Jonathan Turley and Rachel Maddow discuss the possibility of war crimes prosecutions for Bushies.
Monthly Archives: July 2008
The Cracker Case
I posted about PZ Myers, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, and the “cracker case” on the other blog. Go over there and help build up my traffic stats. Thanks much.
Let’s Hear It for Arrogance
I didn’t realize this, but “arrogance” is a synonym for “having a conscience.” No, really. I learned this today from Jammie Wearing Fool.
You may have read about L.F. Eason III, who retired from his job of 29 years at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture rather than obey a government directive. The directive was to fly U.S. and state flags at half mast in honor of the late pox upon humanity known as Jesse Helms. Well, Jammie Wearing Fool had this to say about that.
Such sanctimonious arrogance. Just because he’s a liberal twit with his own opinions, in his mind he gets to decide which state directives to follow.
Oh, my dear ones, read that sentence over and over again, and reflect upon it, because it is the true voice of American conservatism. How dare any of us listen to our own wisdom and act according to our own consciences? We are called upon to muffle our inner voices and do what we’re told. This is the American Way.
However, what Eason did is called “civil disobedience,” and it’s a time-honored American tradition going back to, oh, the Boston Tea Party at least.
Civil disobedience is the willful violation of a law or government directive because that law or directive is unjust. (It is not, as some assume, an act of malicious vandalism to demonstrate one’s unhappiness with government.) Rosa Parks’s refusal to obey a segregation law and sit at the back of a bus was classic civil disobedience. According to Jammie Wearing Fool, Rosa Parks was just being arrogant.
Another time-honored convention of civil disobedience is that if your violation of the law requires punishment, that you accept the punishment and not resist arrest. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay poll taxes because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. He spent a night in prison. He was prepared to remain in prison, but an aunt paid his poll taxes over his protests, and he was released. He later said “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Mr. Eason wasn’t imprisoned, but he gave up a job, which is a terrible penalty these days when good jobs are hard to come by. I wish him well.
And just because these leftists say such things about Mr. Helms does not make them true.
A valid point, but just because Jammie Wearing Fool doesn’t want to believe them, doesn’t make them false, either.
Sure enough, this haughty Eason is a John Edwards supporter.
Clearly, he needs to be sent to the Rush Limbaugh Re-education Camp, so that he can be relieved of his own opinions and think only state-sanctioned thoughts.
Who knows, before long Silky will sue on his behalf for wrongful termination. You can be sure this Eason will be put on the leftist pedestal of worship for his courage. Heck, they’ll probably have him speak at the convention in Denver.
It did take courage, since it cost him his job, and I salute the man. It shows us there are still people with integrity in the world who don’t take the easy road with the rest of the crowd. If only there were more like him.
A couple of days ago I interviewed Zen teacher Norman Fischer, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. And one of the items that came up in our conversation is the extent to which we are socialized into forgetting our own life experiences in favor of an “official” narrative sanctioned by society. We shuffle through life with this sanctioned narrative in our heads about who we are supposed to be and what our lives are supposed to be like, but that narrative may have nothing to do with who we are and what are lives really are or could be. Some people eventually wake up to this, and get real, but others never do.
So Jammie Wearing Fool sees someone who’s awake to who he is and who acts on his conscience, and this looks like “arrogance” to the Fool because it’s overriding the Official Sanctioned Narrative that we’re all supposed to follow and not ask questions about.
Of course, at the other end of the political scale we have the “pro-life” pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions. It seems to me this is also civil disobedience, since pharmacists are licensed by their states to fill prescriptions. If filling birth control prescriptions violates a pharmacist’s conscience I respect that, but the penalty should be loss of his license and a new career path. Instead, such pharmacists want to keep their jobs and play God with other peoples’ lives. I wonder if the Fool finds that arrogant, too?
Timetables
Let’s see — The government of Iraq wants the U.S. to set timetables for withdrawal. The government of the U.S. and the GOP presidential nominee-apparent say no. Hey, who says we’re not an occupation force?
Refining Iraq
Recent comments by Barack Obama on Iraq have been called a “flipflop” and a “move to the Right.” On last night’s Countdown, Rachel Maddow explained why this is wrong.
See also “John McCain, Flip-Flopper.”
Offered Without Comment
This speaks for itself: Medic in famous photo dies after PTSD struggle.
Help Me With This
I am really, really busy doing other things and can’t give this comment the attention it deserves. I hope some of you regulars will have some fun with it. This is comment #17 under “Wingnut Hysteria.” Have at it.
Update: I’ve closed comments on “Wingnut Hysteria” because it was drawing flies righties.
Wingnut Hysteria II
I put this at the end of the “Wingnut Hysteria” post below, but I think I’ll give it its own post so it doesn’t get lost.
One of the running themes of the various Idiots I called out in “Wingnut Hysteria” is that the Tuwaitha yellowcake proves that Joe Wilson lied. For example, Patterico says I am missing the point of the significance of the Tuwaitha yellowcake.
The debate isn’t about if Saddam was on the verge of obtaining nukes or not. Rather, it is about the fact that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are liars – something that most of the press refuses to acknowledge. Notably, Mahablog doesn’t mention the Joe Wilson controversy at all.
