Great White Hope? Nope.

Well, so I watched the Fred Thompson debate yesterday (at least that's what the media were calling it), and I must say that were I a Republican what I saw would have given me little comfort. It was Fred Thompson's moment in the sun, or at least it was supposed to be. And yet it really turned out more like the Mitt and Rudy show (which one was the cat and which the mouse, I'm still not sure).

The simple fact is that when you take away the slow zoom, the gel lens and the patriotic background music, Thompson just doesn't have all that much stage presence. He's certainly no Ronald Reagan. Most disheartening was probably his answer to Maria Bartiromo's question about the negative effects of a weak dollar on the U.S. economy. Fred seemed pretty clueless... not quite Miss Teen South Carolina clueless and not quite George Bush explains Tribal Sovereignty clueless, but certainly at a loss for words. In fact, he was only able to enumerate the benefits to the export sector of a weak dollar, but not the negatives, which is what the question was about (for the record, a weak dollar makes imports more expensive and makes the U.S. less attractive to foreign investors).

As for the other candidates, I continue to be impressed with Mitt Romney. I find his political views pretty much abhorrent, but the guy does exude an air of competence. And he's not a pie-in-the-sky ideologue or a confused theocrat. Had he been president these last four years I have little doubt that we wouldn't be in anything like the mess we're in today (of course you could say that about a Spongebob Squarepants presidency, too, or just about anybody). It's just too bad for the GOP that they've built their party on religious and ethnic bigotry, because Mitt the Mormon hasn't got a snowball's chance if he turns out to be the nominee. You can't win an election by appealing to unaligned voters and a handful of defectors from the other party but without the support of your base.

Excessive Force

22 Years ago the Philadelphia Police department, in a move that has come to epitomize the use of excessive force and official recklessness, dropped a firebomb on the roof of an apartment building housing a black separatist group known as MOVE. The bomb ignited several barrels of gasoline, burned down over 60 adjacent apartments and caused the deaths of 11 people including numerous children. Before all was said and done, the city of Philadelphia was ordered to pay over $30 million in compensation to victims of the bombing.

The MOVE bombing has become emblematic of why it is a bad idea to employ military grade weaponry and tactics to police civilian populations. And similar scattered incidents that have occurred over the years have led to tremendous anger and even civil unrest on the part of significant segments of the US population. Let us not forget that when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murray building in Oklahoma City, OK, in the single most spectacular (and grisly) terrorist attack on U.S. soil prior to the events of 9/11, he did so out of anger at the Federal government's mishandling of the Branch Davidian crisis in Waco, Texas. And while the full extent of the network that aided and abetted McVeigh in planning and carrying out the OK city bombings may never be known, it is a undeniable fact that the Waco incident that motivated McVaeigh sparked tremendous outrage among certain segments of the population (mostly rural conservatives) and provided a great deal of impetus to the formation and arming of numerous armed paramilitary organizations across the country that were overtly hostile to the Federal Government. These organizations were collectively referred to as "the Militia Movement."

I think it important to review this history, because as our newspapers report once again on the deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of U.S. equipped mercenary bands operating in Iraq with a grant of full immunity from prosecution by authorities in that country, it is vital that we understand (by looking back at our own responses to such outrages) the hatred that such incidents engender in the local civilian population. Try to imagine if the MOVE, the Waco incident, the Kent State massacre were regular occurrences in our own country, carried out by private paramilitary organizations under the employ of a foreign government and who have been granted immunity from prosecution by our civil courts. Today the New York Times reports on two women killed by private "security contractors" in Iraq. As is too often the case in these incidents, the victims were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time:

The women were in a white car that drove into the Masbah intersection in the central Karradah district as the convoy of three white and one gray SUVs was stopped about 100 yards away, according to a policeman who witnessed the shooting from a nearby checkpoint.

The men in the SUVs threw a smoke bomb in an apparent bid to warn the car against coming forward, said Riyadh Majid, the policeman. The woman driving the car tried to stop, but was killed along with the passenger when two of the guards in the convoy opened fire, Majid said.

The pavement where the attack occurred was stained with blood and covered with shattered glass from the car windows.

He said the convoy then raced away and Iraqi police came to collect the bodies and tow the car to the local police station.

There's no possible way we can defeat an insurgency while employing such tactics, and no question that we further drive the civilian population into our opponents ranks. Just ask yourself this question: if it had been your mother and your sister in that car, what would you do? If you answer that question honestly, and are not a coward, then you'll understand why the occupation is just as good as lost.

