August 29, 2005

Atlas Had Scoliosis

I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 15, and I'm okay.

I think I was 15. Might have been younger. I was with a bunch of friends, older fellas, you know, and one of them shoved an old, dog-earred copy of it into my hands. "C'mon, man," he said. "Everyone's doing it."

So, I read it, okay? I experimented with an Ayn Rand novel. But I didn't inhale. In fact, as I recall, I skipped the manifesto in the middle.

But I am a rare case. Ayn Rand novels are a nothing but a gateway. They lead poor, impressionable youngsters to become libertarians and generally to vote Republican, little Robbie Goulds with their notes in the margins, socking these overweight monstrosities away in their pockets, well-thumbed diatribes chronicling mythic characters, meant to persuade people to a "philosophy" of "objectivism." The holy grail of these books is pure self-interest, which Rand argued was the only true ethical path.

These are the ideas that are driving today's political economy. And, like the Communist Manifesto, the stuff might look good on paper if you hold it at an angle, but put into practice is a freaking nightmare.

I saw one of them today, an impressionable young lad, not yet 20 pages into it on the subway. I wanted to go to him and say, stop, you don't have to go through with it. You don't have to read Ayn Rand to be "cool." It will only be harder to stop once you start. And I am just on the edge of suggesting that Ayn Rand novels be kept behind the counter, only to be sold to those 35 years old and up, but I am a liberal and therefore believe that even Ayn Rand novels are protected by the First Amendment.

But be careful with that stuff, kids. Look around, and you can see how dangerous it is.

August 26, 2005

The War Is Stupid

I think what bothers me most about our imbroglio in Iraq is that it is stupid.

Every week, every day, and nearly every hour, news erupts from our war in Iraq that is stupid. Today's Post reports that President Bush has been on the telephone with a Shiite leader, urging him to include the Sunnis in the constitutional process. The process has gotten so screwed up that we've been forced to go to bat for the Sunnis. You know. Saddam's people. The former elite minority of Iraq. The ones what had the rest of the joint securely under thumb. Freedom is on the march. Indeed.

(For an excellent primer on the current state of the Iraqi constitution, see Juan Cole's article in today's Salon.)

It's stupid that the United States invaded Iraq in the first place, stupid like if we'd invaded Mexico to avenge Pearl Harbor, like Richard Clarke said. It's stupid that the United States disbanded the Iraqi army, allowed porous borders, permitted looting, didn't start with enough boots on the ground, turned over Abu Ghraib prison to military intelligence, didn't find WMD, didn't capture or kill UBL, signed off on proportional elections and otherwise alienated the Sunnis, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. It's stupid that nobody, including the president of the United States, can tell you why we're at war in one honest sentence. It's stupid that one of the war's MOST ENDURING images is a lady with a cigarette in her mouth POINTING AT A PENIS.

And the reasons get more and more stupid. In a previous post, I lambasted the "flypaper" theory as being the worst war rationale yet. "Yet." Just this week, the president topped it by telling us that the United States has already lost about 1,800 American soldiers, so we might as well keep at it.

It's even stupid that it took somebody's MOTHER to give voice to the opposition, but even more stupid that the only thing that people who LIKE the war can think to do is to attack HER. It sort of reminds me of when the Starr Brigade was witch-hunting Bill Clinton. They kept telling me, "But he lied. He lied about sex," to which I kept saying, "I DON'T CARE." I don't care if Cindy Sheehan is in the middle of a divorce. I don't care if she has allied herself with moveon.org. I don't care if she had Fruit Loops for breakfast. None of it affects my admiration for a woman who has simply taken a stand and in doing so has energized debate and focused opposition. Cindy Sheehan is awesome and no amount of right-wing stick-poking at her is going to alter that.

And as Wesley Clark (sort of) wrote in the Post today, no amount of trying to rally the resolve of Americans is going to account for the execution of a war that is stupid. And it is. And you know it is, too.

So there.

August 25, 2005

Douchebag Of The Year

It's only August, and I believe we've already seen the prime candidate for this coveted award. And, believe it or not, it's not George Bush.

It's Pat Robertson.

It's rather hillarious to listen to my lineup of liberal talk radio hosts this week. Every last one of them seems to get a rise out of playing his first quote, when he said that the United States should assassinate Chavez. You know, this one:

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

Back-to-back with the quote where he denies saying that the United States should assassinate Chavez. You know, this one:

“I didn’t say ‘assassination’. I said our special forces should ‘take him out’. And ‘take him out can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him.”

I see. So, 1) Robertson is a bald-faced liar, and, 2) Robertson thinks that endorsing kidnappng over outright murder is an acceptable way to backtrack. Nice.

Unfortunately, it's not very profound to just compare the quotes and go, wow, what a douchebag. His comments made me curious. What does Pat Robertson have against Chavez? Let's take a look.

