More Demographics? Must You?
I'm afraid I must.The new CBS News poll. At a glance, Bush is, to put it delicately, fucked.
"If the election were today" Kerry would win 49%-41%. With Nader included, he still wins, 47%-41%-5%. Nader is taking only two or three percent from republicans and democrats, but he's polling at 10% among independents. I think that's just a reflection of the number of respondents who were just giving freaky answers because they hate CBS, reasonably. All polls take this into account, or did you think the 'margin of error' had something to do with higher statistical mathematics? Silly rabbit.
Anyway, we're eating more beets. I mean, we're pessimists now. 65% think "things in this country...have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That's a jump of 10% from last month's poll. 91% of Democrats and 68% of independents are concerned. This suggests that maybe Dean's righteous anger thing wouldn't be a complete failure, come November; at least if Kerry tosses a little of it into his stump speeches, like well-measured tobasco on an omelet.
Final notes: only 49% of us think we "did the right thing" invading Iraq, first time that's below half. And, for those of us predicting, as Andy Sullivan put it, "a massive gay-baiting campaign by Karl Rove this summer," only 2% of voters put gay marriage at the top of their priority list. Gay marriage is the new flag burning: everyone hates it, except no one actually, y'know, cares.
Lies, Damn Lies & Demographics
Not long ago, I mentioned Bush's polling troubles. It seems that when I bring it up in the cafeteria, the most common response is, "polls don't mean anything." Hrm. This is obviously untrue. What is an election but a poll? And the election results you see on TV aren't the votes being counted, but the results of exit polls. But people dislike the idea of polling, because they dislike the idea of demographics. A David Horsey cartoon from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Because, if people can be neatly racked into a cartoonist's caricatures, it sort of challenges their individuality. I used to do telephone interviews for Dan Jones & Associates, a Utah polling firm, and when you call someone up, they become uncomfortable at answering questions. This is for the same reason people dislike the whole science of demographics.
No matter that the hundred million or so Americans who vote this November will have something on the order of at least two hundred millions reasons for voting the way they do. We will either vote for George Bush or John Kerry and that is all that matters. We will sort ourselves into, if I may borrow Horsey's alliteration, Bush Bumblers or Kerry Kiakamzies.
So it's easy to understand why people dislike demographics (if you can get past my horrible alliteration). But, to contradict everything I just said, the real value of statistical analysis doesn't appear until you understand it just a little better. Ryan Lizza at TNR blogs:
We can already assess the effect of the two big strategic moves of the pre-convention period. The Bush campaign's decision was to spend some $60 million in an attempt to discredit Kerry as a viable alternative to the president before the race really started. The Kerry campaign's decision was to concentrate on fundraising and allow events in Iraq and 527 spending to parry the Bush assault. Conventional wisdom among nervous Democrats outside the Kerry campaign, as well as much of the press, was that Kerry was making a Titanic mistake and Bush was making a bold and brilliant move similar to Clinton in 1996.This is a good example of how political analysis works. You look at 1)what the candidates are saying, 2)where they are spending their money and 3)what the results are. But without demographics, the first two are pretty meaningless.
But the results are in. Kerry leads Bush in almost every national poll. His fundraising is astronomical, and he is pumping up his ad campaign just as Bush is ratcheting his down. The two main assumptions of the Bush campaign--that Kerry would be seriously under-funded and that he could be crippled by advertising--have proven to be wrong.
Sure, you can just see who wins an election and draw conclusions from that. We run an election cycle that lasts about 18 months in America, and a presidential election has a budget about twice that of making the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Yeah, that's right: all three.) Campaign managers want to be able to make course corrections. Wouldn't you?
Anyway, this post seems to have wandered a bit more that my usual writing, with no particular underlying point. Sometimes the bear gets you.
Oh, dear...
There are some things even the Medium Lobster dares not consider...One of them is the posibility that President Bush's mideast policy may be influenced by the leader an Apostolic Christian lobby that he meets regularly with, and is opposed to a Palestinian State because Jesus cannot return until the Promised Land is in entirely Jewish hands and Solomon's Temple is rebuilt.
Rick Perlstein's article, from the Village Voice, quotes these Apostolic Christians heavily. The least unreasonable thing any of them say is this: "The liberal Jew is unable to believe the Arab when he says his goal is to Islamize the West. . . . But I believe it. And evangelical Christians believe it."
As for most unreasonable, well, that's a large category, but I'm voting for "'Two of the three nights in my apartment I have been attacked by a hair raising spirit of fear,' she writes, noting the sublet contained a Harry Potter book; 'at this time I am associating it with witchcraft.'"
Perstein has also quoted Bush as saying, in 1998, "I believe God wants me to run for President." His bio reads, upon casual perusal, as a lefty reporter working for The Village Voice. Personally, I'm, dare I say, praying he's the next Jason Blair or Stephen Glass...
