Odds and Ends

Moronic Press Conference = Moronic Man?

2006-08-23T10:35:00.000-04:00

Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate, analyzes Bush's most recent press conference, and finds it moronic. On an email discussion list I'm a member of, there was a discussion on the use of language like moronic to describe President Bush. The discussion started because someone objected to using name calling when describing Bush. But what if the adjectives were used to describe Bush's policies? Is saying his policy in Iraq is incompetent the same as saying he is incompetent? In saying the decisions he made about how to respond to Israel's retaliation to Hezbollah were stupid the same as saying he is stupid? In coming to the conclusion that his approach in the Middle East is morally bankrupt and cynical the same as saying he is morally bankrupt and cynical?

Kaplan, it seems to me, makes a distinction. The piece is titled "What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference!" with the subtitle, "It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or …". Bush isn't being called moronic in this title, but the press conference and his answers to questions are being called moronic.

Bush and his team have always taken criticism of their positions as treasonous. Sure, Bush might say, as he did in this press conference, that "I would never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live." But that doesn't stop his Vice President from saying Ned Lamont's primary victory, which comes from democracy in action, would enourage "al qaida types."

To associate Lamont's victory with giving comfort to Al Qaida is the same thing as calling anyone who voted for Lamont unpatriotic. Not explicitly, but certainly implicitly. So Bush's statement that he doesn't question the patriotism of those who disagree is hogwash. His administration and his surrogates certainly do.

So is Bush lying when he says such things, or simply moronic that he can't see that what he says is false?

So God Bless the Bloggers

2006-08-12T10:02:00.000-04:00

Where Chait (see post below) got it wrong, this piece, written by Mark Spencer for The Hartford Courant, gets it right. The difference? Spencer reported --he asked, found out, and told what he learned.

Jon Chait gets it wrong

2006-07-10T12:41:00.000-04:00

Writing in the LA Times about liberal bloggers supporting Lamont over Lieberman, Jon Chait says about their anger that Lieberman will run as an independent if loses the primary and risk splitting the democratic/liberal vote thus allowing a republican to win the seat:

Well, OK, some anger is appropriate here. But doesn't this suggest that
the whole Lamont crusade has sort of backfired? Although I'm no Karl
Rove, it seems to me that turning a rock-solid Democratic seat into a
potential Republican pickup represents something less than a political
masterstroke.

But it's not liberal bloggers who support Lamont who are turning the seat into a potential Republican pick up; it's Joe Lieberman who is doing that by vowing to run as independent.

Liberman and his fellow conservative democrats as well as many traditional print pundits are aghast that liberal bloggers are calling for his ouster and are demanding that democrats become the loyal opposition instead of the loyal lapdog. Primaries are for the express purpose of putting forth candidates that the party members who vote in that primary believe will be the best candidate to carry their views and values to Washington.

Bloggers living in California (Kos, for example) and elsewhere can organize opinion and help drive donations to the candidates in states they like, but what's wrong with that? What will drive a Lamont win isn't the din of bloggers, but the grassroots feet on the ground in Connecticut getting Lamont's supporters identified and then to the poles on August 8.

Bloggers create arguments and rhetorical momentum, but that alone won't translate into a victory.

Still, the fear this network of people who agree and are finding ways to take action strikes into print pundocrats who used to rule opinion and into politicians like Lieberman who believe they are entitled to their seats without challenge from members of their own party is heartening to behold. Ideas matter, arguments matter, and anger needs to be channeled and turned into action.

Traditionalists like Lieberman and Chait would like action confined to rubberstamping their views and their aspirations, voting for Joe because there is no other choice.

Those days --thank, goodness-- are fading and the days of the citizen activist are emerging.

9/11 Begets 1984

2005-12-16T09:52:00.000-05:00

So much for court orders, due process, privacy, innocent until presumed guilty, habeas corpus.

Wonder how long before Republicans started abusing the authority and began tracking their political and personal enemies? I assume it's happened. I have no proof. But since the White House impugns anyone who disagrees with it on the war as traitors and cowards and sympathizers, it'd only be a logical extension in their warped view to also bug those traitors to make sure they aren't terrorists to boot.

My Life in Fiction

2005-10-29T15:21:00.001-04:00

My inner Walter Mitty has always imagined me being a private eye, right down to the Robert-Mitchum-as-Philip-Marlowe hang dog look, trench coat, and weary cigarette. Looks like my inner Mitty has a doppelganger who writes books:

Wendell Cox on Transportation & Hurricanes on National Review Online

2005-09-27T12:02:00.000-04:00

Cox writes, in an article calling for more highways into and out of densely packed urban centers, the oddest thing:

On the other hand if Houston, like Portland had smugly refused to build new freeway capacity seeking (hopelessly) to socially engineer people into transit, not nearly so many people could have been evacuated.

In a time of tight budgets, when a community (Portland) decides to put money into mass transit systems instead of into cars-on-highways (since no city can afford both these days), that's social engineering. But the snarky tone implies that cities and counties which expand highway capacity aren't socially engineering.

Expanding highways is just as much social engineering as putting resources into mass transit.

Proclamation by the President: To Screw Workers

2005-09-19T11:36:00.000-04:00

"Proclamation by the President: To Suspend Subchapter IV of Chapter 31 of Title 40, United States Code, Within a Limited Geographic Area in Response to Hurricane Katrina" offers this rationale for suspending the rule which says any contract for over $2,000.00 and "which requires or involves the employment of mechanics or laborers shall contain a provision stating the minimum wages to be paid various classes or laborers and mechanics.":

(b) The wage rates imposed by section 3142 of title 40, United States Code, increase the cost to the Federal Government of providing Federal assistance to these areas.

So let's get this straight.

Bush and Rove have no problem giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other connected firms, such as Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary with former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh as the money-tree shaker.

Meanwhile, how high could the prevailing wage be for various classes of laborers and mechanics? How much lower can it go if so many laborers were already among the working poor and are hardest hit because they lacked the financial resources to get out of harm's way or to rebuild?

So Bush's cronies get rich and the government can afford that. But it can't afford to pay out-of-work laborers what was already a low prevailing wage?

This is how Bush wants to address poverty, by underpaying laborers who are already barely making it?

Disney on Parade - New York Times

2005-09-17T09:01:00.000-04:00

From Maureen Dowd today:

All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?">Disney on Parade - New York Times: "All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?"

Bush Pledges Have Typically Been Incompletely Kept

2005-09-16T07:49:00.000-04:00

In a speech where the President had no where to go but up --given that he ignored the catastrophe in its early days so that he could rest up before a speech and guitar lesson in San Diego after Gov. Blanco begged him to send every bit of help he could-- Bush came out with a credit card and a promise.

But Bush has made promises before and not delivered. New York didn't get the monies promised after 9/11. Troops still don't have enough armor in Iraq. No Child Left Behind is still an underfunded mandate.

And Bush's recovery plan is no WPA ala FDR; it's a private enterprise free for all. Remember, this is the administration that two years into occupying and rebuilding Iraq via Halliburton still can't manage to get beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad.

I really hope I'm wrong and that things go well and that money isn't skimmed and scammed by the groups represented by loyal republican lobbyists. And I really hope that enterprize zones do the trick. I really hope plans to relax environmental rules to clean and rebuild from what is a major environmental disaster work (Even though the logic of that makes no sense.).

But I'm deeply skeptical.

Bush has so far proven incompetent at every turn on every major initiative: No Child under funded; Iraq an understaffed quagmire bleeding money to a private firm with its own private army; our nation's emergency response system weakened and made inefficient after 9/11, not strengthened; our standing in the world and the mystique of America as a can-do nature imploded, making us more inviting to a terrorist attack abroad, but more significantly at home; and another $200 billion worth of debt about to be settled onto the shoulders of my children and any children and grandchildren they might have.

More on Bush's and Republican Party's Negligence

2005-09-14T09:21:00.000-04:00

From Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times :

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

Bush can stay up late to order a federal court to intercede in a state matter with the clear intent that the court keep a brain-dead alive just so he can score points with his fundamentalist base, but when New Orleans is drowning and the Governor of Louisiana asks him to send everything he can --to in effect do everything he can-- he goes to bed.

This is leadership? This is compassion?

Bush on signing the Schiavo bill:

In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life. This presumption is especially critical for those like Terri Schiavo who live at the mercy of others

And what was going on in New Orleans? What happened to his "presumption in favor of life"? He slept on it and tip-toed around states' rights niceties, niceties that didn't matter a whit when he tried to save an already dead woman.

Hmm. Maybe now we're seeing photo-ops of Bush in action because there are enough dead people to be saved.

Poverty Rates Go Up

2005-09-13T02:43:00.000-04:00

The official poverty rate in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent 2003.
In 2004, 37.0 million people were in poverty, up 1.1 million from 2003.
From the most recent trough in 2000 both the number and rate have risen for four consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 37.0 million and 12.7 percent in 2004 respectively.

But don't worry. Bush wants to eliminate the death tax next. And privatize social security. That'll fix everything.

So what if his economic and tax policies, which benefit the rich, have lead more Americans into poverty.

Maybe he can take a drop from his mother's cold heart and build enough Astrodomes to warehouse the poor.

Oh wait. That's what prisons are for.

Bush Blew It

2005-09-12T21:03:00.000-04:00

Newsweek's Evan Thomas analyzes the President's wretched and inept response to Katrina.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

Utterly disgraceful and inexcusable.

Opt Out, Out I Say

2005-04-08T09:30:00.000-04:00

We bought a house in July.

Since then, we've been deluged with credit card and life insurance offers, and offers to borrow against the value of the home.

Before owning a home, credit card offers that began with "You have been preselected. . ." were common enough. Now we're getting about 10 - 15 a week.

It's from these offers that a lot of theft takes place. Theives pull the offers from mailboxes and trash and fill them out, noting a change of address so the new card or loan check is sent elsewhere. Thieves spend the stolen money, and voila, the person in whose name they have swindled is stuck in a battle with credit card companies, banks and other loaning agencies, and the credit rating agencies to undo the damage. And it's not that easy to do undo the damage. It might take years.

Meanwhile, as one's financial life is locked-down frozen, real life still presents challenges that require financial flexibility.

While not as good as being able to put a hold on one's credit to prevent the issuance of credit in one's name, the credit reporting agencies will let you opt-out of being on those lists they sell to banks and insurance companies who can't wait to send you those "You've been preapproved to go deeper in debt" come-ons. To get off those lists, go here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

It only takes a few moments. If you prefer not do this over the WWW, call this number and Opt-Out by phone: 1-888-567-8688.

You can choose to opt out for a 5 years or permanently. You can also choose to opt back in.

I don't know why anyone would want to opt back in if they own a home; the debt only puts the ownership at risk, let alone the risk that a thief will intercept your mail before you get it, or, if you don't have a shredder or fire pit, after you toss it.

The solicitations aren't worth it.

If you need to borrow or want a credit, you don't need to be pre-approved. You can apply and ask for terms that you're willing to live with.

So opt-out today.

Fraud and Stealing -- Not Identity Theft

2005-03-21T20:14:00.000-05:00

In today's Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray suggests a lock on credit reports to prevent theives from using one's credit to steal. Bray's suggestion is along the same line of thinking I outlined in a letter to my congressmen a few days back. Naturally I'm going to forward Bray's article to them. But I need to do it soon before I can't get it from the Globe's Web site.

What's a Little Snow?

2005-03-13T12:24:00.000-05:00

After shoveling away another 6 inches of new-fallen wet and heavy snow, the only recourse was to retreat immediately to summer.

Mind over matter. Plus the drinks stay cold. Try keeping drinks cold in August without hauling an ice-chest.

Today I Wrote Congress

2005-03-06T13:11:00.000-05:00

After reading this story in the Washington Post about the usurous practices of credit card companies and the Republican plans to further stick it to people by not allowing credit card debt to be resolved by bankruptcy, I wrote the following to my Congressmen: Rep. Lynch (D - MA), an d Sentators Kennedy and Kerry (D's - MA):

Dear Senator,

Today's Washington Post online reports that the Senate is likely to pass a bill making it hard for consumers to clear credit card debt by declaring bankruptcy. This despite the outrageous and capricious fees credit card companies add to cards, making the companies no better than loan sharks in many cases.

Meanwhile, as laws against usury seem to be a thing of the past, credit card companies, in an age of identity theft, continue to send unsolicited offeres for loans, credit cards and other expensive and fee-laded financial services to our mailboxes. And it's from mailboxes and trashcans that we know most identity theft occurs.

If Congress is unwilling to control the rapacious appetites of credit lenders and their practices, and if they are unable to help consumers who get caught up in those practices, most insidiously interest rates jumping astronomically when a payment's late, even if the payment late wasn't on a different card. One woman in the story had an interest rate of 29.99 percent.

If Congress will not at least do something about that, can they try to do something about identity theft.

Here's an idea.

As a consumer, I should be able to contact TransUnion, Equifax, Experian and other credit agencies and put a hold on credit issued in my name. This won't stop the flood of unwanted credit and loan solicitations I get, since that flood comes from mailing lists being sold and bought, but it would at least protect me from identity theft.

No credit lender processes a credit card or loan without checking those agencies. If they check and see that I have a hold on credit being issued, then they can't proceed. For them to proceed I would have to remove the hold.

Now this isn't perfect --there would need to be a system for a consumer to place and remove holds, one that included verifying the identity of the consumer, but there should be a way to do this.

You can't get a job in the U.S. without showing --in person-- proof of citizenship. So what if every bank branch, every credit union branch and other institutions were obligated to work with the credit agencies in such a way that you could walk into those places, and verify your identity and then from those institutions, create an account with the credit agencies, and from that account, you can place a hold on your credit.

The credit industry is awash in billions of dollars generated from onerous fees and usury. They should be able to fund this small bit of consumer protection.

Thank you for considering this idea.

Sincerely,

Nick Carbone

SAT: Is It Useful?

2005-03-06T12:28:00.000-05:00

In a guest opinion piece in today's New York Times, "Topic: Essays Are Useful. Discuss." Curtis Sittenfeld concludes by writing, "Although the cottage industry preying on the SAT anxieties of parents and students has grown since I was a teenager, I still don't believe the test matters very much. I'm glad the SAT is including an essay not because I think the SAT is important, but because I think writing is."

I feel pretty much the same way. There are enough alternate routes into college without betting the farm on having to have high SAT scores. And I agree with Sittenfeld that even a five paragraph essay is better than the analogies test. If anything, it's an easy type of essay to write, so high school instructors will be able to teach kids how to write during their test-training sessions (and make no mistake, high schools will devote some time to training kids on how to pass the SAT writing exam).

Still, it's a pretty dumb system overall. The fact is that with a little practice and coaching, kids can bring up their SAT scores. And as Jay Mathews points out in "How to Ace the SAT Essay in 6 Easy Steps" coaching doesn't have to involve big bucks to Kaplan or some private tutor. A book on getting ready will do, or even cheaper in my view, visiting The College Board's Website for practicing and improving your writing for the test.

Still, there is that anxiety. Ironically I began to notice it visceral this past year, when my daughter became a highschool sophomore, and the school's guidance department held a meeting for parents to talk about the SAT and college admissions processes and how not to be anxious about them. I don't know whether people were already anxious or the meeting triggered their anxieties, but it didn't seem to me that people were less anxious. The message of the meeting was, in short, senior year will be here in a blink, and so now is the time to plan for college admitting hurtles and test preparation.

Among the recommendations re: the SAT -- take the practice tests, starting the sophomore year. Now the practice won't have the writing portion, but pay the fee and take it anyway. The sophomore test wouldn't be used in figuring the official SAT score. Meanwhile, as 10th graders, kids in Massachusetts have to pass a state-mandated MCAS test in order to graduate. I think with MCAS my daughter doesn't need to deal with the sophomore edition of the SAT too. And even without the MCAS, I wouldn't do it.

I also am encouraging my daughter not to take the PSAT her junior either. Again, in Massachusetts she's take a standardized nearly every year in one form or another, so practicing how to do that is a waste of time and money.

Also, my wife took the PSAT her junior year of highschool, and then took the SAT her senior year. She did much, much better on the SAT and was accused essentially of cheating. The statisticians at the College Board determined that there couldn't be an improvement as big as hers. She was forced to take the SAT yet again.

So why in the world would I want my daughter to take a PSAT? National Merit Scholarships? That's not likely. It's a bad percentage bet; her grades are mostly A's, with a B or two every now and again, and that's just enough to keep her out the NMS winner's circle. She sees enough standardized testing as it is.

Also, PSAT scores are now passed on to colleges, according to the guidance counselor, so it's not really just practice any more.

The SAT once will be enough, thank you.

All this talk about taking the practice because it's hard; take the practice because it's important; take the practice so you get into the college you want -- that's the stuff of anxiety.

Better this from my point of view. Take the test once and don't worry about it. It really is not that important and it certainly is not predictive of any damn thing about how a student will do in college. Take it once so schools have the scores if they want them as part of an overall package. However, if a school only takes students with scores of a certain rank, then to hell with that school. There are plenty of good places to learn -- often with better teachers than those that try to be exclusive about SAT scores -- that won't use the lower-than-their-standard SAT score as an excuse to scam you out of your admissions processing fee as they in mere seconds put your admissions folder in the "no" pile without so much as the few seconds it took to check your score.

That's the second part of this.

Admissions. We're not going to play the cast a wide net admissions game either. We'll pick one or two schools we like, and apply there only after we check on how they process admissions. And chances are, depending on scholarships of one kind or another (and plenty exist that don't depend on SAT scores), we might just opt for our kids to do the first two years at a community college, where they'll at least get to work with instructors who want to be teachers primarily.

What Democrats Should Do

2004-11-10T13:57:00.000-05:00

I've been reading lots of analysis on why Kerry lost and on what the Democratic party should do to win more elections and do better in the House and Senate. Advice falls into too broad categories:

be more like Republicans because that's what people want (aka: become more conservative);
be less like Republicans because that' s not what people really want and the people would know that if you were less like Republicans (aka: become more liberal).

The problem with both these categories, and most of the arguments in them, is that they put Democrats in a no-win situation. The minute you define yourself based on what you opponent is, the minute your opponent determines who you are. Yes, you need to be aware of what the Republican party's political and ideological machinery is saying and doing. But to define yourself based on that --to determine to be more or less like the Republican Party, to adopt more or less of their platform and language-- means they set the terms for debate.

Democrats need to look within. They didn't lose because Republicans tricked people or because all Republican voters are stupid or zealots (many are, but so are many Democratic Party voters); they didn't lose because Kerry wasn't charismatic enough; they didn't lose because of their stands on issues. Yes all those things were factors --in an election nearly everything is a contributing factor to some extent.

They lost, I think, because Democrats --and for this blame Kerry and his camp; the presidential candidate defines the party for the year of the election and some time after that-- could not define themselves clearly, consistently, and forthrightly on their own terms.

The classic example of this was the day Kerry stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and said, knowing everything that we now know about Saddam's WMD, he would not have changed his vote to authorize war. That Grand Canyon moment in and of itself didn't cost him the election, but it is emblematic of the weakness Gore had and Kerry had: the inability to be unequivocally brave about who you are and what you believe.

Kerry charged Bush wouldn't admit a mistake or make a change. Yet Kerry, in this crucial moment, showed the same weakness. He could not admit a mistake, in part, I suspect, because he feared how Republicans would use that admission. Karl Rove got inside the Kerry campaign's head; Kerry never got inside the Republican campaign's head. Even after his disasterous first debate, the Bush campaign stayed its course. Which leads to another behavior symptomatic of this lost sense of self -- the Kerry campaign's need to redefine itself over and again, and its need to remake its staff and message.

