Monthly Archives: October 2006

What Does He Know That We Don’t?

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Michael Abramowitz writes in today’s Washington Post:

Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Flashback: As I remember it, on election night 2000 the extended Bush clan watched the train wreck from the Texas governor’s mansion. From time to time they’d appear on television, watching television. And at some point someone told them Florida had been called for Gore, and they shrugged it off. They weren’t worried about Florida. They knew they had Florida, one way or another.

Abramowitz continues,

The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities, in part to squelch any loss of nerve among his legions. Come January, he said last week, “We’ll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate.”

The question is whether this is a case of justified confidence — based on Bush’s and Rove’s electoral record and knowledge of the money, technology and other assets at their command — or of self-delusion. Even many Republicans suspect the latter. Three GOP strategists with close ties to the White House flatly predicted the loss of the House, though they would not do so on the record for fear of offending senior Bush aides.

After the 2004 election, Maureen Farrell wrote an editorial for Buzzflash that documented Bush’s pattern of supreme confidence before “elections”:

On election night, Peter Jennings looked measurably surprised when he learned that President Bush had provided a tape of himself, sitting in the White House, commenting on his impending victory. It was an unprecedented move. No sitting president had ever addressed the nation while polls were still open. It was just not done. But there was George, exuding confidence, offering an election day reminder of our leader’s legitimacy.

It was all so perfectly Rovian, too. And why not? The Bush family filmed a similar made-for-TV moment in 2000, you might recall, when they assured America that Florida belonged to George. “There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying, and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote, two weeks before the Supreme Court’s fateful decision.” Of course Bush would win Florida. Losing was out of the question. Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV.”

Election night 2004, however, was not punctuated by any such hooting. It was the end of a long and grueling journey for the President of the United States and his supporters. Tales of voter intimidation, computer glitches and “partisan mischief,” were reported during early voting in Florida, but somehow those things usually worked in the President’s favor. (Would anyone have complained, do you suppose, if John Kerry’s brother had been running the show?).

Of course, thanks to the Electoral College, in a close presidential election one has only to steal one or two states to swing the election. To keep the House in Republican hands, BushCo is going to have to pull a “Florida” in several states at once. And when pollsters are predicting a blowout (as Kevin Heyden notes, even much of the Right Blogosphere has written off the House), even the U.S. news media might get suspicious if Republicans win.

Emptywheel reminds us that Rove isn’t always right.

As I’ve been flying around the world, I’ve been reading all the Rove classics, including Bush’s Brain. And what struck me as I was reading it is the failures that never get mentioned. There’s the loser campaign in PA. Rove’s plans to win CA in 2000 and MI in 2004. These were all part of Rove’s grand plan and they didn’t come to fruition. Only Rove’s overconfidence in the 2000 NH primary ever gets mentioned. Underlying it all (particularly the MI loss, with the failed bid to win supporters by imposing a steel tariff, which really decimated the Tool and Die industry in MI) is the real possibility that, eventually, people are going to want results. Eventually, policy does matter. Rovian politics are not enough–not enough to win wars in Iraq, not enough to save jobs in the Midwest, and not enough to ensure seniors get prescription drugs.

Also at The Next Hurrah, DemFromCT provides a list of “Perceived GOP Errors” that includes Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers, Dubai Ports, and immigration. I don’t know how much of a hand Rove had in those little episodes, but certainly each of these issues showed the White House with its pants down, so to speak, and very much caught off guard by public reaction it didn’t anticipate.

I’ve long believed that Karl Rove is a kind of Idiot Savant who is brilliant at one thing — Assault Politics — but barely competent at anything else. Like his boy Bush, he may finally have waded in over his head.

Out With a Bang?

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“If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.”—Barbara Tuchman

I don’t know where Tuchman wrote the above; I found it in a “quotes for today” column. If anyone recognizes it, please speak up.

Meanwhile —

I’ve written a couple of posts recently about President Bush’s increasing irrelevancy, here and here. But it may be he’s not planning to go out with a whimper.