On Something
Upon rereading, my earlier entry on Andrew Sullivan was a bit snarky—embarrassingly so, even. I stand by it, of course; but let's try for something a bit analytical to provide balance...My father spent several years in Israel, most of that time on something called a Kibbutz, a sort of communist commune Walden Pond, where Mike Doonesbury, Zonker and the rest spent their college years. There is a long standing tradition of Kibbutzim in Israel—the first were founded very early in the 20th century—but they were especially popular among Zionists from the late fifties to the early seventies. It was what you did if you were a Berkeley/Woodstock radical and Jewish. Some children's fathers tell them stories of walking ten miles to school, uphill both ways; my father told me stories of waking up at four in the morning on the Kibbutz. Kibbutzim are quite socialist: equality for women, and some even used to house children in communal children's houses.
I'd like to contrast the Kibbutz to the West Bank Settlements in general. Today's settlements are pretty much government-subsidized housing. Even the pro-Israel Jewish Virtual Library says:
A third group of Jews who are today considered "settlers," moved to the West Bank primarily for economic reasons; that is, the government provided financial incentives to live there, and the towns were close to their jobs.An interesting, if rather-stretching-it, analogy is to think of a public housing project being built in North Philly, say on Vine and 13th Street (currently the site of a homeless shelter, the U-haul locker where I kept my stuff when I was in Philadelphia, and, on weekend nights, teenage hustlers). But then, instead of moving low-class Philedelphians there, you moved in the more fervent members of Landover Baptist church, so they could be closer to the offices of their Vacation Bible Gun Camp.
Here is what I find depressing: in the late 1980's, while Ariel Sharon was busily building more West Bank settlements, the Kibbitzim were losing a lot of their unique communal principals and radical character. Eli Avarhami writing for kibbutz.org:
Briefly and in general, the changes, still in progress, are essentially a transition from a collectivist, cohesive society with a high level of social and ideological commitment to an individualistic one in which the bond between members and their mutual responsibility is growing steadily weaker. ... Perhaps the most significant change is the primary and central role of money in the consideration of every kibbutz community, institution and individual. The rational economic-pragmatic approach has taken hold in the evolving kibbutz. It changes the kibbutz from an intentional community, carrying out tasks for the common good with economic considerations in last place, to one that as a rule takes on tasks to the extent that they are economically profitable.I'll skip the digression on how well the "rational economic-pragmatic approach" has worked for us, pausing only to give that phrase a well-deserved Oxymoron Award©.
Israel was not like other countries. It did not have a war for independence or coalesce over years like Germany or Italy; Israel was created by a U.N. resolution, and what history it had was thousands of years old. And I would like to say that Israel was not created as a massive land-grab or as part of some sort of plot. Israel, like the Kibbutz, was an experiment. It was something that hadn't been tried before. In 1789, inventing by Constitional Convention was brand-new.
Look: Israel, like the Kibbutz, has had a crisis. It has lost it's spirit of radicalism, of experiment. With remarkable speed, it has become just another drunken schmoe in the pointless bar brawl we call "mid-east politics" (another Oxymoron Award©). So the Israeli experiment has failed far quicker than most. But let's not delude ourselves. No experiment succeeds. You put something together, try it out, and even if it works beyond your wildest dreams, it will still eventually breakdown and need to be rebuilt. I quoted Ben Franklin not long ago, out our own little experiment of a government: "[it] can only end is Despotism as other forms have done before it."
But remember something else. Our founding fathers read the histories of Rome and Athens—the histories of earlier experiments—and the people who had tried to learn from them; Locke, Hume, Hobbes...
When you create an experiment, you draw on what you have learned from the other failures. You try again, only better this time. And in the end, what we may be able to say about Israel and Palestine five hundred years from now is the same thing we'll be able to say about America five hundred years from now: It may have been a failure, but we learned from it.
If nothing else, there was the Kibbutz.
'Unhinged' is the Word I Was Looking For
Matthew Yglesias hooked me up with this one. It seems Stanley Kurtz has written that gay marriage in the Netherlands has, in fact, destabilized Dutch marriage, and cites in evidence a dramatic increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births there. Yglesias:Take a look at his own chart regarding out of wedlock births in the Netherlands and you'll see how unhinged Stanley Kurtz is. Obviously the purported decline of marriage in the Netherlands (and Scandinavia) was in no sense caused by the advent of legal recognition of gay unions.In fact, the chart seems to suggest that the real cause of the increase in same-sex marriages was the election of Ronald Reagan. Which makes sense, if you think about it.
W&I©
I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
Benjamin Franklin, 1789
after the Constitutional Convention,
on our brand-new Republic.