The only democrat who began to say who he was and what he would do on terms that weren't set by Republicans was Howard Dean. And he lost in large part because he didn't have political operatives skilled enough to turnout supporters in the Iowa caucuses, which are a special kind of event. He also lost, in large measure, I suspect, because too many party professionals and primary voters believed Karl Rove when he said openly and often that he hoped Democrats nominated Dean.

So the question for the Democrats is not whether to be more or less like Republicans, but it is to define simply and clearly and honestly what it means to be a democrat.

That won't be easy. But the party needs to find a leader who can stand and say, my name is ______ and I'm a democrat. You should be a Democrat who votes for Democrats, and here's why.

To Paraphrase Henry Higgins. . .

2004-11-03T08:25:00.000-05:00

Damn, damn, damn, damn, I have to stay accustomed to his face.

I really wish Howard Dean's campaign hadn't imploded.

But wishes don't mean much now. Kerry's campaign can wish all they want, for example, but the math isn't there in Ohio to put him over the top.

Kerry will need to concede sometime today, and he needs to do it graciously.

So let me be gracious too.

George Bush won, and he is and will remain President of the United States. I'm an American citizen, and George Bush is my President. His win was, especially given the division in the country, relatively strong. He will have won both the popular and the electoral vote by wide enough margins that there is no basis, as there was in Florida voting in 2000, for challenging the legitimacy of his win.

George Bush is my President. I hope that under his leadership the country improves, that unemployed find real work at good wages, that the uninsured find affordable insurance, that the supreme court finds its vacancies filled with moderate judges, that our armed forces or our allies find Osama Bin Laden, that democracy finds firm roots in Afghanistan and Iraq, that Israel and Palestine find a way to live together, that everything both sides agree need to happen finds a way to happen under Bush's watch, that tax cuts and profligate spending some how find a way to magically combine in some kind of economic alchemy to deficit lead into surplus gold. I wish him every success on reaching those goals.

Yes, I know. Wishes don't mean much. Even sincere wishes. But I hope for the sake of the country that Bush succeeds in making the country better.

As much as I wish that, here's what I fear will happen going forward:

Bush will move further to the right, with nothing left to lose, dividing the country either further along ideological lines.
The deficit will continue to sky rocket and the war on terror will continue to expand, thus shrinking the governments options.
That Bush will become more arrogant, and move to policies that begin to unravel the social safety net -- environmental regulations will continue to fall; social security will be pushed toward privatization; tax policies will increasing benefit the rich, shrinking the middle class. In other words, all the trends now in place will continue more earnestly for at least the next two years, before Bush slips into lame duckness.
That a U.S. House with more republicans in it, will be seen as a sign that the votes are there to move the country's fiscal and social policies further to the right, to the hard right, not the moderate right.
That the tone in Washington will become more shrill as the republican power base becomes more arrogant. Any disagreements will be described as divisive, even reasonable objections.
That Bush will pull out of Iraq before the job is done, but using his rose colored classes, will declare victory. That after the first Iraqi election, whenever that is held, he will begin to cut troops, leaving Iraq afester and the Middle East more unstable than he found it.
That Bush will continue to lead by a combination of the propagandistic leveraging of fear (on the war front) and fact-bending (remember the false estimates given to Congress on what the cost of his drug benefits program would be?).
That 6 and 7 will work as strategies because the media is increasingly either divided along identifiable partisan lines (Fox News vs. NPR) or cowed. We no longer have a national objective voice to look at facts in a timely manner. The best the mainstream media could do on the Iraq war issue was apologize after the fact for their failure to be healthy skeptics.

So here I am. Left hoping that my fears are wrong and that my wishes might come true. It's a grim place to be because the history of the past four years of Bush policy does more to validate my fears than give hope to my wishes.

Catastrophic Success = Gross Incompetence

2004-10-19T01:10:00.000-04:00

Want to know why the success in Iraq is so catastrophic? Read this from The New York Times: 'Catastrophic Success': The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War.

So for all those people voting for Bush because they think he's stronger on the war on terrorism . . . how can such gross incompetence be a strength? Bush is better at bluster and sloganeering, but he can't think strategically and has no real longterm view beyond staying this inane course premised on denying what's gone wrong. It's not a catastrophic success that's putting Iraq on the edge of permanent catastrophe. It's:

catastrophic incompetence
catastrophic hubris
catastrophic arrogance
catastrophic bluster
catastrophic blindness-to-reality.

Bush is the catastrophe.

If he can't manage, to use his own way of framing Iraq, a battle in the war on terror, why should we trust him with the larger war?

Rumsfeld Signals Terrorists Our Goal is to Leave

2004-10-10T18:54:00.000-04:00

What John Kerry said about troop withdrawal on Sept. 20 at NYU:

If the President would move in this direction … if he would bring in more help from other countries to provide resources and forces … train the Iraqis to provide their own security …develop a reconstruction plan that brings real benefits to the Iraqi people … and take the steps necessary to hold credible elections next year … we could begin to withdraw U.S. forces starting next summer and realistically aim to bring all our troops home within the next four years.

What George Bush said about what John Kerry said, speaking on October 7 in Wausau, Wisconson:

There was one new element of Senator Kerry's plan. He talks about artificial timetables to pull our forces out of Iraq. You see, he sent a signal that America's overriding goal in Iraq would be to leave, even if the job isn't done.
AUDIENCE: Booo!

Donald Rumsfeld in remarks made to 1,500 marines during a surprise visit to Iraq:

Rumsfeld predicted violence will increase in the run-up to January elections in Iraq and the United States will probably not pull out any troops before then, the AP said.
"Our hope is that as we build up Iraqi forces we will be able to relieve the stress on our forces and see a reduction in coalition forces over some period of time, probably post-Iraqi election." Rumsfeld said, according to the AP.

Marines Frustrated and Losing Trust in Bush

2004-10-10T08:36:00.000-04:00

Excerpted from the Washington Post via MSNBC:

Realities on the ground
Several members of the platoon said they were struck by the difference between the way the war was being portrayed in the United States and the reality of their daily lives.

"Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better,' " said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder, 22, of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day."

Pfc. Kyle Maio, 19, of Bucks County, Pa., said he thought government officials were reticent to speak candidly because of the upcoming U.S. elections. "Stuff's going on here but they won't flat-out say it," he said. "They can't get into it."

Maio said that when he arrived in Iraq, "I didn't think I was going to live this long, in all honesty." He added, "it ain't that bad. It's just part of the job, I guess."

As a reporter began to ask Maio another question, the interview was interrupted by the scream of an incoming rocket and then a deafening explosion outside the platoon's barracks. Pandemonium ensued.

"Get down! Get down!" yelled the platoon's radio operator, Cpl. Brandon Autin, 21, of New Iberia, La., his orders laced with profanity. "Get in the bunker! Get in the bunker now!"

Members of the platoon raced out of their rooms to a 5-by-15-foot bunker, located outside at the end of the one-story building. The dirt-floor room was protected by a low ceiling and walls built out of four-foot-thick sandbags. Once in the bunker, several Marines lit cigarettes, filling the already-congested room with smoke.

"The reality right now is that the most dangerous opinion in the world is the opinion of a U.S. serviceman," said Lance Cpl. Devin Kelly, 20, of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones, 20, of Ball Ground, Ga., agreed: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong," he said. "We're catching them in a lie."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6214573/

You just know that the Bush administration is going to blame this on John Kerry's criticism of the war. But the fact is, Bush has let down our troops through his shear incompetence as a Commander-in-Chief. It will be interesting to see if the absentee ballots from soldiers in Iraq reflect the feelings in the story above.

Lion King is Loooong

2004-10-09T16:34:00.000-04:00

Missed last night's debate and instead spent the evening with my family. We had tickets to the Lion King at the Opera House in Boston. The Opera House is gorgeously restored, and the cartoon turned to musical was brilliantly and cleverly staged as the actors became one with their puppetry costumes.

But look. The cartoon, while possessed of a few snappy tunes, didn't have a great score to begin with. And the stage musical version added more songs, and, well, they didn't convey any of the emotions they were meant to. They were just long forgetful songs that sounded almost mono-noted and monotoned.

If you're given tickets, go see the musical. But I wouldn't recommend buying tickets. The cartoon was never much to begin with, musically or storywise. The stage musical version, while stunning to look at, takes a bad story and weak score, and makes them worse.

The Price of Bubble Wrap

2004-10-08T13:16:00.000-04:00

Doonesbury has poked fun at Bush's campaign events, many of them done in town-hall style. As you can see if you look at the strip from 9/13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, Bush's events rely on highly screened loyalists to ask softball, feather duster light softball, questions.

The Washington Post reports on the consequences of coddling Bush. Here are some highlights:

During a campaign forum in the Cleveland suburbs last month, President Bush was asked whether he likes broccoli, to disclose his "most important legacy to the American people" and to reveal what supporters can do "to make sure that you win Ohio and get reelected."
. . .
Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University, said the first debate showed Bush had been overprotected. "If you don't talk to the press and deal with audiences with some degree of skepticism, you can't build understanding so people have confidence in you in hard times," Fields said. "His handlers think they're doing him a favor, but they're not."
. . .
The president has stopped taking questions from the small pool of reporters who cover his photo opportunities, and he has answered questions from the White House press corps twice since Aug. 23, both times with interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side. His last prime-time news conference was April 13.
. . .
Tonight's town-hall audience of about 100 will ask 15 to 20 questions and will consist of an equal number of voters who say they lean toward Bush or Kerry but could change their minds, plus a few who say they are undecided. Bush's debate negotiators had sought to eliminate the event from the debate schedule because they were concerned that partisans could pose as uncommitted voters and slip in with tough or argumentative questions.
. . .
Mike McCurry, who was Clinton's press secretary and is a senior adviser to Kerry, said Bush was hurt in the first debate because his aides do not appear to recognize the benefits of having reporters "regularly ask the hard questions that are on the mind of the public."
"They have been very effective and disciplined at managing a message and getting through," McCurry said. "Until now, they have not paid any real price in their press coverage. They have mostly been getting out of the news every day what they wanted to."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16131-2004Oct7.html

The Bush camp is afraid of "uncommitted voters . . . with tough or argumentative questions." Amazing. A leader who is afraid to talk to the people. Wait, that lest sentence is an oxymoron. His fear means he's not a leader, not in a democracy he's not. No wonder Doonesbury draws him as an empty Roman general's helmet.

Weak Analogy

2004-10-08T09:31:00.000-04:00

Mickey Kaus, a reluctant Kerry supporter, suggests that instead of Bush trying to retrojustify the war in Iraq by saying it was because Saddam was trying to get around sanctions, should say simply that we went to war because Saddam fooled us. He uses this analogy to make the case:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that?

The problem with this analogy is that Saddam stopped waving the black bar of soap around.

In September 2002, Bush received authority to wage war in Iraq, and he used that authority to force Saddam to issue a detailed report and to come clean on where and whether he had any WMD's.

That report Saddam issued claimed Iraq had no WMD's, but it was a negative that Saddam could not prove to Bush's satisfaction, nor the U.N.'s for that matter. Still, Saddam dropped the black soap and put up his hands. Inspectors were let back into Iraq, avenues of investigation had been opened. Meanwhile, Bush shaded his intelligence evidence by ignoring the conflicting estimates in it, and presented to the American people the spector of nuclear weapons and biological bombs being unleashed in America by Al Qaeda operatives supplied by Saddam Hussein.

At the same time, the UN Security Council wasn't convinced by PowerPoint Colin Powell has since recanted "proving" Saddam had WMD. The U.N. said in February and March 2003 let's give this inspection process more time and didn't Bush couldn't get his war resolution.

Bush had a choice. He could use the threat of force to investigate further, to allow renewed inspections more time, or, to invade.

So Bush assembled a coalition outside of both UN and NATO auspices, a coaltion where American troops made up 5 times the force of all the other coalition troops combined, a coalition where many members were rewarded for joining via US foreign aide, and rushed into Iraq, changing plans at the last minute because Turkey's parliament elected not to let Bush base operations for invading northern Iraq there.

Bush made the wrong choice, and carried it out in stunningly incompetent fashion. He made a bigger mess of the decision and now Iraq's a hornets nest of pissed off Jihadist and Muslim extremests taking potshots at American troops and any Iraqi's doing anything normal, let alone those signing up to policemen.

Given that Bush could have taken the time to look closer to see whether the gun was real or soap since Saddam had stopped waving it, Bush is in no position to use the Kaus defense. So he's left with something even more desperate now: Bush is saying that the war was still justified, despite how wrong he's been in his most fundamental reasons for going, because Saddam allegedly tried to bribe officials to divert U.N. oil-for-food money into his own pockets.

Please.

Strafer Strife

2004-10-08T08:38:00.000-04:00

As President Bush continues to go ballistic on John Kerry, his desperate distortions become more and more obvious, inviting yet more and more analysis of just how dishonest he has become. A few days ago it was Howard Fineman at Newsweek listing the deceptions, then it was the closing paragraphs in a Washington Post story on Bush's "policy speech" in Wilkes-Barre. Now the New York Times examines Bush's plan to eviscerate John Kerry by contorting the facts:

To cheers in Michigan, Mr. Bush asserted that under Mr. Kerry, the nation would have to "wait for a grade from other nations and leaders'' before acting to protect itself. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly said that he would not give up the right to act pre-emptively "in any way necessary to protect the United States,'' but has suggested that any president would need to demonstrate legitimate reasons for such an action.
To laughter, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry would impose "Hillary care'' on America, a huge national health care program that would impose increased federal control over the health care decisions of citizens. Mr. Kerry's health care plan is significantly larger than the one Mr. Bush has offered, and it includes increased reliance on Medicaid and state health insurance programs for the poor. But unlike what Mrs. Clinton proposed in 1993, it would not create any big new federal bureaucracy and would retain the current employer-based system, and Mr. Kerry said he was averse to any kind of national health care plan.

To boos, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry had set "artificial timetables'' for pulling troops out of Iraq, which the president warned would embolden the enemy and endanger the troops. In fact, Mr. Kerry said that he could envision beginning to withdraw troops in as little as six months, but only if he succeeded in moving Iraq toward stability, and has decline repeatedly to set a timeline.

Bush doesn't trust his own record. He must, like so many voters, find it so fundamentally indefensible that he can only try to win by shredding a caricature of John Kerry. But just as Cheney and republicans thought the Vice President had won the debate only to see him considered the loser the next morning when fact checkers proved he lied about never meeting Edwards and never suggesting a connection of Iraq to 9/11, so too is Bush beginning to lose in the poll as his own lies about Kerry and the facts in Iraq become more divorced from reality.

If Bush Were Like Blair . . .

2004-10-07T21:01:00.000-04:00

Jim Geraghty, in a "Kerry Spot" entry at the National Review Online, writes:

Now - picture the Democrats nominating a candidate who takes the war on terror seriously, who wants to finish the job in Iraq, and who doesn't see every foreign policy issue as a rerun of Vietnam.
A Tony Blair-style Democrat would probably be trouncing Bush right now. Karl Rove & Co. are very lucky to have the opponents they do.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200410071308.asp

That's one way to look at it.

Another is this: If Bush were a Tony Blair-style Republican, who could articulate an argument without resorting to rhetoric like this when left on his own:

Of course we're doing everything we can to protect America. I wake up every day thinking about how best to protect America. That's my job.
I work with Director Mueller of the FBI; comes in my office when I'm in Washington every morning, talking about how to protect us. There's a lot of really good people working hard to do so.

It's hard work. But, again, I want to tell the American people, we're doing everything we can at home, but you better have a president who chases these terrorists down and bring them to justice before they hurt us again,

then Karl Rove wouldn't have to worry.

If Bush were a responsible president, who could admit mistakes and level with the American people, then Karl Rove wouldn't have to worry.

If Bush were an honest president, who looked at both sides of the conflicting intelligent estimates he was receiving back in late 2002 and early 2003, if his White House hadn't deliberately suppressed that evidence, then Karl Rove wouldn't have to worry.

But Bush isn't honest, isn't responsible, and certainly, when bereft of prepared text and asked to think on his own, isn't articulate.

He is in short, no Tony Blair.

And so Karl Rove has to worry and thus his campaign runs on one strategy and one strategy only: deny reality and destroy the opposition in everyway possible. So a major policy speech isn't a vision for the future, but a bait and switch (just like the reasons for this war in Iraq), that's really just a castigation of Kerry built on a string truth-distorting one-liners.

Bush is desparate and it shows. He's been caught lying, caught shifting, caught short and is increasingly found wanting. If John Kerry were as forthright as Tony Blair, Bush would in fact be toast. If George Bush were as forthright as Tony Blair, Kerry wouldn't stand a chance.

But Kerry has a chance because as weak a candidate as Kerry is, Bush is that much worse a leader and president. And the facts in Iraq past and present make that impossible to hide. Even for Karl Rove.

1984 is 20 Years Late

2004-10-07T17:42:00.000-04:00

What's King George's last name? It's Bush right?

Because the more facts that come out, the more he sounds like an apparatchik out of an Orwellian nightmare.

I mean it's not what he does to language accidentally through his oral dyslexia (or is it linguistic dyspepsia?), which, while funny, is relatively harmless. What's really frightening is his sustained belief that by saying up is down often enough, people will believe that's the case. Well that's not frightening so much as the idea that it might work, that enough voters will suspend disbelief to re-elect Bush even though he simply doesn't trust them and won't level with them.

So, we learn from Duelfer's report that Iraq had no capability to build WMD's after 1994, much less have any WMD's in their possession. We learn that Bush's whole original rationale for going to war never existed. Remember when he addressed the nation and described the threat as imminent and said we could not wait for more inspections? Here's how the New York Times covers it:

Mr. Duelfer's 900-page report concluded that contrary to Bush administration's assertions on the eve of war, the Hussein regime had rid itself of chemical and biological weapons, nor was it well on the way to having nuclear weapons.

Today, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney seemed to embrace other findings by Mr. Duelfer, that Mr. Hussein planned to reconstitute his military's deadly-weapons capabilities once United Nations sanctions on him were lifted, and that he was constantly scheming to skirt those sanctions.
http://nytimes.com/2004/10/07/politics/campaign/07CND-BUSH.html?

Sigh. I see. A plan to reconstitute deadly weapons, which couldn't be started until sanctions were lifted, that was the clear and present danger that justified rushing into an ill-planned war, turning attention from Afghanistan, and generating even more Muslim anger that's helped make terrorism a more noble sacrifice.

Gross incompetence is one thing, but incompetence and this shifting of reasons slathered in a campaign of systematic denial that things were ever different from what Bush says they are today, when the evidence is so clear that things are different, is gobsmackingly outrageous. How can we elect a president who lacks the courage to level with America?

That we still might is just frightening.

Refereed Debate Transcripts

2004-10-06T17:02:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post offers a refereed transcript of the debates, where staff writers from the paper and washingtonpost.com site "examine the candidates' claims and charges. The "referee" icon marks the spots of our calls and where you can make your call as well."

Links:

Vice Presidential Debate -- Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards

First Presidential Debate -- Presdient Bush and Sen. John Kerry

Unspun by Facts

2004-10-06T16:26:00.000-04:00

Republican loyalists, such as Fred Barnes for example, or group-think analysts such as Chris Matthews and his crew, are spinning (Barnes) or calling (Matthews et. al.) the V.P. debate as a win for Cheney. The argument is that Cheney effectively shifted focus away from Bush's troubled record back to Kerry's record.

Normally that spin might work, and Cheney did look like a winner in the immediate aftermath to a lot of people.