Kenneth Walsh of US News and World Report writes,

Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7–a concern aggravated by the president’s news conference this week.

“They aren’t even planning for if they lose,” says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush’s final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock.

“The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress,” said a Bush ally. “Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans–the ones that survive–treat them if they lose next month.”

Billmon suggests there is a plan — start a war with Iran. Would this help win the midterm for Republicans? I doubt it; at this point I think it would just make for a bigger rout. However, I think Tristero is on to something:

I believe that Bush will, as he has done since the beginning, continue to play chicken with the US Constitution, daring Congress to force the constitutional crisis he’s created, which has been going on since before he took office, into a full-blown public meltdown. And I believe, just as they did with the filibuster, that Congress will back down to prevent a public meltdown from happening. Congress, either Dem-controlled or not, will prefer to avoid a very frightening confrontation with a rogue presidency – that could lead who knows where – in the hopes that Bush’s insane challenge to the very structure of the US government simply will end when Bush leaves office in 2009.

I’m not saying I like this or that I think it’s a good (or bad) idea. All I’m suggesting is that even if there is a rout, don’t expect much. With Bush in office, the serious danger to the country’s kind of government persists. He will do whatever he wants to do. The Congress, like it or not, will be very anxious to do nothing to exacerbate the crisis, hoping to wait him out.

Yes, indeed, a Democratic House/Congress may raise quite a stink over Bush’s desire for the big Iran Bang Bang he’s planning. But even so, Congress will do all it can not to confront Bush but avoid the confrontation.

That’s right: Even a Democratically controlled Congress may very well go along with Bush’s war plans in order to avoid a catastrophic showdown over who really has the true power in America these days. It may mean that the confrontation over Bush/Iran could devolve into an open clash between Bush and very reluctant generals, with Congress stuck, badly, in the middle. (And I can clearly see the headlines on Fox declaring a ” military coup d ‘etat” and “mutiny.”) But frankly, I doubt it. I suspect that there will be no major dramatic confrontations and, barring the totally unforeseen, that Bush could get away with starting another war. Possibly even a nuclear war – and then watch the fur fly as the world condemns the US and Congress tries to figure out what to do while the bodies of radiated children are displayed on television and Bush demands “loyalty in a time of active war.”

You know that some Dems would give Bush anything he wants — Lieberman, for example, if he returns to the Senate and remains a Dem. You can count on Lieberman and some others to sell us out.

As for the rest of the Dems, majority or not, beginning the day after the November election we must begin an all-out, full-court-press campaign to let the Dems know that, if they don’t stand up to Bush, they will face worse consequences from us.

It’s entirely possible Bush isn’t making any plans because he’s got his head shoved so far up his ass he really doesn’t know he’s in trouble. It’s also possible he will decide to work out some kind of compromise — don’t indict me for war crimes, and I’ll behave. We’ll see. It’s important to remember that, for all his bluster, Bush is a weak man and a weak leader. He doesn’t get his way by leading, but by subterfuge and lies. His weakness is, in fact, his strength — he has no scruples at all, and he might very well force the nation to choose between allowing him to reign as dictator and some sort of coup d’état. But weenie that he is, it’s possible there’s someone who can take him into hand and force him to comply. Like, maybe, his mother.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About North Korea’s Nukes

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I’ve written so much about North Korea I get tired just thinking about it, so I’m grateful when someone else takes up the slack. Here are some new links, plus links to oldie-but-goodie stuff, all in one handy-dandy post to bookmark for future reference..

Some links I haven’t posted before:

Hilzoy, “Do You Feel Safer Now?”