Benjamin Franklin here smacks of what Andy Sullivan calls "a text-book case in the virtues and merits of today's academic elite. They [in this case, blogger and history prof. Juan Cole] can marshall great scholarship and knowledge; but their ideological extremism taints it all." What he calls ideological extremism I would prefer to all terminal pessimism. Or, more accurately, Hunter Thompson's Disease. In any case, yes, I think the academic elite often come down hard on America, especially history professors; but it is for the same reason Franklin had his doubts about our constitution. To the layman, it is self-evident that America's founding document is a blueprint for a good government, a noble thing. To someone who has studied history, it is also self-evident that our country will eventually collapse anyway, because that is what happens to nations. Just as bad gives way to good, good gives way to bad, and it is possible we are witnessing the sunset.
Another point: we all have our biases, and they are almost always crippling. I do, Andrew Sullivan does, and Susan Sontag does. In fact, if you follow the link to Andy's blog, above, you have to scroll past a post on why Susan Sontag is a communist to get to the entry on academic elites. No, not kidding; and entry on how Susan Sontag is a communist. Now, I should point out here that Susan Sontag is a communist, but Sullivan, in an example of bias, writes:
Sontag is urging on America "convulsive" social change to produce "new versions of human nature." Lenin, anyone? No wonder she has found members of al Qaeda to be more moral than American soldiers.Well, perhaps all of America's enemies are pinkos, be they Isamo-Fascists or Susan Sontag or, well, actual pinkos. But I wonder: is Juan Cole is a communist?
A final point on Juan Cole: His blog has almost the same name as mine and the same design I used to use. This, I assure you all, is a complete coincidence and not a communist conspiracy.
Leaving Las Ve--er, Baghdad
Andy Sullivan blogs:The Arab establishment was not too fazed by the removal of Saddam. But they're terrified of Iraqis actually determining their own future. And they will do everything and anything they can to stop it. That means that the terror attacks will continue for years. They are now directed at the infidel; but they will soon be directed more squarely at any elected Baghdad government. Do we have the stomach to hang in there if a future Baghdad government asks us to? That's the question.(emphasis added)Sullivan is one of the most stringent supporters of the war I read regularly. Now even he seems to be admitting our retreat from Iraq is inevitable. After all, a democratic Iraqi government will ask us to leave: four out of five Iraqis want us out, and that's from a poll done before the prison abuse story broke. Therefore, pledging to stay in Iraq unless we're asked to leave is a pledge to leave Iraq.
The problem, it is alleged, is that a U.S. pullout will leave Iraq in even worse chaos than it is now. (Check out William Kristol's NPR interview.) This is true. This is very true, and so far no real solution seems to have penetrated. In The Nation's forum called "How to Get Out of Iraq," most of the various contributors merely reiterated why it was a really bad idea to invade in the first place.
Of course invading Iraq was a horrible mistake. But we are now in a Kobayashi Maru senario: no-win. We can't legitimately stay in Iraq, because they, y'kno, hate us and both sides seem to enjoy doing unspeakable things to each other. We can't leave because there is no one capable to preventing civil war and chaos, which are, y'kno, bad.
(A side note on the Kobayashi Maru: the only way to win is to cheat. John Brady Kiesling proposes just that in The Nation forum I mentioned. It's the only reasonable option I've heard. A horrible gamble, yes, but it's better than nothing.)
Perhaps there is no solution to our problem--dare I say, quagmire? But I rather think there is a solution to be found. We have never lacked ideas. The problem is with those who think that we can simply leave Iraq. Bush went in without knowing what to do after we overthrew Saddam. Let us not go out without knowing how to make a graceful exit.
Marriage Day
I've been sitting here for some time trying to figure out what I'm going to write today. I thought of simply listing the headlines of various papers. The New York Times is Gay Weddings Begin, which strikes me as appropriately simple. I could go long and thoughtful, but Andy Sullivan has done that better than I could, also in the NYTimes. (He's also written an excellent book. He says so himself.)Thing is, Andy is the only blogger I read who's talked about it in detail, and he helped kick off the marriage debate in a 1989 TNR piece. Everyone else is focused on other things. And the coverage in the papers is not very splashy. The Salt Lake Tribune's front page today had relegated the story to a below-the-fold small headline.
Well, I've been saying, along with others, that marriage will be a bit of an anti-climax. May 17th, 2004 is not going to be remembered quite as well as May 17th, 1954, the day Brown v. Board of Education was handed down.
So no big headlines; no long introspectives. But I do want to stop for a second and say, to a hundred Boston couples and to everyone in a country that just did something good, "congratulations."
More McCain
I put in my two cents on the idea of a Kerry-McCain ticket a while ago. Now even the NYTimes has gotten into the act: the McCain VP idea is officially mainstream speculation.McCain could not only help balance Kerry on defense and Iraq, but he could also help with the overly-serious tone Kerry often projects, as illustrated by this photo of Kerry sitting, awake and alert, next to McCain, who is thinking, "Wasn't it awesome when I hosted Saturday Night Live? Hell, yes."
