Of all the mean, petty non-issues to waste bandwidth on, this ought to get a prize.
See commentary on Ann Althouse’s many character flaws at Lawyers, Guns and Money; Echidne; and Salon.
Monthly Archives: September 2006
Desperation
If you missed seeing Countdown last night, there’s a video of the first two segments here. If you’ve already seen the presser, featuring David Gregory’s beautiful moment, you can fast forward the tape to about 5:57 for remarks by Howard Fineman. I transcribed just a snip:
Fineman: It’s not just John McCain, a known maverick; it’s not just Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, a known maverick; it’s not even Colin Powell, who is very popular in the country but sort of outside the system right now. The key guy here is Senator John Warner, the Republican of Virginia, as well as Colin Powell. The thing about Warner is he is the establishment man; he is the very symbol of the Pentagon establishment, the defense establishment, in a way the intelligence establishment over there in northern Virginia, and if HE is taking the side of the rebels on this, the Republican rebels, it’s a very serious division in the party, and one the Democrats ought to sit back and watch.
But the best part begins at 9:43, when Olbermann gets into the legal and ethical implications of President Bush’s proposed “let’s torture!” law. Olbermann interviewed Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law professor at George Washington University. Boldface is added:
Olbermann: … is he [Bush] covering his own backside with this?
Turley: Quite frankly, I think that there is evidence to say he is. You know, the thing that is ticking here in terms of a clock, is the fact that these fourteen guys that were recently transferred, just arrived not that long ago in Gitmo, in Cuba. They are going to be or have been interviewed by the Red Cross. Most people believe that they will reveal that they were subject to waterboarding, where you are held under water until you think that you are going to drown. That is undeniably torture under the international standards. If that occurs in the coming days, the United States and specifically the President will be accused of committing a very serious violation of international law. Torture is one of the top three or four things that the international law is designed to prevent. And so the reason there is this move to try to get legislation as fast as possible is because I think I think this administration senses that there is a lot of trouble coming down this mountain.
Then Olbermann asked how the proposed law would protect Bush legally.
Turley: Well, he would retroactively define what he did not to be a violation. That’s pretty good if you are going to commit a violation of law, to go and get the legislature to retroactively say what you did was not a violation. But remember, the President stands accused of thirty felonies in the NSA controversy; many of us believe he committed felony crimes there. If now he’s going to be accused of intentionally and knowingly ordering serious violations of international law, it’s not going to go well for the United States. We’re already viewed as a rogue nation around the world. But here’s something the President most likely knew about and condoned.
Olbermann read a bit from this Washington Post editorial that explains what the Bush Administration wants:
[WaPo:] It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.
We might note that WaPo says “it” wants rather than “the President” wants.
The editorial is titled “A Defining Moment for America.” Olbermann asked Turley if this is indeed a defining moment, adding, “If the President gets his way, have we just become what the terrorists want us to become?”
Turley: Well, I’m afraid it would be, but this is really a redefining moment. You know, I always tell people — the president used that term as well — that our defining moment came in 1787, when we defined ourselves in a constitutional document that committed us to the rule of law. And what would happen here, if we embraced torture at the President’s invitation, would be to redefine ourselves, and we would become something that we have long fought against.
[Update: See also Billmon.]
If there is one point I would like to see written in the sky in 100-foot-high letters, it’s this: President Bush and his enablers went down this road not because they are strong, but because they are weak.
On last night’s Hardball — I believe it was last night — Jack Murtha told Chris Matthews that the fight over the proposed “permission to torture” legislation is going on between Administration civilians — the overwhelming majority of whom never served in uniform and have no personal experience with war — and the military. It’s Weenies versus Warriors, in other words, and Bush is the chief Weenie.
Most of the Bushies and the neocons generally are hothouse flowers who were either born into privilege or have been firmly entrenched in the power establishment for many years. They don’t know what real strength is; if you have power and privilege up the wazoo, bullying others around to get your way takes no strength at all. People who are physically and emotionally abusive of others are weak people who can’t control their own fears and impulses.
Bush and his followers think cruelty is “smart” and that people who hesitate to be cruel are weaklings. But time and time again, people with experience at war and intelligence; people who see the bigger picture; say that torture of prisoners and abuse of civilian populations is hurting our cause — assuming our cause is security and peace — more than helping it. I say that the torturers are the weak ones, because their actions are determined more by fear than by reason.
Bush and his followers think they are being “strong” by their cruelties and deceptions, which they hide in the dark, but in fact that is weakness. Strength involves keeping your integrity and being true to your principles no matter what the circumstances.
Indeed, if you toss your principles out the window as soon as they are less than expedient, they were never your principles to begin with.
Too many (although not all) “conservative” bloggers are siding with the torturers here. There’s something I want to say to them and to Captain Ed, in particular. He writes,
We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.
I have in the past written about an uncle who was a POW of the Japanese from December 8, 1941 to August 1945. It’s true that the treatment of the POWs was cruel and barbaric. My cousin, David Faries, wrote his master’s thesis in military history about my uncle and other U.S. Marines who had been U.S. embassy guards in Peking when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Here’s a quote:
… at the time of the Guadalcanal Invasion in 1942, much of the Japanese populace believed that Americans tortured prisoners. Rumors circulated that the barbarians churned tanks over those Japanese captured in the Solomon Islands. These of course were untrue, but they were widely believed. Japan, unlike the United States, was not bound to treat its prisoners under international law because she failed to ratify the Geneva Convention articles on prisoners of war. Japan claimed, however, she would observe its stipulations.
The Vatican, of all places, broadcast to the world Japan’s kindness to its captives. Prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese occupied territory, the Holy City reported, received ample supplies of soap, cigarettes, and money to purchase other items from their captors. Those who knew the truth but were unable to speak because of their plight meanwhile learned to avoid the wrath of an Ishihara or to “stand fast or move fast” when suddenly face to face with a “menacing bayonet or rifle butt.” Behind the cold wire walked death, hatred, and hunger. [David Oran Faries, “Home Is My Only Destination: William Harold Thomas, North China Marine, 1940-1945” (Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Western Illinois University, August 1985), pp. 69-70.]