Joe Conason, “Wagging the Big Dog”

Fred Kaplan, “The Slime Talk Express”

Rosa Brooks, “A Good Week for the Axis of Evil”

Tom Teepen, “Bush’s newest N. Korea policy: Blame Clinton”

Linked before, but not to be missed:

Fred Kaplan, “Rolling Blunder”

The Mahablog North Korea posts (most recent first):

“Blame Everybody (But Bush)”

“More Bombs”

“Bombing”

“Happy Talk”

“Bolton Lies; Righties Confused”

And finally,

“Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes”

Update: New links:

Eric Alterman, “Blaming Success, Upholing Failure”

Rachel Weise, “North Korea Nuclear Timeline“

Reagan Youth

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More on the increasing irrelevancy of George W. Bush, which I discussed yesterday — in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s there’s a bone-chilling article by Wells Tower called “The Kids Are Far Right.” I very much regret that it isn’t online yet, and probably won’t be for a couple of months. If you want to look for it on newsstands, the cover art is a donkey head with a halter made of $100 bills.

Tower spent a week at the National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, DC, talking to the young folks. Among many striking passages was this one:

Despite all the jaunty blood thirst for liberals and hippies, it’s interesting to note that none of the students utters words of praise for George W. Bush, or goes in for any cuticle-nibbling over the daily media forecasts of the drubbing the G.O.P. is supposed to suffer at the polls fourteen weeks from now. The more than 400 attendees is a record for the conference, and although this is good news for the conservative movement, it is also an oblique sort of nose-thumbing at the Republican Party, whose frantic volunteer trenches these students have disdained to spend the week in Washington. Proud self-declared Republicans, in fact, are curiously hard to come by among the students , nearly all of whom identify themselves as libertarians or simply as “conservatives,” and who will later describe our president to me in the following terms: “embarrassing,” “stupid,” “arrogant,” “a halfway conservative,” “a puppet of lobbyists and special interests,” and “a liberal, basically.”

Our President is many things, but of course there’s nothing in him that remotely resembles “liberal.” I assume the young person was using liberal in the sense of “nyah nyah nyah.” In another passage, one not-conservative tatooed and black-garbed Goth, attending the conference at the behest of her father, described how she was snubbed by the other attendees:

She says she is still trying to make sense of an incident yesterday, when a group of conferees inside the dorms yelled “neocon” at her, evidently road-testing a new vulgarity they had not quite mastered.

If these young people are in any way a representative sampling of rightie youth, this suggests that young people are breaking from the Republican Party establishment and populism generally. And this reminds me of the way the New Left dissed the Dems and ditched New Deal populism back in the 1970s. Young righties are working hard to marginalize themselves, in other words, which is good news, because this is one creepy bunch of kids. More on that later in this post.

As far as President Bush is concerned, I extrapolate from this that when he retires from the White House — and however he retires from the White House — he is unlikely to be the conservative icon that Ronald Reagan was and still is. The Washington Republican establishment may, or may not, continue to make excuses for Bush in the years to come, but the young folks intend to bury him alive so they can forget he ever lived. He’s not going to be invited to their parties. They aren’t going to buy his ghost-written books or cheer him at his public appearances. Bubble Boy is in for a hard fall.

Instead of remaining actively engaged in public issues as many former presidents do, I predict G.W. Bush (assuming he escapes prosecution for war crimes) will disappear into a ghost world for the rest of his sorry life, much as Lyndon Johnson did in his retirement.

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, is an icon — nay, an idol. The cult of Reagan that permeated the conference was so strong it made a few attendees uncomfortable. “I know Reagan was amazing,” said one, “but I think it’s weird that we’re supposed to pretend he’s God.” That Alzheimer’s ate Reagan’s retirement (and, IMO, his second term) is not an issue, and I suspect it may have helped keep his almighty presidential image pure.

Lately much attention has been paid to the authoritarian tendencies of conservatism. On the surface these young people seem both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian at once. Their heroes — Dr. Walter E. Williams and Wayne La Pierre, for example — are treated with unquestioning adulation. Otherwise their attitude toward authority, particularly government, reflects that of a spoiled little boy told he’d better be nice to Grandma or he won’t get dessert. Come to think of it, that may be the most normal thing about them. But some seem to take anti-authoritarianism to extremes. Tower writes of a young man who has already abandoned political ambitions:

The conference has drawn, or perhaps cultivated more people like Jeff Scott, who would like to see government wholly destroyed (save for the military), than students with fantasies of ascending to the highest office in the land.