Good News II
Perhaps it's not a momentary lapse. Either it's a very big lapse in my thinking, or Bush is in big, big trouble. In addition to the polling numbers I posted earlier, Thomas Friedman has come around:Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion ... I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong.(The bad news, I think, is that this shows how incapable so many politicians have become at thinking of anything in a nonpartisan fashion.)
But What If They Had Clothes On?
The NYTimes account of Paul Wolfowitz's recent senate testimony regarding the prison abuses (if you don't have a NYTimes account, you can also see it here:"Mr. Secretary, do you think crouching naked for 45 minutes is humane?" [Sen. Jack] Reed said."Not naked, absolutely not."
How I Live Now
Perhaps it's a momentary lapse, but I'm feeling optimistic about the election. I think Bush is gone. The Charleston Gazette ran a poll today showing West Virginians prefer Bush 47% to 43%, with 8% undecided. Which still looks at Bush for the winner, but historically, undecided voters swing mostly for the challenger, as Mark Mellman shows. Consider, too, that Bush pere had better approval ratings than his son does at this point in the election cycle. Right now, Bush is at about the level Gerald Ford was at.
More encouraging numbers come from Mark Gersh in Blueprint Magazine. He has some excellent electoral tallies. I'll hotlink them below. Ticking off his battleground states, Minnesota (too libertarian for Bush), Missouri (too much job loss), Arizona (libertarian, plus McCain), and Wisconsin (I have no idea about Wisconsin). Then there's Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio: the Kirk, Spock and McCoy of this election. Gersh has good analysis of these states (and surprisingly unbiased for a magazine published by the DNC, too).
My instincts, at this point, say Bush loses. And the world isn't completely hopeless, yet. (Maybe.)
Gersh's Charts
These charts are not my creation, and I belive the DNC owns the copyrights. You can see the entire article and more charts here. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win.
Hickville Dispach©
Hillcrest High School students Samantha Harman and Cody McCook, wearing "Queers kick Ash" tees. The Hickville Dispach© standard-bearer, the Salt Lake Tribune, reports:
Although Hillcrest's Gay-Straight Alliance is not directing the anti-tobacco campaign -- the nonprofit Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Utah is -- [Hillcrest Principal Linda] Sandstrom said the school club could be disbanded if some of its members insist on being "disruptive." About 25 teens demonstrated near the school Tuesday morning, donning signs that read "Homophobia is so gay," and "Queer is nothing to fear."Here's how this looks to the rest of the world:"This is school," Sandstrom said. "We're trying to help kids learn what's appropriate." ... As for McCook, the 17-year-old isn't buying his school's rationale, especially concerns about student safety. He says gay students are repeatedly harassed at Hillcrest -- earlier this year McCook's ceramics locker was vandalized and plastered with anti-gay epithets -- only to be told by administrators that the students "bring it on themselves."
Last Thursday, three Hillcrest High School students who wore the shirts were punished by Assistant Principal David Breen, who told them that the shirts were inappropriate and that he disapproved of the word "queer." Two gay male students were given three options: taking the shirts off, turning them inside out, or suspension. One turned his shirt inside out and was allowed to stay at school; the other refused and was suspended. A heterosexual girl who wore the same shirt was given an additional fourth option of being sent home for the day without suspension, which she accepted.Let's not forget the breeder males with swimsuit model tees (the Tribune calls them "women in swimsuits") or the girls with "I Love Mormon Boys" (who doesn't?) on their chests, er, shirts. The last words of the Tribune article demonstrate part of the reason I left Utah.On Friday, when more students wore the shirts to school and were similarly punished, Breen also threatened to bring the school's gay-straight alliance, which wasn't involved in distributing the t-shirts, to "a screeching halt."
Jennifer Brown said Hillcrest has a reputation for being radical, and she's had enough. "We have to put up with a lot of crap because people are always trying to make a statement," the 17-year-old said. "People shouldn't go around flaunting their sexuality no matter what it is."The day I've had enough of people being radical, I want someone to strangle me with Gore Vidal's embalmbed intestinal tract.
And I'm Just West of There, Too.
Virginia has just passed HB 751:A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable.This is a fucking veto-proof bill, too, passed with a super-majority. This is now a veto-proof bill, and we're stuck with it until either a)Virginia's legislature repeals it or b)"activist judges" decide to "write the law" and strike down this bill because it violates the "constitution."
This site is urging a boycott of Virginia. There's more info on this bill here and here
Preventing laws like this monstrosity is far more important to the Queer Community than getting marriage immediately. I've repeatedly pointed out the inevitability of marriage within twenty years, if we don't let Ann Coulter and assorted assholes fuck things up for us now. Well, it's a lot harder to repeal a bill than it is to prevent one from being passed in the first place; and this sort of bill is something that needs to be prevented.