In other words, the Japanese falsely believed Japanese prisoners were being treated barbarically by Americans, and they felt this gave them license to treat their American prisoners barbarically.
And now the American Right is following the same ghastly “logic”: They broke the rules first! Why do we have to be the ones who play by the rules? Only weaklings and children think that way.
We have to be the ones who play by the rules because that’s who we are. Or, at least, that’s who we used to be.
Update: Read Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe:
My father was a machine gunner with the Army’s 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east.
My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted to send captured Jewish American soldiers to Auschwitz along with Polish, German, and Dutch Jews and kindred human garbage. But they did not. My father survived because, amazingly, even the Nazis respected the reciprocal agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.
Not every enemy thinks this way, of course, but that doesn’t mean we have to become just like our worst enemies.
Edgy
I’m feeling out of whack today and need a break from blogging. Too much excitement this week, I guess. I’m just going to suggest a topic for discussion and try to get back into the groove tomorrow.
Earlier this week the President just about bit Matt Lauer’s head off when Lauer asked about “interrogation.” Today, Digby says, Bush got pissed at David Gregory. Crooks & Liars has the video.
Here’s a bit of the transcript:
QUESTION: Thank you very much.
Mr. President, critics of your proposed bill on interrogation rules say there’s another important test. These critics include John McCain, who you’ve mentioned several times this morning.
And that test is this: If a CIA officer, paramilitary or special operations soldier from the United States were captured in Iran or North Korea and they were roughed up and those governments said, “Well, they were interrogated in accordance with our interpretation of the Geneva Conventions,” and then they were put on trial and they were convicted based on secret evidence that they were not able to see, how would you react to that as commander in chief?
BUSH: My reaction is, is that if the nations such as those you name adopted the standards within the Detainee Detention Act, the world would be better. That’s my reaction.
Seems to me the President told Gregory 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.
Is that not what he’s saying? Or do I need to take more aspirin?
Anyway, in both videos Bush seemed right on the edge of blowing a gasket. Digby calls him “angry and petulant.” I would add “wound a little too tight.” As of right now it seems the three Republican renegades — Warner, Graham, and McCain — are not yet budging. If Prince Pissant doesn’t get what he wants, his handlers might want to get him on some meds, fast, or at the next presser he’s going to throw an all-out kicking-and-screaming tantrum.
And wouldn’t that be amusing?
Ten Days After: Day Four
Previous posts in this series:
Ten Days After: Introduction
Ten Days After: Day One
Ten Days After: Day Two
Ten Days After: Day Three
The contrast between New York Mayor Giuliani’s and the President’s on-air performances was too big even for Mickey Kaus not to miss. Kaus wrote in Slate:
In several appearances each day, New York’s mayor has been informative, accessible, spontaneously human. He answers questions. He’s clearly in control. As Salon’s Joan Walsh notes, Giuliani says what needs to be said, acknowledging the tragedy without being overwhelmed by it, praising the efforts of rescue crews, counseling against anti-Arab vigilantism, sharing credit, avoiding personal grandstanding.
Meanwhile, Bush has appeared for a few moments a day, reading scripts or (as in his visits to the wounded) giving a few rambling impressions. He doesn’t answer questions. On the first day, he sent out an aide, Karen Hughes, to inform the public. She didn’t answer questions either. Even Bush’s friends don’t really dispute the overall verdict on the president. When columnist and former presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan writes that “the great leaders in our time of trauma were the reporters and anchors and producers of the networks and news stations,” the negative implication is clear. If Bush had offered any great leadership, Noonan would have mentioned it.
But on Friday, September 14, George Bush began to turn his performance around. That morning he spoke at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:
Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
And rid the world of evil. Just like that. Y’know, we’ve tolerated this evil thing far too long. It’s time we did something about it.
(Note to future generations of Americans, if there are any: If your leaders ever start to talk about ridding the world of evil, revolt immediately.)
But the speech as a whole was good; it was about unity and national character. Just the right words. The National Cathedral service was attended by former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; former Vice President Al Gore; and a host of senators, representatives, cabinet members and military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Vice President Dick Cheney was at Camp David for security reasons.
After the service the President flew to New York to, finally, visit the Pile. Many people remember that visit as Bush’s finest hour in office — the Bullhorn Moment.
The official White House transcript:
CROWD: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. I want you all to know —
Q Can’t hear you.
THE PRESIDENT: I can’t talk any louder. (Laughter.)
I want you all to know that America today — that America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. This nation stands with the good people of New York City, and New Jersey and Connecticut, as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.
Q I can’t hear you.
THE PRESIDENT: I can hear you. (Applause.) I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. (Applause.) And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. (Applause.)
CROWD: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
THE PRESIDENT: The nation sends its love and compassion to everybody who is here. Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for making the nation proud. And may God bless America. (Applause.)
CROWD: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
(The President waves small American flag.) (Applause.)
Robert McFadden reported for The New York Times:
Accompanied by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Gov. George E. Pataki and members of New York’s Congressional delegation, the president waded into a rowdily enthusiastic crowd of hard-hatted rescue workers under an overcast late-afternoon sky to shake hands, ask questions and offer thumbs up.
The president had proclaimed a national day of mourning and remembrance, and it was observed in houses of worship and other settings across the country. But it was also observed, apparently spontaneously, in Britain, France, Italy, Israel and other countries closely allied with the United States. In London, traffic halted, classes stopped and people stood silent for three minutes.
Media reaction to the Bullhorn Moment was mostly, but not entirely, positive. On PBS Newshour, Mark Shields suggested that Bush’s finest hour didn’t quite rise up to the level of past presidents’ finest hours:
JIM LEHRER: Mark, how do you feel the President is doing?
MARK SHIELDS: Jim, I don’t think the President has seized the moment. He hasn’t made a connection with the people. He hasn’t established a sense of command. I think Tuesday was important because it was the first real crisis of George Bush’s presidency. And whether subsequent events indicate that there was a real threat or whatever, the fact that he didn’t return to the White House, didn’t return to Washington, and he has lacked any sense of eloquence.
