The Osama Show

I just saw Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden on TV. According to the Bush campaign, he was there to give his endorsement to John Kerry.

Do you suppose that's the reason that piece of shit is still alive?

Osama : too convenient to kill...

("I'm Osama bin Laden, and I approved this message.")

Is this the October surprise? Because if so, it's a pretty lame October surprise.

Costs of War

The war in Iraq was being prepared in 1999 in order to boost Bush's popularity should he become president. Has it been worth it? Did you get your money's worth? There are a lot of American service people and a lot more Iraqis who will never find out.

According to that liberal left-wing radical rag The Lancet, our brilliant little war has cost roughly 100,000 Iraqi civilians their lives. That's civilians. I don't know about you, but that just makes me beam with pride. (Yes, it's an order of magnitude more than are noted on the Iraq Body Count; that's because the IBC only counts deaths actually reported in the media.)

Now let's see. The cost of the Iraq war stands today at roughly 142 billion dollars. So each dead Iraqi only cost us about one and a half million dollars each! It's a real bargain when you realize that the vast majority of them weren't even terrorists! Wait, it gets better! It's all borrowed money! You might not even pay it back -- because your kids will!

Of course, it only takes about ten bucks for an insurgent to blow up a Humvee full of American soldiers. (Do we have a million times more money than they do? Better hope so.)

Seriously: collateral damage is an unfortunate fact of life in warfare, especially in an age of asymmetric warfare and terrorism. It's one of the reasons we should be reluctant to go to war. The professional US military does everything it can to reduce the number of civilian casualties, but it's still an inevitable part of military operations. That's why war should only be undertaken as a last resort, not as a component of domestic political strategy.

What Is That Thing?

There is definitely something there:



So what could it be?
Drainage Tube?
A Broken Spine?
Puppet Strings?

(Full Story available at Salon.)

Lowering the Water

Have you ever heard that phrase, "If you can't raise the bridge, lower the water" ...?

It seems that's just what someone is doing in Milwaukee. This flyer is being passed around in black neighborhoods there.



Now, who would benefit from depressing black voter turnout? That's a tough question...

Some Literary Pointers for the Upcoming Week

This is from Anthony Burgess's book 1985, published in 1978, a critique and counterpoint to Orwell's 1984:

"...That cacotopia of Sinclair Lewis's, It Can't Happen Here, still seems to me to be the most plausible projection, though it was written in the thirties. At least it shows how a tyranny can come about through the American electoral process, with a president American as apple pie, as they say -- a kind of cracker-barrel Will Rogers type appealing to the philistine anti-intellectual core of the American electorate. Core? More than the core, the whole fruit except for the thin skin of liberalism. My old pappy used to say: Son, there ain't no good books except the Good Book. Time these long-haired interlettles got their comeuppance, and so on. And so book-burning, shooting of radical schoolmasters, censorship of progressive newspapers. Every repressive act justified out of the Old Testament and excused jokingly in good spittoon style....

"What interests me is how a species of totalitarianism could come about in the United States through uneasiness about the enemy at the gates. A communist revolution in Mexico, helped by the Chinese, might set America dithering, looking for spies, deploying her immense cybernetic and electronic resources to keep citizens under surveillance. The enhanced power of the presidency, the temporary dissolution of Congress. Censorship. Dissident voices silenced. And all int he name of security. No war is necessary, only the threat of war and, in good Orwellian style, the notion of an enemy, actual or potential, can be the device for justifying tyranny. Orwell was right there. War is the necessary background to State repression. War as a landscape or weather or wallpaper. The causes don't matter, the enemy can be anybody..."

Burgess may be best-known for having written A Clockwork Orange, but this book strikes a deeper chord in me, especially these days.

War is the necessary background to State repression. Bear that in mind.

We Are All Red Sox Now.

The Great Defender - Not

George W. Bush says that 9/11 proves that he is the only presidential candidate who can defend America. Well, since he failed the first time, why should anyone think he'll stop it again?