But any benefit from that perceived win is evaporating already, and Cheney's becoming a clear loser. And the reason he's becoming the perceived loser has nothing to do with -- as Matthews insinuated it would -- the liberal media not admitting that Cheney won. It has to do with all the facts Cheney got wrong. Yes, Edwards made some mistakes, but Cheney's omissions, obfuscations, and errors were huge. And they're being challenged not by liberal media sympathizers so much as they are by reports coming from administration appointees and Cheney's own past public pronouncements.

The revelation of those facts, and the analysis of how they contradict Cheney's claims, is, instead of shifting attention away from Bush's record, calling greater attention to it.

Relevant examples of fact checking and breaking news that is undoing Cheney:

Rewriting History
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

With virtually all of the administration’s original case for war in Iraq in
tatters, Vice President Dick Cheney provided shifting and sometimes misleading
arguments in last night’s debate with John Edwards about Saddam Hussein’s ties
to terrorists and his access to weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — Iraq now appears to have destroyed its
stockpiles of illicit weapons within months of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and
by the time of the American invasion in spring 2003, its capacity to produce
such weapons was continuing to erode, the top American inspector in Iraq said in
a report made public today.

U.S. Report Finds No Evidence of Iraq WMD
By KEN GUGGENHEIM

Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000
American lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported today that he found no
evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991. The
report also says Saddam Hussein's weapons capability weakened during a dozen
years of U.N. sanctions before the U.S. invasion last year.

Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration
officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war
began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, according
to the report by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.

Debate Tactic: Hoping They Don't Check Facts

2004-10-06T07:40:00.000-04:00

In last night's debate, Vice-President Vader denied John Edwards' claims that Halliburton was currently under investigation and had in the past, when Cheney was CEO, used end-runs around U.S. sanctions forbidding companies do business in Iran by farming the work out to an off-shore subsidiary.

To make his refutation seem more formidable, Cheney urged viewers to go to "FactCheck.com." Here's what FactCheck.org opens with in today's post-debate, FactCheck email:

Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts
Getting it wrong about combat pay, Halliburton, and FactCheck.org

10.06.2004

Summary
<>Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted "for the war" and "to commit the troops, to send them to war." He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry's proposals.
Edwards falsely claimed the administration "lobbied the Congress" to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.
http://factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=272

To be fair, I've posted the full summary, which is also critical of some of Edwards' remarks. But it was Cheney who wrongly invoked FactCheck. Of course, he gave the wrong URL too, but let's assume that was an innocent mistake, and that he meant to say FactCheck.org.

Clearly Cheney evoked the WWW site and drew on its nonpartisan reputation to shield himself from Edwards' accurate (on Halliburton) criticisms. Since FactCheck.org does not supply the defense Cheney claims, since they will not be refuting Edwards' claims, Cheney can only be hoping that viewers won't check FactCheck.org, but instead will take his call for viewers to check it as proof enough that Edwards is wrong. He's hoping, cynically, that simply by asserting that the site defends him and telling viewers to check it out, that viewers will assume the site defends him -- why else would he send them there? He's counting on voters to trust him.

Oh, and for kicks, see the automatic redirect that occurs when you go to FactCheck.com. How's that for poetic justice?

Update: 1:54 PM. Kevin Drum at Political Animal snippets a Wall Street Journal storythat says FactCheck.com is owned by a domain-parking group located in the Cayman Islands. They had had info about online degree programs at the URL, but the minute they heard Cheney's gaffe, they redirected the URL. The redirect also saved them some broadband fees because their site traffic jumped: " -- about 50,000 unique visitors in the first hour."

King Bubble-Boy George

2004-10-04T14:09:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Alter, writing in the Newsweek, looks at how living in a yesman-toady bubble has robbed Bush of the need to reflect on his decisions. Instead of reflection and the ability to logically defend his choices, Bush argued, in the debate, from bald assertion and a misplaced sense of divine right:

Oct. 11 issue -- No wonder President Bush lost round one in Miami: he got rusty living in the bubble. The president looked peeved in the debate cutaway shots not just because he's a competitive guy, but because John Kerry was leveling harsh criticism to his face—a new experience for him. Bush claims not to want yes men and women around him but he's had little experience in the past four years with anyone else. Not since last winter—when he handled Tim Russert poorly and botched a press conference by refusing to admit any mistakes—has Bush taken tough questions in public. Instead of responding to those failed outings with more practice, the Bush team took the most inaccessible president in 75 years and cut him off even further from reality. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6160550/site/newsweek/

"Global Test" Distortion Debunked

2004-10-04T11:37:00.000-04:00

Writing in Slate today, William Saletan takes on Bush's false and absurd accusation that Kerry will use a "global test" to get permission to act preemptively:

We've just reached the crux of the presidential campaign—the moment in which one candidate, purporting to expose the other's fatal flaw, has instead exposed his own.

Saletan goes on to make a more detailed analysis of Bush's distortion of Kerry's words than I did on Saturday. It's worth reading Saletan -- here's the link: http://slate.com/id/2107690/

Mixed Up Campaign Strategies

2004-10-03T09:31:00.002-04:00

Thomas Friedman's analysis from today's New York Times, on how Bush screwed up Iraq is devastatingly accurate:

But here is the cold, hard truth: This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever. What happened?

The Bush team got its doctrines mixed up: it applied the Powell Doctrine to the campaign against John Kerry - "overwhelming force" without mercy, based on a strategy of shock and awe at the Republican convention, followed by a propaganda blitz that got its message across in every possible way, including through distortion. . . . [A]las, while the Bush people applied the Powell Doctrine in the Midwest, they applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East. And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is: "Just enough troops to lose."

. . .

Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html?oref=login&th

And why did Bush turn this war into a campaign set piece? Why did ideology trump facts and strategy? Why? Because Bush lacks the courage to leave his political base. He doesn't trust the American people. He won't truly engage them and speak frankly to them; he speaks only from staged political set pieces and campaign ad propaganda. He even fakes press conferences. In a democracy he fakes press conferences. If Bush can't give a speech before adoring believers programmed to roar approval at every applause line, then he'd rather not speak at all.

In a democracy you have to lead by persuasion, not deriding those who bring bad news (the press, your opponent, your own intelligence agencies). Bush acts and thinks like he's entitled to the presidency and that because there's a war, that he's beyond questioning.

But he forgets what America did to the last King George who ruled over her. If recent polling trends are any indication; he's about to relearn some history.

Newsweek Calls Race Even

2004-10-02T19:35:00.000-04:00

Newsweek's latest poll shows the presidential race statistically even: Kerry 47, Bush 45 in a three -way race; Kerry 49, Bush 46 in a two-way race. Four weeks ago it was Bush 52, Kerry 41.

Kerry’s perceived [debate] victory may be attributed to the fact that, by a wide margin (62 percent to 26 percent), debate watchers felt the senator came across as more confident than the president. More than half (56 percent) also see Kerry has having a better command of the facts than Bush (37 percent). As a result, the challenger’s favorability ratings (52 percent, versus 40 percent unfavorable) are better than Bush’s, who at 49 percent (and 46 percent unfavorable), has dipped below the halfway mark for the first time since July. Kerry, typically characterized as aloof and out of touch by his opponents, came across as more personally likeable than Bush (47 percent to the president’s 41 percent).

Look for Bush's campaign rhetoric to get more shrilly negative.

Why the change? Bush and his campaign had been doing battle with a strawman, a caricature of Kerry. But Thursday night, the real John Kerry showed up, and laid out clearly and crisply the mistakes and mismanagement in Bush's execution of the war on terror and in Iraq. It's a criticism Bush hasn't had to directly respond to before. It frustrated and annoyed Bush so much that he lost his way and got inanely redundant, more than once asking for a 30 second extension and and having nothing to say but the same stump speech lines he'd been uttering all night.

And of course, when he wasn't speaking, he was facially impolding.

Bush Fails Global Credibility Test

2004-10-02T18:11:00.000-04:00

King George and his GOPinions, according to this report from Reuters, began assailing Kerry for using the phrase "global test" in the debate. Here's an excerpt from the Reuters' report that shows how Bush & co. plan to twist Kerry's words:

"When our country's in danger the president's job is not to take an international poll. The president's job is to defend America," Bush said on campaign stops in Mansfield and Columbus.
The Bush campaign has prepared a television advertisement to run soon that seizes on the Massachusetts senator's words in Thursday's debate that preemptive military action should be subject to a "global test."
"So we must seek permission from foreign governments before protecting America. A global test? So America will be forced to wait while threats gather?" the ad voiceover says.

Here are Kerry's words from the debate:

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.
No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have our own secretary of state who has had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the United Nations.

I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, "Here, let me show you the photos." And DeGaulle waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."
How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way? So what is at test here is the credibility of the United States of America and how we lead the world. And Iran and Iraq are now more dangerous -- Iran and North Korea are now more dangerous.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_0930.html

First, note that Kerry explicitely emphasized that we did not need anyone's permission to launch a preemptive strike. Just the opposite. It's a right the president holds and he will keep.
Kerry's argument is simple: we can't lead the war on terrorism unless we are credible.

The global test is nothing more or less than credibility. Powell went to the U.N. with evidence he's since had to retract and apologize for. Bush launched a preemptive war on bad evidence, a war that undermined America's credibility abroad. We can't lead the world if we're not credible. This does not mean asking for permission. It means simply making sure the American "people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

Bush failed the test on both these counts. One: He mislead the American people on the facts for the war, what the costs of war would be, and the adequacy of the plan for the war. He continues to mislead us on the conditions of that war.

Two: He declared to the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was connected to Al Qaeda. For those two primary reasons, he declared, we were going to war --not launching preemptive strikes on all those places where Rumsfeld claimed he knew WMD to be, by the way, but invading Iraq, killing or deposing Hussein and installing a democracy. The main reasons Bush gave were wrong. Bush failed the global credibility test.

And he continues to lose credibility at home both as he tries to white wash or deny bad news in Iraq, and as he tries to distort the arguments of John Kerry.

Bush may not read newspapers, but voters do. And 55 million of them saw the debate. They know what Kerry said. They know Bush is lying in his ads and stump speech. Bush, of course, doesn't know they know because he only campaigns in front of pre-screened loyalists.

Who's Having it Both Ways?

2004-10-02T14:06:00.000-04:00

Here's King George on the stump:

Bush noted that Kerry asserted that the war in Iraq is a mistake but then said that he did not believe U.S. troops in Iraq are "dying for a mistake," as the senator had said of the Vietnam War. "You can't have it both ways," Bush said. "You can't say it's a mistake and not a mistake.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1573-2004Oct1_2.html

Here's King George in the debate:

LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a, quote, "miscalculation," of what the conditions would be in post-war Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?

BUSH: No, what I said was that, because we achieved such a rapid victory, more of the Saddam loyalists were around. I mean, we thought we'd whip more of them going in. But because Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn't. [Answer goes on and talks about the Bush plan.]

LEHRER: Ninety seconds, Senator Kerry.

KERRY: What I think troubles a lot of people in our country is that the president has just sort of described one kind of mistake.

We see here that even when Bush acknowledges that things didn't go as he thought they would --a mistake in planning as Kerry notes in the start of his response-- he won't call that a miscalculation. But by definition when something doesn't go as you thought it would, that is in fact a miscalculation. Talk about a it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is moment: when things didn't go as I thought they would, that wasn't a miscalculation or mistake on my part. What then is it?

Here's another key part of the debate that gets at Bush's latest false campaign charge -- that Kerry is trying to have it both ways by saying the war's a mistake but not a mistake:

BUSH: Yes, I understand what it means to the commander in chief. And if I were to ever say, "This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place," the troops would wonder, how can I follow this guy?
You cannot lead the war on terror if you keep changing positions on the war on terror and say things like, "Well, this is just a grand diversion." It's not a grand diversion. This is an essential that we get it right.

And so, the plan he talks about simply won't work.

LEHRER: Senator Kerry, you have 30 seconds. You have 30 seconds, right. And then the president.

KERRY: Secretary of State Colin Powell told this president the Pottery Barn rule: If you break it, you fix it.

KERRY: Now, if you break it, you made a mistake. It's the wrong thing to do. But you own it. And then you've got to fix it and do something with it.

Now that's what we have to do. There's no inconsistency. Soldiers know over there that this isn't being done right yet. I'm going to get it right for those soldiers, because it's important to Israel, it's important to America, it's important to the world, it's important to the fight on terror.

But I have a plan to do it. He doesn't.

What the exchange shows is that Kerry is making a simple, consistent, one-way argument. Here it is by the numbers:

Bush made a mistake by not giving diplomacy and inspections more time.
Bush made a mistake by not focusing more time and troops in Afghanistan and cornering Bid Laden. Today, Afghanistan is primarily controlled by war lords funded by the opium trade.
Bush made a mistake by not planning adequately for the peace and security of post-war Iraq (see his own admission of such above).
Bush made a mistake by not adjusting to conditions in Iraq quickly enough.
However, to paraphrase what Colin Powell has said, we broke it, we own it, we must fix it.
I have a plan to fix the president's mistakes and to better insure that it can be corrected so that our troops sacrifices will not be in vain.

That's Kerry's argument. It's not one of having it both ways; it's one of correcting Bush's wrong way.

But Bush lives inside his King George cocoon, and so any challenge to his world view can't be met by defending his record, but misrepresenting and attacking his challengers. You look at Bush in tapes of that debate and you get the feeling he's thinking, "Why can't I just lock him up in a tower."

Note: Debate transcripts copied and pasted from the Washington Post at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_0930.html

King George Wilts Under Pressure

2004-10-02T13:46:00.000-04:00

E.J. Dionne, writing in today's Washington Post, nails it:

That was the other striking and disturbing aspect of the debate: Bush fares very badly when he is forcefully challenged. It makes you worry about his strength in circumstances he does not completely control. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the president has received a remarkably free ride. He rarely faces the media. He speaks only to partisan crowds; critics risk arrest if they show up. There is little evidence that Bush is challenged by his staff or his Cabinet. He is most comfortable when he sticks to talking points.

And this kind of coddling and angling for television soundbites the GOP calls leadership! Geesh! No wonder Bush's campaign centers entirely on tearing John Kerry apart.

Department of No Relation

2004-10-02T13:18:00.000-04:00

This person was not a relative:

Nude Sunbather Dies in Calif. Bar Fight
4:37 PM EDT,September 29, 2004
By Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO -- A man sunbathing nude on the terrace of a bar died after getting into a fight with a patron who complained.

Jay Carbone, 52, fell and hit his head during the scuffle at the Pendulum bar in the city's Castro District, police said. He died Saturday, two days later.

According to police, Carbone ordered drinks and disrobed. After about an hour, another man complained and asked Carbone to put his clothes on. Police said Carbone replied, "If you don't like it, get out."

No immediate charges were filed.

A Debate Inspite of Itself

2004-10-01T09:11:00.000-04:00

Perhaps because we're in a war that's divided the nation, not united it, perhaps because the choice between Bush and Kerry grows starker, even if some of their ideas on how to proceed in Iraq seem so similar, perhaps because the networks were not cowed by the 35 page agreement, and perhaps because both candidates viscerally distrust and dislike each other and when they're in the same place at the same time that can't be missed, perhaps for all that and more, last night's debate really felt like a debate.

It wasn't a debate in the classic sense; it was not the prime years of Firing Line with Kinsley and Buckley going toe-to-toe, but voters got a real sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both men, of their differences (in attitude and approach to goals, rather than the goals themselves) in how to proceed on the war in Iraq and the "war on terror." (I put that in quotes because it bugs me that they both keep saying war on terror: terror's a tactic, not an enemy. Who are the terrorists and why are they terrorists? Name them and their ideology please.)

Their Iraq plans boiled down to being pretty much the same: stabilize the country; get elections; train Iraqis to have their own police and army to keep the piece, and then leave a.s.a.p after that's done. They both failed to discuss what they would do in the increasingly possible (but not yet certain) event that any of those steps failed.

Their views on what strategies to take to achieve stability, elections and defense, what type of leadership it takes to get this done, and what the current state of affairs are differed radically and importantly.

To my mind, Bush has lost credibility on this issue. He can't bring himself to acknowledge that things are not getting better. He disregards the findings of his own intelligence estimates. But worse, he works hard to try to turn our attention away from those facts by insisting they aren't true or by dissing the people or sources who report them. Then he visibly resents it (see EMAIL OF THE DAY II: from Daily Dish) when he's called out on doing that.

And as this article from the Washington Post shows, Allawi "was coached and aided by the U.S. government, its allies and friends of the administration." So there is merit to Kerry's charge that Allawi's visit was as much politics as diplomacy; yet Bush accuses Kerry of denigrating an ally for making a charge that has some true. It's another example of Bush ignoring the facts and hiding the truth.

It's just too hard to trust Bush's judgment when he won't simply level with the American people. To put it more bluntly: he doesn't trust us; why should we trust him.

Kerry, for all his positions that get qualified and nuanced to the nth degree, came across as concise and direct this time. His goal in Iraq, at this point, is no different than Bush's. The difference is that Kerry will try more vigorously to get help from allies who aren't currently involved, and Bush will stay the current course (whatever that is; tactically they seem to be making it up as they go along, and they're going along one or two steps behind events, not in front of them).

After the speech, news pundits returned to a theme Bush tried to drive home (with middling success in my view because he often stumbled or looked lost uttering it): how are you going to get allies to help when you keep calling the war a mistake and distraction? Kerry never addressed that charge directly, asserting instead, as I recall (I'm not checking the transcript, which is intentional. I want to record what I came away with here.) only that he could and would sit down with our allies. He should have said that they aren't going to see the war as a mistake and distraction because Kerry said it was, they see it as that now because of how Bush proceeded in rushing to war and not managing it well. Only once did Kerry mention in passing a possible reason why they might help even if though they view the war as a mistake and distraction: that they have a stake in the outcome because for Arab countries Iraq is their neighbor and for European countries and Russia, Iraq is at their doorstep. But he didn't sketch that out or use it to blunt the question Bush asked more than once.

Still, even though he didn't make a case that convinced pundits that he could get allied help where Bush couldn't, I think it's important that Kerry will go back to that table while Bush won't. I also think Kerry made clear the distinction between working more vigorously with the world and taking orders from the world or seeking their approval. Bush tried to make it sound like anything less than doing what Bush is doing is compromising. It's not. It's so clear that it's not that when Bush talks that way I can't trust him or his judgment.

So the pundits may be right and the plan may not work, but that doesn't mean trying to get those countries to the table is not a legitimate strategy, a significantly important strategy. It's clear we're stretched too thin in Iraq and underprepared. It may in fact be possible to persuade other nations to do more. If not in terms of troops, then debt relief, training, construction (simply opening up contracts to others besides Halliburton will help on that score), and other kinds of aid to Iraq.

I also thought it important that Kerry at least mentioned the need to reach to Muslim nations and to find ways support them in an effort to tamp down the rise of Jihadist Muslims. It's a crucial --ultimately the crucial-- front of this war. It's the roots of Jihadism that must be pulled and you can't do that by force alone, especially force as Bush misapplies it and mismanages it. I wish Kerry had said more about this.

Of the two, I think John Kerry brings the right temperament to the table. Bush's inability to get beyond circular reasoning, his clinging to repetition of the same phrases "hard work," "can't waver," indicate to me that he isn't ready to think beyond where he's thought. He can't admit mistakes or grow in outlook.

But even more than that, I'm put off by Bush's insistence again and again that any questioning of him and this war disqualifies you to be president. Who does he think he is? King George? This theme of daring to question has been constant in this administration, from Fleisher after 9/11 warning that people should watch what they say, to Ashcroft likening to questioning him and his office to supporting terrorists, to Cheney and Bush in the past weeks calling any questioning of the war an affront to our troops and standing in the world and aid to terrorists because it sends "mixed messages."

