View a two minute video of Lakoff taking apart the extremely loaded phrase "cut and run", among other things. He’s promoting his 2006 book, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea.
"America is at a cusp, at a turning point. The question is: whose concept of freedom is going to prevail?"
I don’t know what it was like at Andover, but in my public school education I took a number of tests and quizzes. Never was it possible to earn a passing grade without getting the right answer on most of the questions.
That was particularly true if you hadn’t gotten any answer for more than half of the questions, say 10 out of 18.
That was true even if a very generous teacher gave partial credit on some of the ones you did answer. That was true even if, for three of the 18, the teacher essentially gave you credit for writing your name, the date and the name of the class at the top of the page.
And, while I did once have a math teacher who wryly described his tests as “opportunities,” as in “an opportunity to improve your grade”, I don’t think even he would have been so mordant as to describe a big red “F” at the top of a graded exam as “a cause for optimism.”
Luckily for Mr. Bush, the press grades easier than the most generous teacher. A quick sampling of wire service and TV coverage of his report on Iraq suggests that it was a “mixed” report. (Little Jimmy, remember that word for next time: that paper with the red marks all over it, the one with the big “F” on it, it’s not a failure, it’s “mixed.”)
But as Fred Kaplan notes at Slate, the administration definition of what counts as “satisfactory” is ridiculous. Not even the most desperate schoolboy would try to claim credit as they do. Unless, as with Mr. Bush, the alternative was a big fat zero.
This wasn’t a “mixed” report. This was documented, outrageous failure.
A parent confronted with a test result like this would certainly decide that something had to change. Despite little Georgie’s protestations that he’s got it under control, a grade like this can’t be acceptable. It’s time to stop letting Georgie determine his own study policy. Adults must take charge.
The House has taken the first step.
As you may know — unless you rely on the corporate media for your news, of course — yesterday the U.S. Senate unanimously declared that Iran was committing acts of war against the United States: a 97-0 vote to give George W. Bush a clear and unmistakable casus belli for attacking Iran whenever Dick Cheney tells him to.
* Persia must be destroyed. A take-off on Carthago delenda est, Carthage must be destroyed.
Senator Barbara Boxer said “Impeachment should be on the table” on the Ed Shultz Show, 7/11/07.
I just received an email/press release from Boxer, mostly about the Defense Authorization bill, now before Congress:
In the opening of an unprecedented, two-week debate on the Iraq war, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today spoke out on the Senate floor and challenged those who have made statements against the war to follow it up by voting for real, binding measures to bring our troops home.
(And here I must gloat a bit, I’m not only a Boxer constituent, but I also live in Henry Waxman’s district. I’ve lived in other parts of the country where I mostly cursed or rolled my eyes at the people who represented me, and so I’m extremely aware of how fortunate I am to have people like Boxer and Waxman working for me. I took the advice of the great conservative hero, President Ronald Reagan, who advocated, "vote with your feet" and I have never regretted it).
Highlights of Boxer’s speech are here. No mention of impeachment.
Another powerful woman, Cindy Sheehan is on her Summer of Love ’07: Journey for Humanity, marching from Crawford TX to New York City, by way of John Conyer’s office in the House of Representatives. She’s scheduled to reach Conyer’s office on July 23, to encourage him to take the lead on impeachment.
I have no idea whether Sheehan will be able to channel and focus the groundswell of anger in this country for impeachment, or whether this will be yet another ineffective replay of 1960s demonstration tactics. A majority of the public supports impeachment of Cheney (at least), and so the energy is there, it’s just a matter of whether Sheehan (and others) can acquire and demonstrate the skill to focus it. If you’ll forgive the very crude analogy, it’s a bit like watching neanderthals about to figure out how to use fire, for the first time, wondering if this will be the time that they get it, if they ever do.
As maha wrote in Protesting 102, the question is whether they’re "still caught up in the romance of being Outcasts and Rebels, and Speaking Truth to Power, and are not serious about taking and using power to effect change". A further question for Sheehan is whether she can move beyond her own personal loss, and identify more broadly with the international (and intentional) tragedy that is the Bush Administration.
