too rare characteristic among Bush supporters. I don't dispute that he has seen what he says he has seen, and despite the rampant corruption fostered by the acting president, it would be shocking to me if it wasn't true that almost every American in Iraq is doing his best to rebuild the country. He's trying to make the case for staying in Iraq as long as necessary without artificial timetables, and there is such a case to be made. That Al Qaida is evil and democracy in the Middle East an important goal is unlikely to be disputed by any of us in the "anti-American crowd" despite our "never-ending whine" of blaming America (actually, I blame the corrupt and incompetent government run by our acting president, a distinction some Bush supporters can't recognize but is real nonetheless). What I would like to say to Repya is that his service, and his willingness to put himself on the line instead of just sending others is admirable, but his demonizing of opponents is neither admirable nor serving his cause. Everyone wants Iraq to go well, and insisting that those who point out that Bush is screwing it up don't want Iraq to go well just adds to the current divisiveness.
A couple examples of how the corruption of the Bush administration has spread far down: in Iraq, charges that the Iraqi army is hollow, and officers are claiming more soldiers in their units that are actually there so they can pocket the imaginary soldiers' pay, and lest someone think the Iraqis did this all by themselves, the article mentions that it started with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA); in Texas, the Bush pattern of making dishonesty and incompetence prerequisites for promotion has reached down to the enlisted ranks, where the recruiter who threatened a potential recruit with arrest if he didn't make an appointment, helping to make a scandal of recruiters' ethics, has been promoted, while a recruiter who honestly missed his quota was busted in rank.
July 21
My complaint here isn't that a conservative columnist said things that weren't true and nobody in the media called him on it. They did. The problem is that the newspaper whose editorial board he sits on hasn't published any rebuttals. The newspaper is a local daily, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which belongs to Knight-Ridder. The columnist/editorial board member is Mark Yost. His column was entitled Why They Hate Us. He was writing about why the military hate the media and and he made some valid points, but also said some outrageous things according to not me, and here's the point I'm driving at, but according to Knight-Ridder reporters actually working in Iraq. Wouldn't you think that since his column engendered such strong reaction from reporters working for the same company, including charges he has his facts wrong, the Pioneer Press might run one of these responses? But it's been a week since Editor and Publisher ran them, and nothing in the paper that ran the offending column in the first place. What looks particularly bad is that since Yost is on the editorial board, readers have to wonder if he has the authority to stop the publication of rebuttals.
I said he had valid points, and by that I mean that he tells us as a veteran and as someone in touch with friends serving in Iraq why they hate the media. That's their perspective, and there's no denying that's how they see things. It also shouldn't be news that the military has a strong dislike for reporters. Yost says the reporting on things he saw while in the Navy didn't look like what he saw, and we have to accept that. Where he goes wrong is in assuming the he saw the whole thing, and that his buddies in Iraq see everything, therefore the reporters are wrong, and for not being as positive as the military the reporters must be distorting, either for nefarious motives or a refusal to look at the whole story. It's like there's no chance the soldiers might be seeing just a small part of the story themselves, and indeed reporters say that a lot of Americans don't see much outside the walls of the Green Zone or military bases. Moreover, he says, "I know the reporting's bad because I know people in Iraq." He hasn't been there himself, but he just threw a nasty accusation at his colleagues who are there. No wonder they're upset, especially when according to them he lives in fantasyland. Hannah Allam, who has done a lot of good reporting from Iraq at personal danger to herself, said, "Mr. Yost's contention that 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are stable is pure fantasy. On his visit to Baghdhad, he can check that by chatting with our resident British security consultant, who every day receives a province-by-province breakdown of the roadside bombs, ambushes, assassinations and other violence throughout the country."
A reader would expect to see Mr. Yost, allegedly being a journalist, gaining some perspective as to whether this belief of many in the armed forces is accurate. It's good he mentioned charities doing good work and I don't begrudge them an appearance at some time on the front page, but surely he should know that if tens of people dying in a terrorist attack in London is front page news for week, a similar attack in Baghdad making the front page for a day hardly constitutes ignoring the good news. Or does he really think tens of people dying in a bombing is really less important than a school getting fixed or someone sending packages to troops, as useful as that is? When I heard of places in the US holding moments of silence for London, I begrudged London nothing, but couldn't help thinking if we held a moment of silence for every similar attack in Iraq, we'd be doing it every week, and maybe then Mr. Yost would finally get what's going on there.
I suppose it still wouldn't bother me as much if he could just be bothered to check his facts, availing himself of fellow Knight-Ridder reporters right on the spot (of course, if as he says he learned his journalism from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, that would be a bit much to expect). He can read his own newspaper and see how false is his claim the insurgency is in just four provinces. He can see, if he ventures out of the editorials, that the electricity situation is not getting better despite the earnest efforts of our forces there.