David McCullough, the historian, said that great Presidents basically have a great ability to communicate and to speak. Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Reagan, and I was thinking of Reagan in the sense of January 28, 1986, when the “Challenger” went down. Ronald Reagan spoke for the nation. That’s what a President has to do — as they waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. That spoke for everybody at the time. The President hasn’t established the tone.
And the problem for him is that, Paul’s right, as commander in chief, that’s an important part of the job, but the President is also a chaplain, is also a coach, is also someone who has to inspire and explain. I don’t think he has done that and Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, so aptly described by Paula Span in the “Washington Post” as Winston Churchill in a Yankees cap, has filled that role remarkably well. And it stood in contrast.
JIM LEHRER: What about today, Paul’s point about the President’s remarks at the National Cathedral and also to the workers in New York?
MARK SHIELDS: I thought the New York event, I’m glad he went. It just seems he’s a day late each place. I don’t mean to be nit-picking on him, but the New York thing, talking at a moment like that at a place like that through rough a bull sound– what the what do you call it?
PAUL GIGOT: Bullhorn.
JIM LEHRER: Mega horn, whatever, yeah.
MARK SHIELDS: Bullhorn – now, it just didn’t seem appropriate. I thought the National Cathedral service was moving and touching and I thought he did better than he had done at any point up to that point.
In time Mark Shields would find himself in a minority; a great many Americans were inspired by the Bullhorn Moment. The rally ’round the President was underway. But last year, Denis Hamill wrote in the New York Daily News:
I’m amazed that anyone is amazed that it took George W. Bush three days to show up in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
That’s exactly how long it took him to show up at Ground Zero after 9/11.
So it mystifies me that the pundits and the cable gasbags keep telling us that George W. Bush missed his “bullhorn moment” in New Orleans.
No, he didn’t.
Because his bullhorn moment in New York City was just as late and just as disgraceful as his fumbling handling of the Katrina carnage.
I wish I had a bullhorn to shout just how tired I am of hearing about how wonderful George W. Bush’s “bullhorn moment” was.
It will go down as one of the worst moments in American history because when he stood on the smoldering ruins amid the dust of the dead it was through that bullhorn that Bush’s Big Lie was first shouted to the world that the people who knocked down those buildings would soon be hearing from us.
It might have been a fairly good, better-late-than-never moment if all Bush had done was use that bullhorn to launch a war on Al Qaeda. It might have escalated into a great piece of historical stagecraft if we’d just gone into Afghanistan and stayed the course on a noble quest to kill Osama Bin Laden and all his Al Qaeda cowards who murdered our people.
But the words that echoed through Bush’s bullhorn into the smoldering 16 acres of lower Manhattan, the words that resounded across the grieving outer boroughs and the sorrowful suburbs and the stunned globe, were but an orchestrated setup for a grander diabolical scheme.
Because we fast gave up the hunt for Bin Laden for a bait-and-switch war in Iraq that had nothing to do with the rubble upon which Bush stood at Ground Zero shouting bull through his bullhorn.
Via Media Matters — yesterday Fred Barnes reported for the rightie rag Weekly Standard:
WE NOW KNOW WHY the Bush administration hasn’t made the capture of Osama bin Laden a paramount goal of the war on terror. Emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism. Here’s how President Bush explained this Tuesday: “This thing about . . . let’s put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.”
Getting bogged down in Iraq for a zillion years, however, is just the thing.
Rather, Bush says there’s a better way to stay on offense against terrorists. “The way you win the war on terror,” Bush said, “is to find people [who are terrorists] and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do.” In a speech last week, the president explained how this had worked–starting with the arrest and interrogation of 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Muhammad–to break up a terrorist operation that was planning post-9/11 attacks on America.
Ah, yes, like the evil Jose Padilla plot. Excellent.
While we’ve mentioned Katrina, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz also compare the federal response to Katrina started and 9/11. I want to correct the implication in the last installment that the federal government hadn’t provided much help to New York in the early days after the attacks. It turns out that the U.S. Department of Health Center for Disease Control showed up and did some good work.–
While the World Trade Center was burning fiercely and about to become a vast cloud of toxic smoke and ash, public health officials were already mobilizing. Within hours, hospitals had readied themselves to receive the injured; hundreds of ambulances were lined up along the West Side Highway awaiting word to race to the scene; the city’s public health department had opened its headquarters to receive hundreds of people stricken by smoke inhalation, heart attacks, or just pure terror; the Department of Health had already begun providing gas masks and other protective equipment to doctors, evacuation personnel, and first responders of all sorts. From bandages and surgical tools to antibiotics and radiation-detection equipment, the federal Centers for Disease Control readied immense plane-loads of emergency supplies, ferrying them up to New York’s LaGuardia Airport aboard some of the few planes allowed to fly in the days after September 11th.
Despite the general panic and the staggering levels of destruction, even seemingly inconsequential or long-range potential health problems were attended to: Restaurants were broken into to empty thousands of pounds of rotting food from electricity-less refrigerators, counters tops, and refrigeration rooms; vermin infestations were averted; puddles were treated to stop mosquitoes from breeding so that West Nile virus would not affect the thousands of police, fire, and other search-and-rescue personnel working at Ground Zero.
However,
It took no time at all for the administration to start systematically undercutting the efforts of experienced health administrators in New York and at the national Centers for Disease Control. By pressing them to return the city to “normal” and feeding them doctored information about dust levels — ignoring scientific uncertainties about the dangers that lingered in the air — the administration lied to support a national policy of denial.
Putting in place a dysfunctional bureaucracy would soon undermine the public’s trust in the whole health system in downtown Manhattan. In the process, it also effectively crippled systems already in existence to protect workers, local residents, and children attending school in the area. As a result, what promised to be an extraordinary example of a government bureaucracy actually working turned into a disaster and later became the de facto model for the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
However, this is getting a bit ahead of the story. We’ll come back to the lies about air quality at another time.
Yay, TEAM!
Peter Baker wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post:
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a “Third Awakening” of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation’s struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as “a confrontation between good and evil.”
Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.
“A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me,” Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. “There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50s and the ’60s — boom — and I think there’s change happening here,” he added. “It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.”
It’s my understanding that the business of dividing the Cosmos up into Good and Evil started with Zoroaster, a guy who (probably) lived sometime between the 18th and 6th centuries BCE in that part of the world we now call Iran. The notion that Good and Evil will duke it out in a final Judgment Day battle, plus most popular beliefs about angels and demons, are Zoroastrian in origin, also. Here’s a pretty good article about Zoroastrian influences on right-wing Christianity, from CounterPunch.
The President’s assumption that “religious devotion” somehow depends on accepting Zoroastrian dualities is, IMO, a tad peculiar. It also reveals a deep and vast ignorance of the spectrum of human philosophies, experiences, and practices that might be considered “religious.” But that’s another post.
As near as I can figure, this view of good-evil duality sees Good and Evil as distinctive forces or powers, and people are said to be “good” or “evil” not because of what they do, but because of which side they root for. I say this because of what Bob Herbert wrote in his column today.
The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.
Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.
Who are we?
Why, we’re the Good team! And we had to go to Iraq to get Saddam Hussein, who was a major player with the Evil team. If the invasion, directly or indirectly, ends up causing as much death or suffering as Saddam did, that’s a mere technicality. In BushWorld, actions or consequences don’t have anything to do with who is Good or who is Evil.
Another example: There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale. But when people are frightened enough, nothing is beyond the pale. And we’re in an era in which the highest leaders in the land stoke — rather than attempt to allay — the fears of ordinary citizens. Islamic terrorists are equated with Nazi Germany. We’re told that we’re in a clash of civilizations.
Clearly, Herbert does not understand the nature of Good or Evil. When you’re playing against Evil, rules and principles are for wimps. And appeasers. It’s OK to do terrible things in the name of defeating Evil. What’s not OK is disloyalty to the Good team.
If, as President Bush says, we’re engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” why isn’t the entire nation mobilizing to meet this dire threat?
That’s an excellent question that I wish someone would press Bush to answer. Another question is, how do you win an ideological struggle by military means? Bush’s rhetoric notwithstanding, World War II was not a struggle between ideologies but among nations. Most people chose sides in that conflict based on loyalty to their nations, not to a belief system. Victory was achieved not by changing peoples’ minds but by compelling the enemy nations to surrender.
The president put us on this path away from the better angels of our nature, and he has shown no inclination to turn back. Lately he has touted legislation to try terror suspects in a way that would make a mockery of the American ideals of justice and fairness. To get a sense of just how far out the administration’s approach has been, consider the comments of Brig. Gen. James Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines. Speaking at a Congressional hearing last week, he said no civilized country denies defendants the right to see the evidence against them. The United States, he said, “should not be the first.”
And Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former military judge, said, “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”
How weird is it that this possibility could even be considered?
I’ll tell you how weird it is; it’s so weird that the Right Blogosphere isn’t discussing it at all. So far, based on google and technorati searches, I don’t believe anyone’s come up with talking points to support executing someone without producing evidence at trial.
If Bush continues to push this issue, however, team loyalty will inspire expedient frames and phrases eventually. And if the Good Team is doing it, it can’t be Evil.
The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many ‘have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.’
Even fewer care.
We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.
On the Right, of course, there’s a hazy faith that if someone’s being held at Guantanamo there must be a good reason. However, I have said before, and I still believe, that someday when the full story of Guantanamo is told, a whole lot of Americans are going to be shocked and sickened and want to know why no one spoke out sooner.
And some of us will say, we did speak out. Why didn’t you listen sooner?
Ten Days After: Day Three
Previous posts in this series:
Ten Days After: Introduction
Ten Days After: Day One
Ten Days After: Day Two
By September 13, 2001, the nation’s news media were reporting that the terrorist attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden. David Johnston and James Risen wrote for The New York Times:
The hijackers who commandeered commercial jets that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were followers of Osama bin Laden, the Islamic militant who has been blamed for some of the bloodiest attacks against Americans, federal authorities said today.
The authorities said they had also identified accomplices in several cities who had helped plan and execute Tuesday’s attacks. Officials said they knew who these people were and important biographical details about many of them but declined to provide their names or nationalities.
Accomplices?
Acting swiftly today, investigators obtained warrants and searched businesses and homes in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Florida. They made no arrests but interrogated several people, compiling an outline of the terror group’s structure. They prepared biographies of each identified member of the hijack teams and began tracing the recent movements of the men.”
Here’s an interesting tidbit:
Separately, officials said a group of about five men were now under investigation in Union City, suspected of assisting the hijackers. In addition, the officials said the men had apparently set up cameras near the Hudson River and fixed them on the World Trade Center. They photographed the attacks and were said to have congratulated each other afterward, officials said.
Subsequent news stories about the five men, or maybe three men, were arrested while driving a white Chevy van on Route 3 in East Rutherford. The arrests were based on based tips from witnesses who saw them “cheering” and “jumping up and down” in Liberty State Park. In the van were box cutters and maps of New York City with “certain places” highlighted.
The men would eventually be identified as Israeli nationals who worked for a moving company.
According to Human Rights Watch:
On the morning of September 13, 2001, Issa Qandeel, a Palestinian Muslim and an Arab, was leaving the Idriss Mosque in Seattle, Washington when he smelled gas near his jeep and saw a man, subsequently identified as Patrick Cunningham, come out from behind his jeep. Cunningham was carrying a can of gasoline and a gun. When Qandeel asked Cunningham what he was doing behind the jeep, Cunningham walked away.
When Qandeel tried to stop him, Cunningham shot at Qandeel three times, although his gun did not discharge any bullets. Cunningham then started running away and Qandeel chased him. Cunningham shot at Qandeel again and this time a bullet did discharge, although it missed Qandeel. Cunningham was apprehended when he crashed his car trying to get away. Police later discovered that Cunningham planned to burn cars in the mosque driveway because of anger at the September 11 attacks. Federal authorities prosecuted Cunningham for attacking Qandeel and attempting to deface a house of worship. He pled guilty on May 9, 2002 and was scheduled to be sentenced on October 18, 2002. He faces a minimum of five years of incarceration.