I happened to catch Fox "News" report on Cindy Sheehan’s challenge to Nancy Pelosi, where Sheehan promised to run against Speaker Pelosi if Pelosi did not get behind impeachment, and pronto. Setting aside whether this is a good idea or not, what was striking about the report was how Fox portrayed the two women. They showed a still photo of Sheehan that looked as if she hadn’t slept in days – she looked terrible, every bit the fringe wacko strawman that the right relishes standing up and knocking down. By contrast, Pelosi looked radiant, while the "newscaster" helpfully explained that Pelosi enjoys 80 % approval in her district – well, she probably did before her refusal to consider impeachment.
This parallels the relentless focus by the conservative media on John Edwards’ hair earlier this summer. They spent weeks distracting us with this trivia instead of reporting on the substance of Edwards’ proposals. To my knowledge, no other Democratic candidate got this kind of treatment from the right. And let’s not forget the other sideshows of Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith. One gets the sense that they must actually hold auditions for these distractions, deliberately seeking them out.
The powers behind the right wing media know they’re likely to lose this time around, and so they are doing everything they can to deep-six anyone on the left who has the potential to rock the boat. Winnowing the field. Our field.
WASHINGTON (AP) – A new threat assessment from U.S. counterterrorism analysts says that al-Qaida has used its safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border to restore its operating capabilities to a level unseen since the months before Sept. 11, 2001.
A counterterrorism official familiar with a five-page summary of the document – titled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West” – called it a stark appraisal. The analysis will be part of a broader meeting at the White House on Thursday about an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate.
Down in the Engineering Sub-Basement at the White House, a voice barks from an intercom: “We need more power!” A man with a Scottish accent yells back: “Cap’n! The reality-distortion crystals are almost fused after that speech in Cleveland. I canna give ya no more power or the spin engines will IMPLODE!”
“Dammit, Scott! I need maximum spin, and I need it NOW.”
At his news conference Thursday, President Bush acknowledged the report’s existence and al-Qaida’s continuing threat to the United States. He said, however, that the report refers only to al-Qaida’s strength in 2001, not prior to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The group was at its strongest throughout most of that year, with well-established training camps in Afghanistan, recruitment networks and command structures.
Bush used the new threat assessment to show his administration’s policies are the right course.
“Because of the actions we’ve taken, al-Qaida is weaker today than they would have been,” he said. “They are still a threat. They are still dangerous. And that is why it is important that we succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq and anywhere else we find them.”
Yes, I suppose that in some sense, colossal failure does indicate why it is important to succeed. But as I recall, back in September of 2001, just about everyone in the civilized world agreed that success in dealing with those who had attacked us was a good thing. Even many who loathed you, Mr. Bush, and thought you’d stolen your office, agreed that we as a nation should succeed in defeating that threat, and supported you toward that goal.
So why is it, six years later, that what you have to show is a reiteration that they are dangerous?
Why is it, almost six years to the day after your infamously ignored daily briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US”, you are being handed a document entitled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West”?
It seems to me there was a tall, horsey-faced guy running around a few years ago, complaining about a place called Tora Bora, and shifting focus onto Iraq. Huh. How about that?
We’ve now spent somewhere around a trillion dollars on our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s a one followed by twelve zeroes. It’s a room full of a million boxes, and when you open each box, inside there is a million dollars!
And yet, six years and a trillion dollars later, the President himself will admit that “They are still a threat. They are still dangerous.” Does he say this in his resignation speech, shamefully acknowledging his failure, before being allowed to honorably retire behind closed doors with a revolver?
No! He does it in irrational defense of his own policies, and in the same breath asserts the importance of success!
Mr. Bush, we all agree about the need for success. That’s what you’re being paid to deliver, and why you were re-hired in 2004. Success against al Qaeda.
Where is it?
Meet Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation:
Drew Westen, a genial 48-year-old psychologist and brain researcher, was talking to a rapt liberal audience about the role of emotion in politics, how to talk back aggressively to Republicans, and why going negative is not to be feared.
It was Day 2 of the progressive Take Back America confab, and those who had crowded into a meeting room of the Washington Hilton were about to discover why Westen, a psychology professor at Atlanta’s Emory University and former associate professor at Harvard Medical School, had quietly become the great rumpled hope of Democrats who believe their candidates should have won the last two presidential elections.