We will never know, but do you suppose that if President Al Gore saw a Presidential Daily Brief titled, BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S., he would have said to himself, "You know? This is a good time to take a month off." Because that's what George W. Bush did, after eight months of doggedly ignoring Osama bin Laden and al Qaida. Didn't you know? They had a war to plan -- with Iraq. ("Bin Laden? Never heard of him. Now get out of here -- we've got a war to sell.")

9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch. It was Bush's responsibility to stop. Had Bush not been installed in office, had someone serious been in office, the plotters might have been stopped -- the attack might have been foiled -- just like the Millennium Plot was foiled.

So who knows? Maybe it's just a coincidence. Bush wanted a war in Iraq. He was ready for it. He just needed a way to sell it to the American public. And when a devastating attack came, from people he had been warned about and ignored, he capitalized on the fear it generated in order to justify a war he had already decided upon. Is that a coincidence? It's probably a coincidence, but Bush has never shown the slightest hesitation or restraint in exploiting 9/11 as a political opportunity. If another attack happens, it's clear that Bush will exploit that attack as ruthlessly as he has the first.

So, to recap: he knew the attack was coming. He did nothing to stop it. When it came, he used it to push a disastrous, expensive war he'd already decided upon. But he says 9/11 proves that he can defend America. How does that follow, exactly? He's got a hell of a lot of nerve.

Election Protection

Dear Friends:

There are a lot of reasons why people think that the upcoming election will be the most important election we have ever seen. To my mind, however, even with all the important issues confronting us, nothing is as important as ensuring and maintaining the integrity of the electoral process. After the fiasco of the 2000 election, and with every indication that the 2004 election will play out in a similar fashion, it is incumbent upon us as citizens to step up and do whatever it takes to make sure that every eligible voter who shows up at the polls is able to vote, and that every vote is counted.

With the stakes so high in this election, and with the electorate so evenly divided, we are already seeing attempts to interfere with voting rights on a massive scale. We can expect many more such attempts, up to Election Day, on Election Day, and beyond. These efforts range from the destruction of voter registration forms, to the use of error-filled voter exclusion lists, to the improper use of police to intimidate voters, to the deployment of buggy and unreliable electronic voting machines. These efforts suit the short-term interests of some politicians, but in the long run do nothing but erode the essential confidence that Americans must have in their democratic institutions. This damage serves no party's interest, but that fact alone will not stop them from trying anything they think they can get away with.

Don't let them get away with it.

Election Protection (http://www.electionprotection.org/) is organizing volunteers to monitor thousands of polling sites across the country, but especially in the battleground states, where the voting rights of millions of voters are most at risk. Please go to their site and volunteer time or donate money to help them protect our Constitutional rights.

This is not a partisan effort. Election Protection exists to protect the voting rights of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens, and every other American eligible to vote. All Americans have a stake in the integrity of this election.

Please go to http://www.electionprotection.org/ and help protect the very basis of our democracy.

"Funny - the Fastest Guy In Iraq"

About a year and a half ago, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a friend of mine at work sent a video around by email. The video was entitled "Funny - the Fastest Guy in Iraq". It was about five seconds of what appeared to be nose-camera imagery from some sort of missile or bomb, the kind of footage we all became familiar with during the 1991 Gulf War. In those few seconds of noisy video imagery, you could see the vehicles that were the apparent targets of the strike, but that wasn't what made this video "funny". What was funny was the ghostly white silhouette in the shape of a man, who could be seen running away from the center of the image -- from the aim point of the weapon. Clearly, he was running in vain, because at that moment, the bomb was only a second or two away from impact. It's unlikely the guy in the video made it more than a few meters away from the blast.

As the video made its way around the office, I could hear a few of my coworkers chortling over it. But I didn't find the video funny. I found it tragic and unspeakably sad. The poor schmuck in the video was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. For all we know, he'd never done anyone any harm, and in all probability was only in the army because it was the best job he could get. Not only was he blown to bits, which is surely a rotten way to die, but his last frightened moments were then sent around the world for the amusement of the people who paid to have him killed (i.e. us).