However, no matter what I say, the critiques of his colleagues are stronger not merely because they are journalists and work for Knight-Ridder, but because they have spent quite a bit of time in Iraq. I asked the Pioneer Press to run their rebuttals. Then perhaps Mr. Yost could explain to his buddies why the news coverage has to be the way it is, if they really want the whole truth to come out and not just the favorable bits. Just in case someone is wondering if I bothered to look and see if the Pioneer Press published a rebuttal and I missed it, which occurred to me since I don't see the print edition every day, I searched the web site for the Knight-Ridder reporters who rebutted and didn't find the rebuttals.
July 19
Just so I'm on the record, in case it's true the acting president announces his Supreme Court nominee tonight, I predicted a few days ago in a comment I added to a quote on the right by Rep. Peter King (it may be in the quotes archives by the time you're reading this) that Bush would nominate a nutjob to distract from Karl Rove's problems. I hope I'm wrong and if I am, I'll happily say so and be glad Bush picked someone reasonable. However, I think he and the rest of the corrupt right want a fight and that might be true even without the Plame leak investigation. It's agitprop, like I explained about the right's campaign after the election about Christmas being under attack. They've been saying all over the conservative propaganda outlets that Democrats will oppose anybody, so they need us to do that to prove them right, besides the issue of judicial nominees being a good one for agitating the conservative base. We saw that in the fight over the filibuster, even though Bush got the highest percentage of nominees approved even before the filibuster deal. Here's some information on the 5th circuit the court on which possible nominee Edith Clement sits, and notice how they had long term vacancies and serious backlog problems because Republicans wouldn't let Clinton nominees get to a vote. Watch and see if I'm right.
Now that Duke Cunningham has opted not to run for reelection, maybe some other crooks can be likewise persuaded. Here's one that bears more scrutiny about the White House's spokesmodel, Norm Coleman. While Coleman was mayor of St. Paul, the city built an office complex for $101 million. In 2000, with Coleman still mayor, the city sold it to Frauenshuh Companies, a developer, for $54.7 million. Last month, they sold it for $84.5 million. Nice profit. Could just be real estate going up in value, right? Except when Frauenshuh bought the building, there were no competitive bids. By happy coincidence, the CEO of Frauenshuh Companies, David Frauenshuh, is a major financial backer of Norm Coleman. The city's economic development director when Frauenshuh got his nice deal, Brian Sweeney, is now president of a Frauenshuh unit. John Mannillo, a St. Paul real-estate broker, says the downtown real estate market has never been worse, making it look unlikely the building's value rose 60% in five years. So it looks like Coleman sold a city building to a financial backer for a bargain price, and a highly placed city employee helped the developer in exchange for a nice job with the developer afterward. Though this made the Pioneer Press, Star Tribune, and City Pages last month, nothing has come of it. I guess it's not real until it hits TV.
And don't forget as you hear Coleman going on about how we have to let the Rove investigation play out before drawing any conclusions, and the Democrats are just playing politics by going after Rove, that this is the same Coleman who called for Kofi Annan to resign at the start of the Oil for Food investigation. Coleman hasn't been on that for while. Maybe he's afraid George Galloway will come back and shrink him again.
July 16
Following up on Thursday's entry, when I listed an agenda for the Democratic Party, I had one of those "what was I thinking!?" moments when I realized I'd left off two issues of great importance. Also, I've seen a couple things to show my suggestion we focus on ethics can work, even if some think it's negative especially ethically-challenged Republicans, which of course in the case of the White House and Congress is a redundancy. So to the agenda add these two:
- Global warming: The environment, like 3G, is a long list of issues, but global warming is the one that should really scare us. I list it by itself because it's not just the biggest environmental issue, but it belongs at the top of any list. The effects are simply bigger than everything else, and it will take a long time to reverse.
- Protect the right of workers to organize: The labor movement has been weakening for a long time, and the laws and enforcement are stacked against it. The only way for unions to grow stronger is to organize, so our agenda must include protecting the right to organize, and that includes making it tougher for employers to fire workers during a strike and especially a lockout. Firing is illegal, but "permanent replacement" isn't. Employers can with impunity break the law to make organizing tougher and make the right to strike about meaningless.
One more follow up: on Wednesday I posted a letter I sent to the reader rep of the Star Tribune about the jailing of Judith Miller. I doubt she'd care if I published her reply, but I never told her I would do that or asked if I could, so I'll just assume it's private correspondence. I'll just say she responded very quickly and thoughtfully, and stuck to her defense of Miller, which I respect even though I still don't get why she would a protect a source who did what this source did. It seems confidentiality is for vulnerable whistleblowers, not powerful people committing a crime.
See the archives for earlier entries.