Last year, Chavez called President Bush an asshole. In Spanish. In public. Heh-heh. He's a communist who embraces Cuba and Iran, and he sits on top of a whole lot of oil. One could argue that he wields more political legitimacy than President Bush: He is a rather authoritarian leader, but he survived a recall vote last year that was given the thumbs-up by international observers. All this cribbed from Time.

CBN has an entire, um, "news story" about why Chavez is such a terrible guy. I'm not linking to it. Google it if you want to read it. But here's a quoth: "Internally, Chavez has already rewritten the constitution, stacked the courts and begun throwing political opponents into jail. And some say he is now looking beyond Venezuela's borders. With billions of dollars in oil profits, Chavez is buying advanced Russian fighter planes and helicopters, dramatically increasing the size of his armed forces and integrating it with Cuba's."

Essentially, I think Robertson's dislike of Chavez boils down to one little fact previously mentioned: He's a commie. And, goodness knows, we can't have commies in Central America. Such a thing might cause a president to illegally sell arms to a militantly Islamic nation, to launder the profits, and then to deliver the laundered dough to an ongoing illegal war to fight the commies.

Wouldn't it be fascinating if our foreign policy grew another leg, one that returned to the good ol' Cold War days, and then we'd be fighting a "War on Terrah" at the SAME TIME we're fighting the commies? Wouldn't that be great?

Now, watch as the United States government does nothing about Robertson, a former and unexplainably successful presidential candidate who has said we should assassinate a democratically elected leader. They won't do anything, but I will: Pat Robertson, I do hereby declare you as the inaugural nominee for the first annual Ketchup Is A Vegetable Douchebag of the Year. Please put on your funny hat and go sit in the corner. Thank you. Douchebag.

August 22, 2005

CNN Presents

I heartily recommend that everyone find time to watch the latest "CNN Presents." It is about the intelligence failures that led to this stupid war. It is called "Dead Wrong: Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." Here is the schedule for future showings, according to Tivo:

8/27: 6 a.m., 3 p.m., 8 p.m., 11 p.m.

8/28: 2 a.m., 6 a.m.

This is an excellent look at the intelligence snafus and an amazing journalistic admission by a cable network that was a damned cheerleader in the early days of this stupid war. It's very good.

August 15, 2005

A Noble Cause

My Grandma G is fond of telling this here story, though I'm sure she'll write me later and provide some more details:

She and her Dad, that's my Great-Grandpa Flip, were attending a board meeting at the little resort town that was one of my childhood summer spots, and they were debating the future of the lake there and how to get something-or-other done with it. So Flip stood up and nominated his daughter to be on the case because, by god, you need a woman to get anything done at all.

I really wish I had more of that story. But Flip did have a point.

Check out my girl Cindy Sheehan. All she did was say fuggit and set up camp, and now all of a sudden we've got a focal point. She's amazing, and I, for one, am rooting for her. But let me make one thing clear: Cindy Sheehan doesn't want to ask Bush for an immediate pullout, like the media's trying to have you believe. According to Sheehan, she went to Texas because she heard Bush refer to troop deaths in terms of service to a "noble cause." Her mission is simply to ask him to define, exactly, what the noble cause IS. And you can bet dollars to doughnuts that he's ducking because he's, uh, got nothin'.

Because if there is a noble cause, why is the Post reporting that the administration is lowering its expectations? Quoth, Post, 8/14/05: "The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say." The story anonymously quotes another U.S. official as saying that they started out hoping to establish a democracy, but are slowly realizing they'll have an Islamic republic.

What I extrapolate from this is that the only success we've drawn from our incursion into Iraq has been to upset the apple cart, and we did that in the first six weeks with 137 American casualties. Since that point, the United States has suffered persistently trashed justifications for war, mounting American casualties, additional terrorist attacks for our allies, occassional videotaped nose-thumbing from UBL and his crew, and, just recently, reportedly lowered expectations of mission and a constitutional process mired over, among other issues, the most basic question of whether to have a strong central government or instituted factionalism.

If you can macrame me a noble cause out of that, I'll give you a nickel.

August 11, 2005

Freedom's On The March March!

So I got a little caught up in wishing that guardsman poster well and neglected to call attention to my original point. When I consider it now, I think it was downright weird of Mr. Trevor to accuse me of being nothing but a naysayer when alls I did was point out a little tiny truth there.

I mean, is it naysaying for the sake of naysaying to point out that the utopian vision of our great leaders can't even hold up to support a stable municipal government in the capital? Is it naysaying for the sake of naysaying to observe the irony that a coup d'etat just happened in a place where we're supposed to be establishing democracy? Furthermore, is it just pissing on somebody's parade to imply that, perhaps, the Shiite incursion at Baghdad City Hall might just possibly be the canary in the mineshaft (though, quite honestly, aren't we just about to drown in little yellow dead birds?)?