Example: When President Bush recently refused to allow Karl Rove to testify under oath about his role in the sacking of federal prosecutors, Westen said, Democrats blundered. Instead of insisting Rove testify under oath, they simply should have said (over and over), "Mr. Bush, just what is it about ‘So help me God’ that you find so offensive?"
Read the whole article here. The problem Westen’s work addresses is well known: The Rs have learned how to effectively communicate to the gut, and run rings around the Ds who talk to the brain (recall the Bush-Kerry debates). Westen is the guy who looks like he could change this.
I usually try to steer way clear of self-fulfilling prophecies, and so this is a subject that I’m hesitant to add any energy to, but it’s also important to be clear about it. Here’s a quiz:
Which presidential candidate said the following, on June 20:
The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities to make the hard political decisions necessary to give the people of Iraq a better future. So the American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions which are important for their own people.
Here’s a clue. It was a woman, and a Democrat. As William Blum writes in the Atlantic Free Press (loads slowly, be patient):
Right, it was the woman who wants to be president because … because she wants to be president … because she thinks it would be nice to be president … no other reason, no burning cause, no heartfelt desire for basic change in American society or to make a better world … she just thinks it would be nice, even great, to be president. And keep the American Empire in business, its routine generating of horror and misery being no problem; she wouldn’t want to be known as the president that hastened the decline of the empire.
And she spoke the above words at the "Take Back America" conference; she was speaking to liberals, committed liberal Democrats. She didn’t have to cater to them with any flag-waving pro-war rhetoric; they wanted to hear anti-war rhetoric (and she of course gave them a bit of that as well out of the other side of her mouth), so we can assume that this is how she really feels, if indeed the woman feels anything.
There’s more in Blum’s article about how conservatives are seeing Hillary as their best chance to get what they want:
Now we hear from America’s venerable conservative magazine, William Buckley’s "National Review", an editorial by Bruce Bartlett, policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan; treasury official under President George H.W. Bush; a fellow at two of the leading conservative think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute; you get the picture. Bartlett tells his readers that it’s almost certain that the Democrats will win the White House in 2008. So what to do? Support the most conservative Democrat. He writes: "To right-wingers willing to look beneath what probably sounds to them like the same identical views of the Democratic candidates, it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most conservative."
We also hear from America’s premier magazine for the corporate wealthy, "Fortune", whose recent cover features a picture of Clinton and the headline: "Business Loves Hillary".
Most of the liberal netroots doesn’t ♥ Hillary, and I hope I haven’t ruined your day. I want to talk a bit about Empire, which Blum briefly alluded to, above. It’s a vast subject, and one that the DC establishment struggles with, especially back when Bush and the neocons were in ascendance, although this discussion hasn’t really filtered down to the average American.
But oh, how we pay for it. We can’t have decent health care in this country, but we must have our stealth aircraft, our worldwide network of bases, and a permanent standing military. Military hardware is one of the few things our industries still make well, and service in the military has become an increasingly compelling venue for young people to advance themselves. Our media promotes fear, which discourages us from seeing any other choices in how we operate on this planet. It’s really the subject for another Michael Moore movie all by itself. Most of his films touch this theme on the way to making their main point. Chalmers Johnson has probably done the most work in popularizing the subject, and Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us? is a good introduction to his ideas.
It’s not that America hasn’t used its might as a benevolent force in the world, it has. These last six years however, have brought out the shadow side of our country, the monumentally bad consequences when its might is misused when placed in selfish and thuggish hands.
Empire has enormous costs, both in terms of dollars, and in terms of fidelity to the original principles of this country as laid out in the Constitution. We see this everyday in our country. It’s possible that a Hillary Clinton presidency will use our might for good in the world, but it’s also unlikely that she has any intention of scaling things back. As Mel Brooks famously stated, “It’s good to be King”. This is part of the reason why conservatives are warming to her.
