The Vegetable Speaks

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David Brooks says that liberal blogs maintain a “Stalinist line of discipline.” Think Progress has the transcript from today’s Chris Matthews Show — think Dumb and Dumber:

DAVID BROOKS: Whoever the Democratic candidate, that is the weakness of the Democratic party, they’ve got the blogs and the netroots who are semi-nuts and they insist on a Stalinist line of discipline.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I love your objectivity.

DAVID BROOKS: It’s objectively true. I did a psychoanalytic test.

I read that, and it occurred to me that it’s been awhile since I’ve posted Brooks’s picture. So there ’tis.

The truth is, it’s the Right that marches in Stalinist discipline. Hell, the Right is more like the Borg Collective than a political movement. See (via Avedon) “The Democrats’ Tiny Megaphone” by Robert Parry:

Wealthy progressives and liberal foundations can match up almost dollar for dollar with conservative funders. But the American Left has adopted largely a laissez-faire attitude toward media infrastructure, while the Right has applied almost socialistic values to sustain even unprofitable media ventures.

Indeed, the Right’s subsidizing of media may be the most under-reported money-in-politics story in modern American history. Many good-government organizations track the millions of dollars contributed to candidates, but much less attention is paid to the billions of unregulated dollars poured into media.

This imbalanced attention continues even though the conservative media is arguably the most important weapon in the Republican arsenal.

And all the while they do this they scream that the “media” is infested with “liberal bias.” Strangely, the only news program this liberal can stand to sit through any more is Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” on MSNBC. The rest of them on all channels are mostly far-Right propaganda. I swear, if MSNBC ever messes with Olbermann I will call up the Mighty Maha Army (all six of us) and march on Rockefeller Plaza.

Back to Parry:

Political “propaganda themes” – often coordinated with GOP leaders – are distributed instantaneously across the country, reaching into both rural and urban America with a repetition that gives these messages a corroborative ring of truth.

The messages echo from talk radio to cable news to conservative columnists who appear in the mostly pro-Republican local newspapers. The themes then are reinforced in magazine articles and in books that dominate the shelves of many American bookstores.

Over the past two decades, Republicans have exploited this media capability with great deftness in consolidating power across large swaths of the country, especially where there is little media diversity (i.e. the Red States).

And the Right Blogosphere is an integral part of the Republican Noise Machine.

In essence, the right-wing media – a vertically integrated machine reaching from books, magazines and newspapers to radio, television and the Internet – has the power to make almost any ludicrous notion seem real and threatening to millions of Americans.

If Karl Rove wants people to believe John Kerry faked his war injuries, in spite of documentation and eyewitness accounts to the contrary, all he has to do is whistle. The Machine will be sure that’s the story the public hears, nonsense or not. If Karl wants to tweak the paranoia of the Christian Right, he yanks the chains and, suddenly, the Machine is spewing out nonsense about a war on Christmas. Smooth as butter. In comparison, the Left can barely coordinate its socks.

Along these same lines: If you haven’t already, be sure to read Peter Daou’s “THE TRIANGLE: Matthews, Moore, Murtha, and the Media,” “THE (Broken) TRIANGLE: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness” and “Scandal Fatigue, Catnip, and the ‘Angry’ Left.”

Busted Bomb Busters

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Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times reports that there’s a device called the Joint IED Neutralizer (JINs for short) that in tests has destroyed 90 percent of roadside bombs in its path. Roadside bombs account for more than half of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq. Yet none of the JINs have been shipped to Iraq.

JINs are remote-controlled devices that blow up bombs with a directed electrical charge. No one expects the JINs to eliminate all deaths from roadside bombs, but troops in the field seem to think that the possibility of eliminating some deaths should make deployment of the JINs a priority. They’re cheap beasts by military standards — $200,000 each — and they can withstand AK-47 fire and detonate bombs from a distance. Each device ought to be usable multiple times. The company that makes them says they could crank out 50 per months if they got the go-ahead. Only about a dozen have been produced so far.

The excuse is that deployment of these thingies to Iraq has been snagged in Pentagon bureaucracy for months. Others in the Pentagon say the device requires further testing. However, recently the Marines decided they’d test the things in the field, thank you, and are preparing to ship some JINs to Al Anbar province in Iraq.