The Chief of Shi--er, Staff
(And did Card actually say "streets of Laredo" unironically? That just works on so many levels...)Noam Scheiber on Andrew Card, who's a much better cheerleader than the guy he works for.
The John-John Ticket
Andrew Sullivan argues in The New Republic for a Kerry-McCain ticket:There is one obvious possible result of the Abu Ghraib fiasco, and it affects the presidential election profoundly: It has, I think, made the possibility of a Kerry-McCain ticket much more imaginable. In fact, in some ways, a Kerry-McCain pairing would be an almost painfully appropriate response to the recent loss of confidence both in the war and in the Kerry candidacy. Such a bipartisan ticket remains highly unlikely, but recent events make it less so.There is an excellent case for a Kerry-McCain ticket. There's recent support from Joe Biden and a Boston Globe article that was picked up by that old Hickville Dispach© reliable, The Salt Lake Tribune.
But there's an elephant in the room: McCain has repeatedly said he does not want to run. Kevin Drum speculates that McCain is quietly talking terms with Kerry. Well, here's my thoughts on this:
The only reason a Kerry/McCain ticket might be unbeatable is the fact that McCain will be publicly calling on reneging on his promise not to run. However, remember that this need not be a zero-sum game. Sen. McCain has a third option, other than simply joining a Kerry ticket or not joining it, and it's an option that solves a lot of problems for him: issuing a public ultimatum.
While McCain's party loyalty has always been the main obstacle to his joining the Kerry ticket, he has a more practical reason to remain a Republican s well. It makes him much more valuable to the Democrats. Remember what happened to Jim Jeffords after he formally left the Republican party? While Jeffords faded into obscurity, McCain has remained a major figure since his failed run against Bush four years ago. (This is not mere political machination: a politicians reputation defines what he or she can accomplish.) While the situation is not the same, it's similar, and simply saying "this national crisis demands that [McCain] put country ahead of party and serve" sounds, unfortunately, like an excuse.
That's why he should issue an ultimatum. "Mr. President, for the sake of the country, you must dismiss Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. If you do not, I will rethink my decision not to run for Vice President with John Kerry." This sets out a clear line, that, when crossed, will allow McCain to join the Kerry ticket. If Bush does fire Rumsfeld, McCain will be hated in the White House and by the GOP orthodox, but independents and moderates will respect his ability to get things done by taking on comers from both parties. Which is pretty much what we have now. If Bush refuses, yes, some conservatives will lambast him and Ann Coulter will no doubt call it the "John-John ticket." That's something we can't avoid. But this way, when McCain appeals to moderates with the message, "I had to join this ticket, my conscience demanded it," he'll mean it.
How's Your Journalistic Objectivity These Days?
New Republic editor Michelle Cottle dislikes Michael Moore:Yes, it is a free country, but it is not a perfect one. Because in a perfect country, an irresponsible, intellectually dishonest windbag like Moore would not be a rich, successful, Oscar-winning documentarian. He would instead be just another anonymous nutter, mumbling about fluoride in the water and penning anti-establishment tracts by candlelight in some backwoods Appalachian shack. And he would never, ever find another funder for his "art."Now, okay, maybe Michael Moore is not exactly a Mailer or Vidal (or, hell, even George Will) -- but to say Moore has less sense than Ann Coulter? I'll be dispatching Mr. Watkiss presently to get her to try reefer...
W&I©
"Until death do us part" sounds very romantic until, y'know, the death part.
Peter David
From the "Why didn't this guy
ever write for Buffy" dept.
Through the Looking-Glass
- I was there for a whole month!An Iraqi blogging, recounting a conversation he had with a friend stationed at Abu Gharib. Read. Now.
- In Abu-Gharib!? What were you doing there!?
W&I©
You see control can never be a means to any practical end ... It can never be a means to anything but more control.
William Burroughs
Naked Lunch
The Last Days
Chris Lehmann provides an insightful analysis of the success of apocalyptic Christian fiction accented by artistically fascinating pictures from art history, Beltway parties and The Spy Museum. Awesome.But The Working-Class Have Jobs Already
Brent Cunningham in Columbia Journalism Review's May/June issue. It's an excellent piece, analyzing the way journalists cover the poor. People report on problems - homeljoblessnessoblesness, drugs, so on - no one reports on people who are poor. In fact, according to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, most Americans place the number of poor people in the country at about a million. The real number? Thirty-five million.In a Newsweek article on the Chicago transformation plan from May 15, 2000, for instance, Mayor Richard M. Daley is quoted as saying, "What people want is education, jobs and job training." But in a survey that Kalven's organization did in 2000 that asked residents of the Stateway Gardens housing project what they most wanted for their neighborhood, three of the top five answers were related to better health care, but the other two were "more activities for children" and "more cultural activities," like theater and music. Says Kalven: "These people were asserting their dignity as human beings. Our entire discourse defines them as problems, and they quietly resist it, but no one is listening."