What an insulting and despairing line of attack to take in a democracy! It's that kind of imperiousness that most makes me distrust Bush and his ability to lead us effectively. And all of this is ranting is summed up better over at Slate by William Saletan, so I'll quote him here to close:

But the greater shame belongs to the candidate who launched this war, refuses to admit his errors, and now holds the moral pride of his countrymen hostage, blackmailing them into shunning the truth. Tonight he scoffed, "If I were to ever say, 'This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place,' the troops would wonder, 'How can I follow this guy?' "
Exactly, Mr. President. If you were ever to give them the correct assessment, they would ask the correct question.
http://slate.com/id/2107517/

Bill O'Reilly's Factoring

2004-09-30T16:48:00.000-04:00

I don't watch a lot of Fox News, but I check in every once in a while to see what the GOP talking points and memes are. When I do watch, I admit to enjoying sometimes (and sometimes not), The O'Reilly Factor, which seems like a parody of itself to me because O'Reilly's schtick is obvious and over-the-top and because he wears his insecurities on his sleeve.

Anyway, so I'm watching, and heard on 9/16/04, Bill say the following:

As far as Dan Rather (search) is concerned, 38 percent say he is biased in favor of John Kerry. And 38 percent say he's fair and balanced.

Even the ultra liberal editorial page of The Los Angeles Times says this. "CBS News was had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion."

But as usual, The Times blames it all on those dreaded conservatives. "As CBS floundered, conservatives cited this episode as an egregious case of liberal media bias."

Well, come on, L.A. Times. It isn't only conservatives who are concerned about the validity of the story. It should be every clear thinking American. CBS News is a powerful voice in America and millions rely on it for their information. Any kind of mistake regarding the president of the United States must be fully explained.

Sure, some conservatives are hammering Mr. Rather, but the story is much bigger than ideological passion. The national press must be held accountable for its reportage. We have a responsibility to see that everything is above board and transparent. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,132602,00.html Note: the Fox site has this dated 9/17, but it's an error on their part; they have two of O'Reilly's Talking Points Memos dated for 9/17).

Now here's an excerpt from the L.A. Times editorial O'Reilly was referring to:

As The Times reported, conservative bloggers detected glaring inconsistencies, such as a Microsoft Word type style. The alleged memos from Killian also contain stylistic problems, such as the fact that Killian signs his rank not in accordance with National Guard procedure.

In addition, Killian's signature on a memo dated May 4, 1972, is different from one on file in the
Pentagon. The part of a memo supposedly written by Killian that refers to pressure from an earlier Bush commander to help out the young fighter pilot is highly dubious. The 1973 memo is dated almost a year and a half after the commander had resigned from active duty.

As CBS floundered, conservatives cited this episode as an egregious case of liberal media bias, while some liberals indulged in the comforting notion that Karl Rove, who is responsible for everything bad that happens everywhere, must be behind the documents.

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country.

It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-cbs15sep15,1,7747016.story

The L.A. Times wasn't "blaming" conservatives for anything. It was blaming CBS for the shoddy journalism it practiced. The editorial merely pointed out that:

conservative bloggers were the first to question the documents and
that some conservatives did see the Killian documents fiasco as a case of liberal media bias while at the same time some liberals thought it was Karl Rove who set it up.

Now O'Reilly might have challenged the L.A. Times for tacitly dismissing the bias argument by linking it with Rove conspiracy theory, but he didn't do that. He claimed the L.A. Times was blaming conservatives for CBS troubles. That's clearly not the case.

I don't know whether O'Reilly is deliberately dishonest or blinded by his own schtick, but the fact is that he uttered out of context a single sentence from of the L.A. Times editorial, and then spun it to fit one of his favorite memes: the liberal elite media is out to get President Bush.

Well, duh! Of course liberally led editorial pages generally run arguments critical of Bush, just as conservatively led pages run arguments critical of Kerry. The point is, that here, the L.A. Times was agreeing with the general assessment that CBS News blew it, was crediting --not blaming-- conservative bloggers for questioning the documents authenticity, and pointed out that now both sides have their consparicy theories about why and how the documents were used by CBS.

But that's not how things play out in the no spin zone, where sometimes O'Reilly spins so you so fast and often you get whiplash.

Internet Use Up; Television Use Down

2004-09-29T09:43:00.000-04:00

The University of Southern California Annenberg School's Center for the Digital Future released their fourth annual report on the Internet and its impact.

Among the findings from Year Four of the Digital Future Project:
• Internet access has risen to its highest level ever. About three-quarters of Americans now go online.
• The number of hours spent online continues to increase, rising to an average of 12.5 hours per week – the highest level in the study thus far.
• Although the Internet has become the most important source of current information for users, the initially high level of credibility of information on the Internet began to drop in the third year of the study, and declined even further in Year Four.
• The number of users who believe that only about half of the information on the Internet is accurate and reliable is growing and has now passed 40 percent of users for the first time.
• The study showed that most users trust information on the websites they visit regularly, and on pages created by established media and the government.
• Information pages posted by individuals have the lowest credibility: only 9.5 percent of users say information on those sites is reliable and accurate.
• Television viewing continues to decline among Internet users, raising the question: “What will happen as a nation that once spent an extremely large portion of time in a passive activity (watching television) transfers increasingly large portions of that time to an interactive activity (the Internet)?”

The Digital Future Project compares findings from all four years of the study, looking at five major areas: who is online and who is not, media use and trust, consumer behavior, communication patterns, and social and psychological effects. (Quoted from Press Release Summary/Report on Ten Trends)

The CDF also identified ten trends they see emerging from this and their prior reports, many of which, in the summary linked to above, offer elaborations on the list above from the 4th year study by drawing on prior studies as well. I'm interested in three items from the list above and the list of ten.

More people are going online and spending more time online, especially as they increasingly move from dial up to broadband. As people move online and become Internet regulars, the Internet becomes a more important source of information, often the primary source.
People are properly more skeptical of the information they find online as they spend more time online. That is, they become more savvy. However, once they come to trust a source or site, they return to it, whether a government source, an established news source, a particular blog, community, and so on.
As people spend more time online, they spend less time watching television, including television news.

I think this election cycle is a benchmark moment in these trends. We're seeing quite clearly the confluence of these trends, both its benefits and risks. For a recent example of course, look no further than bloggers who assailed the authenticity of the Killian memos used in the 60 Minutes report. The Dean campaign's, and currently Kerry and Bush campaigns', use of blogs as fundraising tools has proven pivotal.

Or more impressively to me, and not campaign related, are the bicyclists who started posting streaming video demos of how they could pick their bike's U-shaped Kryptonite locks. It caused a consumer backlash and pr fiasco that forced the company to offer a redesigned locked to its customers (though that may have come too late). But the lock owners, using cyclist message boards and WWW sites, drove this story before any consumer reporter managed to do a report on the local, let alone national, news.

But back to the bloggers. Bloggers, mostly, in this case, conservative bloggers skeptical of the so-called "elite media," drove the Killian memo story, with assist from conservative traditional media such as Fox News and The National Review Online. Even so, it was an impressive event that forced traditional media to look more quickly into the documents authenticity than they may otherwise have. It helped set the news coverage agenda. (Note: This kind of thing cuts both ways, politically/culturally: a while back mostly liberal bloggers called out Trent Lott's remarks on Strom Thurmond, and got that into mainstream press.)

The bic-lock story is even more impressive because it wasn't so much second hand press criticism, but actual reporting and demonstrating key information factually.

Both stories benefited from broadband --the streaming video and graphics images showing the picked lock; the swapping of PDF's of the Killian documents and word files mimicing the fonts in those documents via blogs in the Killian story.

But broadband's not a key just because it allows for richer and more interactive content. It's also a key because it lets you always be on the Internet if you want to be, without tying up a phone line. Those of us who work this way know the benefits: turn on the computer and you're on the Internet. You can check your email on a whim. Browse your favorite WWW sites between phone calls or meetings. Read an article online, hear a news report on the radio or see it on television, and blog a response while you're reading, listening, or watching. Read other bloggers, and respond to them. Or respond in email lists or discussion boards and other community spaces. People are making their own protest posters and campaign art. They're making their own Internet based position ads, satires, and commentary in Flash and other digital video formats.

The technologies of big media sit increasingly on everyone's desktops (yes, there's still a digital divide, but it's closing, if slowly). What's also important is that the skepticism people learn to bring to Internet sources begins to bleed and to applied to more traditional sources, including of course newspapers, magazines, and television news and infotainment. So the authority of all sources is being questioned.

The risk is that the skepticism and questioning becomes kneejerk and based on dogma (see Wayne Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent for what that entails), where you distrust a source not for what they say, but for who or what entitity is saying it and fail to move beyond that distrust to give the source a fair hearing. This leads to paranoia.

What's needed is a healthy skepticism, one that allows, at least, for the possibility that sources you don't agree with and don't fully trust at face value might none-the-less have good points to make, good and accurate stories to tell from time to time.

As a teacher, I wonder often how best to bring students to healthy skeptics and not just paranoid skeptics.

Research and Order in WPA Land

2004-09-28T13:24:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Jeff Rice's "Yellow Dog" blog entries WPA II and WPA. Just a few thoughts in response, in no particular order.

By way of summary: WPA stands for Writing Program Administrator, and in the first post, Works Progress Administration. In WPA, Rice describes how he links these meanings using Greg Ulmer's idea of "puncept" to question composition studies "dependence on "order" as a governing principle of methodology and pedagogy." In WPA II, he elaborates, in response to the comments others made on the WPA post.

In WPA II, he writes:

I'm reading Nancy Sommers' article in the latest CCC, "The Novice as Expert," and here we find a nice example of the WPA instituting order. Like Andrea Lunsford's St. Martin's Handbook, Sommers justifies her work and research as WPA at Harvard with student comments collected in an evaluation process. All of the comments are supportive and enthusiastic.

I don't have the Sommers' essay at hand, but I am familiar with Andrea Lunsford's St. Martin's Handbook. I currently work for Bedford/St. Martin's, the company which publishes the book, and I worked on The St. Martin's Handbook even before coming to work full-time for Bedford/St. Martin's.

No where does Andrea Lunsford justify the research that went into the St. Martin's Handbook "with student comments collected in an evaluation process." Lunsford and Bob Connors, when they began their work for the St. Martin's Handbook, did research on the frequency of formal error in student writing, drawing a large and extensive national sample of 30,000 student essays. (That research was published in their Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research essay). In subsequent editions of the book, they returned to those essays and asked different questions. They also surveyed instructors and students prior to the 4th edition, asking about how the Internet, computers, and other digital technologies were shaping how students write. That was a national survey of 2,500 students and 53 teachers. The current (5th) edition of the book was informed, in part, by Lunsford's interviews with first year student writers at Stanford University, where Lunsford teaches.

But those were formal research interviews, not course evaluations.

That said, it seems to me that there are two key issues raised by Rice.

What is the role of order and why does a Writing Program Adminstrator seek it?
Can applied 'puncepting' (if that's the way to phrase it) be a form of invention?

One of the main connections between the two questions --order and invention-- is found for Rice in textbooks:

The usefulness of these kinds of writings, I believe, is the exploration of digital invention (not codification of..) whose focus does not mirror the ways invention is typically taught in a composition textbook or classroom. (WPA)

Or to put it even more explicitely, in a comment on this post, Rice writes:

"Where do you find the common expressions valuing order in writing programs?"

Textbooks, textbooks, textbooks. (WPA, see comments)

I think this is a fair conclusion. Textbooks do provide some order and structure to a composition course, and when adopted program wide with a common syllabus, to a program. But what I've learned from working at a textbook publisher for the past four plus years is that order found in textbooks emerges from the field, from what and where people are teaching and from how instructors see the role and purpose of the writing they teach.

And I think this is the heart of Rice's critique: the role is traditional, or what Rice, in his examination of Sommers' essay, calls cliche'. First year college writing programs and courses and curriculum are gateway --not gatekeeping-- entities. Yes, if students don't do well in a FYC, that might contribute to them quitting college, or in some cases, if they don't repeat the course to reach a certain grade, being forced to leave college. But the fact is, most WPA's and most writing instructors see themselves as there to help students succeed in college. And yes, that success often means, supporting either the given order and idealized form of order as enlightened participation in civil discourse.

This emphasis is expressed in many forms -- course descriptions premised on "college writing," or assignments that emphasize "research skills," "critical thinking," "analyses," and "academic conventions." The arugment is that through these skills, students will learn to question authority, to critique order, to seek alternatives, to invent new ideas and persuade others of their values in a civil and orderly way. Textbooks are in fact part of this system, and do express the values and views of a discipline.

Textbooks come from ideas about teaching, and those come from one of two places generally: An instructor who has a teaching idea that he or she thinks would work in a book, an idea, usually that other books do not address at all nor in quite the right way. This idea is presented to a publisher for consideration. The other way a book gets done is when an editor hears an idea or approach or issue arise in the field that they think a textbok could help address.

And editors are avid followers, indeed members of, the field they edit and develop books in: they read journals; attend sessions at conferences; talk to professors about teaching and other professional issues when they travel to campus; participate in discipline email lists and blogs; and when they can, talk to students. So when an editor has an idea, they'll sometimes get in touch with those instructors and scholars whose work they've come to know and they'll invite them to work on a book of some kind.

I wouldn't be surprised if someday an editor doesn't ask Rice about using puncepts in a writing book, or else seeing that idea picked up and put into a first year composition textbook. It's a good idea; it would be fun to do and fun to teach.

Which brings me back to puncepts and order. If puncepts are an example of a good way to create new topoitic paths of invention, and if those paths somehow disrupt the current order, that's only going to be temporary. Once an idea begins to circulate, whether through a textbook, or lore, or professional workshops, blogs, conferences, email lists, or other means, it becomes absorbed, and goes from revolutionary to merely evolutionary before settling down into routine. In other words, it becomes codified.

What gets lost in the transition from new to codified is the excitement of something being risky, rare, and well, a bit disorderly because it's an experiment. What is also often lost are the intellectual excitements that made an idea new. We see it in terms that were once liberating to the field, and needed to used with some explanation of what they meant, like "writing process," and that are now taken for granted and attached to the original insights and research that lead to the term by a kind of collective shorthand. Jenny Edbauer, I think, is getting at this process of loss, as order inevitably finds a way to codify (and commodify) what was once unodered. Her post to WPA-L on rhetorical analysis essays turning up in paper mills is a good example.

What's useful too, in this context, are two things. Ideas like those Rice pursues which attempt to bring something new to the mix, in this case, puncept as a way of invention, and work like Edbauer's, where if I'm reading right, she's trying to, in her dissertation, make the familiar, rhetorical analysis, strange again by rediscovering and recalling forth the circumstances that made the approach exciting and unpaper millable. In her case the move to do this is to bring back the complexity at the root of such assignments and to remind instructors that the complexity is required. These teaching things --by which I mean not just rhetorical analysis assignments or a given invention strategy-- to work well, can't be rote or routine. They need to be invented anew each time.

The question I always wonder about is can you make and sustain huge changes, upset a given order, in an institutional context without going about it very deliberatively and patiently and politically astutely. In other words, in an orderly fashion. When departments undergo radical revisions in direction without building consensus and support, they're often disbanded, abandoned, or the WPA is replaced and reputiated. Those failures are often about a failed revolutionary approach, a failed cult of personality at the top (Not always of course; we've seen great programs gutted for no logical reason, which leads to the cause in the final clause.) , or the perception from higher powers that be than the WPA that what the program is doing isn't worth pursuing. And what happens when programs implode, or get taken over? What happens to those people, those faculty and students? Where do they go and what do they become?

So I don't see how a WPA can proceed without some order. Or how a textbook can be orderless, even if it were purely hypertextual in every sense of that word. But it should be possible to create a model where there was room for recreation and reinvention.

I doubt, though, that within an institution as conservative in purpose and goals as a college, you're going to have any truely revolutionarily unordered approaches. Even a Montesorri college, where there such a thing, would not be unordered. If only because there's a theory to give it shape and order.

Bloggers Crow

2004-09-22T10:07:00.000-04:00

Bloggers --especially conservative bloggers-- are crowing that blogs, in questioning the authenticity of the Killian memos have brought down, have even killed, the power of old media/big media. Andrew Sullivan's written a piece on this for Time Magazine.

I was going to write that bloggers should temper that crow with some humble pie, that the blogosphere would be only one, big self referencing pool of opiners were it not for the fact that broadcast outlets, often starting with talk radio and cablenews, give their views air time.

Except that this would be wrong. I think broadcast attention helps, but really what we're seeing is not so much the death of big media like CBS, NBC, and ABC, as we are the diffusion of media outlets and means. That is, certain well trod blogs are part of a new universe of more diverse news, or unewsiverse. The shift isn't so much about blogs as it is about fiber optics. The growth of cable television and the growth of the Internet happened pretty much at the same time.

We're at the point where slightly more than half of Internet users now have broadband access. As that shift continues, we'll see even more growth in people turning to the Internet for news, and a greater merging of the role that blogundrity, analysis, and on rare occasions actual reporting start to play. The reporting will be, most likely, of the kind that we see now in traditional news when reporters interview eye witnesses, first on the scene responders or air "amatuer video" of crashes, beatings, hurricanes, tornadoes and so on.

Often those reports are fairly unfiltered and those interviewed aren't given column inches or air time for any other reason that represent immediacy to the event. News reporters aren't so much filters as conduits, with perhaps the reporter offering more context.

In the new media landscape, the context will be linking and cross referencing. A videoblogger will upload his or her video of some event, an amatuer photographer will get a picture the wire services didn't, and they might give their impressions of what they saw in a supporting text entry or audionote. Other bloggers will notice and opine. Broadcasters will go to the WWW site for the video, or report on the bloggers analysis.

And so things will merge even further.

What's at risk is the slow and patient vetting of news, the investigatory story, the deep and patient reporting that takes time and money and sustained access.

Update: This piece by the Philadelphia Inquirer nails it (link found via Romensko's MediaNews) . Here's a key quote:

Writers for Web logs - or blogs - began the questioning of the bogus documents. Bravo to the "blogosphere" for that. But other "old media" such as newspapers nailed the story down and drove it home.

The blogosphere is citizen dialogue in action, which is great. If bloggers' watchdogging makes journalists more careful, that's also great. The real lesson for the mainstream media is a very old one: Get the facts right. Speed without accuracy is no good.

CBS News's Sad Demise

2004-09-16T10:36:00.000-04:00

Dan Rather has finally admitted that the documents used in the story are problematic, but insists that the story is true and the sentiments expressed in the memos, even if they are faked, are accurate. Of course that's a useless argument.

The coverage of the memo scandal done by the Washington Post has been fascinating and revealing. I still can't believe that CBS went to air on this story only having photocopies of the documents and not the originals. Any authentication done of photocopies is automatically inconclusive at best. And for a story like this, which relied for so much of its oomph on the documents, to rely on various authenticators looking only a pieces of the whole -- one person for a signature, another to confirm the font type was technically doable in 1972 -- is just beyond careless.

And then! And then to get Burkett to cooperate on her story, Mary Mapes calls Joe Lockhart and asks him to talk Burkett because Burkett hasn't been able to get through to anyone in the Kerry campaign. How stupid is that, asking a candidate's opposing campaign to help you on a story that will hurt that candidate? Even if the documents hadn't been fake and were inconlcusively genuine, that appearance of collusion drastically undermines the reporting. It opened both the Kerry campaign and CBS News to charges of orchestrating an attack on Bush. Dumb. Just dumb.

Dan Rather should fire Mary Mapes and then resign. If that doesn't happen, CBS should fire them both.