On September 13, 2001, Raymond Isais Jr. allegedly assaulted Kulwinder Singh, a turbaned Sikh taxi worker, in SeaTac, Washington. After getting into the back seat of Singh’s taxi, Isais told Singh, “You have no right to attack our country!” He then started choking Singh. After both men then got out of the taxi, Isais started punching Singh, pulled out tufts of his beard and knocked off his turban. Isais called Singh a terrorist during the assault. Local police were able to apprehend Isais Jr. the same day using a description provided by Singh. He was charged with a hate crime by local country prosecutors.
Thursday, September 13, the President declared that the following day would be a “national day of prayer and remembrance.” In a phone call with Mayor Guiliani and New York Governor Pataki, Bush said,
THE PRESIDENT: … You’ve extended me a kind invitation to come to New York City. I accept; I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon, after the prayer service at the National Cathedral. I look forward to joining with both of you in thanking the police and fire, the construction trade workers, the restaurant owners, the volunteers — all of whom have really made a huge display for the world to see of the compassion of America, and the bravery of America and the strength of America.
Every world leader I’ve talked to in recent days has been impressed by what they have seen about our nation, and the fabric of our nation. And I want to thank everybody when I come; so thank you for your hospitality.
GOVERNOR PATAKI: Well, Mr. President, thank you for coming to New York. I’m sure it’s going to be a great inspiration to all of us and, particularly, those thousands of men and women still downtown trying to help us with the rescue efforts.
I also want to thank you for all the help we’ve gotten from the federal government, it’s been tremendous; and for your words.
I have no idea what “help” New York had received from the federal government at this point. I remember reading that a Navy hospital ship anchored in the Hudson about this time, but it was New York City firemen and policemen combing the rubble for survivors. At this point all Bush had offered were promises.
You are right, our nation is united as never before and we will triumph over this evil with your leadership and your inspiration. And I also have to congratulate the Mayor for the tremendous effort he has made.
Mr. President, you would be proud of the leadership and the cooperation we’ve seen here. The city has taken the lead. Your people have been enormously supportive and we’re very grateful.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, thanks, George, and Rudy; thank you all. I know you’ve put in a request, and I’ve directed the Attorney General to expedite any payments of benefits for those fallen public safety officers to their families, any benefits to their families. And the Attorney General, as I understand it, will be making a formal announcement of your request today.
I told Allbaugh, anything — anything it takes to help New York. I have been in touch with the Congress, they are expediting a supplemental. We’ve worked in great cooperation with members of the Congress in both political parties. So just keep in touch — I know you will. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked, and I really appreciate the fact that you all are in charge and I know the citizens of New York and the tri-state area, people of New Jersey and Connecticut are appreciative, as well.
MAYOR GIULIANI: Mr. President, the uniformed officers, the police, the fire, the emergency services officers, their families will really appreciate this. We’re going to sustain a tremendous loss of our bravest and our best people. And the relief that you’re now making available to the families is going to mean a lot to them. They’re going to be able to think about the fact that their children are going to be taken care of, that they’re going to be able to go to college, that they’re going to be able to carry on.
So I can’t express to you how appreciative we are of your acting so swiftly. And, also, on that terrible day when our city was being attacked, you were in immediate communication with us, Mr. President, and helped to secure the city. And the work you’ve done for us, we all eternally appreciate. You’ve been a terrific leader and we’re taking direction from you, and we’re following your example. You’ve done a terrific job, Mr. President.
But he hadn’t done anything.
Fear Is Not an Idea
I’m so grateful to E.J. Dionne for writing that insensible column dissing Richard Hofstadter. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to find and read Hofstadter’s work. Truly, the man was a genius (Hofstadter, I mean). This morning I want to look at something Hofstatder wrote more than 50 years ago and then add to it to something I read in today’s Washington Post.
In the mid-1950s Hofstadter embarked on some lectures and essays about pseudo-conservatism. To understand this fully, keep in mind that in the mid-1950s the New Deal coalition was the establishment. New Dealers had been in power for 20 years. Moreover, Hofstadter wrote, the “jobless, distracted and bewildered men” of the Depression had become comfortably middle class — well fed, well clothed, well housed — thanks to the New Deal, the GI Bill, postwar mortgage subsidy programs, and solid economic growth.
Hofstadter quotes Adlai Stevenson:
The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations.
Yet in those days there were dissenters. We recognize that dissent now as the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in fetal stage. Here is how Hofstadter described them — note I am adding some boldface and breaking up the long paragraphs into smaller bits to make it easier to read —
Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative.
Speaking of what is or isn’t radical — you must read this new post by Billmon. (If you want to read to the end of this post first, I’ll remind you about Billmon again later. But do read that post and this one together.)
Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for nonconformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions.
Sounds familiar, eh?
They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.
I haven’t read John Dean’s new book on authoritarian personalities and the “conservative” movement, but if any of you have, let me know if this sounds familiar —
From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative.
I like the part about “concealing from themselves.” One of the most consistent traits of rightieness is their utter blindness to where their own ideology is taking them. And us, too, of course.
The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. … The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”
Hofstadter tries to identify exactly who these pseudo-conservatives were. Pseudo-conservatism appealed to people across social classes, “but its power probably rests largely on its appeal to the less-educated members of the middle classes” (many of whom, please note, wouldn’t have been middle class were it not for Franklin Roosevelt). Further,
The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator Taft had finally become official in 1952, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming: “This means eight more years of socialism,” was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality.
Compare/contrast something Joe Scarborough wrote (yeah, I know, it’s Joe Scarborough, but it’s not that bad) about right-wingers calling Bill Clinton a Marxist.
Hofstadter continued,
The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that is it constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.
This ties in to what I wrote in this post, about how the Right usurped the Left’s credibility on national defense and foreign policy through lies and hysteria. And it ties very nicely into “Stabbed in the Back!” by Kevin Baker in the June issue of Harper’s.
