disconnect

There's a review on the NY Times about a couple of documentaries, one in the theater and one on PBS, that deal with foreign news coverage of the war in Iraq. I've wanted to see these other news stations for some time now just to see what isn't being shown here. From what I've been able to gather there's a lot more in-depth, on the ground reporting being shown in the Middle East that isn't being shown in the US. These two movies look interesting and look like they go into that pretty well. I want to see 'em.

There's an amazing interview in the Sacramento Bee with a Marine discharged on December 31 after 12 years of service. He talks about some pretty widespread civilian casualties and other crazy things. I imagine there's tons of these stories just like it's coming out that there's tons of those pictures like at Abu Ghraib. They're out there if you're paying attention, but I figure Iraqis already know a lot more about this than we do. You ought to get acquainted with these events, since they're being done in your name.

Then after reading this interview, you get to read this story about that wedding party bombed the other day that killed 45 people. Or it was a terrorist hideout, if you believe US military commanders. The fact that we even have to doubt the word of these generals, much less believe that they're at best misinformed and at worst lying, shows you how bad things have gotten. And they're only going to get worse.

How can Bush and Rumsfeld have any credibility left? Who is more responsible for this endless chain of humiliation and destruction than them?

Nancy Pelosi:

"Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he's not a leader. He's a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide upon.''

Thomas Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee:

"If Nancy Pelosi has nothing to offer our troops, who are living and dying thousands of miles away, besides taunting them by saying they are dying needlessly and are risking their lives on a shallow mission, then she should just go back to her pastel-colored condo in San Francisco and keep her views to herself."

Now I, and most people reading this site, probably agree with everything Nancy Pelosi says, and think that Thomas Reynolds and guys like him are asses. Plenty of others think exactly the opposite. I think fewer and fewer people though have no opinion on the matter. This country is definitely becoming more polarized by the second and I really wonder what things will be like after the election. I know I can't imagine what it would be like to live under four more years of George W. Bush. I'd be pretty upset about it and I imagine lots of people would be more upset than me. If Kerry wins, I doubt Republicans will have the same kind of anger but I'm sure the attack machine will rev up to try to undermine his presidency as quickly as possible.

I blame Bush for about 90% of this of course. I don't deny that Clinton was a polarizing figure, but the guy won a sweeping victory in 1996 and didn't use it as a launching pad for implementing a radical agenda. By contrast, Bush wins with a minority of the popular vote and sees it as a mandate for throwing out everything he can and pursuing his own agenda ruthlessly. That's not exactly going to help bring the country together. 9/11 was supposed to do just that, bring us together, but instead it's been used to split the country and split us from our allies abroad.

I thought the idea of a Kerry-McCain ticket was pretty ludicrous when I first heard it, even if I think McCain's a great guy and one of the few Republicans I wouldn't mind voting for. There are simply too many issues in which the two of them differ substantially. But it's the only ticket that would significantly help calm down the polarizing situation taking place. Kerry, despite Bush's attempts to paint him as a typical Massachusetts liberal, is a centrist. Most Democrats I know were fairly disappointed he won the primary due to his relative conservatism compared to the other candidates. Similarly, McCain is a centrist, though he leans toward the Republican side of most arguments. More compelling is the fact that both these men are intelligent and prefer reason over political bickering, but having a "unity ticket" would be a positive as well. I'm sure plenty of Democrats and Republicans will see it as an abomination and I'm not even sure it would work. And I think a good point can be made that Kerry doesn't need any help moving to the right on issues. But it would certainly send a powerful message that there are some serious problems we need to face and that Kerry-McCain would be the choice on the ballot to actually face them and get things done.

(For the record, I voted for Edwards in the primary and like him as V.P.)

Robyn keeps bugging me to post something that's not about Iraq, so I thought I'd post a link to this article in yesterday's NY Times about how the White House will propose massive budget cuts in a program or propose killing the program altogether, and then cabinet officials will go out and announce new funding for these programs. It's also about how officials will go on a business-related trip and use it to promote the Bush campaign or agenda, but since Clinton did roughly the same thing and it's being somewhat addressed already I don't have much standing to attack that (besides, there are other, better cases in which the administration's mixed politics and business in a way deemed as "covert propaganda" (as opposed to the outright propaganda the administration usually carries out)).

A tasty excerpt:

In April, Secretary Thompson announced that the administration was awarding $3.1 million in grants to improve health care in rural areas of Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico and New York. He did not mention that the administration was trying to cut the same rural health program by 72 percent, to $11.1 million next year, from $39.6 million.

It's bad enough that Bush will tell us that we can have everything we want as far as government spending is concerned plus tax cuts, but even worse when he tells us he's increasing funds to something when he's trying to kill it. Fancy press conferences touting "compassionate conservative" programs for the swing voters, budget cuts of these "bleeding-heart" programs behind the scenes for the right-wing base.

From Atrios comes a link to a story about the influence of Christian fundamentalists in the Bush administration. The actual story, in the Village Voice, is here but it's long and Atrios excerpts a bit of it in that first link if you're lazy.

I always figured, half-jokingly, that Bush's policies would bring on Armageddon. I didn't think he'd actually have people working towards that as a policy goal.

So I was reading this article on the NY Times about how we don't know who we're handing Iraqi sovereignty to on June 30 or what that even entails. Now we know the Bush administration doesn't like to concern themselves with namby-pamby diplomatic details and isn't so good at that "planning ahead" thing (with the notable exception of war planning), so I was wondering, what if they just didn't do it? What if they were like some kid who had a book report due but never bothered to read the book, and on June 30th Bush says, "Um, Mr. Brahimi, I didn't finish my Iraqi sovereignty handover report. Can I have an extension?" Then two days later he turns it in, but it's very obviously plagiarized from when Japan regained sovereignty from the US in 1952 because there are all sorts of references to "the Emperor" and who retains control of various islands.

Are they working on some secret handover procedures to be unveiled at the last minute that will wow us all with a perfect solution to this mess? Can this be anything other than a complete fiasco? I'm afraid everyone in this administration has been living in a dream world for so long that they're about to hit reality hard next month, that no one knows enough (or is competent enough) to do anything about it, and that they're hoping that the UN will bail them out. But I don't think that's going to happen.

I've been predicting for a while that as the Bush administration came closer to falling out of power, they would start doing more and more outrageous things. Now comes this clip from today's Meet The Press showing Colin Powell getting cut off during an interview with Tim Russert by a press aide basically acting like a minder. One wonders how much this happens behind the scenes on occasions that don't get broadcast on national TV. I guess when you can't get the press to censor themselves anymore, you have to get proactive. Watching the video it's really quite disturbing that someone would try to censor the Secretary of State like that as an interview was taking place.

The New Yorker: Fact

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.