Update: Pentagon Planet: How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies will amaze you with the vastness of our Empire:
…to begin to grasp the Pentagon’s global immensity, it helps to look, again, at its land holdings — all 120,191 square kilometers which are almost exactly the size of North Korea (120,538 square kilometers)…
I was watching Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) last night on the news say that our country’s intense focus on the Middle East has caused us to neglect other areas of the world. Webb had Southeast Asia in mind, and noted that this is a very important region to us economically. Of course, Webb is right, but I would argue that our Mesopotamian myopia has had some other interesting side effects, beyond intensifying the glaring hatreds and competition between the jihadists of all sides – theirs and our own.
If you look closely, some voices of reason are starting to make themselves more widely known. They’re having the effect of teaching the West something about this mysterious, complex, and misunderstood area, and some things about ourselves. Sara Robinson over at Orcinus recently posted Why People Hate America?, which was triggered by this recent Pew poll, and was largely based on the writings of Ziauddin Sardar, who is…
…an orthodox British Muslim of Pakistani parentage…one of the UK’s more visible public intellectuals. In recent years, Sardar has made a career out of explaining the Muslim world to the Brits, mediating and translating between the Western and Near Eastern cultures on the pages of the Observer and The New Statesman and frequently on BBC news shows as well. (It’s interesing that nowhere in the US media do we have a similarly trusted Muslim media figure who can help us bridge the most important cultural chasm of our times. Wonder why that is?) A iconoclastic outsider, Sardar is unsparing in his critiques of both cultures, issuing insights, warnings, and alternatives on either side that have made him indispensable to a European audience that increasingly sees itself caught in the middle.
I encourage you to read her whole post (as well as the comments). We have had the invaluable Juan Cole for some time now, and it’s good that others are gaining a wider audience, even if this is at times, only through blog writings such as Sara’s.
In a doctor’s office on Monday, I came across an aging issue of Time Magazine, which featured Queen Rania of Jordan. In typical, brief, upbeat, and to the point Time Magazine style, the Queen was asked Ten Questions, and I found some of her answers to be freshing and hopeful:
Q: Do you think that women will ever truly have equal rights in the Middle East?
A: Absolutely, I believe they will. I think that mind-sets are changing in the Middle East. Poll after poll is showing that men see the value of greater female participation and empowerment. We still have a long way to go, but Islam should not be used as a scapegoat. The obstacles that face women today are more cultural. It’s not about the religion.
Q: Will the Arab world ever be free of the kind of mindless violence occurring in Iraq?
A: The Middle East is not just about Iraq. The Middle East has both challenges and opportunities. Many countries in our region are experiencing a massive economic boom. It’s a very youthful region, and the young by nature are hopeful, optimistic and innovative. The world shouldn’t overlook our successes and achievements.
Q: What is the biggest negative about the U.S. invasion of Iraq?
A: The civilian suffering. This conflict has spared no one. It’s incredibly sad to see such a proud and great country broken.
Q: What’s the solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
A: First, start with will on both sides–not just the political kind but the kind that comes from the conscience and the heart. To achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East takes guts, not guns.
I was so impressed with these answers, but of course it’s difficult to know how widely held they are, and how much influence people like the Queen have in this region. Her outspokenness and quiet wisdom is emblematic of the rise of the feminine, worldwide, over the last century or so. Our country is part of this, beginning with the suffragettes earlier in this century, followed by the energizing of the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s, and culminating recently in the election of women to high office, such as Nancy Pelosi, and, in the future, possibly our first female president in 2008. I hope to write more about this shortly, and I hope I can do it justice.
(Maha has graciously also offered me a set of keys to her place while she’s away. It looks like it’ll be a party! So before I go to digest the latest in her Wisdom of Doubt series, below, and the tech support leave town, here’s my post, cross-posted from my regular playpen, Ratiocination. –Paul, aka biggerbox)
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The National Weather Service has issued an Excessive Heat Warning for my home city today. But in reading the news, I see there should also be a warning about excessive heat in Washington, DC. Specifically, at the Department of Justice, in the area around the Attorney General’s pants. They are, once again, quite visibly, on fire.
From the Washington Post:
As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,” Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.
Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.
Spinmeisters at the DOJ lept into action, assuring us that perhaps Mr. Gonzales had not read the notification that his pants were flammable, that everybody’s wearing flaming pants these days, and besides, they aren’t really large flames.