I am weary of the “bureaucracy” excuse. Bureaucracies are as good as their managers. Yes, low-priority projects can linger in someone’s in-box, but if the top suits (or brass, as it were) make it well known they want some particular thing to move, and direct mid-level managers to expedite the process, then I bet movement there will be. But when the top guys can’t or won’t set clear priorities because they have their heads up their butts and don’t know how to work with the bureaucracy beneath them, that’s when items get bogged down.

Update: While at the Los Angeles Times, don’t miss “For One Marine, Torture Comes Home.”

Mondo Snow

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Here in the greater New York City metro area we really did get slammed with some major snow. This is a guess, as I haven’t gone outside, but from the kitchen window it looks like 18 inches, give or take.

We’ve been having an extraordinarily mild winter until now. This storm is a major setback for my plans to convert my co-op apartment into a luxury tropical beachfront property. Maybe next year.

While I’m on a personal level — I want to thank everyone for the supportive emails. I hope to answer all of them, but it may take a few days. I really, really appreciated them, though.

On to Iran

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Philip Sherwell of The Telegraph reports that the Pentagon is planning a military blitz of Iran.

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites as a “last resort” to block Teheran’s efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt. …

… “This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment,” said a senior Pentagon adviser. “This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months.”

The Telegraph also provides a brief history of Iran’s nuclear program, here.

You all remember the “axis of evil” line from the 2002 SOTU speech, I’m sure. The “axis” of dangerous nations was North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Of the three, Iraq was the weakest and least dangerous; naturally, we squandered our military and spoiled diplomatic resources by invading Iraq, leaving the problems in Iran and North Korea to fester.

(For an account of Bush’s serial screwups regarding North Korea see “Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes.” Note that you have to scroll past a bunch of junk after the February 10 post to read the rest of it. I don’t have any way to edit the junk out, sorry.)

James Fallows, whose articles on Iraq for the Atlantic Monthly are indispensable reading, wrote in December 2004:

The decisions that a President will have to make about Iran are like those that involve Iraq—but harder. A regime at odds with the United States, and suspected of encouraging Islamic terrorists, is believed to be developing very destructive weapons. In Iran’s case, however, the governmental hostility to the United States is longer-standing (the United States implicitly backed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s), the ties to terrorist groups are clearer, and the evidence of an ongoing nuclear-weapons program is stronger. Iran is bigger, more powerful, and richer than Iraq, and it enjoys more international legitimacy than Iraq ever did under Saddam Hussein. The motives and goals of Iran’s mullah government have been even harder for U.S. intelligence agencies to understand and predict than Saddam Hussein’s were.

And, most critically, the Shiite clerics in charge of Iraq have developed close ties to the majority Shiite government in Iraq. Indeed, there is a very real danger that Iraq is becoming a puppet of Iran, in spite of Bushie attempts to make it a puppet of the U.S. It is likely a U.S. strike on Iran would set the Iraqi insurgency on fire; even the U.S.-powered Iraqi government would turn against the U.S.

Further, unlike Iraq, Iran really does have weapons of mass destruction. Fallows wrote that “the Iranian regime would conclude that America was bent on its destruction, and it would have no reason to hold back on any tool of retaliation it could find.” Among other near certainties, Israel would be drawn into all-out war before you could say “ayatollah.” Also,

Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a threatened Iran would have many ways to harm America and its interests. Apart from cross-border disruptions in Iraq, it might form an outright alliance with al-Qaeda to support major new attacks within the United States. It could work with other oil producers to punish America economically. It could, as Hammes warned, apply the logic of “asymmetric,” or “fourth-generation,” warfare, in which a superficially weak adversary avoids a direct challenge to U.S. military power and instead strikes the most vulnerable points in American civilian society, as al-Qaeda did on 9/11. If it thought that the U.S. goal was to install a wholly new regime rather than to change the current regime’s behavior, it would have no incentive for restraint.

And the Pessimist at The Left Coaster warns that other nations — notably China and Russia — are making noises about siding with Iran against us.

In other words, a strike on Iran carries terrible risks, much greater risks than did a strike on Iraq. And we know how that turned out.

There is a possibility that the Pentagon is just saber-rattling to encourage Iran to be more compliant with IAEA weapons inspectors and with the UN Security Council. That would be a sensible thing to do. But the Bushies hate the UN Security Council, and they hate the IAEA even more. You’ll remember that in the buildup to the Iraq invasion, IAEA president Mohamed ElBaradei was telling everyone who would listen that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons capability; was not even close. And he was right. Thus did ElBaradei become Public Enemy #2 to the Bushies, behind Saddam Hussein himself. They hated him so much they had the NSA tap his phone to find evidence against him, as part of an effort to have him replaced at IAEA. As evidence of the high regard in which the Bushies are held, the rest of the world supported ElBaradei, who last year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Bushies, for whom every frustration becomes a personal vendetta, would pot-roast their own babies before they’d do anything to help the IAEA and ElBaradei.