Bush Still Shirked Guard Duty

2004-09-13T01:42:00.000-04:00

Unless and until the original documents (not just the "original copy" used by CBS news, but the actual documents themselves) cited by CBS News find their way to forensics specialists for testing, enough questions have been raised, recantations issued by people cited in CBS's story, and denunciations from Killian's family made to forever cast the authenticity of the Killian documents in doubt.

But those documents really don't matter in the larger view of Bush's National Guard Service. Even without the CBS documents, it's clear that Bush was indifferent at best to his guard duty and skipped out on some of it. Both the Boston Globe, on Sept. 8, and now U.S. News cover how he did that.

Andrew Sullivan points to the U.S. News story as well, and writes:

Does this matter? Not to me. I always assumed that Bush got cushy treatment his entire life in everything he did from military service to business to politics. I don't see how that really affects the important question of whether he'd be a the best pick to lead the country for the next four years.

If it were all so simple as the folly of youth and just a cosseted rich kid getting out of serving in a war he said was worth fighting, that would be one thing, and it wouldn't matter to me either. And really, it's not important on one level; the whole what-they-did-in-Vietnam-yin-yang really doesn't address the issues that need discussing today.

But on one level, while the issue won't matter to most voters, Bush's past service as a folly of a rich youth and just a thing of the past is not that simple.

It's of a pattern. It's Bush starting something (Guard duty as pilot), and not following through (shirking his physical and showing up for duty when it was convenient for him, like when he needed his teeth cleaned). Of saying one thing --that the war in Vietnam was a good war, but doing another -- taking advantage of family connections to get a leg up into pilot training in TANG, a path that kept him out of the draft. So he enjoyed, as did so many other rich kids, the advantages of his family's wealth and his father's power to skirt the war. And he partied on, reportedly until he was 40.

Bush had two conversions that we know about. The first, when he was 40. He turned from drugs and drinking to Christ. Now I'm not a religious conservative, but I respect --and am glad for him-- that he found a religious grounding that helped him sober up and find some peace. His next conversion was on 9/11, when after the shock of the attacks, Bush found a cause for his Presidency -- to fight the war on terror. So a day later Bush stood on the rubble, braced by fireman, and rallied the nation.

But his religious conversion didn't change the fact that Bush still benefited from his life of privilege and his father's position --instead of skirting through life in a frat boy haze of drugs and liquor, he sobered up, and skirted through the business and political worlds on the strength of his father's connections. Bush at 40 was blessed not only with God's grace, but also the grace of being able to succeed in business without really trying. Because of who his father was, things came his way.

And that's the problem at the heart of Bush as President. He believes, in my view, that just by asking for something to be some way, or believing it should be so, it will be so. And just as in his Guard days, he's not above shirking the details.

So he wasn't, in fact, honest with the American people about the war. There was no need to rush to war in March 2003; we could have given inspections more time as the UN wanted. Had he done that, we might have determined, finally and more accurately, that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Or had that not been discovered and had the war proceeded, we might have been able to form a partnership of nations like that of the first war with Iraq. In that war, Bush's father built a true coalition that chipped in for the cost of the war. Most emblematic of that is that in Iraq 1, we paid 5% of the cost of the war, and the other nations in the coalition chipped in 95% of the costs. In Iraq 2, that's reversed.

To pay for this war, Bush cut taxes, and underestimated the costs of the war. All of that was part of his continuing failure to level with the American people. The war would be easy, we'd be welcomed with roses by the Iraqi people, Saddam would fall, and democracy would bloom, as if by magic. No need for anyone in America to sacrifice, other than National Guard and Armed Forces troops, their families and friends. The rest of us could go on our merry way, and those with Haliburton stock or in the richest 2 percent would just go along a lot more merrily.

Meanwhile, it was Al Qaeda, protected by the Taliban in Afghanistan that attacked on us on 9/11. So in addition to hyping Iraq's WMD's, Bush and his team alleged a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, implying that Iraq would arm Al Qaeda with chemical, biological, or even radioactive (dirty bomb) weapons. But that turned out not to be a real threat either.

So Iraq, as Thomas Friedman noted often from December 2002 to the start of the war, was a war not of necessity, but of choice. Bush's principle was preemption, and he argued that he had no choice. He wanted that to be true, but it wasn't. And now he won't admit that he was wrong in the facts. He still insists that the war in Iraq was necessary and he wouldn't have behaved differently had he known the facts he has now.

He wanted the war to be easy, and after Baghdad fell, he donned a jump suit again for the first time since he walked away from his pilot duties in the Guard, posed in uniform, and declared "Mission Accomplished!" Saddam was in a hole, the war was over, and all we needed to do was hang on until the Iraqi oil flowed to recover our expenses and to get a pro American democracy up and running before too long. Well, it's been too long and too many have died for that rosey picture that Bush sold to ever pan out, but Bush still insists things are going well.

If the facts don't fit, just don't admit.

He went into the war with little preparation, brought our country into unprepared. He didn't prepare a realistic plan for the peace and he didn't prepare the American people for the true costs of this war, both in dollars, and in the fierceness of resistance. Since the invasion, Iraq has become less secure, not more; since the invasion, Iraq has become a recruiting and training ground for Al Qaeda, where it wasn't before. Meanwhile, Afghanistan lingers on the edge of implosion, with its government really unable to step out of Kabul, Al Qaeda and the Taliban snipping at the edges of the Pakistan border, and warlords running opium and the rest of the country.

Bush's father's friends, as they so often had in the past, tried to pave an easy path for W., assuring him the war would be easy, just as Bush's life in the guard had been a cakewalk and his life in business had been a series of cozy arrangements.

But war isn't like that.

Now when things go bad, Bush likes to pretend they're going swell, or he likes to forget what he set out to do. So at the RNC commercial in NYC, he touted the war on terror's success, hoping people would forget that in a moment of unscripted candor just a few days before, he admitted the war couldn't be won. And remember Osama Bin Laden, whom we were to get dead or alive? We couldn't do that as glibbly as Bush smaggered (smaggered -- said in that smirk of his that he passes off as swagger). So because it isn't easy, it's a back burner affair, not a priority, and we never hear the name Osama Bin Laden from Bush any more. We're not a war with Al Qaeda, or Islamic Jihadists inspired by the kind of twisted view Bin Laden espoused. No, we're at war with terror, a tactic.

And where are our priorities on this war? In Iraq our priority is reduced to saving face, to finding a tenable solution, but for every step forward -- the creation of an interim Iraqi governing council to give the appearance of sovereignty, there are greater setbacks: Collin Powell admitted yesterday that the elections slated for January are unlikely, and U.S. Armed forces now stay out of certain areas of Iraq. And the insurgency grows. It's not another Vietnam say analysts, it's more like Lebanon after Israel invaded that country and where they remained for 18 years.

But unfortunately, Bush is dealing with this war they same way he dealt with Vietnam. He's trying to make it easy, or to find the easy way out, or putting a the best spin on its shortcomings, and asking us not to pay too much attention to his record.

That's not leadership. That's delusion.

Typewriter Science

2004-09-11T09:33:00.000-04:00

Update: Below, where I reposted Slate Fray messages, I say in two places that independent experts should examine CBS's original Killian documents. However, CBS doesn't have the originals, according to this excerpt from the end of an LA Times story on the controversy:

Howard Rile of Long Beach, former president of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, cautioned against feverish vetting of the memos without seeing the originals and other documents produced at the same time and place.

That could be difficult because CBS says it does not have the original memos.

"We shouldn't have to be be doing this over the Internet," Rile said. "This sounds like a case that could be resolved very quickly if you get the evidence and examine it; if you get the original."

CBS has made the same mistake so many blogs and conservative radio talkers are making -- coming to conclusions about a document's authenticity (and it's only one document of the four that that is being challenged) without looking at the original. With the original, one could assess the age of the paper, perhaps test the ink, see the way the letters are embedded into the paper by the typewriter's keys, and so on.

Where is the original? Without it, we're stuck in a rounds of circumstantial analysis and counterarguments, which no doubt is part of the point with Bush backers. Because even without the one memo, there are enough facts to clearly show that George Bush got into the guard because of his connections, and that as time went on, he became increasingly indifferent to his obligation. He was a spoiled and aimless rich kid from one of the most politically connected families in the country.

I just read a summary of the Killian memo debate in a Slate piece by Josh Levin. I've posted a response to that article, followed by a reply to a Fray poster who responded to my response. Here are those posts, edited a bit for clarity (changes appear in italics), with links to the originals I put up in Slate.

Subject: Further Updates: Or More You Need to Know
From: NC45
Date: Sep 11 2004 5:23AM

From The Boston Globe, "Authenticity backed on Bush documents" By Francie Latour and Michael Rezendes, September 11, 2004:

After CBS News on Wednesday trumpeted newly discovered documents that referred to a 1973 effort to "sugar coat" President Bush's service record in the Texas Air National Guard, the network almost immediately faced charges that the documents were forgeries, with typography that was not available on typewriters used at that time.

But specialists interviewed by the Globe and some other news organizations say the specialized characters used in the documents, and the type format, were common to electric typewriters in wide use in the early 1970s, when Bush was a first lieutenant.

Read More at:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/11/authenticity_backed_on_bush_documents/

See also, Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603

Unless and until an expert examines the original documents in CBS's possession, and not PDF's downloaded from the Net, the forgery claims have little basis in anything but speculation. And many of the bloggers who jump-started the discussion are getting their facts wrong (for example claiming that no typewriter existed at that time that could create superscripted "th" of the type found in the documents), and are making observations that are beside the point (They can replicate the layout and font with Microsoft Word. Well yeah, that's what a font is supposed to do, look the same whenever it's used. So what's the point?)

Slate Fray Link: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=12110196

Reply to a Fray Post by gadfly19

Subject: RE: Further Updates: Or More You Need to Know
From: NC45
Date: Sep 11 2004 6:30AM

I agree with your observations, generally. A few thoughts:

I think the best way, perhaps the only way, to help settle it --there will be groups that are never satified-- is for CBS News to share the original documents with independent examiners.

As for Killian's family, I feel for them. It's got to be painful to have someone you love, who has beed deceased for so long, cast posthumously into this debate about events from over 30 years ago. That said, it's very possible that they're wrong. Or put another way, as much as you love and know a person, there's often a lot you don't know about their day-to-day lives at work. I know my wife, for example, whom I'm very close to, doesn't know everything I do at work, what I write, and so on. I know the family claims aren't that simple, but I can see where it's possible that they might believe to the point of absolute certitude that the Killian wouldn't have held or written the views in the documents, but they could well be wrong.

And yet, for all that, here's where I agree with you most: Even if the documents are proved indisputedly genuine or undoubtedly forged, we're still not left with a serious discussion of current issues. I'd rather have that discussion than this campaign coverage reduced to a bad episode of Cold Case.

Can some reporter, any reporter, just ask each candidate this: You've said we're at war with terror, but terror is a tactic. And to say we're at war with terrorists, people who commit terror acts, is circular. Who are these people? What is their ideology? And how do we successfully end this war with them?

Slate Fray Link: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=12110478

Long Now

2004-09-11T07:30:00.000-04:00

On the Internet, Sterling is amassing a roll call of their once-honored personal computer names: Altair, Amiga, Amstrad, Apples I, II and III, Apple Lisa, Apricot, Atari, AT&T, Commodore, CompuPro, Cromemco, Epson, Franklin, Grid, IBM PCjr, IBM XT, Kaypro, Morrow, NEC PC-8081, NorthStar, Osborne, Sinclair, Tandy, Wang, Xerox Star, Yamaha CX5M. Buried with them are whole clans of programming languages, operating systems, storage formats, and countless rotting applications in an infinite variety of mutually incompatible versions. Everything written on them was written on the wind, leaving not a trace.

Stewart Brand, from the Purpose Statement for Long Now's Library Project.

Long Now is a foundation that was established in 01966; the group adds a zero to the front of the establishment year and to all contemporary dates because its goal is to think, and plan, for into the future: 10,000 years. The zero leaves room for the future, reminds us of it, and asks us to think about it and to work towards it. Long Now seeks to counter Here Now thinking, short term thinking. In thinking long, they've established two main projects; one that has to do with preservation (The Library Project), another that has to with planning for the future (The Clock Project).

James Wolcott referenced Long Now in a post about the current presidential election, which is mired on the documentary minutiae of where Bush and Kerry were 30 years ago, and whether what they were doing matches precisely to what their biographies claim. Nor are the campaigns themselves talking much about the future. The future, for both campaigns is now. Both candidates, between swipes at one another, profess to be candidates of optomism who bring hope for the future, but neither seems willing to discuss the future, or to plan for what will sustain us in the future. But really campaigns are essentially cynical operations. They lofty rhetoric is a patina stretched thin over a relentlessy negative message about the opposition.

So like Wolcott, I found the visit to Long Now to be refreshing, especially for me, the library project. How do we record and preserve the works and records of our day so that the future can learn from both our triumphs and mistakes? And the question for Long Now isn't philosophical, it's also practical. They're not just imagining a library that will be there in 10,000 years from now, they're working to build it. Now that's optomism.

We Can't Trust Iraq's Future or Or Our Own Security to Bush

2004-09-09T01:58:00.000-04:00

Looking through new reports and analyses on what went wrong and is failing still to go right in Iraq is monumentally dispiriting (see a short list below). Bush's team failed to adequately plan for the peace; they failed to recognize that toppling Saddam was not "mission accomplished," but only "mission begun." They failed to dispense allotted aid dollars. Bush forgot at one point to ask for monies needed for Afghanistan, which is still a country ruled by war lords, not a democracy. Bush failed to reckon with the details. Bush failed to use patience and judgment with the UN and our NATO allies.

George Bush did not lead us into war in any true sense of "leadership." He didn't trust the American people with the hard truths about going to war. He sugar coated the costs. This was a war of choice, not of necessity. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, in a series of columns from December 2002 to March 2003 noted Bush's failure to level with the public on why this was a war of choice and what the true costs would be would come back to haunt him (and us), and it has. Bush didn't lead, he mislead, on Iraq, and in the process lost site of the work to be done in Afghanistan.

No Leadership. Bush can't even name the enemy accurately. Terror is a tactic, not an entity. We're at war with a Radical Islamic Jihadists. Not with Islam, not with Muslims, not with terror. We haven't defeated the Taliban or silenced Al Qaeda so much as we've inspired Jihadists. Even Rumsfeld now admits that we haven't done enough via diplomacy and other forms of outreach to effect and alter the roots of Jihadism. And why haven't we done this? Because Bush posits that diplomacy is "either your with us or against us." He leaves no room for diplomacy.

Bush couldn't give an honest reason on why we should go into Iraq. He didn't articulate a vision of converting Iraq into an oasis of democracy, except as an afterthought when we he was warning us about the immediate danger Saddam posed. Remember, the Bush doctrine wasn't one of liberating oppressed peoples, but one of striking enemies preemptively. We went to Iraq to preempt an imminent threat that turns out not to have been capable of any of the imminent scenarios Bush's team painted in the lead up to war.

Bush is a miserable Commander-in-Chief. When you strip away the folksy lines, the swagger, the wanted "dead or alive" rhetoric, you get a man of privilege who was given whatever he wanted, positioned to succeed in life without really trying.

Bush seems to want to run the war the same way he's lived his life, without thinking too much on the details or working too hard. His expectation seems to be that what he wants will somehow simply happen because he's entitled, and by extension, America's entitled. And it's failing America, it's failing our soldiers in the field who are dying because of his incompetence, and it's failing Iraq.

"What Went Wrong in Iraq" by Larry Diamond in Foreign Affairs

Spencer Ackerman's Iraq'd Blog, post from 9/8/04

"US Troops Death Rate Rising in Iraq," by Thomas Ricks in the 9/8/04 Washington Post

The Convention Mess

2004-09-03T10:32:00.000-04:00

I just read a couple of blog entries on the RNC by William Saletan over at Slate: one on Bush's speech; the other on Miller's. And I read Andrew Sullivan's take on the same speeches (Bush; Miller) over at his blog, along with Sullivan's Sunday Times analysis of the Bush camp's smear campaign against Kerry's war service.

The heart of Bush's strategy is to make the war on terror the driving issue; and to paint Kerry as weak, traitorous (via Swift boat ads), indecisive, and unpatriotic. So Miller and other republican's are spouting bald-faced lies about Kerry's senate record.

Meanwhile, Kerry plans to campaign on the economy, which Bush has mishandled. And Kerry should draw attention to that. But he also needs to move attention away from the Vietnam issue and onto the Iraq war issue.

And the message is simple: even if you believed when Bush rushed to war, or still believe now, that the war in Iraq was a good idea; even if you believed when Bush rushed to war that we couldn't give inspections more time; even if you believed when Bush rushed to war that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; even if you believed when Bush rushed to war that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda; even if you believed all that, which we now know to wrong, there's no way you can believe that Bush went to war responsible.

Simply from a management standpoint, everything about Iraq and how Bush has handled it has been incompetent: the intelligence; the postwar planning; the trust in Chalbi; the my way or the highway attitude and discussions with the U.N.; the monies and materials being lost by Halliburton hijinks and mismanagement; the stress on national guard troops and families faced with seemingly never-ending tours; the lack of resources devoted to Afghanistan, whose "democratic government" dare not step out of Kabul for fear of the warlords who rule everywhere else; the failure to find Bin Laden after making him public enemy number one, wanted dead or alive.

But most of all, Bush keeps talking about a war on terror. Terror's a weapon. We're not a war on terror, we're at war with Islamic Jihadists whose ranks are filled by every act of agression we make, the biggest being the invasion of Iraq, and turning that country into a terrorist recruiting and training center. We made short order of Saddam's military, the depleted paper tiger that it was. We made short order of it when we threw him out of Kuwait, and that was before the long years of sanctions and no fly zones and other restrictions that crippled his army even further. Of course the initial battle and march to Baghdad was swift.

But in failing to secure the peace, to secure the country, to provide order quickly, we made Iraq more porous and more open to terrorists. Dumb. Stupid. Incompetent. But worse of all dangerous. We're not safer because Saddam's gone; more soldiers have been killed in Iraq since he's been deposed than before.

If Kerry's going to win, in addition to running on the failures of Bush's economic policy, he also has to run on the failures of Bush's foreign policy and the utter incompetence with which Bush has waged this so-called war on terror.

Kerry's been reluctant to do that for fear of appearing unpatriotic. But look, he's being charged with that anyway, so he may as well step and say. "How dare you use that charge to avoid taking responsibility for your failures. You failed to be honest with the American people; you failed to be honest with our troops adn their families; you failed to honestly plan for the peace; you failed to honestly assess the cultural and political costs of building a postwar Iraq; you failed in every conceivable way in executing this war. We cannot win this war with that kind of incompetence and rash judgment. You sir should be fired."

That's got to be the other half of Kerry's message. If he doesn't make it, forcibly, he will lose.

If We Could Only Elect One Beer

2004-08-03T12:32:00.000-04:00

After an election somebody is out of work. When we met over lunch, Brabender realized that these all-or-nothing stakes would offer a vivid way to illustrate the difference between consumer and political ad campaigns. "Can you imagine if there was going to be a vote in November and there would only be one light beer?" he mused, seeming to relish the prospect. We considered how the conventions of negative campaigning might apply. ("There they go again. Flip-flopping Miller Lite says it's 'less filling' and that it 'tastes great.' So which one is it? We're Bud Light, and we approved this message.")

From, Joshua Green, "Dumb and Dumberer: Why are campaign commercials so bad?" The Atlantic Monthly: July/August 2004 http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200407/green.