Hofstadter goes on for several very rich paragraphs about the social-psychological elements of pseudo-conservatism, and this essay is followed up by two more in this book. Right now I’m going to skip over several pages and quote one more paragraph, from the essay “Goldwater and the Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” which Hofstadter wrote in the mid-1960s.
Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” This still seems to be the true potential of the pseud0-conservative right; it is a potential that can be realized without winning the White House, even without winning the Republican nomination.
The Right did indeed create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” Unfortunately, once they had accomplished this they were able to seize political power as well. And now the very people Hofstadter wrote about 50 years ago have seized both the White House and Congress and have refashioned themselves as the mainstream, the center, the true patriots, the defenders of the American ideals they undermined and all but destroyed in order to gain power.
The pseudo-conservative movement started out as an intellectually incoherent reaction to the New Deal and the ideals and values that were mainstream 50 and more years ago. It was based on a complex of fears — fear of foreigners, fear of Communists, fear of the powerful forces in the world that they didn’t understand. Most of all, they were beseiged by doubts that they fit into a world that was rapidly changing but which they didn’t understand. They feared they were being pushed out of what they saw as their rightful place in American life. Exactly what that place was, and who was pushing them, cannot be clearly defined. Often they lashed out not at real enemies but at the very institutions that protected them and enabled social and economic stability. Theirs was an irrational attempt to erase the previous several years of world history and go back to an earlier time — before the Depression, before World War II — when they had felt more secure. It didn’t sink in that that old feeling of security had been delusional.
At some point, however, the Right managed to invent an ideological facade in which to hide their fears. In the 1950s they seized upon scholar Russell Kirk — I’m not sure Kirk was really One of Them, but they seized upon him, anyway — and William Buckley. Under Goldwater’s influence the pseudo-conservatives increased their influence within the Republican Party, which they re-invented as the “Party of Ideas.” Their “ideas” were the standard pseudo-conservative agenda of dismantling the New Deal while somehow becoming both more aggressive and more isolationist in foreign policy — neoconservatism is, at its core, proactive isolationism — but through their growing infrastructure of “think tanks” they figured out how to package their incoherent agenda to make it look like ideas.
But their “ideas” are all based on the conceit that if they could just brush away all the liberal crapola — dismantle the New Deal, deregulate everything in sight, and lower taxes to shrink government in order to drown it in a bathtub — that we would find ourselves living in Utopia. Somehow.
And this takes us to Harold Meyerson’s column in today’s Washington Post.
Wasn’t it just a couple of years ago that Republicans were boasting that they were the party of ideas? They would privatize the commonwealth and globalize democracy, while Democrats clung to the tattered banner of common security in both economics and national defense. The intellectual energy in America, it seemed, was all on the right.
That, as they say, was then. In 2006 the campaigns that the Republicans are waging in their desperate attempt to retain power are so utterly devoid of ideas that it’s hard to believe they ever had an idea at all.
With fewer than 60 days remaining before the November election, the only two Republican strategies left standing are to scare the public about the Democrats collectively or to slime the Democrats individually. There’s nothing new about these strategies, of course, but this year they exist in a vacuum. Having run both the executive and legislative branches for the past two years with nothing but failure to show for it, the Republicans can no longer campaign as the party that will balance the budget, reform entitlements, lower energy costs, fix the immigration problem, create a more secure world or find a suitable way out of their endless war of choice in Iraq. What’s left is a campaign of scaring and sliming, with the emphasis on the latter. ..
…What’s a party to do when its high road leads nowhere but down? The Republicans tried privatizing Social Security, but their numbers never added up. They tried spreading democracy with unilateral, preventive war but instead unleashed a sectarian bloodbath. So the party of big ideas, of Milton Friedman and the neoconservatives, is now just one big Swift Boat flotilla, its ideas sunk of their own dead weight, kept afloat solely by its opposition research. For their part, the Democrats still champion common security; they call for a government that can build dikes and reduce the costs of college and medication and that knows that remaking the world becomes more plausible when some of the world is actually willing to go along with us. Those are, in the campaign of 2006, just about the only ideas in play.
We lefties are pragmatists who think that nothing is ever perfect, but through democratic government We, the People, can at least make improvements. (Bill Clinton spoke about this at length yesterday, but I want to wait until I get the transcript to quote him.) But pseudo-conservatives are utopians who have long believed that, if they could only have their way, they could create a perfect America and a perfect World.
Well, folks, they got their way. And they failed. That’s because their “ideas” were never really ideas at all; just fantasies that grew out of their fears. And fear is not an idea.
The Right can’t see that yet. As Richard Parker wrote here,
For America’s ”party of ideas,” it is still only their opponents’ ideas which have failed. To the fatal contradictions inherent in their own utopian principles, they seem to remain impervious.
But the facade is crumbling, fast.
I want to hop over to the Billmon post I mentioned above.
I see no reason to doubt the ultimate aim of Rovian politics is to dismantle the remaining framework of New Deal/Great Society liberalism. But most Rovians understand it’s a long-term project. And if offering the seniors a third-rate drug benefit (and greasing Big Pharma in the process) helps the vanguard party tighten its grip on power here and now, so be it. A revolution is not a dinner party at the Cato Institute.
Of course, such compromises (for the good of the movement, you understand) are also how radicals gradually morph into reformers and refomers turn into comfortable establishmentarians. And the Rovians, particularly the congressional branch, are obviously pretty far down that road. But there’s a difference between betraying your principles and not having any, and I think most conservative cadres within the Cheney Administration, like their brethren on K Street, are still loyal — in their hearts, if not their wallets — to an explicitly radical agenda.
Maybe the best way to put it is that the Rovians are radical reactionaries — so reactionary their aspirations to turn the clock back to circa 1896 actually sound like something fundamentally new, in the same way that “globalization” sounds so much more hip and modern than good old Manchester Liberalism. The conservative “Great Leap Backwards” probably isn’t attainable (and, considering the death toll from Mao’s attempt to jump in the opposite direction, thank God for that) but I’d be willing to bet there are Cheney Administration staffers who will be scheming, or at least dreaming, of “the day” until the day they die.
