Winter means no more sitting in the windows all day because it is too cold. Nowadays, afternoons are spent curled up in a ball hibernating on a couch in the home office. When I took this picture, he was so asleep I thought he was dead.
Archives for December 2005
The Bush Administration as Heroin Addicts
I haven’t had much to say on this FISA bit, and there are several reasons for this.
First, and I guess we can just chalk this up to either naivete or cynicism (or ignorance), and you can take your pick, I sort of just assumed that NSA and other agencies monitored foreign communications and monitored them for national security issues. I thought that is what NSA did. I thought that is what Echelon did. I thought that is what the big complex at Ft. Meade was for.
I don’t know if I am “‘OK” with that- but that is what I thought they did, and I had grown to accept it. I would be livid if they used these intercepts for issues unrelated to national security, like drug or other criminal issues, or corporate espionage, or spying on domestic political opposition, but I errantly was under the impression that NSA did just spy on foreign communications. Again, I am not sure if I am ok with that, but I thought that they had permission to do it, so it is a little difficult to get outraged about something you thought was happening all along. I am glad it is illegal and they are not doing what I thought they were, but I am having a hard time getting whipped into a frothing rage. Does that make sense?
Second, I am not sure what all actually has gone on. Was it just snooping intercepts between Al Qaeda agents? Because I am ok with that. Are they situations such as the one described here? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, to my knowledge.
Third, I am not convinced Bush has done anything wrong (and I mean in the legal sense) . The statutes are a complicated mess for a layman (loudmouth idiot) like me, and for every person in high dudgeon that Bush should be impeached, I can give you a security expert who claims what Bush did was within the letter of the law. Not surprisingly, the most strident critics are all Democrats, the most ardent supporters are Republicans (with the exception of Bob Barr). If it turns out he broke the law, I am not going to support him.
At any rate, putting all that aside, this is inexcusable:
WASHINGTON — In confirming the existence of a top-secret domestic spying program, President Bush offered one case as proof that authorities desperately needed the eavesdropping ability in order to plug a hole in the counter-terrorism firewall that had allowed the Sept. 11 plot to go undetected.
In his radio address Saturday, Bush said two of the hijackers who helped fly a jet into the Pentagon — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — had communicated with suspected Al Qaeda members overseas while they were living in the U.S.
“But we didn’t know they were here until it was too late,” Bush said. “The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after Sept. 11 helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities.”
But some current and former high-ranking U.S. counter-terrorism officials say that the still-classified details of the case undermine the president’s rationale for the recently disclosed domestic spying program.
Indeed, a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines.
This is the strongest indication to me that they did do something wrong, and they know it.
Why can this gang not shoot straight? Why can they not tell the truth? Why?
On days like this, the Bush administration reminds me of heroin addicts. Junkies will lie to you- about everything. Sometimes they lie intentionally, sometimes accidentally, sometimes they can’t tell truth from fiction. But they never have any long-range concepts of time- it is just say whatever they can to get out of the current mess, with no regard for what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is going to happen when this false truth is uncovered. It is just deal with the right here and the right now, get their fix, and deal with tomorrow when it comes.
They don’t respect themselves. They don’t respect you. And they just do whatever they have to do and say whatever they have to say to get by.
I don’t think Bush is personally a bad man or an evil man. But I wonder what the hell is going on in this White House, and I wonder what the hell is wrong with these people and why they keep setting Bush up for the fall like this. Why would his advisors clear this speech if it is bullshit? At some point, when you deal with junkies and addicts, you have to quit trying to convince yourself that they are telling you the truth and realize that they can’t help themselves- they are going to rob you, they are going to lie to you, and they aren’t going to remember why tomorrow.
If this latest piece in the LAT turns out to be true, I will be at that point. I simply will refuse to believe anything this administration says.
*** Update ***
Jeff Goldstein, who apparently takes any discussion of this administration’s honesty and forthrightness personally, states I am talking smack and assumes it is a matter of bad faith:
John Cole works himself into quite a state today over an LA Times story he believes suggests that the President may have “lied”—a pronouncement upon which John’s commentariat pounces like angry terriers on a bloody lamb shank.
***Second, Cole’s reaction is so hyperbolic as to beg credulity.
Because this administration would never lie or embellish anything.
In short, Jeff’s real claim is that I am being sucked in by the LAT’s distortion of Bush’s statement. Why he couldn’t just say that without the charges of bad faith is beyond me.
The Bush Administration as Heroin AddictsPost + Comments (297)
Narnia Review
Frequent commenter Bruce Moomaw offers the following Narnia review:
The movie is quite good, although not great. It’s not absolutely top-notch children’s entertainment, because — and only because — the book itself isn’t quite at the top rank; it is, after all, an allegory of the Gospels, and Lewis was always better when he was telling his own religious stories about the different kinds of moral trials and temptations that we can undergo (on which he was seemingly incapable of writing a dull word). The remaining Narnia books, save the last one, are all his own invention.
The biggest news is that neither the non-Christians who feared that the movie would be a heavy-handed piece of bigoted Christian propaganda, nor the Christians who feared that the story would be secularized into unrecognizability, have anything to fear. The movie follows the book almost perfectly — I can’t think of another movie that has followed its book so closely — and the result is that it is unmistakably Christian but not heavy-handed or bigoted, for the simple reason that Lewis himself was a Christian but not a religious bigot. His portrayal of the true nature of morality is one that both Christians and non-Christians can agree on totally.