So what is it, authoritarian or anti-authoritarian? I think this bit from a panel on conservative literature provides a clue:

Majory Ross recommends the usual syllabus: Goldwater, Kirk, Buckley, Ayn Rand. At the mention of Rand, a current of ardor passes through the ballroom, and someone gives a low, deferential whistle.

I’ve long viewed Randians with astonishment and wonder. Here are people who have built a cult around someone whose message boils down to individuality is God; the hell with community. If you ever have the bad judgment to wander into an Objectivist forum, you’ll find one Randian after another quoting the same passages from The Fountainhead to demonstrate how individualistic they are. But as this fellow says, “Rand’s sacred word is unmistakably ‘EGO.'” Since most of the world’s philosophy, East and West, warns against the perils of egotism, if you’re looking for a philosophy that says ego-indulgence is good, Rand’s is an obvious choice. And I understand Randians hate neocons almost as much as they hate liberals, which accounts (sorta) for the epithet hurled at Goth girl, above.

Thus, the Reagan youth are less individualistic than they are self-centered little brats who mistake egotism with individualism. As such, it is striking how much they resemble George W. Bush — like him, they are spoiled, narcissistic, and badly socialized.

For example, one evening a young man from Oregon describes what he does for fun:

Bunny bashing, he explains, involves borrowing someone’s father’s pickup truck for an evening and filling the bed with young men armed with cudgels. Then you drive around the countryside until an unlucky jackrabbit freezes in the high beams, at which point somebody hops out and clubs the animal to death.

What becomes of the dead rabbit? I ask.

Chase Dannen turns bashful. “Do you really want to know?”

With a little prodding, he continues. If you’re keeping true to the spirit of the thing, what you do is rip the rabbit’s head off and then impale it through the throat and eye socket on the antenna of the borrowed truck. On a bountiful evening, he says, you can accumulate a totem pole sure to astound the truck’s owner when he sees it in the morning.

This reminded me of the charming story of Young George and the Exploding Frogs.

“We were terrible to animals,” recalled [Bush pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. “Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Throckmorton said. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”

Kristof made plain that “we” explicitly included George W. Bush, and that George W., the Safari Club International Governor of the Year in 1999 for his support of trophy hunting, was the leader among the boys who did it.

There is a well-documented link between animal cruelty and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

That was just one kid, but the Reagan youth do seem to have a proclivity for romanticizing cruelty and violence. For example:

In her facebook bio, Samantha Soller listed among her hobbies “political science, philosophy, and hippie-hunting, enjoys foreclosing on poor people’s cardboard boxes, eating red meat, using her Sigarms P232 Stainless to shoot cute little bunny rabbits.”

We’re into the creepy part, by the way. Note that these same young people can work themselves into outrage over the “cruelty” of abortion.

Throughout the young folks display the easy arrogance of the privileged toward the poor. Sheltered and provided for from birth, they cannot imagine their life any other way. Thus they are eager to dismantle all “welfare,” including Social Security. They imagine that poor people would learn to fend for themselves if cut off from government assistance.

Bennett Rwicki, who has been in a quiet, reflective mood since the lecture, ponders the drug issue with a troubled brow. After a moment he brightens. “Hey, do you think — like what Walter Williams said — if you got rid of welfare, so that if families had to support themselves, that would lead to people doing less drugs?”

“Absolutely,” says Marianne Brennan.

“I think so,” says Samantha Soller.

“Definitely,” says Tom Samper of the College of New Jersey. “If it’s a choice between drugs or survival, they’re going to spend their money on survival.”

With the trouble birds of welfare reform and the drug problems of the American poor neatly felled with a single stone, an air of satisfaction settles over the table, and Samantha Soller makes a trip to the buffet table to fetch everybody some dessert.

Like I said — bone chilling.

Friday the 13th

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President Bush doesn’t scare me any more.