WTF, people?!

The opening line of this New York Times piece set my head a-spinning:

AFTER the 2004 elections, religious conservatives were riding high. Newly anointed by pundits as “values voters” — a more flattering label than “religious right” — they claimed credit for propelling George W. Bush to two terms in the White House. Even in wartime, they had managed to fixate the nation on their pet issues: opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.

I've got to ask the question: has the right so dominated the propaganda wars that they've managed to christen themselves "values voters" while implicitly and by extension re-defining the rest of us as hedonistic nihilists?

When in February of 2002 I marched through the streets of New York along with 200+ thousand like minded lefties in opposition to a looming, "pre-emptive" war of choice that would bring death to thousands of innocent men, women and children, were those not my values on display?

When I vote for the candidate who promises to extend health coverage to the needy who cannot afford it, are those not my values on display?

When I pull the lever for the candidate who assures me that he will ensure that our nation's elderly do not sink into destitution when they retire, are those not my values on display?

When I vote for the candidate who promises to allow scientists to inform the people of the environmental dangers we face in the coming decades, without censoring their speeches or de-funding their research, are those not my values on display?

When I rise in protest against a death penalty that almost all other industrialized nations have discarded, and which places these United States in league with totalitarian dictatorships such as Burma and China, are those not my values on display?

When I pen a blog entry lamenting the Bush Administration's promotion of torture as an acceptable form of interrogation for detained suspects, are those not my values on display?

The simple answer to these questions is that, yes, those are my values on display. I am not a nihilist, or a solipsist, or a hedonist. I am a values voter, and so are all the like minded people who I've met along the way, at political gatherings, at rallies, at universities, at churches and at work. And so to all those dime-store propagandists who wear the mantle of "pundit" and who would seek to convince the nation that I and my like-minded compatriots are valueless, I extend a hearty fuck you. I'll put my compassion and love of humanity up against your greed, your xenophobia, your jingoism, your warmongering, your homophobia and racism any day of the week as far as values go.

Not half as funny

OK, so conservatives have talk radio and liberals have satirical, "fake" news shows... and never the twain should meet. You'd think the Right would have figured this out sometime after the disaster that was Fox News' "Half Hour News Hour," but apparently the geniuses at the conservative "media watchdog" site Newsbusters didn't get the message. Take a gander at this nuttyness:





Egad, that's pretty awful stuff, canned laughter and all.

Update: I just realized how much this guy, Mark Ellis, looks like an asshole-fratboy version of Peter Lorre:



Again... not good.

Democrats: their prices are insaaaaane

According to Mitt Romney, supporting the Democratic proposal for an expanded SCHIP program is so unwise that it'd be like offering a customer a 10% discount on top of your already low, low 10% sale price in order to move a product:

“Can you imagine doing something like that in your enterprise, saying we want to get a new customer, so we’re going to lower the price to get this new account by 10 percent but then we’re going to go to all of our old customers and all give them 10 percent off too?” Mr. Romney said.

Which, apparently no businessman would ever contemplate* because they're already selling under invoice, and you can't find prices like these at any of their competitors and they're already losing their shirts at this price and it's just too crazy and insane and just plain zany an idea to even contemplate, but I tell you what: let me run it by my sales manager and see what he says!!!


*Except maybe on President's Day, and the day after Thanksgiving, and maybe Dec. 26, or if you're a mattress salesman maybe every other week... at most.

Patriotism pays off:

It pays to be a patriot:

Torture & Tossed Salad

It happened again the other night. Debate moderator Tim Russert directed the following question at Democratic candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton:

"Senator Clinton, this is the number three man in Al Qaeda. We know there's a bomb about to go off, and we have three days, and we know this guy knows where it is. Should there be a presidential exception to allow torture in that kind of situation?"

To her credit, Senator Clinton responded by disavowing torture under any and all circumstances: "As a matter of policy it cannot be American policy, period," she said. But to her shame, this was not the position she held in October when she told a New York Daily News reporter that there should be narrow exceptions allowing for government sanctioned torture in some cases. Whether her change of position reflects a genuine moral shift or simply a new political calculus cannot be known for certain. But whatever it is that moves this change of position, and the similar disavowal of torture we heard from the mouths the other major candidates at last night’s debate, I’ll take it. It’s certainly better than we’ve seen from the Republican candidates in recent months. Indeed, apart from the very notable exception of John McCain --the only genuine torture survivor among the group-- the major Republican candidates for the presidency all seem to delight in reassuring their conservative audiences that they would not hesitate to grant interrogators the right to torture olive skinned foreigners if doing so might prevent an attack on honest, God fearing Americans.