Unfortunately, as Billmon concludes, just throwing the bums out will not solve our problems. We will still have to deal with the pseudo-conservatives’ chief accomplishment — the political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety are impossible. I’m not sure even where to start.
Ten Days After: Day Two
Previous posts in this series:
Ten Days After: Introduction
Ten Days After: Day One
On September 12, 2001, military and civilian personnel returned to the still-smoldering Pentagon — three fifths of the building remained open — to discuss possible retaliation. Meanwhile, the White House made excuses for the President’s actions of the day before. R.W. Apple, Jr., reported for The New York Times,
Stung by suggestions that President Bush had hurt himself politically by delaying his return to Washington on Tuesday, the White House asserted today that Mr. Bush had done so because of hard evidence that he was a target of the terrorists who hijacked airliners and slammed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said this afternoon that officials had ”real and credible information” that the White House, not the Pentagon, had been the original target of American Airlines Flight 77, which was hijacked about 45 minutes after leaving Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Another senior official said that after that plane hit the Pentagon, a chilling threat was phoned to the Secret Service.
”Air Force One is next,” the official quoted the caller as saying. The threat was accompanied by code words that indicated knowledge of White House procedures, the official said.
Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s adviser, said in an interview this morning that Mr. Bush had twice on Tuesday — in the morning and in the early afternoon — argued strenuously that he should return immediately to the capital. Mr. Rove reported that the Secret Service insisted that the situation here was ”too dangerous, too unstable” for the president to come to Washington.
”We are talking about specific and credible intelligence,” Mr. Rove said, ”not vague suspicions.”
But neither Mr. Rove nor other officials explained why this information was not made public on Tuesday. Partly because it was not, Mr. Bush was criticized for spending the day traveling a zigzag route from Sarasota, Fla.; to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, La.; then to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha; then back to Washington. He did not land at the White House until 7 p.m., almost exactly 10 hours after he learned of the first attack.
In fact, Air Force One had not traveled a “zigzag” route from Sarasota; it had flown in circles over Sarasota for more than an hour while the President tried to decide where to go next. And several days later the threat against Air Force One was revealed to be a White House fabrication.
Apple continued,
On television, in newspapers and in animated discussions in offices across the country, Mr. Bush’s conduct was compared unfavorably with that of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who went to the scene of the attacks in Lower Manhattan; to John F. Kennedy, who stayed in Washington throughout the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, when many feared that nuclear war was imminent, and to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who remained at the Pentagon after it was hit and for a time helped in the evacuation of the dead and wounded.
The president’s conduct, said an article this morning in the staunchly conservative Boston Herald, ”did not inspire confidence.”
On September 12 thick, acrid dust hung in the air in lower Manhattan. The families of those who haven’t come home begin to hang “missing” notices on walls ans lampposts all over the city.
I am at the foot of the smoking wreck, Building Seven. This is ground zero, the heart of the blast zone.
I know maybe I shouldn’t be here. But after two days in the city, interviewing families, victims, officers, and relief workers, and after having ridden the elevator with the mayor as he returned to his command center from the wreckage on that first night, silent, covered in soot, mouth turned down, eyes sick with grief, something has drawn me here. There have been no reports yet from the inside; no time in the chaos of these early hours to bear witness.
The city block is an ash-covered canyon. Buildings on either side rise silent and black, their windows shattered. Two fire fighters on extension ladders in front of the mountain of rubble fade in and out of vision between waves of purple-gray smoke and hissing steam, spraying impossibly small arcs of water across the wreckage. Water trickles beneath my feet, mingling with ash and shards of broken glass in a gritty mud paste.
Early on I found a piece of high ground from which to watch the changes. It was inside the severely damaged and deserted Bankers Trust building, a black steel structure forty floors high, which stood across Liberty Street from the ruins and was eventually draped in dark safety netting and hung with a large American flag. In 1999 the German company Deutsche Bank had absorbed the Bankers Trust Corporation, and with it had acquired this building, whose offices it had occupied until the attack. During the South Tower’s collapse steel spears and column sections had plunged into Bankers Trust, tearing a huge gash in its north face, destroying a load-bearing column for ten floors, spilling tons of office innards, and leaving the partially demolished floor slabs to sag like hammocks over a deadly void. In a crater at the base a mound of rubble lay laced with the remains of people who had been killed in the South Tower or on the street. There was serious concern at first that the building would not stand, but it did, and sturdily, because of redundancies in its design. The back offices, away from the Trade Center, were fine. And apparently no one had died inside. Firemen checked the spaces quickly, leaving their fluorescent-orange graffiti—SEARCHED—on each floor. In the dust that coated one wood-paneled wall someone, maybe from the Boston Fire Department’s team, drew a sad face and scrawled,
Kill All Muslims
9-11-01
B.F.D.
Early this year some workmen found human bone fragments on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building, which was adjacent to the World Trade Center complex and significantly damaged on September 11. After allowing some employees to return briefly to retrieve belongings, Deustche Bank locked up the 41-story building and covered it with a black shroud while litigation over the site’s fate went forward. (The Project Rebirth site has more photos.) During an inspection in 2002, a number of mummified human remains were found in the building. It’s believed the bodies had been ejected into the building when WTC 2 collapsed.
On September 12, New York City firemen and others looked through the debris lower Manhattan for survivors. John Cloud, Time magazine, wrote this about the last survivor to be found, Genelle Guzman-McMillan, in September 2002:
Anyone who watched the avalanche, even from behind the safety of a TV screen, knows how extraordinary it is that someone could survive it. New York City’s medical examiners are still trying to identify 19,858 pieces smashed from the bodies of the 2,819 people who were slain. Steel beams weakened to their breaking point; solid concrete was pulverized. But somehow Genelle’s tumbling body found an air pocket. She was buried in the rubble for more than 26 hours; on Sept. 12, around 12:30 p.m., she became the last of just four people caught in the debris to be found alive. (An additional 14, mostly fire fighters, survived relatively unscathed in a lower part of stairway B that stayed upright.)