Oh, I realize he’s still capable of considerable mischief, like launching a global thermonuclear war. But these days there’s something so pathetic about him it’s hard to take him seriously.

Yesterday Dan Froomkin described Bush’s Wednesday press conference:

On North Korea, rather than coming off as an assertive leader, Bush spoke meekly about what has so far been a failed and listless diplomatic effort. On Iraq, his rhetoric was familiar and unlikely to stanch the loss of public support for the war. Even his formerly dependable warnings about threats to the nation’s security lacked authority amid the growing doubts about whether his approach to the war on terror is working.

Froomkin quotes Dana Milbank:

Pressed to defend his foreign policy, Bush instead cited the “stakes” involved in the Middle East and North Korea — 13 times.

“I understand the stakes,” Bush announced. “I’m going to repeat them one more time. As a matter of fact, I’m going to spend a lot of time repeating the stakes.”

He made good on that promise. Five times he said “the stakes are high,” occasionally adding that “the stakes are really high” and even that, “as a matter of fact, they couldn’t be higher.”

“I know this sounds [as if] I’m just saying it over and over again,” Bush admitted. But repetition is crucial to learning; to that end, Bush also said four times that the enemy is trying to establish a “caliphate.”

There’s been considerable hoo-hawing about Bush’s use of the word caliphate, btw, and some speculate it will replace Islamofascist as the preferred term for Our Enemy. But Bush’s larger problem is that he’s out of red herrings. His Administration is such a disaster that there’s no issue he can use to distract attention from another; it’s all bad out there. He’s been reduced to comments on reporters’ wardrobes.

I wrote yesterday about how the White House is leaking to cover Bush’s butt on North Korea. Today Helen Thomas describes how long-time Bush family consigliere James Baker is maneuvering to get Junior off the hook about Iraq, too. Pathetic, I say.

It’s not just that Bush’s approval ratings are drifting south again. These days, what ground Bush has left to stand on is pretty shaky. Not only are some Republican candidates distancing themselves from their own party, but even white religious voters and suburbanites are backing away from the GOP. And the GOP itself seems to be in self-destruct mode.

But hold the celebration. First, elections have a way of, um, surprising us these days, and Bush will keep his butt covered and retain operational capabilities as long as Republicans control Congress. And what Digby says scares the stuffing out of me:

If and when we manage to take back one or both houses of congress get prepared to relive those glory days of the 90’s, when the Republicans acted like raving lunatics and braindead losers like Chris Matthews blamed it all on the Democrats.

It is going to be as if the Bush years never happened. All this unpleasantness will be disappeared and we will begin anew with a horrible fiscal situation, a terrible global situation, a hopeless military situation which will be laid squarely at the feet of the “lefties” by “smart, grown-up Republicans,” the shrieking rightwing harpies and their close relatives the robotic codpiece-worshipping pundits. Oy.

Folks, taking Congress away from the GOP (assuming we do) is just the beginning of the fight. Although Bush is still a concern, never forget that the real danger to democracy comes from the VRWC, not Bush. And they’ll still be around when Bush is gone.

Update: See Jeffrey Smith in today’s WaPo:

President Bush finds the world around him increasingly “unacceptable.”

In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems “unacceptable,” including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea’s claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Bush’s decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd time, a phase of his presidency in which all manner of circumstances are not bending to his will: national security setbacks in North Korea and Iraq, a Congress that has shrugged its shoulders at his top domestic initiatives, a favorability rating mired below 40 percent.

But a survey of transcripts from Bush’s public remarks over the past seven years shows the president’s worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush’s rising frustration with his declining influence.

Get used to it, Sweetums.

Numbers That Go Crunch

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Daniel Davies, better known to bloggers as Daniel of Crooked Timber, explains the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study on deaths in Iraq.

First, don’t concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths – it’s basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party’s rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage “small samples extrapolated to the whole country”. The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

Just as a number on a chart, a mortality rate of 13.3 is not self-evidently absurd. A great many third-world nations have mortality rates at least that high, if not higher. (You can find a handy-dandy table of world demographics in this PDF file. I believe Mozambique wins the mortality prize at 20 deaths per 1,000.)

Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% – 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we’re interested in the qualitative conclusion here.

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

Most of the criticism coming from the Right Blogosphere amounts to “I don’t believe it,” albeit expressed in more colorful language and accompanied by ad hominem attacks on the researchers. And all of the criticisms of the study that I’ve seen pick apart the point estimate number but do not seriously address the methodology or the increase in mortality rate.

Some of the comparisons are downright weird. For example, some guy quoted on Instapundit said “It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.” I assume that’s true, but that’s not an honest comparison. An honest comparison would compare pre-war mortality rates to mortality rates of German citizens during World War II — deaths from everything, including mumps, traffic accidents, and the Holocaust — and extrapolate from that the number of people who would not have died had the mortality rate not risen.

The “WWII bombing” comparison just tells me that whoever came up with it does not grasp what the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study even is about, never mind understand the methodology. Yet he declares himself an expert and says it’s wrong.

Daniel Davies continues,

A particularly disgusting theme of some right-wing American critics of the study as been to impugn it by talking about it being “conveniently” released before the November congressional elections. As if a war that doubled the death rate in Iraq was not the sort of thing that ought to be a political issue. Nobody is doing anything about this disaster, and nobody will do until people start suffering some kind of consequences for their actions (for example, no British politician, soldier or spy has lost his job over the handling of the Iraq war and no senior member of the Bush administration either).

There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.


Richard Horton writes in The Guardian:

Not only do we have a better understanding of the toll our invasion has had on the country; we also understand better just how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is our occupation and our continued presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence. Claims that the terrorist threat was always there are simply disproved by these findings.

The nature of these causes has changed too. Early on in the post-invasion period deaths were made worse by aerial bombing. But now gunshot wounds and car bombs are having a far greater effect. Far from our presence in Iraq stabilising the chaos or alleviating the rate at which casualties are mounting, we seem to be making the situation worse. In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased.


In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased. That’s the important point, and that’s what the Bush Administration and its rightie supporters need to explain. And answer for.

Blame Everybody (But Bush)

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Someone’s leaking again. Bill Gertz writes for The Washington Times (emphasis added):

Recent U.S. intelligence analyses of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were flawed and the lack of clarity on the issue hampered U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert the underground blast detected Sunday, according to Bush administration officials.

Some recent secret reports stated that Pyongyang did not have nuclear arms and until recently was bluffing about plans for a test, according to officials who have read the classified assessments.

The analyses in question included a National Intelligence Estimate a consensus report of all U.S. spy agencies produced several months ago and at least two other classified reports on North Korea produced by senior officials within the office of the Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

And these classified reports were leaked by … ?

The officials said there were as many as 10 failures related to intelligence reporting on North Korean missile tests and the suspected nuclear test that harmed administration efforts to deal with the issue.

Like they didn’t know North Korea was processing plutonium? It’s been in the news, dudes. You can find out about it by googling. I realize that having plutonium is not the same thing as having a bomb, but if somebody’s got enriched plutonium, I understand that making the bomb itself is the relatively easy part. On top of that, it has been widely believed for years that North Korea built one or two nuclear bombs back in the 1970s.

I can’t believe even Bush Administration diplomats are so stupid they wouldn’t have been working under the assumption North Korea could have nuclear weapons, or might get them at any time, no matter what some NIE said.

And if they were genuinely surprised by the recent alleged nuclear test, is there something they would have done differently had they known? Like, maybe, take North Korea talks more seriously?

Even more astonishing, White House mouthpiece John Hinderaker admits his masters leaked the reports to get back at the CIA. Get this:

We’ve reported many times on the four-year-long war the CIA has carried on against the Bush administration. Today the administration returned the favor by telling Bill Gertz of the Washington Times that the intelligence community failed to foresee the recent North Korean nuclear test.