Justice officials said they could not immediately determine whether Gonzales read any of the FBI reports in 2005 and 2006 because the officials who processed them were not available yesterday. But department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that when Gonzales testified, he was speaking “in the context” of reports by the department’s inspector general before this year that found no misconduct or specific civil liberties abuses related to the Patriot Act.
“The statements from the attorney general are consistent with statements from other officials at the FBI and the department,” Roehrkasse said. He added that many of the violations the FBI disclosed were not legal violations and instead involved procedural safeguards or even typographical errors.
Oh, typographical errors? Well then, nothing to be concerned about, eh, Mr. Buttle?
Gonzales received another report of an NSL-related violation a few weeks later. “A national security letter . . . contained an incorrect phone number” that resulted in agents collecting phone information that “belonged to a different U.S. person” than the suspect under investigation, stated a letter copied to the attorney general on May 6, 2005.
At least two other reports of NSL-related violations were sent to Gonzales, according to the new documents. In letters copied to him on Dec. 11, 2006, and Feb. 26, 2007, the FBI reported to the oversight board that agents had requested and obtained phone data on the wrong people.
Now, I realize that I have a reputation for being a mite tetchy about the rights my ancestors fought the British for, but if I were to find out that the FBI had been snooping around my phone records, without a judge’s permission, for no reason other than a ‘typographical error’, I’d be pretty ticked off. It seems like the very definition of an unreasonable search.
You know, the kind of unreasonable search that the Fourth Amendment says I am to be “secure from”, by a right that “shall not be violated”. I don’t know where Mr. Gonzales starts his enumeration of civil liberties, but me, I think the Bill of Rights is a good place to begin.
Now, odds are that it wasn’t my phone records the Feds were snooping through. Though I don’t know. Somebody, or rather several somebodies, had FBI agents prying into their lives for no good reason. It might have been me. It might have been you. That’s the point. We are not ‘secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.’ The safeguards that have been in place to ensure that right shall not be violated have been removed.
In March of this year, the FBI inspector general released a report detailing many abuses. As TPMmuckraker reminds us, at the time, Attorney General Gonzales was quoted as being “incensed”, and order FBI director Robert Mueller to clean it up.
But, as today’s news shows, he’d been receiving reports of such abuses and violations for years by then. And yet, like Louis in Casablanca, he seemed shocked -shocked!- by the news in March.
How could it be that the Attorney General of the United States would tell Congress what he did, and how could he have been surprised by news in the spring of this year that had been being reported to him for years? It seems impossible.
Until one remembers that the legal brains of the Bush administration went to the Lewis Carroll School of Law:
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
For a dose of satire, Bush’s First Video Blog is George W. Bush unplugged, by a decent Dubya impersonator, James Adomian. He’s got the sneering contempt down pat:
“I can get away with whatever I want…. All you criticizers: F*ck you – F*ck you hard.”
Channeling his own id in reaction to Bush, is another wonderful, underappreciated, leftie blogger, Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque. A recent posting:
Death everywhere, death every day, nothing but death and the stench of death and the never-ending agony of the aftermath of death. This is the true and only meaningful context of all the punditry and political posturing around the “issue” of Iraq. While the White House maneuvers to “buy time” for the president and provide “political cover” for continuing the war – and the Democrats make plans to float some “proposals” on “beginning to redeploy some forces” – the cry of an Iraqi grandfather whose entire family was murdered in the bombing at Amerli rips like a knife to the heart of the matter:
“We were wiped out mercilessly, and we blame the Americans, the Iraqi government, the criminals and all the politicians who brought us catastrophe and destruction. They have destroyed everything with their sectarianism and politics.”
These were the words of Zainulabideen Rustam Abdullah, who “lost his wife, three daughters, his grandson and his daughter-in-law” in last Saturday’s attack, the Washington Post reports. I have never read anywhere a more succinct and accurate portrayal of the hell-hole that George W. Bush has created in Iraq with his unprovoked invasion and destruction of that country…
These i-gleanings were brought to you, for your consideration, by moonbat, who will be guest blogging for a few days, by the very gracious i-invitation of your blog hostess, maha.