In this connection, let me add that I remain mystified by the fact that Lewis’ most venomous enemies (including Philip Pullman) have apparently never read anything he said or wrote in his life EXCEPT the Narnia books — which they insist on grotesquely misinterpreting. The man was not a religious bigot, not a racist, and not a misogynist (some of his earlier writings show some mild misunderstanding of the psyches of women, but that
disappeared totally by the 1950s and was never serious). Where homosexuality is concerned, his views were amazingly tolerant for someone in the first half of the 20th century: “I have never understood how any sexually normal person can view homosexuality with anything other than a kind of bewildered pity.” (In one chapter of his autobiography dealing with his years in a brutal private school, he notes the large number of gay relationships between the boys there — and then adds that they were the one sign of human affection he saw there.)In the end, Lewis was simply too morally sane to be a bigot on any subject. He wasn’t even very politically conservative — he was a moderate conservative with the emphasis on the “moderate” part, which is why his admirers have included everyone from Bill Buckley to Kenneth Tynan (who had some of Lewis’ lines read at his own funeral), and which sometimes got him in hot water with Tolkien. Anyone who doubts this about Lewis is free to read, say, “The Four Loves”, or his poems and letters — and anyone who regards him as a religious bigot can read almost anything he ever wrote for clear proof that he absolutely detested it. (In the first chapter of the first book he wrote after his complex adult conversion back to Christianity, “The Pilgrim’s Regress”, our hero John abandons Christianity as a boy because of the way it was presented to him in his homeland of Puritania: “The upshot appeared to be that the Landlord [God] was extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would most certainly torture them all to death the moment he got the slightest excuse for doing so.” In Lewis’ view, Hell is a state of misery that mortals impose entirely on themselves, through selfishness and cold pride.) I myself never quite followed him all the way into Christianity, for complex reasons that I won’t go into here — but it’s an understatement to say that he changed my life for the better at age 15; I recommend his works for adults unreservedly.
The movie does some little things wrong, which you’ll notice. Most seriously, Susan (Anna Popplewell) is bad-tempered and grumpy through most of the movie, and it isn’t made adequately clear that this is because she’s driven by fear. But it does all the big things right: Liam Neeson as Aslan’s voice (that is, the voice of Christ himself), which is warm and authoritative rather than pompous; Tilda Swinton as the White Witch, who is
(literally) chilling rather than over-the-top melodramatic — she convincingly portrays a person purged of every last speck of affection or human feeling — and, most remarkably, the movie somehow manages to make it believable that in this world these four kids could be valuable warriors. (As an added fringe benefit, it features the only non greed-oriented depiction of Santa Claus I’ve ever seen, which I would have thought
impossible.) And, my God, computerized animation simply goes on getting better and better. We have finally achieved cinema’s long-sought promised land: we can now portray on film, absolutely convincingly, any scene that a fantasy writer can ever imagine.The reason the movie gets the big things right was instantly clear when I saw the opening credits: the executive producer of the Narnia movies is one other than Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, who made it clear in his autobiography that he both liked and understood Lewis very well. In short, these movies are being made by someone who genuinely cares about the sourcematerial. And if all the remaining Narnia books are filmed, and filmed faithfully, I look forward with delicious anticipation to the reaction to the last one — in which Aslan says flatly that even self-declared Satanists will go to Heaven if they do kind and generous things in the name of Satan because they are actually worshipping Christ and just calling him “Satan”; whereas even self-proclaimed Christians will NOT go to Heaven if they are selfish or cruel, because they are actually worshipping Satan and calling him “Christ”. You can’t possibly state a more ecumenical version of Christianity than that. Now sit back for a moment and imagine the reaction of the “Left Behind” gang to it..
Sounds like a good movie…
No Arctic Drilling
The Senate has once again rejected drilling in ANWR:
The Senate blocked oil drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge Wednesday, rejecting a measure that had been put into a must-pass defense spending bill in an attempt to garner wider support.
Drilling supporters fell four votes short of getting the required 60 votes to avoid a threatened filibuster of the defense measure over the oil drilling issue. Senate leaders were expected to withraw the legislation so it could be reworked without the refuge language. The vote was 56-44.
This has become another one of those pointless symbolic issues that is less about what people actually claim (oil independence and the environment) and more about political clout.
Iraq Elections Open Thread
The rightie blogs are dancing in triumph while the leftie blogs are listing the problems. I don’t know enough about them to say anything one way or the other.
What do we know at this point? Who benefits? Did Nader play the spoiler, again? Have at it in the comments.
Meet The New Meme, Same As The Old Meme
Did Carter and Clinton order warrantless wiretaps/searches of American citizens? No.
***Update***
Also, Kevin Drum has a quick rundown of some other recent FISA stories. Most interestingly, it looks like the warrantless wiretaps netted some purely domestic communications. Tsk.
***Update 2***
Scott McLellan tries to define ‘oversight,’ instead defines ‘Congress.’ Hilarious.
Meet The New Meme, Same As The Old MemePost + Comments (209)
Abramoff Preparing To Flip?
As unconfirmed rumors go, this one’s a doozy.