Of course, this isn’t really about North Korea. It’s about making excuses for George W. Bush’s sorry ass and setting up a scapegoat to take the blame. Oh, and selectively leaking intelligence for political purposes. Same old, same old.

New York News

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I check the blog aggregating site Memeorandum at least once a day, because it tells me at-a-glance what most people are blogging about. And as many have noticed, righties and lefties tend to comment on different stories.

Most of the time, the reason for this is obvious. “Our” side chases stories that make “them” look bad; “they” go after stories that make “us” look bad. The occasional “hooray for us” swarm is usually followed closely by a posse of “so what?” posts.

But what about this: Yesterday most of the Right Blogosphere reported frantically on the plane accident in Manhattan that killed a New York Yankees pitcher. Several righties “live blogged” what they saw on television. The Left mostly left it alone, except to comment on what the righties were up to.

I didn’t blog about it because I do political and social commentary here, and there was neither a political nor social angle to the accident. It was off topic, as far as I was concerned. I probably would have blogged about it had I been an eyewitness, but I wasn’t. I don’t know anything more than what was reported on television yesterday.

Tom Tomorrow snarked at the righties: “No one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.” Allahpundit responded,

True, but no one’s going to win a blog Pulitzer anyway. And it does come in handy for the 90% of the readership that are at work and looking for information.

But why was this “information” so vital that people couldn’t wait to hear about until they got home? A political development likely to impact the elections or the government or otherwise have widespread consequences is one thing. But a small plane accident? I could sorta kinda see commenting on the accident before it was determined it was an accident and not terrorism, but a number of righties continued to treat it as a Big National Bleeping Deal story long after they knew it was an accident.

For that matter, I was surprised Chris Matthews spent the entire hour of the 5:00 Hardball on the plane accident. New York local news was all over it, which is understandable, as the accident was a big local story. And since a nationally known sports figure died, it was worth some time on national news. But an entire hour of Hardball? Of course, cable news is not exactly famous for perspective, given the absurd amount of attention given to John Karr a few weeks ago.

But it gets worse — apparently, for some reason, the accident was a global story. Tim Footman in the UK comments:

A small aircraft has crashed into a building in Manhattan. Obviously, we are gripped by the news: the attacks five years ago are still seared in our minds, and the memory is made more grim by the knowledge that the whole thing was a beginning, not an end. The outside chance that such an event might be repeated grabs the attention of media providers around the globe.

But soon, it becomes clear that, although the precise details are yet to emerge, it wasn’t a terrorist attack. There’s added flavour from the fact that one of the men on the aeroplane was a baseball player with the New York Yankees, but that’s as far as the story looks likely to run: a tragedy for the people directly involved and their friends and families; a shock for local residents. Please move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Except, apparently, there is. I quite understand why the initial reports flashed around the planet – no editor would want to miss the possibility of 9/11 redux. But when we realised that it was a false alarm, surely it became little more than a footnote.

Not according to the BBC website, which was still making it their lead story, hours after it became clear that Osama was nowhere in sight. Ditto the Daily Telegraph site. The Guardian, Times and Independent kept it as second or third lead. Further afield, the story led on the sites of Le Monde, La Repubblica, Süddeutsche-Zeitung, El País, the Times of India, Yomiuri Shimbun and many more.

Mr. Footman speculates that the story got international attention because it happened in New York.

It seems that we’ve exchanged the Little Englander insularity of the men in dicky-bows for a weird loss of perspective, in which the lives and deaths of Americans take precedence over all else. It’s a sort of vicarious insularity, something akin to the morbid fascination some people feel for the celebrities in Heat magazine, to the exclusion of news that may actually affect their own lives. Just as medieval scholars created maps that placed Jerusalem at the centre, the world’s media has made Manhattan the capital of the planet.

Maybe, but that doesn’t explain rightie bloggers, who tend to think of New York City as an alien corruption defacing the edge of the beloved Homeland. Maybe, deep down inside, they hope one plane crash in Manhattan is the beginning of a trend. Otherwise — WTF?