Word Count: Word Use as Art

2004-08-03T11:07:00.000-04:00

http://www.wordcount.org/main.php

Here's how they describe themselves:

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

The interface is kind of cool to boot. In addition to viewing a word's ranking, you can also see words in the ranking neighborhood. So diplomacy (10434) sits, appropriately enough, next to acknowledgement (10435). But alas, perhaps because of diplomacy failures, terror comes in for more frequent use at (5292), and is separated from damaging (5295) by only brussels and brighton (5293 and 4).

The is the number 1 most frequently used word; Conquistador is number 86,800

All the rest are somewhere in between; where's your favorite word?

Kerry's Iraq War Votes

2004-07-30T16:47:00.000-04:00

The L.A. Times has a piece by Janet Hook, Mary Curtius and Greg Miller that tracks the rationale of Kerry's two war votes. Here's a relevant portion of that article:

Less than two days before the Senate vote Oct. 11, Kerry said his gut told him to vote for the resolution. But his speech on the Senate floor was riddled with reservations and caveats.

Despite the doubts he had expressed about the administration's commitment to diplomacy, Kerry said he would back the resolution on the strength of assurances from Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that they would not go to war unilaterally or without exhausting diplomatic options.

"Let there be no doubt or confusion," Kerry said. "I will support a multilateral effort to disarm [Hussein] by force, if we ever exhaust those other options as the president has promised. But I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible."

There was nothing in the resolution that guaranteed those conditions would be met. Nonetheless, he was one of 29 Democrats to vote for the resolution, which passed 77 to 23.

In his Senate speech, Kerry had said, "I will be among the first to speak out" if Bush failed to seek international support and go to war as a last resort.

One could argue that Kerry never should have trusted Bush and Powell. Or that, he should have read the intelligence briefing provided members of the senate, instead of just the executive summary of it. The summary argued there was clear evidence of WMD, but the briefing itself was full of caveats and differing interpretations of the evidence.

One could also argue that Kerry voted to give Bush the power to go to war, but prefaced his votes with caveats and conditions as a way to straddle the fence.

But here's a different interpretation. He voted for the war resolution as a patriot, suspending pure partisan politics because he believed the president deserved the benefit of the doubt. He voted to authorize the war, despite the resolution not having the conditions he sought that diplomacy be exhausted, because he believed the president needed the threat of war to make diplomacy work. He suspend disblief and accepted the words of Powell and Bush.

And diplomacy was working. Inspections were allowed; Iraq issued an accounting of its WMD. There was no longer any immediate need to rush to war when Bush did. But Bush did rush to war and Kerry did call him on it according to the LA Times article. He began criticizing Bush's march to war in December, a month later. And kept up that criticism. This was well before Howard Dean was a factor in the campaign. Finally, reports the Times, in fall of 2003 he voted against the $87-billion. Here's how that's viewed:

Critics say Kerry's vote was politically motivated. The surprise leader in the Democratic presidential race had become Dean, who was riding a strong tide of antiwar sentiment among party activists.

Kerry said he voted against the bill because Bush had gone to war recklessly and without a plan for postwar Iraq. He called it a "principled" vote designed to pressure the administration to change its policies.

The question everyone's asking is how Kerry could vote against the $87-billion financing bill and still support the troops. As some of his senate colleagues predicted would happen when he made the vote, the republicans are using the vote against the $87-billion to attack Kerry as a flip-flopper and as someone who doesn't support our troops. They also say Kerry's a political opportunist.

But if he's such a political opportunist, wouldn't the smart play have been to have voted for the $87-billion, and to have done so in a flourish of rhetoric praising our troops. Even Howard Dean had come to the realization that we couldn't simply walk out of Iraq and leave it a mess. Kerry could have made that argument at the time.

Kerry also knew the bill was going to overwhelmingly pass, that a vote against it would be unpopular.

Of course, the counter argument is that at the time, in the heat of the primaries and in the face of Dean's campaign, the first consideration was stopping the bleeding and throwing a sop to the leftist democrats who seemed to be driving the primary dynamics.

But let me tell you, I am a leftist democrat and Kerry's vote didn't impress me, or many others, as an act of coming around. It was too little too late. It gained Kerry nothing. And he had to know that it wouldn't really help. So why'd he do it?

The only logical reason is that he believed it was important to send Bush a message. Kerry's real problem was trusting Bush and not looking more carefully at the evidence before the war authorization vote. But he did lay the ground work for what his continued support would be, and he did stick to that ground work later, when the $87-billion was asked for.

The damn problem with Kerry is that he can't admit the first vote was a mistake nor explain that second vote took some political courage. At least he hasn't been able to do that to date.

He didn't address the votes in the conventions, and he's not running ads that will address now because his campaign is suspending ads for a long month. So if he's going to address this issue, and he has to well before the republican convention, he's going to need a setting that's public and that will build a good sound bite that the news media will cover and the pundits will stoke for a while. Otherwise, it's all left hanging on the debates.

The Office View

2004-07-12T14:45:00.000-04:00

Here's a partial view of what I see if I look out the window of my office. The windows from my window belong to the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, where I work.

Shades stay down most of the time, as they are in this picture; though even when they're up, you can't really see into the windows unless someone turns a light on.

It's not exactly a stimulating view, but it's useful in that it lets you alone, which is a good thing when you're trying to work.

2004-07-08T21:31:00.000-04:00

Experience and John Edwards

2004-07-07T15:01:00.001-04:00

E. J. Dionne nails it:

When you hear Republicans disparage Sen. John Edwards's lack of experience, remember the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch, spoken to George W. Bush at a debate on Dec. 6, 1999.

"You've been a great governor," Hatch declared of his rival for the Republican presidential nomination. "My only problem with you, governor, is that you've only had four and going into your fifth year of governorship. . . . Frankly, I really believe that you need more experience before you become president of the United States. That's why I'm thinking of you as a vice presidential candidate."

Which is exactly what Edwards was chosen for yesterday.

One Republican argument against Edwards was put out today by William Safire in the New York Times:

A larger question looms that confronts every presidential nominee: what if he wins and dies in office? In making his decision yesterday, Kerry should have kept that criterion of "the best man ready to take over" uppermost in his mind.

In my view, he failed that test.

If Bush can go directly to the Presidency with the little experience he had, then Edwards is certainly qualified to be Veep.

Besides unlike Bush, Edwards wasn't born a millionaire; he studied and worked hard and made his millions on his own. Edwards didn't have a connected family with ties to the oil business, or people looking to him favors because his father was President of the United States. All of which is to say, that Edwards's life experiences are more quintessentially American mythos than Bush's. And it's that experience that seems to me more important right now than Bush's silver-spooned (both in his mouth and during his formative years, up his nose) background.

It's really important that we have people in the White House who can relate to the experiences of the working poor. Edwards has those roots. Bush doesn't.

Employment Rates

2004-07-02T13:38:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post (and other news outlets) reported today that the job growth rate for the month of June was not as high as analysts had predicted it would be, only 112,000 new jobs instead of the 240,000 that had been estimated.

But what gets me is this tidbit at the end of the article: "June's Labor Department report showed that average hourly wages rose by a 2 cents to $15.65, a 0.1 percent increase, less than the 0.3 percent expected. The average workweek fell by two tenths of an hour to 33.6 hours. Total hours worked in the economy dropped 0.6 percent."

$15.65 x 33.6 hours x 50 weeks = $26,292.00

That's not a good wage in today's economy, with housing, heating, and food costs being what they are. It's certainly not a wage one would want to support a family on.

And I would venture to guess that many people who are in these new jobs are making less pay than they did in their old jobs. I would also assume that while they were out of work, that they may have chewed up savings and/or increased debt. Coming back to work for less under those stressed circumstances is better than not working at all, but it's hardly cause for celebration.

And at 33.6 hours, what kind of benefits are these people getting, if any? Are they jobs in places where you need to work a full forty hours a week to get health insurance?

The economy may be on the mend, on paper, and by all economic theory, but going back to work for only $26,292 isn't the kind of thing that would make me at all excited about endorsing Bush's economic policies.

Meanwhile, businesses are being encouraged to offshore more jobs to survive. Again, according to the Washington Post: "In blunt terms, the report by the Boston Consulting Group warns American firms that they risk extinction if they hesitate in shifting facilities to countries with low costs. That is partly because the potential savings are so vast, but the report also cites a view among U.S. executives that the quality of American workers is deteriorating."

So the good paying jobs get outsourced more cheaply and what new jobs American workers can get offers fewer hours and less pay. These same workers who have increased productivity dramatically over the past decade or so are now deemed inferior.

And Bush and Cheney are bragging about this? They're proud of what's happening to working families and they think this is a good economic outcome?

I wonder if they will say what percentage of the tax cuts they love so much go to companies outsourcing jobs?

Follow Up: Blogs and Teaching

2004-06-29T11:26:00.000-04:00

1. From BLOG THREE HUNDRED NINETY-ONE:
A less obvious answer lies in getting teachers open to change, to examining carefully all their practices to ensure that the writing they ask students to do is grounded in interest, choice, value, and authenticity.

2. See also BLOG THREE HUNDRED EIGHTY-EIGHT, A Guided Tour To Blogging.

Blogs and Teaching

2004-06-28T20:05:00.000-04:00

I've been puzzling over how to think about blogs in a writing course. Well not puzzling over whether I might use them were I teaching a course at the moment -- I would in heartbeat, but how.

As a teacher, the technology behind a service like Blogger is too good not to experiment with and in; it's a really a good pedagogical playground. I could use a Blog as simple course interface -- a place to post a syllabi. I could ask students to keep blogs, assigning them different prompts or activities to post.

They might keep a blog for research projects. Or as shared and public reading journals. Or really, anything else we can think of to write on that's course related. With any luck, some would come out of the experience with a newly discovered writing voice, along the lines/along the way Austin Lingerfelt describes in "(this) space", an essay on blogging and writing.

Though at this point, my thinking is that blog use in the course would be better used as a way to simply introduce students, if they're not already blogging in some form, to the technology and possibility offered. It would be optional to make the blogs public, though for some that's half the fun -- being read. And like any kind of writing tried in a writing course, the goal would be to find enough ways to prompt students to write interestingly, or rather to find an interest in what they're writing despite the fact that it grew out of a required course (as first year writing courses, the kind I most like to teach, are).

Much would depend upon where I taught, the context for the course I was offering, and what I was contracted to do by the program as an instructor of that course. But choosing to experiment wouldn't be an easy choice to make.

The harder question for me, and frankly the more interesting question, is what's the future of blogs as pedagogical tool. Not among the trailblazers, like Jeff Rice and the folks he links to in his "TechRhet" entry (an entry that comments on a techrhet email list discussion about the role of blogs, a discussion I took part in and that forms the basis of this rumination). Trailblazers and people who jump and make use of a new, or relatively new technology and do cool things are interesting to study and learn from. And a lot of them are in fact asking questions about blogs and teaching.

But I'm always more interested in what to say to instructors who are not pioneers.

I ask this because I spend a good part of my job for Bedford/St. Martin's traveling to campuses, often giving workshops on teaching with technology. And not just technology we offer as a college publisher, but very often on helping people use the technology at hand, whether that's word processing software in a networked computer lab, a course management system they have on campus, or an amalgamation of freeware, including blogs.

The thing I find is that there needs to be a compelling reason for teachers to change what they're doing and the technologies they're using. Sometimes teachers are self-compelled. They might stumble across an essay like Austin's (linked above), and be moved to try blogs. They might hear a good teaching story at a conference. (I heard several at Computers and Writing 2004.) They might be motivated by a technology grant or teaching and technology program on their campus.

Unfortunately too, many teachers are compelled by circumstances not of their choosing. The department might be feeling pressure to do more with technology in way or another. And so instructors might all be given course WWW sites and asked to use them in some way. Or they might be under pressure from students to do more online.

And there are the vast majority of teachers who simply see no reason to switch what they're doing; they remain uncompelled, or unmoved by arguments others find compelling. And often for good reason: what they're doing is working for them. How they teach writing fits into their course loads, their lives, the way they manage their time, how they respond to students, when and where they do work, and so on.

So for these teachers, what advantages do computer-based, and more significantly, blogs, however you want to define them, offer? Why use a blog, why add a new technology layer onto what one is doing? How can we make clear the advantages? How do we help teachers learn how to shift the way they work? How do we keep learning curves gentle rises and not rock-face climbs?

Those are the questions that I think matter not only with Blogs, but with any new technology. They were the questions that mattered 20 years ago and 10 years. They mattered with email lists and file sharing and MOO's and chatrooms; they matter now with Blogs and they'll matter in the future with whatever new technology or innovation changes the way students and teachers write and teach and learn writing.

Beatifying Reagan

2004-06-08T07:22:00.000-04:00

An article at The Weekly Standard's Web site criticizes The New York Times for not being hagiographic in its coverage of President Reagan's death.

But geez, get over it. President Reagan was a public figure, and in his day, was a controversial President. He had both fine qualities and weaknesses. I disagreed with his policies and many of his decisions. I don't believe he was a good President, even though his term in office was successful for him politically. He was a strong president in many ways; he was persuasive. But he wasn't a saint.

I don't think the coverage of his passing and the retrospectives need to be hagiographic. A look back at his presidency and his life, to be honest, needs to recapture and remind readers of both Reagan's accomplishments, but also what writers consider his controversies and missteps.

There's much to admire about Reagan -- his grace under an assassin's gun; his deep and abiding love for his wife, and hers for him; his ability to rally the nation in times of crisis, such as the Challenger explosion; his skills as political speaker and powers of persuasion.

But he also loaded future generations with enormous debt. He started us down an expensive weapons program boondoggle dubbed Star Wars. He submitted budgets to congress that didn't cut spending, despite his rhetoric to shrink the size of government in order to pay for his tax cuts. Ketchup was a vegetable. He got 241 marines killed in Beirut (but unlike the current President, took responsibility for the decisions that put them in harms way). Yet on Iran/Contra, which had us trading arms to Iran for hostages and funding a rebel army to oppose a democratically elected government in Nicaragua, all done illegally, he ducked responsibility (and the impeachment that would have come with it), feigned ignorance, and played the befuddled, in-the-dark dolt. And thus he became known as the Teflon President.

So look, bottom line, President Reagan deserves praise and recognition for his years of service in elected office. And his partisans certainly have the right to gloss over his flaws and to beatify them to their hearts' contents.

But the general press is required to keep things in balance. For the most part they won't -- they aren't. They're tilting to the side of sentimental mourning.

The Press at a Presidential Press Conference

2004-04-16T14:11:00.000-04:00

Well, you can see why George Bush rarely does press conferences (only 12 so far), let alone in prime time (the one on April 13th was only his third). He can't -- or won't -- go off message, and the longer the conference goes on, the more dim the President seems because he's reduced to repeating himself over and over.

He never looks good after the first few questions. So resoluteness becomes stubbornness; conviction becomes cement; concern becomes cynicism. He converts his assets, as time goes on, into negatives. As a critic of Bush's policies, I think this process reveals a truth -- he lacks imagination. He's intellectually lazy and dishonest. He doesn't question a decision once it's been made, even when the actions taken need adjustment.

He rushed to war on March 19, 2003. He made the war primarily about Saddam's WMD and argued we could no longer wait for him to disarm and that we were in immediate danger from those WMD's. Even though, given the lack of WMD's to date, Saddam had apparently disarmed. Bush could have taken more time -- the summer, another year, to let more inspections play out, and used that time to build a coalition with U.N. imprimatur (not control, but just backing) that would have made the post invasion safer and more likely to succeed. But he didn't.

If the war is about democracy and freedom and America's role as a country which needs to foster that --a laudable goal-- then Bush should have taken the lead up and planning for war far more seriously than he has. But he rushed into war and bungled the postwar planning. The war was the easy part; our military shredded a paper tiger. But winning the war and winning the peace and securing democracy are markedly different. And Bush has so far failed miserably in planning for peace and democracy.

Bush has failed as a President not so much for going to war, but for making the public argument for war predominantly about WMD because that was the scariest scenario, for politicizing the war very early on via Karl Rove's strategies, for not revealing --and not looking to see-- the true cost of such an effort in terms of lives, monies, resources. He's failed not in boldness, but in honesty on what the war would cost. He also failed to truly trust the American people; he duped them into the war by linking Saddam to September 11.

Bush didn't have the patience to make the case that this war was needed to spread democracy and to bring a tyrant to his knees. He didn't have the courage to tell the people and congress what this war would cost in people and money. And he didn't have the foresight to see how difficult and continually dangerous the post war occupation would be.

In September of 2002, USA Today ran a cover story about Bush's war preparations which reported that analysts were being told not to prepare any reports or estimates that considered the complications and possible negative outcomes of invading Iraq. That is, in part of the propaganda effort, there was a deliberate --and unconscionable-- decision made to not consider the true costs, the true effort, the true sacrifices this war would require.

But that is not surprising. Bush failed to put into his budget an 87 million dollar funding for post Afghanistan war efforts. Embarrassed republicans in congress had to remember that and add it into the budget. Bush is negligent and dangerous because he doesn't attend to the details.

And that's why the press did so poorly at the press conference -- they never pressed on the details, but instead on the symbolic and the trivial. The reporters turned their brief question period not into a moment to learn new information or to ask questions that pressed on the details of Bush's actions in calling for the war, in starting it, and in carrying out the aftermath. No, they focused on cheap --and stupid-- gotcha questions. How many times was he asked to admit mistakes? How many times was he asked to apologize? And how many times did Bush deflect those questions and repeat his speech?

Why not ask questions about policy details? Why not ask questions strategy? When those were asked -- who will we be turning sovereignty over to? -- Bush didn't have good answers, but at least he tried to answer those, and in the trying, we got some measure of his thinking and planning and learned how abysmal they've been.

But no. For the most part, the press focused on issues or aspects of issues made them like jackals, hoping Bush would slip. So as bad as Bush came across, the press came across as worse.

Spain and 9/11 -- Maybe It's the Lying

2004-03-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

The conservative line on Spain's recent presidential election is that the results are a victory for Al Qaeda, and that the electorate capitulated to terror. See for example, Andrew Sullivan, who writes:

March 11, 2004, was easily the greatest victory for terrorism since 9/11 itself. It was a victory not simply because so many innocents were murdered in cold blood - going about their business in a free and democratic society. We know how thrilled the Jihadist terrorists are when they can murder in large numbers - as they have now done in Iraq and Morocco and Bali and New York. It was a victory because it also succeeded in provoking the one response terrorists long for and feed upon. Faced with mass murder, the Spanish electorate voted to give the Jihadists what they were demanding: withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. 3/11 was a reprise of 9/11. But this time it worked. Instead of rising up in anger against the mass murderers of the new fascist movement in the Islamic world, as the United States did, Spain did the reverse. It gave in.

But Ivo Daalder, writing for The Center for American Progress, points to another interpretation:

Another flaw in this reasoning is in assuming that Spaniards, like Americans, see Iraq as the central front in the war on terror. They don't. For them, as for most Europeans, the war in Iraq and the war on terror are completely separate. In fact, the train bombings in Madrid (like the earlier attacks in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey) underscored that toppling Saddam Hussein had not ended the threat of terrorism. To the contrary, it may even have encouraged it ? which is how many Spaniards interpreted last week's terrorist attacks.

The train bombings put the government in a quandary, which it tried to escape by pointing the finger at ETA, even though this Basque terror group had never engaged in a terrorist act of this magnitude. Even as signs of al Qaeda involvement multiplied, and the inevitable link to Iraq became politically salient, the government insisted that ETA more likely than not was responsible for the attacks. None of this rang true to a majority of Spaniards.

Most Spaniards did not believe attacking Iraq was a good strategy in the war on terror; they were against the policy. But also, the Spanish government lied!

And this wasn't a minor lie, a lie about sex. It was a cowardly lie, a fundamental act of betrayal. The government of Bush's ally, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, didn't trust its own people. So why should those people trust --and re-elect-- such a man? What right does he have to lead after such a fundamentally wrong deception?

