Crazy busy.
Archives for April 2007
Why President Bush Irritates People
A White House official who attended the meeting, and spoke on condition of anonymity in order to describe details, said Mr. Bush’s first question to the Democratic leaders was, “When can you get me a bill?”
And, this official said, Mr. Bush told the Democrats that he hoped to ultimately follow several of the guidelines set forth last year in a report by the Iraq Study Group, which called for an eventual draw-down of American troops. According to the official, Mr. Bush noted that the Study Group, whose co-chairman was his father’s former political aide, James A. Baker III, had suggested that a temporary troop increase could be a necessary step on the way to an eventual withdrawal.
Let’s tease apart the insulting stupidity of this reasoning. Say that I break your leg in three places. How could you get angry with me? Medical doctors break bones all the time. I could pull out a manual where it says – in plain English – that you sometimes need to break a bone when an old break doesn’t set right.
The president obviously does not plan to pull troops out of Iraq. Maybe he honestly thinks that people are morons, maybe he fails to see the stupidity of his own statement, whatever. The remarkable thing here is not the president’s quotidian stupidity but the almost totally counterfactual nature of his claim. Surging troops now will not only do nothing for a withdrawal that won’t happen, but our current troop surge will make a safe withdrawal nearly impossible.
Our army was tired before the “surge.” Even then our commitments were hardly tenable, sustained by rapidly deteriorating equipment and a massive callup of the National Guard and reserves. Readiness is a real crisis and increasing our troops now will only make it that much worse. When our “surge” winds down the army will need a significant time before America is able to commit new troops abroad for any reason.
The “surge” does more than just put off the date that we leave Iraq. It also ensures that pullout orders will go out to tired troops with worn-out equipment and virtually no hope of reinforcements. If Iraq remains hot when the inevitable pullout comes, Americans will die because Frederick Kagan convinced the president to spend our last resources on a quixotic troop buildup.
***
To broaden the point, compare this with the mantra that we should invade Iraq because of 9/11. Think about what group could possibly have wanted America to invade Iraq as badly as the neocons. If al Qaeda doesn’t ring a bell, it should. Iraq relieved al Qaeda’s siege in Afghanistan, threw our resources down an insurgency hole, brought on exactly the public-inflaming occupation of Islamic holy lands that AQ tried and failed to accomplish in Afghanistan, and (bonus!) it saved AQ the chore of knocking over Saddam themselves.
Again the unique Bush gift goes beyond making a plainly stupid argument to some ethereal plane of counterproductive mendaciousness. A sworn enemy of the United States could not manufacture a Manchurian president-bot that would serve their interests better than our current leadership.
Media Bias
Just curious. What do you think the media and others would label someone who wrote this before murdering 31 people:
You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.
Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave?
Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive?
Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can?You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like ALLAH, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.
I am betting half the blogosphere would be drawing up plans to invade Iran (the new Originals*), and the words Islamic terrorist would be flowing freely. Hell, some in the blogosphere were HOPING for that to be the case.
*- Sorry for the Spinal Tap reference.
Profiles In Courage (A Continuing Series)
Another Republican is implicated inthe Abramoff mess, and the FBI has raided Rep. John Doolittle’s home:
The FBI on Friday raided the Northern Virginia home consulting business owned by the wife of Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.), whose ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff have been under investigation for two years, sources familiar with the matter said. Agents seized computers and documents.
Doolittle’s wife, Julie, operates Sierra Dominion Financial Services Inc. out of the couple’s home in Oakton. Since 2005, a Justice Department task force has been looking into payments made by Abramoff and other lobbyists to Doolittle’s wife and the spouses of other lawmakers.
Abramoff, the once-powerful lobbyist at the center of a wide-ranging public corruption investigation, was sentenced to five years and 10 months in prison on March 29, after pleading guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials in a deal that required him to provide evidence about members of Congress.
Julie Doolittle has denied wrongdoing. “Sierra Dominion Financial Services, and its owner, Mrs. Julie Doolittle, have cooperated for years, and continue to cooperate, in the ongoing investigation of the Jack Abramoff matter,” said her lawyer, William L. Stauffer Jr.
Just your run of the mill corruption, but what makes this so awesome is his statement to the press throwing his wife under the bus:
Doolittle said in a statement: “My wife has been cooperating with the FBI and the Justice Department for almost three years and that cooperation is going to continue in the future. I support my wife 100 percent and fully expect that the truth will prevail.”