Some victims’ families received only a shard of bone to put in a coffin; many got nothing. Genelle’s family got her back with a crushed right leg and a few other injuries—but basically whole. Relatives held a joyous 31st-birthday party for her in January, after she had fully recuperated. By May, she was walking without so much as a leg brace, an accomplishment that astonished a doctor who had told her she would walk with one for the rest of her life. It’s difficult to envision how those who were extricated from the fiery heap survived. Like Genelle, two Port Authority cops were buried but not mortally wounded by hurtling chunks of stone and metal—even as people in close proximity were killed. Pasquale Buzzelli—who worked with Genelle on the 64th floor and was also in stairway B at 10:28 a.m.—fell when the stairwell broke under him but somehow landed atop a rickety pile of debris. These four were rescued before they were burned in creeping fires or crushed in mini-collapses in the later hours of Sept. 11 and after. It’s not known whether anyone else could have been found alive—just that Genelle was the last.
It would be several more days before New Yorkers would publicly acknowledge that no one else would be found.
In Washington, reporters grilled White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer on the report of a threat against Air Force One.
Q And if Air Force One happened to be a target, isn’t it true that when the President went to Louisiana, at that point, once he took off from Louisiana, there were no flights in U.S. airspace?
MR. FLEISCHER: No, at that moment there were still reports of airplanes that had not yet been identified as to their whereabouts. That’s another reason that the White House and the President operated in the secure manner that they did. At that moment, when the President had left Florida and was on his way to a base that no one knew where the President was heading to, there were still reports of planes that had not yet been brought onto the ground per the FAA’s order.
The order to clear U.S. airspace had been given only minutes before Air Force One took off from Sarasota, so certainly there were many planes still in the air. However, no one asked Fleischer about the fact that Air Force One had circled Sarasota for over an hour because the President couldn’t make up his mind where to go next.
Q If I could follow up, though, but when Air Force One left Louisiana and headed to Nebraska, I believe at that time there were no U.S. planes, or any planes, still in U.S. airspace. So then why did the President go to Nebraska and not back here to the White House?
MR. FLEISCHER: Because the information that we had was real and credible about Air Force One. And the manner in which Air Force One operated maintained the security of Air Force One at all times. And that also is one of the reasons why Air Force One did not come back to Andrews, where some people thought it would.
Q If we could make the connection here, that would suggest, Ari, then, that the threat against Air Force One came in the form of another aircraft?
MR. FLEISCHER: No, I’m not indicating what form it came in, John, and I will not.
Q Ari, at what time did the White House get this information?
MR. FLEISCHER: On the flight from Sarasota to the first location.
Q So did the evacuation of the White House come as a result of that information?
MR. FLEISCHER: That’s a detail that I’m not going to get into, Terry. But all appropriate security precautions were taken.
When a reporter asked if Osama bin Laden was involved, Fleischer would neither confirm nor deny al Qaeda’s involvement with the attacks.
In Washington, President Bush met with his National Security Team. After the meeting he assured the nation “we will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms.” Also,
This morning, I am sending to Congress a request for emergency funding authority, so that we are prepared to spend whatever it takes to rescue victims, to help the citizens of New York City and Washington, D.C. respond to this tragedy, and to protect our national security.
“Whatever it takes” would prove not to mean, um, “whatever it takes,” exactly.
Too Cool
A little group of us bloggers ate lunch with the last elected President of the United States today, in his Harlem office. I’m afraid if I try to name everybody I’ll leave someone out, so I’m not going to try, but attendees included (in no particular order) Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest; Matt Stoller of MyDD; Duncan Black of Eschaton; Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who has photos up already; Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith from firedoglake; Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis, and, um, more people. And moi. I’ll post the full list eventually.
The purpose of the meeting (as near as I can tell) is that Mr. Clinton has been reading blogs and just wanted to do a little outreach, facilitated by Peter Daou. We had a lovely time schmoozing about, you know, political stuff.
No big bombshell revelations, but it was certainly an interesting discussion. Lots of smart folks in the room. I took a few notes, but I think I’ll wait until I get the official meeting transcript to write in detail.
But how cool was that?
Update: John at AMERICAblog has more photos. McJoan at Daily Kos has more details.
Paranoia
The scheduled installment of “Ten Days After: Day Two” probably won’t be up until late this evening. Click here for Day One. Meanwhile —
I’ve been reading Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an essay written in 1963. I regret that I haven’t found it online except in abridged form that leaves out some of the best stuff, so I’ve keyboarded four paragraphs to bring to your attention. I’m sure I could extract several dozen blog posts out of these four paragraphs alone, but since I’m short on time this morning I’m going to just post the paragraphs for you to think about.
Seems to me these paragraphs fit several groups in the U.S. today — the Right versus militant Islam; the Right versus the “liberal elite”; the Bush Administration’s approach to the “war on terror” (the second paragraph in particular); Dick Cheney and other neocons versus Saddam Hussein; and on the Left, people who are convinced the WTC towers were brought down by controlled detonation.
Have at it.
Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. All political behavior requires strategy, many strategic acts depend for their effect upon a period of secrecy, and anything that is secret may be described, often with but little exaggeration, as conspiratorial. The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast†or “gigantic†conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the face of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to see a date for the apocalypse. “Time is running out,†said Welch [Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society] in 1951 “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month in which Stalin will attack.†The apocalypticism of the paranoid style run dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it. Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy, and strike at susceptibility to similar themes in Christianity. Properly expressed, such warnings serve somewhat the same function as a description of the horrible consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon: they portray that which impends but which may still be avoided. They are a secular and demonic version of adventism.
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of the past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed newsâ€; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brain washing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.
The enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Senator McCarthy, with his heavily documented tracts and his show of information, Mr. Welch with his accumulations of irresistible evidence, John Robison with his laborious study of documents in a language he but poorly used, the anti-Masons with their endlessly painstaking discussions of Masonic ritual – all these offer a kind of implicit compliment to their opponents. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operations through “front†groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various Christian anti-Communist “crusades†openly express their admiration for the dedication, discipline, and strategic ingenuity the Communist cause calls forth.