I don't make the fiasco by saying it's a fiasco. George W. Bush and his team of utopians are the ones who made the fiasco. I didn't let UBL go at Tora Bora. I didn't insert those 16 words into the State of the Union. I didn't refer to the case for war as a "slam dunk." I didn't withhold orders to stop the looting. Yada. Yada. Yada.

I'm still shocked that the coup in Baghdad hasn't received more press. There are so many aspects to this story that scream "fiasco." The coup of a municipal government in the midst of the U.S. effort to build a democracy. The coup, motivated by the municipal government's failure to provide Baghdad with adequate power and water. How long have we been in Baghdad, now? The promise of American power's incredible capacity to rebuild infrastructure has been clearly broken. The coup, upsetting an instituted power that was to have been a shining example of how to do it.

The bottom line of this story, to me, is that if we aren't even providing stability for Baghdad's municipal government, then we're not even close to providing security and stability for the nation as a whole. We are five days from the day that the new Iraq is supposed to have drafted a constitution, and the adage of the day in Baghdad is still "don't drink the water."

Anyway, enough of that. There're other things going on. Like:

August 10, 2005

Trevor

Since I've moved my engine to Blogger, comments here at KIAV have been less spammy but also less frequent. I mean, I understand that, to a large extent, I am masturbating into the wind here. And limiting the pool of commenters to members of Blogger, it doesn't help. I know. I know. That's blogging for you, especially, I think, when you blog from this side of the dais. But, at least I've limited advertising resources for online poker.

So I was pleasantly surprised to get a comment that wasn't spam and wasn't from my Mom. It was from a man named "Trevor." Trevor wrote: "No worries. It'll work out despite people like you who have nothing to contribute but negativity. Or am I wrong?"

I of course stood up from my handy dandy Briggs and Stratton computer device and began to argue with Trevor. Hey, man, I said to the wall, I got positivity. I got yer positivity right here. I was gearing up and ready to let this right-wing whacko have it. Yeah, bitch.

So before I sat back down again to write, I looked up Trevor's profile and checked out his blog. It's called "will to exist."

Trevor is a National Guardsman getting ready to go to Iraq. To quote a dead ex-friend of mine: "Not so fucking funny now, are we?"

So, Trevor, my man, I have a few things to say to you. First of all, thank you for posting a comment here at KIAV, and thank you for that comment not being some milquetoast "Yes, I Agree With You Completely" sort of comment. Your comment, not for what it said but for what you are, has been the most interesting thing to ever happen to this project since its inception. Because with what you've laid at my feet, it no longer feels like shadowboxing. From my visit to your site, I can see your face, man. In cammos, no less. And how do I answer you directly without telling you that the sense of purpose you clearly feel in this mission is worthless? How do I tell you where I'm coming from without making you feel that my opinions are specifically meant to render your sacrifice as "in vain?" Could I look you in the face while you're wearing those cammos and tell you that I believe this war is bullshit and sleep all right that night?

All right, fine. "...nothing to contribute but negativity..." Listen. I was in downtown Washington, D.C. on September Eleventh. I had to walk home to Arlington with several thousand of my closest friends. I saw the smoke. I fussed for a whole evening over a friend who was in New York. I lived it and had stomachaches over it and cried it out just like everybody else. And on the other side of the grieving, I supported our president. And, at the time, I was willing to suck up my obviously
partisan proclivities and support George W. Bush in whatever endeavors he attempted. I was positive, my man. Like most of my American brothers and sisters, conservative or liberal, I positively wanted two things: I wanted justice, and I wanted measures taken to insure that this wouldn't happen again.

Gary Schroen reported to Tim Russert that Bush wanted UBL's head in a box on dry ice. Tim Russert's initial question upon hearing this was about where you'd find dry ice in Afghanistan. I think I might have asked something like, "His head? Really? His fucking head? You're shitting me. He wanted his HEAD? No fucking way. You're shitting me. No, really. His HEAD?"

But, if that were to have come to pass, I can't say that even my happy capital-punishment-hating liberal ass would have been disappointed. But it did not come to pass, and nor did the routing out of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, or so a little home movie featuring Ayman al-Zawahri released just last week tells me. So, no justice. And, certainly, we've enjoyed a cessation of attacks here at home, but the recent London bombings indicate to me that there's no peace, either. And every line of relevance that these folks have tried to draw from September Eleventh to Iraq has been broken. This administration and its policies have made it diffcult for me to just give our president any attaboys.

Regardless, Trevor, of whatever disagreements you and I might have about the path our country has taken, the most important thing I have to tell you is this: Please come home. Please come home safe and with all of your arms and legs and fingers and toes and with your sanity intact. Come home to your country and your family and your hometown, preferably to a tickertape parade and a fat happy beautiful American life. Godspeed to you, but please, come home.