Ahh. The sanctity of marriage. Translation: “I don’t know what that crazy woman is up to, but if any laws were broken, I didn’t know about it.”
Because we all know that in most marriages, when a couple hundred thousand extra dollars show up in the bank, spouses rarely if ever discuss it. At any rate, I am sure Julie Doolittle appreciates the brave way in which here husband has stood behind her, and John Doolittle is probably the only Republican right now who thinks having everyone in the country armed is a bad idea.
Profiles In Courage (A Continuing Series)Post + Comments (18)
What Libertarianism Looks Like
With our current crop of big-government bullshit artists the word Libertarian hardly seems to mean anything anymore. For those who forgot, Greenwald serves it up straight.
The general topic of why we have prescription drug laws seems pretty easy to answer. One, a huge number of drugs on the market become habit-forming very fast. These medications often make a formerly rational person begin to act irrationally in order to serve the habit. Rush Limbaugh makes a bad example since he was never rational, but you get my point. In an uncontrolled environment practically everybody who has an addictive personality, which is a very large number of people, will have a habit by their eighteenth birthday.
Second, even professional pharmacists have a hard time keeping up with the huge number of dangerous drug interactions. Some interactions are automatically bad, some become risky with certain medical complications. The libertarian model hardly breaks down if consumers are willing to take risks that doctors are not, but it absolutely depends on consumers’ ability to gauge risks accurately. When it comes to prescription drugs the concept of a fully informed consumer becomes untenable.
So there you have it – what libertarianism really looks like and why, in my view, it doesn’t work.
Hilzoy On D’Souza
Religious triumphalists like D’Souza make no sense to me. These guys talk as if we would all become horrible ultra-Hobbesian monsters if it we did not believe in some sort of punishing god figure, but I don’t see any evidence of that. Out of the religious and non-religious people in my sphere of acquaintance I would say the jerks are spread out fairly evenly. I can separate right from wrong just fine without believing in god*.
Conversely, people do pretty horrible things to each other in the name of god. That should not condemn religion per se, rather intense faith in any cause lets people abstract their actions from the restraints of human decency. All forms of idealistic/utopian thinking have the same danger. The same fanaticism that people claim to be uniquely Islamic burned Europe and Europeans through the middle ages.
As far as I can tell the evidence which drives people like D’Souza to claim that we would all become unrestrained barbarians without in-your-face religion must be internal rather than external. It’s creepy.
***
(*) Full explanation – as a determined empiricist I don’t have anything against religion per se, I just find non-falsifiable statements irrelevant. Religion and the general category of superstitious belief seem to be ineradicable aspects of the human psyche so hating them strikes me as analogous to hating people. I like the general idea just fine, even if some get on my nerves.
Wed. Open Thread
As I said yesterday, make sure you don’t learn the lessons that people will try to teach you in the next few weeks:
Police can’t be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it’s usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they’re armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.
“Gun-free zones” are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That’s an insult. Sometimes, it’s a deadly one.
Again, I don’t know what fantasy world people live in that “more guns on campus” is the solution to the tragedy the other day.
It may very well be that an armed person may have pulled a gun and downed the gunman at VT. Just as plausible, he could have pulled the gun and shot another innocent. Or would have been armed when police showed up and accidentally shot. Or any number of things.
Regardless, suppose the best case scenario happened- an armed individual shot the killer before he finished his spree, and only half the people killed would have died. I am betting the number of people involved in accidental, spur of the moment rage shootings, drunking shootings, and what not would top those lives saved in simply a matter of weeks were campuses populated with heavily armed young men and women.
Those who want armed campuses will point to statistics that state that shall-carry states have seen no rise in violence as gun possession increased. What they are not looking at is that those statistics show no sign of increase in violent gun crime across the population as a whole. Colleges are a very unique cross-section of the population, composed of 18-22 year olds, the most violent members of society. Pointing to statistics from the entire population and extrapolating to behavior of a limited cross-section of society would and should be problematic. Social science researchers are aware of this and that is why research designs which use data only from student populations are always somewhat dangerous to make broader assessments about the larger population.
As far as I am concerned, only if you want more gun violence would you support heavily armed students on every campus. I may be wrong, but I don’t think I am- regardless, I refuse to let the actions of a crazed mass murderer dictate policy decisions that would have broad and potentially disastrous implications for society. And that is what this is really about- knee-jerk reactions to the actions of a crazy person.