A Bit More Seriously Than They Deserve, Even
If Hassett really does want to claim that zero is a number strikingly similar to +140,000, and that +150,000 is a number strikingly similar to +320,000, he is free to do so. And I am free to take such claims with the seriousness that they deserve.Brad DeLong in a long, serious entry on why +140,000 is not, in fact, similar to zero.
W&I©
(The segment formerly known as Witty & Insightful©)I'm predicting nothing (except a massive gay-baiting campaign by Karl Rove in the summer). But I do think that Republicans who think they're a shoo-in because Kerry is such a bad candidate are deluding themselves.
Witty and Insightful©
This is a large part of the academic profession: to make up complex, subtle arguments that are childishly ridiculous but are enveloped in sufficient profundity that they take on a kind of plausibility.
Noam Chomsky
Notes from the Abyss
The report on the 800th MP brigade lists enough awful things to cover more than fifty pages. A few of the carnival freak-show highlights:The 800th MP (I/R) units did not receive Internment/Resettlement (I/R) and corrections specific training during their mobilization period. Corrections training is only on the METL of two MP (I/R) Confinement Battalions throughout the Army, one currently serving in Afghanistan, and elements of the other are at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. MP units supporting JTF-GTMO received ten days of training in detention facility operations, to include two days of unarmed self-defense, training in interpersonal communication skills, forced cell moves, and correctional officer safety.Read that first sentence again: The MP's in charge of prisoners did not recieve training in handling prisioners. Yuck.
Get's better. When they say the JTF-GTMO forces recived training in all that good stuff... JTF-GTMO are the Joint Task-Force Guantanimo Bay security guards. That's right, the Guantanimo Bay prisioners have better guards than prisioners in Iraq.
The units that remain are generally understrength, as Reserve Component units do not have an individual personnel replacement system to mitigate medical losses or the departure of individual Soldiers that have reached 24 months of Federal active duty in a five-year period.Well, the guards might be untrained, but at least there aren't too many of them.
We reviewed numerous photos and videos of actual detainee abuse taken by detention facility personnel, which are now in the custody and control of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command and the CJTF-7 prosecution team.My roomate asks: "What were them motherfuckers doing with the videotapes?"
The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) ... uncovered numerous photos and videos portraying in graphic detail detainee abuse by Military Police personnel on numerous occasions from October to December 2003.Some "potential susptects" have already rendered "full and complete confessions." Others are invoking their Article 31 rights: Article 31 of the Uniform Code is the military 5th Amendment.
Let's skip straight to the bottom of the ninth:
I [Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, Investigating Officer] MAKE THE FOLLOWING SPECIFIC FINDINGS OF FACT:5. (S) That between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320thMilitary Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF). The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements (ANNEX 26) and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.
6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
- a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
- b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
- c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
- d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
- e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
- f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
- g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
- h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
- i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
- j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
- k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
- l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
- m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
Bad. Really, Fucking Bad
Just a few of Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the abuse scandal. No, let me rephrase: 'abuse' is too kind a word. The military investigation's report is now online. Do not read it if you have a weak stomach.It renders one speechless ... I've had a hard time coming to grips with the appalling abuses ... the sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach.
Andrew Sullivan continues, on what we should do now:
"I have no doubt he feels" remorse and responsibility. Well, remorse - but responsibility? The NYTimes covers Bush's address on Arab TV:So far, the punishments meted out have not been severe enough; and the public apology not clear and definitive enough. It seems to me that some kind of reckoning has to be made by the president himself. No one below him can have the impact of a presidential statement of apology to the Iraqi and American people. Bush should give one. He should show true responsibility and remorse, which I have no doubt he feels. I can think of no better way than to go to Abu Ghraib itself, to witness the place where these abuses occurred and swear that the culprits will be punished and that it will not happen again.
Bush promises "people will be brought to justice." By using a vague and nonspecific word like 'people,' Bush distances America from these crimes: it was people who did this, not Americans. He, as President, certainly can't be held responsible for 'people.'The people of Iraq "must understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know," [Bush said.] ""There will be investigations, people will be brought to justice. ... We want to know the truth."
Bush said he retained confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and talked to him earlier Wednesday and told him to "find the truth and tell the Iraqi people and the world the truth. We have nothing to hide."
I think that's nitpicking. But it is getting repetitive, all the times Bush retains confidence in so-and-so. We may have nothing to hide, but that's no virtue if your simply making your sins public.