On the other hand, Karl may figure he could use Iran to do to the 2006 elections what he accomplished with Iraq in the 2002 elections. The Republican Noise machine will spew out visions of mushroom clouds hovering over American cities, and the Dems will fail to put up a cohesive challenge. Hmmm. Sounds like a plan.

World War III, anyone?

Trust

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Editorial in tomorrow’s New York Times:

We can’t think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can’t think of a president who has deserved that trust less. …

… Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Bushies in Training

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I’ve been to Fulton, Missouri. It’s close to Columbia, home of the main campus of the University of Missouri. Winston Churchill delivered the famous “iron curtain” speech there, which is its chief claim to fame. Like most little Missouri towns it’s very conservative and very insulated.

But this spring, high school students in Fulton will be presenting a shockingly provocative play. A play featuring juvenile runaways, couple swapping, and the wanton seduction of a human-animal creature (A hybrid? Who can say?) by a supernatural pagan female.

The town of Fulton is outraged. But not about the play described above, a sexy romp called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by some guy named Shakespeare. No, they’re messed up because the high school dramatists produced a sanitized version of “Grease.”

The drama teacher cleaned up profanity and substituted standard tobacco cigarettes for “weed.” But that wasn’t good enough. According to Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times, a few people complained

… that scenes of drinking, smoking and a couple kissing went too far, and glorified conduct that the community tries to discourage. One letter, from someone who had not seen the show but only heard about it, criticized “immoral behavior veiled behind the excuse of acting out a play.”

The school has cancelled a production of “The Crucible” (of course) and will produce “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” instead. So instead of pilgrims battling witchcraft (the Fultonites won’t know it’s an allegory if nobody tells ’em) they’ll produce what is, essentially, a sex farce. Will the drama teacher edit out some of Bill S.’s more obvious double entendres? And will Titania still seduce Bottom, or will she take him to an all-night revival?

What Puck said: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Blabbermouth Bush

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You know a guy is a screwup when incompetence is the least of his problems. It’s not that President Bush is trying to do what’s good for America, and failing; it’s that he doesn’t give a bleep about what’s good for America. Bush’s only concern is Bush. If you want proof, just consider how he plays with national security.

Jonathan Alter writes for Newsweek (web only):

For crass political reasons—namely to advance his position on the National Security Agency spying story—the president chose to use a speech to the National Guard Association to disclose details of a 2002 “shoe bomb” plot to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles. While the plot had been revealed in general terms in the past, the White House this week arranged for Bush’s counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, to explain to reporters in a conference call exactly the kind of details that Goss claimed on the op-ed page helped the enemy. “We are at risk of losing a key battle,” Goss wrote. “The battle to protect our classification system.”

That system is at particular risk when it is exploited for political purposes.

Presidents can declassify anything they like, of course. But what other purpose could Bush have had than to “remind” us that we’re supposed to be afraid of terrorists? “[L]et’s be clear” Alter writes, “on what this was: a deliberate effort to use declassification for partisan purposes, in this case, defending the administration’s policy on NSA surveillance, which Karl Rove says publicly will be a big part of the 2006 midterm campaign.”

Townsend employed the Bushie trick of placing dots in a way that assumes connection, much the way Bush and his surrogates linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11 in the public mind without explicitly stating there was a connection. In this case, Townsend did not claim the NSA program had anything to do with foiling the Los Angeles plot. Yet Townsend left a trail of breadcrumbs between Los Angeles and the NSA nonetheless. “[W]e use all available sources and methods in the intelligence community,” she siad, “but we have to protect them. So I’m not going to talk about what ones we did or didn’t use in this particular case.”

Dutifully, Fox News host John Gibson followed the crumbs. As Media Matters reports,

Gibson suggested a link on the February 9 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story with John Gibson. When guest P.J. Crowley, former special assistant to President Clinton, noted that the Los Angeles terror plot was foiled by the CIA, not the NSA, Gibson responded: “They’re the same kind of thing … the same animal” Later in the program, while purporting to “[c]onnect the dots,” Gibson lumped together the alleged Library Tower plot and the “controversy over the use of high-tech spying.”