How's that for positive?

I have linked to your blog and will check it often, though I will understand if spinning the blogwheel isn't your first priority. But please try to keep us updated when you can.

Thank you.
Aaron

Freedom's On The March!

I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the fact that the mayor of the capital city of the country the United States overran to install democracy was forced out of office yesterday by a Shiite militia-man, or the "in other news" treatment this story seems to be getting.

Alaa Mahmood Tamimi wasn't exactly elected to office. He was approved, first by the city council, and then by then viceroy (yes, he was actually called viceroy) J. Paul Bremer.

Here's an interesting quote from a news article from April 2004, when the new mayor was installed.

"One year after a U.S.-led invasion toppled the government of former president Saddam Hussein, the American-led occupation authority has promoted the new Baghdad city government as a symbol of Iraq's democratic potential."

How's that workin' out for ya?

August 5, 2005

No, We Won't Shut Up

A stark difference between conservatives and liberals: Liberals genuinely believe in Voltaire's most quoteable quoth, "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." Conservatives don't.

You know it if you've ever heard Bill O'Reilly's masterful interviewing technique. You know it if you've ever tried to attend a Bush rally with a "No Blood For Oil" bumpersticker on your car. And, you know it if you've been paying any attention at all to the conservative blogorama lately.

Michelle Malkin and her lot have been making a bunch of hay over a nonstory and the media's "failure" to cover it. You see, it seems that Evan Cohen, the former CEO of Air America Radio, was, how shall we put it, "shady." This is obviously a big story that the liberal media is ignoring completely. Right?

Waitaminute. Didn't HBO have this entire documentary called Left of the Dial? And wasn't the thesis of said movie pretty much that Evan Cohen was a shady dealer? That he was talking out of his ass when he said he had enough venture capital to float AAR for as long as three years? That after three weeks, AAR was defaulting on payroll and health insurance, and that shortly thereafter, Cohen got out of dodge and was divorced from the company two months after the first broadcast?

So, here's the "scoop": The New York Department of Investigation is looking into whether hundreds of thousands of dollars were illegally transferred from the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, a nonprofit organization in the Bronx, to Air America Radio during Cohen's ever-so-brief tenure there. Bloggers and even Tony Blankley's editorial page are painting it as the network preying on children, a ridiculous characterization on its face. Cohen was a shady dealer and a bad businessman who apparently made more than one horrible business decision. Air America Radio is not the White House, however, and instead of promoting Cohen for his incompetence, he was summarily drummed out.

No, the maelstrom the conservatives are attempting to create over this nonissue isn't about conservatives' overreaching concern for respect of the law, nor is it out of heartfelt compassion for the children. They're making hay out of this simply because they cannot stand the fact that Air America Radio is on the air at all.

From Franken's first broadcast, they've been predicting its failure. And, true, it almost failed, but not because there's no market for it. It almost failed because the guy running the business was a douchebag. But the network is growing, now with 67 terrestrial affiliates and an exclusive deal with XM Radio that should cement its survival.

To conservatives, though, there is no room for other ideas. You're either a blind, unquestioning adherent to the, um, "philosophy" of Ayn Rand, or SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

Air America Radio did not partake in thievery from children; that assertion is ridiculous, mean-spirited, and meant to hush a voice that's been needed for years. The Gloria Wise mess will certainly be moderated adequately, and these fine liberal voices will continue to be heard.

August 3, 2005

America Drinks & Goes Home

So, you go out in Las Vegas to buy beer. Why not take your assault rifle with ya?

That's what 20-year-old Matthew Sepi did. He ended up using it, too. He killed a woman and injured a man. He later said he "reacted in keeping with military training: engage targets and retreat," according to the AP story.

Sepi's mom said her boy has been trying to get help for PTSD ever since he's been discharged.

This story couldn't be more ironic in light of the Democrats' radio address last weekend, in which Sen. Daniel Inouye chided Senate Republicans for putting off work on a $491 billion defense bill to work instead on the NRA's gun manufacturer liability shield law.

Kind of on the nose, don't you think?

Anyway, I kind of reckon that when you send home some 40,000 troops who can't fight anymore because they've lost limbs and had their brains shook around in their heads, stuff like this is bound to happen. I've been saying for months that I didn't envy this country the debilitating aftereffects this war was bound to produce. Right now, in Lost Wages, there's a lady who is just as much a casualty as any poor sucker "over there" who died from taking shrapnel. And the most telling part of the story is Mrs. Sepi's comment that he was "trying to get help." Trying to get help? A team of counselors should be descending upon every one of these people the minute their Keds squish on American soil. They shouldn't have to "try" to get help. "Help" should be trying to get them.