A few videos of this sort were in email and web circulation in the wake of the odd euphoria which was in the air at the close of the invasion, when it appeared as though the US forces had triumphed in Iraq. Now the war has taken on a decidedly different cast, and videos of a different sort are circulating. The jihadis are sending out videos of them beheading their Western captives. My friend hasn't sent any of these around. I don't think he'd consider any of these to be "funny". In fact, I'm sure he'd be disgusted by them. I certainly am. I haven't looked at any of those videos, and I'm not likely to.

I'm not saying that there's a moral equivalence between American and allied forces and the jihadis in Iraq that are opposing them. I'm not talking about who's the "good guys" and who's the "bad guys". I'm just saying that a snuff film is a snuff film. The one thing that all these videos have in common is that the victim is just some poor sap who got caught up in events and has no desire to be there, especially now that it's clear that these are his last moments. Who among us wants to be the star of such a sick video? Who deserves that?

I'm not writing this because I feel morally superior to the people I work with. My friend who passed the video around is a good man. I don't think he's cruel, or that he'd stand by in the face of cruelty. Sometimes we play Unreal Tournament together, and we laugh at each other when we blow each other into virtual bloody chunks. Perhaps at some level, he appears to have confused the video game world with the real world. More likely, I think, is that he was channeling a little bit of War Fever, which makes anything "we" do automatically good, and excuses anything done to "them", since "they" deserved it anyway.

War is a tragically necessary business, which must be undertaken sometimes to defend ourselves and our country, but it is also a dirty and disgusting business. We should always honor the men and women who stand up and put their lives on the line to defend our country. However, we should never glorify the act of killing, and war is ultimately about killing. It's a terrible thing to do. It's not fun, it's not funny, and it shouldn't be taken lightly. I believe that part of the reason we're in this tragic, wasteful, stupid, useless war in Iraq is because as a nation, we thought it would be fun, because we glorify war all too easily, and there is a part of our culture that wants war, because we have obscured that it's really just organized killing. I don't think my friend really thought about what he was watching when he sent his "funny" video around, any more than the American public really thought about what we were really getting into when we invaded Iraq.

Jefferson's Words for Today

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds... our people... must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live...

"We have not time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers. Our landholders, too... retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile... private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.

"This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in it's train wretchedness and oppression."

Bear these words in mind this November. Will you be voting for economy and liberty, or will you vote for profusion and servitude?

Morons

Seen on a highway somewhere in America:

Something To Be Proud Of

A private voter-registration firm hired by the Republican Party in Nevada has been destroying the Democratic registrations it has gathered, and is turning in only Republican registrations. Apparently a lot of people who thought they were registered to vote will have a surprise waiting for them on Election Day. This is against the law, but the Republicans figure that there's no real penalty for this sort of chicanery, since the damage will be done long before anyone has to answer to a judge.

I have to wonder, though, about a party that commits fraud, and about the kind of people who belong to a party that commits fraud. I ask my Republican friends: is this the sort of behavior that makes you proud to be a Republican? Does this bring honor to your party? What does it say about your party, that you have to resort to cheating people out of their votes in order to win?

Nevada's not the only state which is seeing this sort of criminal behavior. Republicans all across the country are doing everything in their power to rob people of their rights to vote. It's the clearest sign that they are intellectually and morally bankrupt, that they can't persuade people based on the merits of their arguments. They have to resort to outright deception and fraud. Republicans, I hope you're proud of yourselves for that.

Moving to a New Address

I finally decided that the time has come to move to my own domain. I'm moving my personal website, including this blog, from http://world.std.com/~pbrennan to my new domain, http://www.pbrennan.net/. The old site will remain for a while as a mirror, but I will eventually shut it down. In the meantime, please update your links and bookmarks.

Must-Read for Today

The Unfeeling President by E.L. Doctorow. Eloquent and sad. Over 1,000 service people dead, but:

"He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country....He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves."

This Just In

Don Rumsfeld has said that he doesn't believe there will be a civil war in Iraq. Considering Rumsfeld's track record so far predicting how things in Iraq would go -- he's batting a perfect .000 -- a civil war is starting to look more and more inevitable.