At a debate in South Carolina last May, both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney responded to a similar question by assuring the audience that they would give interrogators wide latitude in the use of harsh interrogation techniques, while slyly denying that such techniques would constitute torture. You could almost feel the breeze as candidates and audience members traded a collective wink and a nod. Both men went on to specifically endorse water boarding, a method of torture whereby a prisoner is repeatedly brought to the edge of asphyxiation and made to believe he is drowning. And Mitt Romney further insisted that the prison at Guantanamo Bay Cuba should be expanded to twice its size rather than boarded up, as some critics contend.

Reflecting a bit on the Republican Party’s fondness for torture, a question occurred to me that I would really, really like to be afforded the opportunity to pose at a future candidate’s forum. The question would go something like this:

"Mayor Giuliani, Governor Romney, this is the number three man in Al Qaeda. We know there's a bomb about to go off, and we have three days, and we know this guy knows where it is. We’ve been torturing him for weeks, but to no avail. He won’t give up the information. But then one day he wakes up and says: ‘OK, OK, I’ll tell you guys where the bomb is. But only if Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney will fly down here to Gitmo and toss my salad.’ I ask you, Mr. Mayor... Governor... Would you do it? Would you toss his salad if it might potentially save hundreds of innocent lives? "

Now, if you don’t know what it means to toss someone’s salad, then I suggest you forego looking the expression up, and just accept that it’s not a very nice thing to have to do. Yes, you will find an explanation for it in the hip & with it, online, Urban Dictionary. But you’ll wish you hadn’t. Trust me. Just accept that tossing someone’s salad is not something you want to find yourself doing every day... or ever, actually. It’s an activity that’s kinda on the degrading side... sorta the way planet Jupiter is kinda on the big side, or the surface of the sun is kinda on the hot side.

And that’s just the point. You see, these candidates and their enablers in the media (I’m speaking to you Brit Hume and you Tim Russert) never seem to tire of assuring us that they would be more than willing to degrade America and drag her name through the dirt, compromise her values and betray her founding principles all in the name of foiling a fictional terrorist attack scenario that exists only in the imaginations of Hollywood script writers and fear mongering propagandists. But what I would like to know is whether they’d be just as willing to degrade themselves, drag their own names through the mud, compromise their own values and betray their own principles all in the name of foiling that same attack.

“Now, hold on there,” I hear you say. “The scenario you’re describing is preposterous. No terrorist is going to ask Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney to toss his salad in exchange for information that might enable U.S. authorities to foil an attack.” And right you are. But then, no real-life example of the so-called “ticking time-bomb” scenario, which could have been prevented through torture, is ever known to have occurred in all of recorded human history. This is probably because the scenario itself is so preposterous. Consider all the pieces that would need to fall into place, as described in a recent publication of the Association for the Prevention of Torture (PDF):

· You’d have to have the guy in custody.

· You’d have to know an attack was imminent.

· The attack will kill a lot of people.

· The guy has enough information to prevent the attack.

· If you torture this guy he’ll give up the information.

· There’s no other way to get this information.

· There’s no other way (i.e. evacuation of a building) to prevent a loss of life.

In addition I might add:

· This guy’s important enough to know about the plan, but not so important that the fact that he’s out of commission won’t by itself prevent the plan from being carried out.

· The bad guys don’t know you have this guy, so they won’t alter the plan.

So we’re talking about a very improbable scenario here. Indeed, one has to assume further, that once the bad guys know that we’re torturing their captured officials, they’ll give their field operatives enough leeway in choosing targets and hideouts that no other member of the organization could have enough information to prevent it (this is assuming they don’t already operate in this manner).

“But wait,” I hear you say, “this scenario is not really so improbable. After all, I see it played out every week on T.V. and in the movies” And to this I respond that if movies are your metric for plausibility, then I think that you’ll find plenty of movies in which the bad guys do, in fact, offer to mend their evil ways in exchange for a salad tossing. They’re just found in a different section of the rental store, that’s all, a little dank, musty room in the back alongside a whole host of other unusual titles with names you’ve never heard of and some very unconventional cover-art.

So once again, the question stands: Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, if you could prevent a terrorist attack upon these United States of America by tossing a terrorist’s salad, would you do it? Please, don’t be shy, Patriotic Americans wants to know.