And Now for Something Completely Different
I'd like to take a break from my usual discussion in order to describe this morning.I walked out of the dorm into a mist: white lace draped over the hill, too thick to see across campus. The sun was a golden light buried in the west, casting a glow across the sparse trees outside the cafeteria. The tall trees over the fence were grey silhouette on white.
When you are on an airplane dropping through the cloud layer, looking out the windows, there is a white that defies distance. Foggy mornings here, this white hangs over the hill, and the campus is nothing but a small wing in the corner of your window view. The ground is solid below your feet, but a small part of you in some corner knows that you are outside the airplane.
The mist is cold; but infinite
Compare & Contrast
I picked up the May 10th issue of The Nation. (Hey, that makes it sound like I can go out and pick up a copy of a magazine whenever I want instead of being stuck on this hill and having to read the online version in the computer lab. Sweet.) It struck me that as much as progressives complain about FOXNews and talk radio's fact-free right-wing pseudo-journalism, the left is not exactly free from it's own jingoism. Let's take two articles as an example of the difference between good journalism and bad. The first is Neocon Man by Eyal Press. The second, The National Insecurity State by Stephen Holmes.
Neither article is straight journalism. Neocon Man is a profile, Insecurity State is a book review. The difference in format illustrates the difference in quality: Neocon uses it's unusual format to make points journalists can't usually make; Insecurity reduces it's form to a MeetUp talking points memo.
The fact that it is a book review does not justify Insecurity's flaws; Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and others have made book reviews sing. I cringe when book reviewers feel their only responsibility is to summarize. Holmes can certainly summarize:
Mann [the author of Rise of the Vulcans] refers to Wolfowitz as "the leading conservative foreign policy thinker of his generation." But with the country reeling [after 9/11], his immediate reflex was to strike a Churchillian pose, revealing his psychological, or perhaps ideological, fixations. As Richard Clarke reveals in his scathing memoir, Against All Enemies, Wolfowitz showed himself wholly unable to bring a new threat into focus.
This nod to Clarke is the only time Holmes mentions any book or source other than the one being reviewed.< br> Holmes uses the words "Mann refers" repeatedly, often substituting "Mann shows." He never bothers to tell us if Mann is right or wrong about anything. He doesn't tell us if Mann's book is important or unimportant, either. The book simply is, and Holmes has nothing more to do than explain calmly that "the principal architects of the current calamity, in Mann's account [another synonym, for variety], are Cheney and Rumsfeld, with Wolfowitz playing a strong supporting role." Then he calmly spends most of the remainder of the article talking about Wolfowitz.
Holmes does not say that the book talks a great deal about Wolfowitz, but considering his summarization fixation I think it is a fair assumption. It is always possible of course that Holmes merely has an unrequited crush on the Undersecretary of Defense. But we cannot tell because it is not Holmes job to explain why the parts of the book he summarizes are the important parts. Nor is it his job to explain why Mann may have spent so much time talking about Wolfowitz. A good book review puts the book in context; with Holmes, we get the feeling that we are sacrificing so much of the bulk of the book, such as why Wolfowitz is so important, without gaining any perspective in return. This is especially jarring in a review that talks so much about the big picture:
[T]he basic reality cannot be hidden. A tiny group of individuals, with eccentric ideas and reflexes, has recklessly compounded the country's security nightmare, launching a costly and destabilizing military adventure on publicly unexamined assumptions. ... We knew it already, of course, but it is nevertheless unnerving to read that fateful decisions, perhaps affecting the course of world history, are profoundly influenced by palace intrigue and deadline-driven haste in selecting party loyalists to occupy public offices.
Holmes enjoys explaining the big picture to us, but it's a pixelized image: without the details of Mann's book, the edges are all fuzzy.
If Holmes leaves us short of details, Press provides enough minutiae to drown a small farm animal. He begins by telling us that Mr. Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. And, knowing that we have no idea who Daniel Pipes is, explains:
The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station for an interview. Over the next twelve months, Pipes would appear on 110 television and 450 radio shows. His op-eds graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times The New York Post signed him up as a columnist.
Eyal Press' profile is in-depth the way the television advertisements want you to think of it: he provides a plethora of facts–often trivial–with just a little editorial bias, and all of that clearly labeled. Pipes, it seems, was a student at Harvard in the late sixties. The height of the Vietnam War was a difficult time to be a budding conservative college student, but Pipes wasn't much of an outcast. "He was a bright guy ... We got along real well. I don't recall him being political at all." That's one of his old professors, Richard Bulliet, now at Columbia. Press has done some heavy digging.
Pipes didn't turn out to be as apolitical as Professor Bulliet thought. In 1982 he became part of the policy planning staff at the State Department, quite possibly through his father, Richard Pipes, who ran the Soviet Affairs Desk in Reagan's NSC. Regardless, he also published a second book while in Washington, on the same subject as his first: Islamic fundamentalism.
