It turns out that we didn’t have to wait long to find out whether Bush’s gesture was sincere; today, Steve Clemons of The Washington Note reports that Bush is trying to push the Bolton nomination through a lame duck session in order to circumvent the upcoming Democratic congress (via Susie).
Thankfully, it appears that Lincoln Chafee for one, isn’t buying it: according to Clemons, he has declared that he will not support Bolton’s nomination.
Perhaps that’s because he, unlike Bush, understands what the word “bipartisan” means.
Oh, this is going to be a fun couple of years . . .
Holy crap, Bush really *did* say “In my first act of bipartisan outreach since the election, I shared with her [Pelosi] the names of some Republican interior decorators who can help her pick out the the new drapes for her new offices.”
While my jaw was lying on the floor, apparently an idea crawled in. Here it is:
Who can come up with a more tone-deaf statement about the importance of Pelosi’s becoming the highest-ranked woman in American history?
I didn’t post about Bush’s ridiculous claim, this past weekend, that his administration has never had a “stay the course” policy in Iraq. It just seemed too . . . too obvious a lie, even for this administration, for it to be taken seriously by anyone. The evidence to the contrary is out there, and we’re living in the YouTube age; some industrious teenager has, no doubt, already compiled a series of clips of Bush saying the words “stay the course” over and over again, with “Would I Lie to You?” playing in the background.
But Bush’s assertion has, apparently, gone unchallenged by CBS and the AP (via Atrios). This silence on the part of the mainstream press goes way beyond attack-poodle punditry (poodluntrity?). We have arrived at a point when even the most basic, the most obvious, the most bold-faced of lies is allowed to propagate itself, like a virus, throughout the media landscape, without even so much as an antibody in sight. The sad thing is that we reached that point five years ago.
Lord, November 7th can’t come soon enough, can it?
There is one constituency I worry about, though, in all of this: the Republican pundits. After months — nay, years — of faithfully regurgitating the Republic “stay the course” mantra, these pundits have been left abruptly by the President with no rhetorical ground upon which to stand. The script has been changed at the last minute; all of those perfectly-timed sneers and knowing smiles will now have to be reworked into an entirely new routine.
That’s got to be a hard life, being a Republican marionette whose handlers have started to tangle all of the strings. But, I’ll say one thing for them: those suckers sure know how to dance.
I just wish they’d tango out of the room, already.
Update:Think Progress has a nice collection of “stay the course” clips (second video on that page). Sadly, The Eurythmics do not make an appearance.
It was a cultural moment whose significance (like Oprah’s influence) should not be underestimated. You can read excerpted transcripts from the show on Oprah’s site, which includes a primer on developing critical literacy. Rich, who was, as always, an astute, eloquent, and observant speaker, described the deceptive selling of the War in Iraq and the ways in which those initial untruths have haunted the war (and the Bush Administration) ever since.
Speaking about media coverage of the war, Rich said:
The problem in Iraq is that it is so unsafe. A very brave war correspondent for the Times said two weeks ago that 98 percent of the country—and in Baghdad in particular—reporters can’t go to because it’s just too dangerous. More reporters have been killed in this war than any modern war. At a certain point, a place like the New York Times or ABC News has to say, you cannot get killed for the story. That in itself tells us something that the country is so unsafe that we can’t cover it. We rely on Iraqis to cover it and the Iraqis often are so frightened of being seen working for Americans that they won’t reveal their identities to their own families as journalists.
Oprah’s show was telecast only a day after a new report in The Lancet (free registration required) revealed just how superficial our knowledge of the war in Iraq really is. The Lancet study estimated that 665,000 “excess deaths” (see Majikthise’s post on the methodology) have occurred in Iraq since the U.S. invasion:
We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.
Think about that number for a minute. Or, devote a second to thinking about each one of those deaths.
What, you don’t have 655,000 seconds to spare?
According to this site, a city with a population of 655,000 people would rank as the eighteenth largest city in the U.S. — above Baltimore.
655,000 excess deaths. A city bigger than Baltimore. It boggles the mind.
Rich didn’t mention the Lancet study, which was mostly likely published after the show was taped. But he did talk about the television coverage of the war. He noted that the networks presented us with long shots of bombs exploding, but that we never saw the street-level effects of those bombs. It was like a fireworks display, he said. Another guest, Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, added that no country would be able to sustain war if citizens were able to see its real consequences.
One woman got up and said that she had never thought about the television coverage in that way — that she had never considered the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and babies who died in those attacks.
655,000 excess deaths: it’s long past time for Americans to start thinking about that.
Postscript:
It’s exactly the type of person who hasn’t thought much about the Iraq War that Oprah’s show is able to reach.