Kool-aiders across America are now certain that the NSA spy program stopped the bombing of Los Angeles, and how can those soft-headed libruhls be so stupid not to trust the President? Don’t they remember 9/11?

Yeah, just like we remember Iraq didn’t have anything to do with it. But let’s go on …

Via True Blue Liberal, Maureen Dowd writes in her column today:

Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he’s doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic.

President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage.

The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn’t. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned.

The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, “he’s smoking Dutch Cleanser.”

The president doesn’t know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids.

The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn’t, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme.

A pattern, as they say, emerges.

Update: The Medium Lobster (the Wise; the All-Seeing) explains Bush national security policy.

Ann Coulter Unhinged

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And they say liberals are unhinged … Max Blumenthal writes,

On Friday, February 10, the rock star of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was none other than Ann Coulter. Before an overflow crowd of at least 1000 young right-wing activists, Coulter took her brand of performance art to new heights. Afterwards, I caught up with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to ask him about Coulter’s characterization of Muslims as “ragheads.” Before I reveal his indignant response, here is a sampling of Coulter’s most memorable lines.

Coulter on Muslims:

“I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'” (This declaration prompted a boisterous ovation.)

Coulter on killing Bill Clinton:

(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemma) “There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought ‘Ann, that’s not going to help your career.'” …

See also “Ann Coulter: ‘We Need Somebody to Put Rat Poisoning in Justice Stevens’ Creme Brulee” at Editor & Publisher.

Compare/contrast to moi. You can find a link to today’s C-SPAN Washington Journal on this page, under “Video/Audio.” I didn’t threaten to kill anybody, right?

Update: See also Digby. And see Jane for more examples of the evil liberal elitist media at work!

Back to Work

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again — George W. Bush is a terrible manager. He’s all the bad managers I’ve ever had rolled into one bumbling mess, and then some.

Consider: Today Eric Lipton’s New York Times article took us back to the flood waters of New Orleans and the revelation that the White House had been informed of the levee failure much earlier than they had previously admitted.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

Jane Hamsher observes that either no told President Bush about the levee breaks, or he was told and didn’t care. I’m betting on the “no one told him, and he didn’t care, anyway” option.

Just for fun, let’s take a look back at this September 29, 2005 Newsweek article by Evan Thomas, “Katrina: How Bush Blew It.”

It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president’s early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

Another article, by Mike Allen of Time, is no longer online. But I quoted it here.

A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President’s increasing isolation. Bush’s bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news�or tell him when he’s wrong.

Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. “The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,” the aide recalled about a session during the first term. “Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, ‘All right. I understand. Good job.’ He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.” …

… “His inner circle takes pride in being able to tell him ‘everything is under control,’ when in this case it was not,” said a former aide. “The whole idea that you have to only burden him with things ‘that rise to his level’ bit them this time.”

I’ve seen managers who are abusive to staff and who fly off the handle at bad news, and the result is that no one tells them anything. The staff learns to tip-toe around the manager and hide disasters in the making as long as possible, in the hopes that somehow the mess will be resolved before the boss has to be informed. Such managers not only fail to enable work to get done; they get in the way of work getting done.

But the kinds of workflow problems many of us stumble over in our jobs generally do not make worldwide headlines. I still can’t get over the fact that Bush was so incurious about the damage caused by a major hurricane that he didn’t flip on a television and watch for himself, but was content just to listen to what the lackeys told him. Even the worst manager I’ve ever had wouldn’t have been that incompetent.

I missed Michael “fashion god” Brown’s testimony today. I’ve read some of it and can’t help but suspect it was mostly butt cover. Seems to me that even if FEMA had failed to inform the White House on Monday, however, one might assume the Bush staff was getting a clue by Tuesday. Yet the Evan Thomas article told us Bush was not made aware of how badly the recovery efforts were going until Friday.

You can blame the staff, but who’s responsible for the staff? For that matter, who’s responsible for turning FEMA into a crony-infested mess?

I’m Baaaaaack

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Thank you everyone for the kind comments. To the couple of snarky commenters: You stink, too.

I am exhausted … didn’t sleep at all last night and eventually got up at 4 a.m. … so remembering what planet I was on was a major accomplishment. Now I hear they’re forcasting mondo snowfall tomorrow so I need to hit the grocery asap for the traditional pre-snowball milk-and-bread run. I’ll blog something later if my brain doesn’t totally shut down first.