Maybe American conservatives don't want to think about lying because they're supporting an administration whose deceptions and secrecy and fundamental dishonest and cynicism and distrust of the judgment of the American people are unequaled.

Bush lied about Iraq's WMD's.

Bush lied about the cost of his Medicare bill.

Bush tried to sandbag the 9/11 commission.

Bush lies about important policy details on matters of war, on matters of economic policy, on matters, in short, that go to the fundamental elements of governing. It's that simple.

Conservatives don't want to see that lies have consequences in a democracy. They don't want to see what lying cost Bush's ally in Spain. Because to see it means they'll have to consider what might happen to Bush.

Andrew Sullivan as Witness

2004-02-12T08:35:00.000-05:00

TIME.com: Why The M Word Matters To Me -- Feb. 16, 2004

In this eloquent Time Magazine essay, Andrew Sullivan, who also has been writing wonderfully about this at his Daily Dish blog, gives witness to the argument I made below about "civil unions" being a shabby "separate but equal" approach. He talks about what it means --emotionally, developmentally, logically, personally, and socially-- that he grew up, and continues to live, in a country where gay marriage is forbidden.

Gay Marriage in Massachusetts

2004-02-11T08:46:00.000-05:00

Text of the amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution limiting civil marriage to a man and woman.

The amendment is dishonest. It pretends that marriage is sacred and must be reserved only for heterosexual couples for some reason. But marriage isn't necessarily sacred, especially in the eyes of the state. In the eyes of the state, a marriage occurs when a couple gets a marriage license and has the license signed by someone the state designates that power to, whether it be a Justice of the Peace or a member of the clergy. No ceremony is required. All that the state demands for granting a couple the status and benefits of marriage are a few signatures.

So when the ammendment says, "The people also wish to establish civil unions to provide to same-sex couples all the benefits, protections, rights and responsibilities under state law as are granted to spouses in a marriage. . ." and "Two persons of the same sex shall have the right to form a civil union if they meet the requirements set forth by law for marriage between a man and a woman." all the state is saying is that you can get married, but you can't call it marriage. You get the benefits and responsibilities, but a second level, compromise term -- "civil union." In order to unite civilly, you need to meet the same requirements (such as they are) man and a woman who want to marry. So to civilly unite, you have to meet the requirements of marriage, only the state won't say you're married.

So again the question is, what's so special about the word "marriage" that only heterosexuals may legally have it describe their state sanctioned unions? Well, according to the amendment, nothing much. What does it marriage really mean? Ultimately, what it means depends upon the couple who marry and where they get married and how they approach their marriage. A marriage is only sacred if a couple believes their love to be sacred. It's only religious if the couple marries in accordance with the tenets of their faith, both in word and spirit. The Supreme Court decision doesn't force any church to perform same sex marriage ceremonies. The decision doesn't undermine the rights of people of faith to marry in accordance with their moral and religious beliefs.

Further, the decision doesn't undermine the meaning of marriage or dilute its value. In fact, it strengthens marriage by extending it, by making it possible for more people to marry. The decision, at its heart, says there can be no such thing as separate but equal. The court recognizes that gay and lesbian couples exist, and that many of them are committed to one another with as much love as any heterosexual couple, and that they have been discriminated against by the state for no good reason. This discrimination didn't help heterosexual marriages. It only stigmatizes those who are gay and their families, especially the children of those couples.

Defining marriage as only the union of a man and woman is something a church might do, but not something the state should do. The amendment's own language makes it clear how wrong the designation "civil union" is. It's a second-class, second-rate designation; gays and lesbian are not second-class, second-rate citizens. To treat them that way is wrong, said the Massachusetts Supreme Court. And the Court is right.

IPL

2003-11-03T22:44:00.000-05:00

Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org is an excellent beginning place for students who will use the WWW for research. As the name implies, it uses library standards to sort and organize sites and resources.

2003-07-01T09:41:00.000-04:00

Robert McCloskey, 88, of 'Make Way for Ducklings,' Is Dead
This headline and link to the obituary by Eleanor Bau in the New York Times Online sucked the wind out of me for a moment. Just last Friday, my wife, daughter, and I met for lunch in Boston and then we wandered over to the Public Gardens, where McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings is set.

We saw the bronze sculpture of Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings honoring McCloskey and his book, and noticed, as we did, a family with toddlers, sitting on the bench across from the sculpture, a new copy of Make Way for Ducklings in Hand, reading from the book, and comparing the illustrations to the sculpture.

We also took a ride around the Public Garden Pond in the Swan paddle boats; as it curved around a small island in the pond, we watched this season's ducklings teeter-waddle about, slipping among rocks, hectically dropping into and out of the pond. And even as we left, a an ice-cream truck was parked on the corner of Boyleston and Arlington Streets, the back of which featured the famed image from the book, of the police officer with a hand held up and whistle blown, stopping traffic so Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings could cross the street and enter the Public Gardens.

So the news comes when thoughts of McCloskey are still fresh because his work was literally alive for us just days ago.

I think maybe we'll head to Maine for some blueberries soon.

2003-06-26T10:19:00.000-04:00

Summer at the Pool
I called home late yesterday afternoon, and got no answer. So then I tried my wife's cell phone. I wanted to give her some news about an appointment we've been trying to arrange. When she answered, I could hear in the background: kids laughing and talking, parents calling out, a life guard whistle, the sound of feet walking in short, fast steps through the shallow puddles that form at the edge of the pool, the sort of twangy hard thump of the diving board, followed by a splash, my daughter and her friend rustling in the beach bag that was very likely hooked over the back of the chair my wife was sitting on as we talked.

Yesterday was hot and a little bit humind in the Boston area, and the town pool was the place to be. As we talked, I could almost smell the chlorine.

2003-06-13T09:30:00.000-04:00

Compassionate Conservatives are at it Again

Those wonderful folks in the Bush administration have done it again. According to a story by Greg Winter in today's New York Times, "Change in Aid Formula Shifts More Costs to Students," :

. . . millions of college students will have to shoulder more of the cost of their education under federal rules imposed late last month through a bureaucratic adjustment requiring neither Congressional approval nor public comment of any kind."
. . .

But they will also have a ripple effect across almost every level of financial aid, shrinking the pool of students who qualify for federal awards, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants and, in turn, heightening the reliance on loans to pay for college.

How much more money this may require of students and their parents will vary widely, changing with every set of circumstances that make families unique. Some families may be expected to pay an extra $100 or less each year, while others may owe well over $1,000 more.

Ah, so simple, so direct, so hidden from the public eye. What's worse, this shift in burden comes when state budgets are slashing higher education resources, and state community colleges, four year colleges and universities are raising tuition at alarming rates.

So let's see, Bush's compassion so far has meant:

tax cuts for the rich, check.

increased college costs for those who need financial aid, thus making it harder for folk to work their way up the economic ladder, check.

fat contracts and favorable legislation to corporation and republican special interest groups that write fat checks to Tom Delay and George Bush, check

no real reform of corporate accounting laws or significant punishment for those who ripped apart people lives and pensions, check.

a growing deficit that will continue to erode government services and undermine social security, check

At this rate, by 2008, we'll be living in an America where the government will only supply an army, build interstate highways, and spy into our private lives to make sure we're all as puritan as John Ashcroft. Every paltry sum saved in taxes will more than be eaten up buying the services we need from the private sector. We'll be a country of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich.

Starving the government --what Bush's policies are doing-- really means starving communities, cities and towns and the people who live in them. It forces local taxes to be raised, and it forces poeople to use their paltry tax cuts to pay for other things, such as trash pick up, sewage lines and water rate increases, school bus rides, and other services that cities and towns must cut. And usually increased local costs outstrip any savings most people will see from Bush's tax cuts.

That's just sooo compassionate.

2003-06-12T17:45:00.000-04:00

Whither the WMD's and Why

As debate grows about whether the intelligence on Iraq's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction was twisted, exaggerated, ignored, faked, or simply inept, it helps to remember that this is not news. Well before the war began (and it ain't over), as far back as last fall, when the drumbeat to war began in earnest just before the mid-term elections, reports in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (summarized at The Dubya Report) laid out several examples of Bush and his court making claims about Iraq's WMD capabilities and links to Al Qaeda that were not substantiated by intelligence data.

So this is nothing new. The President mislead the nation about the Iraqi threat. Why? If you recall polls from the time, when the drumbeat began, it was clear that the American public was against going to war in Iraq unless there was an immediate threat. A majority of Americans were against the war.

So what happened? Did Bush make a case for war based on Saddam's being a totalitarian dictator who in the past had murdered thousands of his own people, who tortured people still? Well, of course that was mentioned along the way, but less as a primary reason for going to war and more as a way to dehumanize Saddam, to reduce sympathy for him. But in reality, Bush never made a case for going to war to save the Iraqi people, that was an after thought in the arguments made for the war to the American people, a side benefit, not our moral imperative. (And if that is our reason for war -- human rights, when do we go to the Congo?).

And the press knew this back then, but are only exploring the corruption of intelligence now?

Meanwhile, Bush's defenders say two things:

1. Give it time, weapons will be found, but
2. even if they aren't, it doesn't matter -- didn't you see those mass graves and besides, we won!

Writing in the Washington Times, for example, Donald Lambro typifies this ratoinale when he writes, "I think we will find further evidence of weapons buried in the sands of Iraq. But the news media's obsession with such weapons overlooks one important and overriding reality: Most Americans think the quest for illegal weapons at this juncture is irrelevant."

But that kind of thinking misses the point. The point is, about going to war, Bush mislead the American people, and he mislead the world. And when much of the world questioned his action and march to war, he told them to get on board the war wagon or get out of the way. That we won, and that people backed the effort once the war began misses the point that Bush undermined our democracy by lying about our reasons for going to war. We were just lucky, our soldiers were just lucky, that the army we fought was demoralized, untrained, under-equipped, tactically uncoordinated. We're lucky there was no urban fighting, that worst fears of our war planners were not realized.

But what have we won? We haven't won the peace in Iraq. And we haven't moved quickly or competently enough to restore order and services. Our troops are being harrassed, and to protect themselves, they have to resort to more and more military police tactics -- incursions, roadblocks, searches and other actions that reek of occupation, not liberation. It's too bad we have no mechanisms and systems in place for rebuilding Iraq. It's too bad the rush to war left us with few allies to really help with the reconstruction. It would be nice, as frustrations grow, to have the U.N. on the ground, an international force of arms and resources to keep the peace and rebuild the country. But no. Bush didn't argue for saving Iraq, for rebuilding it. He argued that it was an immediate threat to the U.S. and that he would use his authority as Commander-in-Chief to protect our country from those WMD's getting into Al Qaeda hands no matter what the U.N. said. And so, he rushed us to war for a threat that wasn't rather than building a true international consensus and international support for what will really be the hard part -- peace and democracy in Iraq.

I think the precedent for this war was wrong and dishonest. I think Bush is corrupt and that he lied, and I don't think the end of Saddam's rule in anyway justified the means which brought it about. But I'm glad, for the Iraqi people, that he's out.

And I sincerely hope that their country is rebuilt, that it's a democracy where they can determine their own course, that they aren't robbed of their natural resources. The only way to salvage any of this fiasco -- the culmination of decades of disastrous American foreign policy in the region (Remember, at the height of his killing spree, in the 80's, Saddam was our friend; Dick Cheney visited him.) -- is for us to now make sure that we establish a democracy in Iraq. I hope we do this.

But I don't think Bush really cares. Not if the paltry support we've given Afghanistan is any indication.

So I won't be surprised if we pull up stakes in Iraq and on Iraq after Halliburton cashes it check. I hope I'm wrong. But Bush's credibility leaves me with little hope.

2003-06-09T15:55:00.000-04:00

New Blog: Teaching Writing in an Online World
I began a new blog, Teaching Writing in an Online World that I started a few days ago as a way to experiment with using a blog in TechNotes. TechNotes is a newsletter with tips on teaching writing, focusing mostly on technology.

I first created TWOW because this blog, Odds and Ends, has drifted into being a place for me just to post short essays on, well, odds and ends. TWOW will be predominately about issues that in some way connect teaching writing in a time when networked computers are increasingly the default writing technology.

2003-06-06T11:45:00.001-04:00

Odorless Supermarkets

Tuesday night I went with my wife and two daughters to the supermarket. We were in the neighborhood and decided on a whim to get some ice-cream to make sundaes, and a few other odds and ends. We entered the store and diverged in teams of two. I trailed along behind my 12 year old, who made a beeline for the bread section; she loves crusty breads, baguettes, that kind of thing. It's a favorite snack (along with snap peas, go figure).

So as she ran ahead, towards the bread, I flashed on an image of me having done the same kind of thing when I was her age, skittering ahead of my mother to where we were heading in the grocery store to select and make a case for the variant of the staple that I liked best (or disliked least in some cases). The flashback was strong, I remembered the store, a neighborhood market, with worn and warped wooden floors, and shelves that seemed more loosely grouped than regimented by product rows. But the thing I remembered most in that flashback, were the odors from that old store.

When I was a kid, we spent a lot of time in grocery stores that had odors, places where you could smell the food the minute you walked in. So on Tuesday night, as I stood there in the supermarket, with its garish lights, and abundance, was the absence of scent. Even in the bread section, there was no smell of fresh baked bread. Even in the vegetable section, where fruits and vegetables are laid out, there was no odor of fresh vegetables. And forget about meats and cheeses, which are shrinkwrapped, boxed, cellophaned and styrofoamed into odorless units. Between the packaging, the cavernous size of more and more supermarkets, and the air conditioning, 1/3 of the intimacy and sensuality of food shopping (texture and taste being the other two thirds) evaporates. I think it literally evaporates into the large cavernous spaces of the modern supermarket, with its broad expanses and conditioned air. The odors are either locked in plastic or pushed out by filtered air.

Stores should be clean, of course, but shopping for food shouldn't be so sterile, so plastic, so distant from the olfactory pleasures food can offer.

This summer, if you find a small neighborhood grocery store with good produce, meats, and cheeses, breathe deep, and remember that scent, a mixture of earth and green and fruit, the smell of tomatoes, of an orange's pectin, of arugula, of corn, the flavors of cheese in the air, that sort of tangy sweet muskiness of combined meat odors, that all together mix and give the store its own perfume. Remember that scent the next time you stand in a large supermarket and can't smell anything.

Small stores with fresh vegetables, with cheeses and meats that hang by cord above the counters where you order your slices and cuts, with baskets of beans that you scoop into bags on your own, with stacks of potatoes and beets; small stores with lower ceiling, narrower aisles, those are places where you can still smell food when you walk in, where you can look at it, ask about it, get small tastes of this and that. If you've a store like that in your neighborhood, visit it often.

And shop there too, buy something, keep it in place. Your food will taste better if you do.

2003-06-03T13:00:00.001-04:00

Remembering

My Aunt Lucille sent me a clipping from the Hartford Courant that she had saved for 34 years. It's a picture of me when I was ten, getting a golf lesson from the golf pro at Goodwin Park, a municipal golf course in Hartford, CT, where I grew up. The year was 1969; the lessons were sponsored by the Police Atheletic League (PAL). Victoria Rd., where we lived, was the last street in Hartford before you entered Whethersfield, if you walked west, the street lead into Goodwin Park. If you entered the park there was a skating pond, with an ice-house, a picnic pavillion just near it, and then just beyond the picnic pavillion, a path to the club house of the golf course. Goodwin park has two courses, an 18 hole course and a nine hole hacker's course -- mostly flat and straight, the hacker's course, with no water and I think no sand traps, but I can't remember for sure.

The path to the club house wasn't marked really, but essentially one walked up between the 18th hole of the 18 hole course and the 1st hole of the nine hole course.

And that's what I did that summer, I'd walk up Victoria Rd., past the pond, through the picnic grounds, between the fairways of holes 18 and 1, and get a golf lesson. For a few years after that, until I started high school, I played golf almost every day in the summer, nine holes in the morning and nine in the afternoon on many days. It was only 50 cents a round for city residents.

I played most often with a kid from the neighborhood named Brian Sherry. One of Brian's arms ended about where his elbow would've been -- a birth defect -- but he played all kinds of sports -- golf, football, baseball. In baseball he'd gotten real good as a fielder and could quickly snag a ball, tuck his glove under his short arm, pull his hand out of the glove and get the ball to the infield. In football he often quarter backed, and in golf we swung away.

I think those summers, between when I was 10 and 13, were some of the most idyllic I've yet lived.

2003-05-29T15:14:00.000-04:00

Teaching Writing is Hard Enough

Steve Krause (see link to his Blog on the left), kicked off a discussion on TechRhet, an email discussion list for teachers and others interested in the intersection of technology and rhetoric, about whether instructors of writing in first year college writing courses will really be able to have students create compositions using richer multimedia. His wondering was sparked by attending the 2003 Computers and Writing conference, where numerous sessions described how instructors had students creating Flash projects or doing work in iMovies.

What strikes me most profoundly, even more so than the merits of teaching iMovie in a writing class (and I think one can make a case for including an iMovie in the course), or the issue of technology and access, or even the issue of how long it might take a teacher to get up to speed on the technology and to understand it deeply enough to teach it, is simply this: it's hard enough teaching students simply how to write everyday prose well.

It's hard writing even a few good paragraphs for a Blog, or an email message, or an essay. Organizing one's thoughts along the relatively uncluttered interface of a blank page, whether the page is paper or pixel, is hard to teach, and hard to do, without adding the complicating factors of different interfaces and modes of composing (audio, visual, moving image). Again, it's not that these things can't be used, nor that students might not benefit from using them or learning them.

But it's much more work to write with more than words. Even doing a simple, text only, linking to nodes hypertext is more work than writing a standard linear essay, if only because of what goes into learning and doing the protocols and mechanics of linking.

2003-05-06T15:27:00.000-04:00

Pensions, Tax Cuts, and Aristocracies

Let's see, in the financial news of late, we're learning that pensions, both traditional (defined benefit) and more recent types such as 401K's (defined contribution), are undefunded. Meanwhile, we know that CEO benefits and pensions are growing as companies cut worker pension benefits. In 1980, the average CEO's pay "was 42 timess that of the average worker . . . By 2000, CEO compensation was 1,531 times as much as the hourly worker's" ("The Pension Gap Widens," by Kristin Downey, Washington Post --Downey was citing figures from Business Week).

Meanwhile, unemployment is up to its highest level in years.

And what does President Bush propose? Cutting taxes for the wealthiest. No pension refrom ideas, no addressing worker's wages, no help with necessary life costs, such as health care and prescription drugs, which costs will make the future for retirees even more tenuous than their already shrinking and underfunded pensions do.

But what can you expect. Bush is rich, and connected. The rich take care of their own. He has stock brokerage company presidents advising him on corporate accounting and stock market brokerage ethics. He has a vice-president who is giving away contracts for rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan to corporations that helped pay for Bush's election and that helped make the vice president wealthy.

Meanwhile, Bush cynically relives the flying days he never finished, the duty he pretended to honor, but ignored instead, by making the crew of an aircraft carrier that had been ten months at sea, ten months away from home, in one of the longest tours of duty ever, wait an extra day, and sit a mere ten miles from port, so that he could do a photo op landing in a jump suit.

Welcome to the imperial presidency and the age of the aristocrat. And they called Clinton slick. We'll we've traded in "Slick Willie" for "Oily George."

2003-05-02T10:27:00.000-04:00

Photo Op Addresses
What a crock, flying in on a jet, jumping out in a jump suit, looking for all the world the like the president protrayed in Independence Day. I can't believe how cynical this White House is. Well I can, because they're going to get away with it.