Oprah mentioned during the broadcast that when she did a show, before the beginning of the Iraq War, that asked “Is War the Only Answer,” she got the worst hate-mail of her entire career in television. One correspondent called her an “incredible treasonous bitch.” Another said, “I wish you would choke on the ashes of 9/11.” One person told her to “take your hairy black ass back to Africa.”
I think it’s important that readers of this site thank Oprah for doing this show. In one hour of broadcast television, she brought Frank Rich’s analysis of “truthiness” into more living rooms than most bloggers could ever hope to reach. Please write to her here.
This bill is a stain on the honor of our nation, a moral and ethical outrage that strains the credibility of our country. I am embarrassed to call myself an American on this day.
I’ve been teaching Frederick Douglass recently. In his famous anti-slavery speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, Douglass writes that “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” Though his subject, in the passage below, is slavery, it is to that institution of the past, and its effects on American society, that the base, outrageous, shameful, and inhumane practice of torture in the present should be compared.
Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
The “compromise” will, as I predicted, allow the “tough interrogations” by amending the war crimes act. And they will reportedly create a new JAG office to review classified information and determine if terrorist suspects can see it if it’s being used against them in a trial. We already know they have devised some habeas corpus loophole to keep innocent people imprisoned without any due process.
Democrats allowed this to happen by not calling attention to the fact that the McCain-Graham-Warner bill did away with habeas corpus for terror suspects. Interested more in the spectacle of Bush being handed a “defeat” by members of his own party than they were in critiquing the flaws in the actual piece of legislation M-G-W proposed, they stood silent. They forgot that Cheney-Bush-Rove never truly compromise: they ask for everything they want, knowing that they’ll wind up with most of what they want. And, as Digby notes, they look all the better for having “compromised” to get the legislation through.
The words “habeas corpus” were not even part of the public debate.
Now we are going to be, by fact and law, a nation of torturers. The day that bill passes will be a day of infamy not soon forgotten.
Update: Amid the despair we feel today, it’s important to remember this:
The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.
The bill is not yet law. There is still time for action. What will Democrats do to stop it, and what will we do to support them?
Bush’s tone during this press conference has been well-limned by Ezra (who deems him “furious”), Digby (who calls him “angry and petulant”), and Barbara (who writes that he is “wound a little too tight”).
But what strikes me even more than Bush’s typical peevishness is his complete inability to grasp even the basic substance of David Gregory’s simple question, which boiled down to this: Do you agree to allow other countries to treat American soldiers in the way that you have treated, and propose to treat, enemy combatants?
It was a question that asked Bush to step outside himself, to view himself and his country from another perspective. And we all know that this is something that he is almost constitutionally incapable of doing. That rigidity has been, indeed, the only thing that has allowed him to maintain his belief in himself and in his self-appointed mission, despite the objections of much of the world. Like a horse wearing blinders at a racetrack, he can look neither to the side nor behind him, but only straight ahead, to the path directly in front of him. He has come to believe that that path is the only path; and why wouldn’t he, when he can see no other?
It seems to me that the only possible retort to Gregory’s question would have been an assertion of American exceptionalism, based on a claim of its inherent moral superiority: we should be allowed to treat others worse than we wish to be treated ourselves because our values are superior to those of other countries.
But that moral superiority was shredded when the Bush Administration did away with the Geneva conventions. We can no longer condemn other countries for torturing people because we now torture people. We can no longer condemn the unfair treatment of prisoners by brutal dictatorships because we have proved ourselves worthy of comparison to the worst despots.
And so Bush is left to stammer and steam and evade, and to practice, in spectacularly half-assed fashion, every known debate trick in the book as he tries to avoid the question before him.
But none of those tricks worked, and the fact is that if you look at what he actually said, rather than what The New York Times wants to interpret him as having said, it was, as Barbara noted, that “the world would be a better place if enemies who capture U.S. soldiers could torture them, try them on secret evidence, and execute them.” [that quote is Barbara’s, not GWB’s]
I’m sure that will bring great comfort to our soldiers serving overseas.
Update:More from Billmon (via Susie), who hits on the loss of moral superiority I was trying to get at above:
We are, in a sense, at the moment of truth. The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld — or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn’t know about Al Qaeda. Either way, they were not acts of national policy, endorsed and approved by Congress after open, public debate. But, thanks to the Hamdan decision, the question is now formally on the table.
[. . .]
So now we’ll find out, I guess, what we’re really made of as a nation — down deep, in our core. Would the Geneva Conventions themselves start to unravel if the global superpower disavowed its obligations under them? Balkin seems to think this is possible. At best, the United States would add another big asterisk to its place on the list of civilized nations, and forfeit forever its ability to chastise the human rights abuses of others without triggering a global laughing fit.
[. . .]