Rumsfeld also seems to think "what has to be done in that country is what basically was done in Samarra over the last 48 hours." In other words, drive most of the population out of it and kill everyone that's left behind?

Go SpaceShipOne!

As any geek worthy of the title knows by now, SpaceShipOne has flown its second of two required flights necessary to secure the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. This is a remarkable achievement, and it's a clear step in the direction of everyday, private space flight.

There are now three directions for follow-on development. The first, as highlighted by the Virgin Galactic deal, will be the commercialization of SpaceShipOne-class vehicles as short-hop thrill rides to the edge of space for the well-heeled, starting at about $20,000 per ride. The second will be the development of more capable suborbital vehicles for commercial use. (I'll be very surprised if we don't learn in 10 years or so that the US military isn't already operating "black" suborbital vehicles of some sort, but that's another topic.) Suborbital cargo or passenger carriers could revolutionize commerce and transportation every bit as much as overnight package delivery and jumbo jets have done. But the long-range payoff will be on the third follow-on, which would be a private orbital space vehicle. The challenges for this are formidable, because getting SpaceShipOne to 100 kilometers is nowhere near as difficult as pushing it to orbital speed once it's reached that altitude. And once you're in orbit, then you have the problem of getting rid of all that speed in order to come home again. Remember, we lost one Space Shuttle in the process of pouring on the speed to get into orbit, and another one in the process of shedding speed to come back to Earth. Both parts of the problem are difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, someone will do it at some point. And with any luck, I'll have saved enough money for a ticket by that time.

George W. Bubble Boy

George W. Bush put on such a dismal performance in last night's debate, I was at a real loss for an explanation. Was he tired? Was he stressed out? Did he not bother to prepare? He was on-message ("9/11 - no mixed signals - I know how the world works"), but there wasn't much conviction to what he had to say, and he said it over and over again. He seemed visibly lost at a couple of moments in the debate, struggling to remember his lines. At other times he looked smug, smirking his famous smirk, and all in all acting as though the debate was nothing more than a waste of his valuable time. Where was George W. Bush, the straight-talkin' guy who was supposed to wipe the floor with John Kerry? Where was George W. Bush, the mighty leader who was going to deliver the knockout blow, on the topic he controls -- foreign policy -- and put Kerry away once and for all?

The answer, of course, is just that that George W. Bush doesn't exist outside the Republican media machine. And to make sure you don't know that, they keep the real George W. Bush inside an impenetrable, hermetically-sealed bubble.

For the past four years, access to Bush has been meticulously managed. Press conferences -- when they occur -- are occasions for softball questions by friendly reporters, and reporters who don't play ball are frozen out. Bush campaign events are scripted even for the participants, who must sign loyalty oaths before being permitted in, and where security toughs ensure that even then, they may be ejected for not displaying the proper level of deference. Once in, they participate in call-and-response with the president, in a grotesque parody of a leader addressing the citizens he serves. Every time he makes a speech, of course, he's not speaking his own words: he's just reading talking points off a teleprompter. So the impression that has been conjured is that of an infallible and wildly popular leader. Facts -- like the insane rush to a disastrous war in the Middle East -- almost don't matter, as long as the Republicans can control the impressions.

But last night, for the first time in four years, we saw Bush by himself, without a script, without having the questions beforehand, without being able to memorize his pat answers beforehand, without a teleprompter or a bud in his ear (as far as we know), and without a cheering audience to back him up.

And you know, maybe this morning it looks like keeping Bush isolated in a bubble wasn't such a good idea after all.

I think he's gone soft from all the cushy treatment. When you don't have to work for the applause, when you don't have to have the right answers because they'll be given to you, when you don't even have to think for yourself -- how can you not lose your edge when that happens?

It's no secret that Bush never had much use for doing real work in the first place. Once relieved of any need to perform in public, he lost the ability, and it showed last night.

George W. Bush is a Bubble Boy. Once he's outside the bubble, he can't defend himself. Maybe they should have inoculated him first -- or maybe they shouldn't have isolated him from the world in the first place.