But this president, this president who took National Guard duty to ditch going to Vietnam and then ditched out on his guard duty has the gall to fly in on a miltary jet and pretend he's a pilot again!

What bunk! What hokum!

Meanwhile, the networks lapped it up, the image of Bush in flight suit was used in the Boston Globe and who knows how many other newspapers. The White House must be giddy. They do Presidential press conference with docile reporters called upon by index card, where the president gives the same answer to every question, no matter what was asked. And people still call it a press conference!?!. Then last night they stage manage a 27 minute victory speech that's a rehash of the incredible, in fact so far discredited claims, and no one calls them on it.

The President claimed that the war in Iraq turned the tide on terror, further weakened Al Qaidi, and stopped the weapons of mass descruction from getting into terrorists' hands. What weapons of mass destruction were kept from terrorists? -- so far we haven't found any, despite being in Iraq for close to 40 days and having visited all those sites that Powell's UN PowerPoint claimed were sites of WMD production!! What connection to Bin Laden and Al Qaida was disrupted?-- so far there hasn't been one evidenced, and before the war, such connections were disavowed by the CIA, hardly a pacifist group!!

This rant is not about whether the war was right or wrong, it's about the fact that this president lies and cheats, can't give an honest and coherent unscripted answer, and gets away with this, all because the White House knows how to script and stage the president in a way that wows the population and cows the media.

It's a disgrace.

2003-04-27T13:48:00.000-04:00

Having Gone Off Line
Not for lack of access (I had my laptop with its built in modem and a phone line handy.), I was off line for four whole days. Instead of connecting and keeping my email inbox lean by copiously deleting, or logging in here, I spent a few days hanging out with family, not doing much of nothing except hanging out, playing cards, eating a bunch, running errands here and there. Most of the work I do, and many of my social connections, are conducted by email. So when I was off line, I was gone for three days from the world where I spend most of my working hours.

The fun part of taking a simple break from work, with no planned events or things to do, was in getting away from a job with deadlines to meet, meetings to go to, and other planned events or things to do. I shucked that skin for a while. For a while the prospect of living that way continuously, without having anything in particular that I had to do, seemed appealing.

Of course, if the respite became the routine, appeal would turn to ennui pretty quick. I was reminded especially of that by a piece in today's New York Times that looked at how many people have opted -- or have been forced to opt -- out of the job market. These are people who, unable to find jobs, have decided to stay home, or go back to school, or are living off savings.

One person interviewed remarked on how much he missed work, on having a work life, an office to go to, people to work with, projects to work on, challenges to meet, problems to solve.

The paycheck matters, but so too does the work, the place of work.

As much as I enjoyed, and wouldn't mind a few more days of just hanging out, I'm glad I'm going back to work tomorrow.

2003-04-16T16:44:00.000-04:00

Flirting With Spring
The cold air's arrived and Boston's flirtation with warm, spring-like weather has ended. Cold tonight, and tomorrow, and perhaps some sleet and freezing rain on into Friday. This after a chilling-to-the-bone snow whipped winter. This after days of nonstop rain and only day or so of ice-cream weather. And you know, I really think that whiplash change of elements is kind of cool, maybe a bit psychically cruel, especially if one leaves the house in warm weather clothing and then has to shiver their way home at night.

As much as I really want to see a string of days where it's possible to walk comfortably barefoot in the squishy-cool damp grass of a newly green spring lawn, the kind you get on that day when suddenly the trees have budded and the crocuses and tulips startle your vision, as much as I want that, I don't mind these flirtations with warmth followed by the return of cold and dreary skys.

Weather should be coy. It's one of New England's charms, that weather changes by the minute.

And too, there's something not-dreary about otherwise dreary weather. There's beauty in the gray and fog of rain, the drenching cold of sleet, especially if you're dressed right for it and are out it in the weather on foot. And really especially if you can walk in the woods, or across an open field, away from sidewalks that hug traffic, away from sidewalks where the pedestrian is so easily beseiged by walls of water when cars speed through those long thick puddles that collect at the road's edge.

2003-04-14T16:48:00.000-04:00

Carpe Carping
The political right has wasted no time in seizing the carping. They're primarily carping and complaining that those on the left who opposed the war won't admit they were wrong. They're carping that left won't apologize for questioning the military strategy. I heard one commentator carp the other day that the New York Times didn't have front page coverage of PFC Jessica Lynch flying home; instead, the commentator biled, the Times covered the looting and lawlessness in Iraq. Even President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld play the carping game, complaining about any coverage that deviates from the press releases and rose-colored slide shows that are the CentCom briefings.

And that's what all the carping comes down to -- any instance of anyone in the media anywhere not towing the party line (the FoxNews Republican T.V. party line), is carped and mau-maued.

But look. The war strategy was questioned when commanders in the field remarked that they hadn't "war gamed" for the Fedayeem attacks on the supply line they were seeing. It was the chimera that doesn't exist, the so-called "media elite" that drove this story. To a large degree it was driven by ex-generals who, in their best imitation of retired NFL coaches second-guessing the call on the field of the coach actually in the game, raised the issue and picked at it. And it was the artificiality of CentCom "press conferences" as news, and the maw of 24 hour news cycles that really mean two minutes of actual and verifiable news, surrounded by three hours of hot air and speculation, that drove the battle plan questioning.

And sure, many liberals, as well as conservatives, were concerned that the war might go badly. And all sides, from the Office of Homeland security which raised us up a color on their terror alert scale, to the Pentagon, to the FBI, to the CIA, are still worried about continued side effects. No one was wrong per se to be concerned about this stuff.

But conservative pundits now have spun this illusion that antiwar types and liberals predicted bad things would happen, and that they won't now admit they were wrong, and admit now that everything's hunky dory. Well not everything is hunky dory, of course; and everyone knew we'd win this war. But the future is still in doubt, Iraq's between governments, which is not quite the same thing as being liberated.

Personally, I'm glad the war was not protracted. I only wish the forces could move more quickly and assuredly to the humanitarian part of the mission, to getting water and electricity to people, to restocking hospitals, and more. Some movement has been made, but there's so much more to do. One question, on the hospital side -- why not set up MASH units (or whatever the military these days calls mobile hospitals deployed in war) in Bosra, Baghdad, and other cities where doctors and hospitals are struggling?

I also wish the Bush team had a plan for helping Iraq become an open and democratic society. They don' t appear to, beyond the vague statment that Iraqi's will control Iraq. It seems to be a time of winging it.

I also worry that we'll turn our sights to the next conflict, and lose sight of what is, or isn't, happening in Iraq. That will settle for the illusion that Iraq has been liberated and made democratic, just as we settle for the illusion that those things have happened in Afghanistan.

I hope every fear I have is unrealized and that things turn out as rosy as the Bush group keeps telling us it will. But so far, I'm skeptical, and I don't think it's wrong to be skeptical or to voice that skepticism or to question the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department forcibly and directly.

2003-04-09T08:07:00.000-04:00

A Convention of Clowns. Really
I came to St. Louis yesterday afternoon and stopped by my hotel to get check in and eat lunch before heading off to a meeting with members of the Meramec English Department. I was a bit tired, a little groggy, and encumbered of the usual stress that comes from being in airport, where every one is a suspected terrorist and treated accordingly so.

I trudged off the shuttle, but as I made way to the registration desk, I was passed by a clown. A real clown, with baggy clown, a red clown nose, purple fuzzy clown hair and with an oversized clown flower in her oversized clown jacket. And coming towards me, from the opposite directions, were two more clowns, chatting, checking the time. And to my left, seated in the lobby couches, hunched over a something I could see, but conversing away like three business executives planning a presentation, were yet more clowns.

And they all had badges. I'd stumbled into a clown convention.

And just the site it of it all, with the juxtaposition of so much color and clown clothes on people who were being, well, so convention-like, rather than clown like, was better than a seeing a clown in performance mode. It was wonderfully funny.

And so I felt better, just by the sight of it all.

2003-04-09T01:23:00.000-04:00

24 Hour War News Coverage: No News, but Plenty of Noise
So look at cable news. Well don't look, it will drive you batty. Because news is rare, facts are few, and worst of all, the perspectives are bowlderized and laced with hot air and schmaltz. Speculation replaces second guessing; anchors ask air-heard questions. And visuals? You see a tank go by. You see a green tinted explosion. You see gold bathroom fixtures.

But what are you seeing? Really, it's a kind of parade, in somber voices, of a one long march to Bagdhad. It's one sanitized war we're getting. It's a painless war, except for the families who've lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, or for those who've been wounded. And those views are drenched in the flag, in words and phrases like, "hero," "ultimate sacrifice," or "brave." And those things are true enough, but they really don't get at the cost of being a hero, of making an ultimate sacrifice. Nor do those words, with the corresponding images and segment music, in the instant eulogoy and cliched rituals of televised loss (grief in a minute for a minute, but first this word from our sponsers) ever get at the loss of our humanity.

This war is too clean. It's too palatable to too many. People are dying and suffering, horribly. But that's white washed. It's too sanitized.

And the 24 hour war coverage of cable news makes it worse -- in large part because very often they have no news. So they cover the war like it's a football game. Only, in a football game, announcers and analyst at least pretend to be neutral and critique both sides; and try to show the whole game. No, this war coverage has made news invisible -- since if everything is news, there really in no news. There's mostly noise.

And too, the Iraqi's are invisible. We primarily see and hear where troops are, what they bombed, where they advanced, and their rationales and strategiec goals for bombing and advancing on those things. But we don't see, or hear much from those who've been advanced upon. We don't hear much from those who've been liberated.

This is war whose images are, for the most part acontextual, without a clear picture of wars ugliness, less we disturb the sensibilities of the cable news viewer, and without perspective. We get plenty of jabbering on the strategy, with ex-generals doing their John Madden thing, but no cohesive and complete view. Sure that may be impossible, but there doesn't seem to be much of an attempt at that as the news channels whip slim snippets of info into a fluff of blather.

So while embedded reporters might in fact be helping to keep the war as clean as possible, but the coverage is also obscuring the fact that war is still an ugly affair.

We need to see the costs of war, to viscerally know it.

Yes it would be upsetting, but war should be upsetting. We certainly don't need 24 hour news stations pretending to cover a war when all they're really doing is cover the hometeams progress. They're confusing this with Olympics coverage.

2003-04-07T12:37:00.000-04:00

Classic Reader
Here's a pretty cool site, that was passed on to me from a colleague at work. It's an interesting experiment in a (so far) free online reader of classic (aka public domain) texts. Registering at the site is easy; providing email is optional, so you don't have to worry about spam and marketing materials. Registering creates an account on the site so you can write and store annotations on the texts. If you're interested in this kind of stuff for distance education, or computer-based classrooms, or just to see an alternative form that digital publishing might take, give this site a look-see:

----Original Message Follows----

FYI:

http://www.classicreader.com/
At this site you can read, search, and annotate great works of literature by authors such as Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and many others. The collection currently contains 743 books and 1041 short stories by 211 authors. New works are added to the collection on a regular basis, many at the suggestion of readers. The works are split into seven categories: fiction, nonfiction, children, poetry, Shakespeare, short stories and drama.

2003-04-05T18:56:00.000-05:00

Talking to Teachers
I really enjoy talking to teachers. At the OAH conference today I had lunch with a number of historians, good and dedicated scholars who also really cared about teaching history well. I was struck by the amount of though and care they put it into engaging students in history. Their goal, across the board was simply this: to have students do history, not memorize history.

That's such an important distinction. They want students to think about history, about exploring the past, and about learning from it so that they can understand it deeply and relate what they learn to their lives now.

History for these scholars isn't just a list of dates and causes, but rather is, to put it crudely, critcal immersion in the past. The people here that I've met want their students to viscerally experience the past and the struggles, passions, and day to day life of it.

It's all very vibrant and exciting.

2003-04-04T08:25:00.000-05:00

Doing History

I'm at the Organization of American Historians conference in Memphis, TN. One of the things I'm hearing in sessions and conversations is the distinction some historians make when they teach. Instead of teaching history --i.e. telling students about history via lectures-- there's an effort to have students do history --having students engage history the way historians do. So there's a growing emphasis on primary documents, on field work, on historical thinking, while at the same time trying to have students read and learn history.

Yesterday I attended an excellent session: "Reaching with Technology: Approaches to Increasing Involvement through Instructional Technology."

The session opened with Bradley Austin, of Salem State College describing a teacher outreach project he worked on while at Ohio State. The Goldberg project is designed to have college historians work collaboratively with high school historians, with an eye toward helping both groups improve the teaching of history. Technology played a role in outreach --a WWW site was used for online meetings, file sharing and so on. What Bradley showed, however, was how things don't always go as planned, and talked about what the Goldberg team learned from the first year to the second of the project. And really it came down to discovering a better model of hybrid teaching -- part face to face and part distance. The first year, there was too much distance and the beginning face to face was overwhelming, with too much technology training. The second year, the program was reorganized, with more face to face, and more direct contact from teacher to teacher in the program. Everything Bradley described as working with colleagues also holds true when teachers work with students, and many of the teachers are taking the kinds of online activities and interactions they had with one another and are doing the same things with their students. So this was a tale of obstacles overcome. The Goldberg project WWW site is at http://goldberg.history.ohio-state.edu.

John Tully from Ohio State described how he uses not only primary documents, but primary artifacts --posters, art, and other images (which are plentiful on the WWW --see for example, that National Archives at http://nara.gov/). Instead of just reading a textbook, and gliding by an image or map that might be in the book, he gives students primary sources and asks that they "read" those, that they think critically about them. He provides them the kinds of questions historians ask. The process has students investigating the images and not passively reading what someone else thinks of the image. John found that this process, which takes advantage of the multimedia age students grow up in, has helped students become interested in history and wanting to read about it. Their questions and thinking about the images spark their interest and curiosity. And their work on the images is part of the course's grading economy; students get tests and assignments where image analysis plays an important role.

David Stricklin of Lyon College described a very neat project where students did fieldwork, interviewed people, did historical research, and then worked together to create a radio documentary. Why that? The idea was to get them to synthesize and present all their data and research in a format that required them to think carefully about how to present the information, to think creatively. But radio was used instead of say a WWW site because they had access to a some cassette editing equipment and some tape recorders, but not a computers for doing a WWW site. It was a great assignment --students produced their show and played it for the community -- and an ingenuous reminder that multimedia doesn't necessarily have to be WWW-based and with images. A lot can be done with just voice, sound, and recording.

Peter Rutkoff lead us on an overview and tour of North by South, an ongoing research project that follows African American migration patterns from south to north. Students visit a southern city, and then the northern city that African Americans migrated to. They do interviews, visit sites, and look to see how the movements affected African American culture. Very cool, very smart. And with a very nice WWW site at http://www.northbysouth.org/. Peter focus on the field trips, and he takes students to places he hasn't been, to explore things he doesn't know yet. By doing this, it's clear to student that they're co-investigators, explorers. Peter, like David in his project, are more coach and consultant than fonts of all knowing. But here's the kicker: Peter doesn't know a thing about building WWW sites, HTML, or any of those things. However, his students do. So he comments on the site's design, but the entire site was designed and built by students, who again, like David's students, made very sophisticated and smart decisions about how to organize and integrate and present intelligent very detailed and complicated research.

2003-04-02T16:30:00.000-05:00

Argument and War
In addition to working as the Director of New Media for a college textbook company, I also teach first year college writing as an adjunct about once a year. I'm not teaching now, but I wonder what I would be teaching about the rhetoric around the war if I were teaching now.

I think the trick would be helping students write persuasively even when I fundamentally disagreed with their positions. And as part of that, sharing my opinions and thoughts during class discussions in a way that doesn't make students believe they have to adopt them. It's a delicate balancing point that I know many teachers are trying to find.

Jonathan Zimmerman had an op. ed. in Sunday's Boston Globe (No point in linking; you have to pay to get it now.) where he pointed out that people tend to believe that if they make a good argument, others, being reasonable, will agree. And when people don't agree, we tend to view them as unreasonable, even suspect, even evil or looney or against us. Both the left and the right in this debate fall into that trap. They forget that reasonable people can disagree, and they see anyone who disagrees with them as defacto unreasonable. So Zimmerman reminds us:

Both sides, then, are operating in profoundly bad faith: they each presume that decent, knowledgeable people will agree with them. But the true democratic faith, the one that John Dewey proclaimed, teaches us that decent people disagree -- often profoundly -- about the same knowledge. Now, more than ever, it's a lesson that all of us need to learn.

I think if I was teaching now, I'd try to teach my students that. So they'd listen to one another, and then discuss differences without attacking motives and personalities.

2003-04-02T12:44:00.000-05:00

On Making War (and Peace?) Visible

I'm fascinated by how the 24/7 news coverage of the war in Iraq effects so much of what goes on. The presence of cameras and journalists, embedded and otherwise, from around the world, makes this a real-time war. That has affected directly the way coalition troops are prosecuting this war and fighting battles. Yes, there's intense bombing, and the war is violent and bloody, but also, there's an effort to keep it as clean as possible, to minimize when and where possible not only civilian deaths, but opposing troop deaths. The preference is that enemy troops surrender, not fight. And as much I was against the war and the immediate need for it, now that we're in it, I hope it ends as quickly and as bloodlessly as possible. I hope the strategies work exceptionally well, even though the danger in them is that they do make war seem more palatable.

With opposition to this war so strong and pronounced, there are political reasons for taking this approach. And with the stated aim of making this a war not only one of deposing a man willing to use weapons of mass destruction, but also one to liberate the people he controls by fear, the war has to be fought as cleanly as possible.

The real struggle will begin after the regime is removed. The questions will be, what next and how? No one knows the details, or what the plan is, not even the White House apparently.

But that the coalition forces are conscious of being watched closely, and that Bush's motives for insisting upon this war are justifiably mistrusted (In large part because he kept shifting his reasons for this war and because his foreign policy is based largely on arrogance and impatience.), means, that for now, there is some hope that the aftermath of this fight might mean some progress for the Iraqi people.

The forces move with care, in part, because every civilian death is not only a tragedy, but also a long term political, cultural, and military liability.

War is wretched; it's reached when there's a failure of diplomacy and foreign policy. In this case, the foreign policy failure is long and historical. It is the failure of the U.S. to follow and assert democratic liberal values in the region -- We helped bring Hussein to power; we armed him in his war with Iran; Reagan sent Cheney to Iraq to look into oil rights in the 80's. We supported him as dictator and only oppose him now because we believe he's too much a danger to us. Our failures go back a long way and continue to this moment.

Bush's incompetence to date, his inability to articulate a consistent and believable case for choosing this war, and the fear and mistrust he's brought to bear on the United States as world power, can only be reversed if all goes well after the war. The scary thing is that America's an impatient country, and that Bush has a history of not funding his promises and carrying through.

So any chance for a democracy of some kind evolving in Iraq will only happen if the depth of attention being paid now to the battle is also paid to the much less dramatic and tedious and hard process of building the peace.

The only hope now is for the post-war process to be ethical, honest, patient, and with a sustained commitment to helping Iraq become a free and independent democracy shaped by Iraqi people. That means, really, that antiwar marches must become peace and freedom marches for the Iraqi people. If the anti-war movement becomes a peace movement, then it can play vital and necessary role in making the best of this sad situation.

Anything less a free and independent Iraq after this, and this war will have been for nothing, and all the fears about the bad consequences of it -- more unrest in the middle east, more terrorists attacks here and abroad -- will come to pass, and that would only this war more tragic than it already is.

Subject:	Further Updates: Or More You Need to Know
From:	NC45
Date:	Sep 11 2004 5:23AM

Subject:	RE: Further Updates: Or More You Need to Know
From:	NC45
Date:	Sep 11 2004 6:30AM