What will be on the table then is the question of whether a nation as powerful and potentially dangerous to others as America (the proverbial bull in the china shop) can survive on brute force alone — without moral legitimacy or political prestige, without true allies (save for the world’s other leper regimes) and without “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
“9th ward diagonal car 1″ Matt Cohen, August 26, 2006
Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
Last year, I posted the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken,” and linked various phrases to images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The degree to which Dylan’s words fit the events unfolding before us was uncanny.
Of course, only a fool would think that that has been an accident. Bush put Karl Rove in charge of the administration’s post-Katrina strategy, an act of bad faith of such magnitude that one recoils from the sheer monstrosity of it. As Dan Froomkin noted at the time:
Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.
That is Rove’s hallmark.
And that is exactly what has come to pass: a bungled recovery process that has allowed the wreckage of the storm to fester under the hot Louisiana sun. And it’s all being done with political objectives in mind, as Frank Rich noted in the The New York Times this past Sunday:
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
All across the media landscape, the Bush administration is being shown for what it is: a callous political machine that cares only for its own survival.
That is going to be brought home over the next two days, as President Bush attempts to whitewash his response to the storm with a series of PR stunts. After all, you don’t introduce new products in August: you just shine up the old lies and put them out on the shelf in some new packaging.
As noted here a few days ago, Matt Cohen, who blogs at 1115.org, decided to take a first-hand look behind the Bush administration’s spin. Traveling down to New Orleans with his camera, Matt has posted a powerful set of pictures on flickr that document the all-too-slow recovery of New Orleans (I thank him for granting me permission to use a few of his images here), and he has just written a searing account of his trip through the 9th Ward.
But all of that is just the least bad part. What remains of Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward is a national embarrassment. One year after Katrina, and some houses rest off their foundations and in the streets. Cars sit upside down or crushed, some even under buildings washed away by flood waters. Water-damaged and mud-caked objects are distributed inside houses and in yards. Block after block, the damage appears infinite. The fact that $44 billion has been released for recovery, yet the ruins of the 9th ward are allowed to stand almost frozen in time, is nothing short of disgusting. With so many of our ruling Republican majority subscribing to the “Broken Window” theory, it’s amazing that the ultimate broken window is the flood damage allowed to remain across New Orleans.
It’s an amazing post that showcases the best of what blogs can do. Please go and read it.
Of all of the images that Matt has posted, the one below struck me most deeply:
“HOME This was HOME,” the spray-painted eulogy reads. The house still stands, but the home inside it is gone, for now. It will be vanquished permanently, if the Bush administration has its way.
And that is something that we will never forget.
Update: Please visit Shakespeare’s Sister for many more perspectives on the first anniversary of Hurrican Katrina. In her post, Shakes argues convincingly that “Katrina was the inevitable failure in the wake of Bush Conservatism’s success.”
“If our President were black, we would not be at war right now. Not because a black person wouldn’t have done something like that — just because America wouldn’t let a black person do something like that without asking them a million questions.”
Philadelphia Daily News journalist and blogger Will Bunch has the low-down on CNN’s latest obsession: Rockey Vaccarella, the “plain-spoken guy” whose house was destroyed after Hurricane Katrina. Vaccarella travelled from New Orleans to D.C. in his FEMA trailer, with a documentary film crew trailing him, on the off-chance that Dubya would meet with him to discuss the recovery efforts.
Politicians who spend any amount of time around reporters are bound to say something, every now and then, that gets them into a bit of hot water. An ill-timed disclosure can lead to all sorts of unpleasantness, but a quick clarification can cool things off and put the matter to rest before any real damage is done to livelihoods and reputations.
That’s how it’s supposed to work in theory, at any rate, but in practice, clarifications almost always complicate matters further and implicate the clarifier in another round of questions under the hot lights.
I know that we’re only midway through the year, but I have a hard time believing that any public figure will be able to top the clarification recently offered by British MP Harry Cohen.
Labour backbenchers defended John Prescott yesterday as the deputy prime minister found himself at the centre of more political turmoil after it emerged he had described George Bush’s handling of the Middle East peace process as “crap”.
Leading the support was Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton and Wanstead, who had embarrassed Mr Prescott by revealing the remarks, made in a private meeting on Tuesday.
Mr Cohen reported that Mr Prescott had described the Bush administration as “crap” in its handling of the “road map” negotiations to reach a settlement between the Palestinians and Israelis, and referred to the US president as “a cowboy with his stetson on”.
Okay, Mr. Harry Cohen. You’ve done embarrassed yourself and your deputy prime minister. How are you going to rectify this situation?
With a priceless clarification, that’s how!
Mr Cohen told the Guardian yesterday: “He wasn’t saying Bush was crap or the Bush administration is crap, or that Bush in the Middle East is crap. He was saying that Bush and taking the road map forward is crap.
Oh, that should settle the matter. Well done, sir!
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