After leaving State, Pipes spent the late '80s and most of the '90s as a wonk, writing essays for The National Interest and Commentary. He became director of the think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute and later founded The Middle East Forum, a think tank dedicated to "promoting American interests" in the region.
Ah, but I just complained about summary in reviews. Context, then:
Pipe's biggest impact has not come from analyzing foreign affairs. ... Two years ago Pipes launched Campus Watch, an organization whose stated purpose is to expose the ... political bias of the field of Middle Eastern studies. The group's first act was to post McCarthy-style "dossiers" on the Internet singling out eight professors critical of American ... policies. When more than a hundred scholars contacted Campus Watch to request that they be added to the list in a gesture of solidarity, Pipes obliged, labeling them "apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam."
"McCarthy-style dossiers"? There's that clearly labeled editorial content. But Press does something too many progressive wonks don't: he has listened to what Pipes has to say. This man would be easy to dismiss. In addition to McCarthy-style lists of professors, he has written about "American academics [who] so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes" and, in the late 90's, wrote "West European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."
This apparently casual racism would make it easy to dismiss Pipes. But Press has done something difficult, especially for those of use understandably sick of Bill O'Rilley. He has seriously considered Pipe's arguments:
Shortly before pipes launched Campus Watch, Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand appeared. The academic establishment, argued Kramer in his more scholarly version of the argument Pipes would soon popularize, had been asleep throughout the 1980s and '90s, producing not a single "serious" study on Osama bin Laden while lavishing attention on so-called Muslim moderates.
I consider the Bruce Willis/Denzel Washington movie The Siege to be a serious study. But never mind about that.
There is some truth to [Pipes accusations]. Books like John Esposito's The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, published in 1992, advanced the then-fashionable view that the danger of Islamic terrorism was overblown. "I think a lot of us were slow to appreciate the real depth of radicalism on the Islamic fringe," acknowledges William Quandt, a professor at the University of Virginia and former fellow at the Brookings Institution.
I have to admire Quandt's ability to question his own conclusions: rational thinking requires self-examination, and self-examination requires knowing that there are things we don't know. In other words, rational people admit they might be wrong. And (now it's time for that snappy last line, to show how witty I am) if we can't apply that standard to ourselves, how can we ask Bill O'Riley to live by it?
Wedding Bells
That's Jeffrey Rosen, on why the Mass. marriages will be an anti-climax. The conventional (i.e. anti-radical) liberal argument on marriage goes something like this: gay marriage is inevitable, if we take things step by step. Start by lobbying legislatures on behalf of civil unions, like the ones in Vermont or the similar domestic partnership laws in California. That will take a while, and in the meantime people will see that the gay marriages in Canada, Holland and Boston haven't brought about Armageddon. At that point we'll be able to get marriage is most of the states, and eventually the Supreme Court will knock the remaining flyover states into line.On May 17, by order of the state supreme court, the first same-sex couples in the United States will be legally married in Massachusetts.
Opponents of gay marriage fear that, after May 17, same-sex couples will flock to Massachusetts from other states, get married, and return to their home states demanding recognition of their new marriages. These fears are unfounded, thanks to a provision of the Massachusetts marriage law that refuses to recognize marriages celebrated in Massachusetts if they take place between parties domiciled in a state that does not recognize the marriage as valid. ... [A] well-settled body of law says that states don't have to recognize the marriages of their own residents who have traveled to another state to get married for the purpose of circumventing a strongly held public policy in their home state.
Rosen notes that "Southern states were even more fervent in their opposition to miscegenation than opponents of gay marriage are today." He then discusses how the fall of anti-miscegenation laws played out and contends that we can expect a similar outcome in the gay marriage debate:
I have niggling doubts. Anti-miscegenation laws were a southern phenomena, and opposition to interracial marriage was virtually unheard of in the north. It was easy to let states work it out on their own. But the gay marriage debate is not regional. There is a sizeable gay population here in Charleston, or in Salt Lake; there are fundamentalist Baptist congregations New York and L.A. that purchased blocks of free Passion tickets to hand out to potential conflicts. The major division on the marriage issue is not geographic, but generational: Datalounge runs the 18-39 demographic is in favor of gay marriage 62% to 33% with the 65+ fogies against marriage 69% to 21%.Unless they are forced by courts to recognize gay marriage before the public is ready, state legislatures may move through the same progression, recognizing first civil unions and eventually gay marriage. For the moment, the best thing for judges to do is the thing they're most likely to do, which is very little.
This says to me: progressives would be making a mistake to lobby legislatures to pass civil union legislation. The priority needs to be preventing legislatures from doing anything to hamstring the inevitable future public support for gay marriage. Time is on our side, but we have to hold off the current opponents long enough for the kids being raised on Queer Eye to hit voting age. That means playing a defensive game.