Please. The yellowcake in Tuwaitha is completely unrelated to Joe Wilson. The Tuwaitha yellowcake had been sitting in those drums, with the IAEA seals, at least since the end of the Gulf War. The IAEA had exhaustively inventoried it and monitored it from 1991 until inspections stopped in 1998, and when they went back in 2003 they found nothing whatsoever had changed — nothing had been added, nothing had been taken away. The same barrels were still there, with the same seals.
Documentation for the IAEA inspections is in my old Tuwaitha posts, and you can also find some of the same documentation on this Iraq Nuclear Verification Office page, which provides summaries of inspections from 1991 to 1998
Wilson’s trip to Niger in 2002 was to investigate an alleged sale of uranium in the late 1990s. The alleged Niger uranium had nothing whatsoever to do with the Tuwaitha uranium.
In fact, one of my arguments all along about the 16 words and the alleged Niger yellowcake was that it made no sense for Saddam Hussein to purchase more yellowcake when he was already sitting on a huge pile of yellowcake that he didn’t have the technology to enrich.
The Missing Monks of Lhasa
On the other blog — since Tibet was officially “opened” to journalists and tourists a few days ago, a number of visitors to Lhasa, the old capital city, have commented that there was an unusual absence of monks. Now there are reports that a majority of the monks of Lhasa’s three principal monasteries — a number easily in the thousands — have been shipped to detention camps and prisons.
Some people have real problems.
Oh, and you may have heard that the Chimpster will attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Not going would be an “affront” to the Chinese, he said.
Translation: The Chinese are underwriting his war and his tax cuts. They own his ass.
Wingnut Hysteria
Updated Below
They really are like simple, but nasty, children.
Long, long ago, in those heady days just after the invasion of Iraq but before it all went sour — a very narrow period, to be sure — some Marines stumbled upon the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, at a site near Tuwaitha that had been bombed into rubble by Israel back in 1981. A whole lot of yellowcake uranium was stored there, all of which had been inspected and re-inspected by the IAEA many times over the years.
In fact, the IAEA had inspected the site several times before the Iraq War began in March 2003. The last inspection was on February 11, 2003. United Nations weapons inspectors had visited the facility in December, 2002. The yellowcake was all inventoried and stored in drums with IAEA seals. I wrote a lot about this back in 2003.
The critical point is that Saddam Hussein couldn’t do anything with this uranium because he lacked the equipment and technology to enrich it. So it had been sitting around for years in drums sealed by the IAEA. No nuclear program.
When the Marines found this cache of uranium in April, 2003, they were completely caught off guard. If anyone in the Bush Administration knew it was there, they didn’t bother to inform the military. So for a while the uranium became the vindication for the invasion, until finally someone admitted that, um, yeah, we knew it was there, and it was all still under IAEA seal as it had been for several years. No vindication.
The amusing part of all this is that every single time some part of that yellowcake uranium gets back into the news, the wingnuts get all excited about the “new” discovery and start celebrating that the invasion of Iraq is vindicated. This seems to happen every 18 months or so.
Well, folks, they’re at it again. There’s an Associated Press story (that I’m not linking to because it’s the Associated Press) that says the last of the yellowcake was removed from the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex. And they seem to think this is some brand new discovery.
Here’s the Idiot’s Hall of Fame:
American Thinker
Don Surber
Gateway Pundit
Pirate’s Cove
Neptunus Lex
Patterico’s Pontifications
Sweetness and Light
The accumulated IQ of the above bloggers adds up to about 47.
See also Daniel DeGroot, who is not an idiot.
Update: Here’s another candidate for the Idiot’s Hall of Fame — Macsmind. That takes the accumulated Idiot IQ up to about 48.
Sample quote:
Of course Yellow Cake is harmless in itself but then it’s only a few steps away from becoming uranium.
Yellowcake IS uranium and is radioactive, but you can’t make weapons with it. It is not “only a few steps” from being weapons grade. It takes considerable refinement and considerable time, and it’s clear that Saddam Hussein lacked the means to refine it and wasn’t trying.
This story of course blows the Bush Lied/People Died story out of the water and puts to rest any question whether Saddam was seeking to build a nuclear program. In fact we know that Saddam did in fact have a WMD program.
Yellowcake uranium that had been stored in sealed drums for several years with no attempt to do anything with it does not constitute a “WMD program.”
Update: One more for the Idiot’s list:
This may push the collective IQ number above 50. It’s so hard to tell.
Update: Now Patterico Justine Levine, writing at Patterico’s Pontifications, says I am missing the point.
The debate isn’t about if Saddam was on the verge of obtaining nukes or not. Rather, it is about the fact that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are liars – something that most of the press refuses to acknowledge. Notably, Mahablog doesn’t mention the Joe Wilson controversy at all.
Please. The yellowcake in Tuwaitha is completely unrelated to Joe Wilson. The Tuwaitha yellowcake was [partly] the remnants of material from the defunct Osiraq reactor that Israel bombed in 1981 [the rest was purchased before the Gulf War]. The Tuwaitha yellowcake had been sitting in those drums, with the IAEA seals, at least since the end of the Gulf War. The IAEA had exhaustively inventoried it and monitored it from the beginning of the 1990s until inspections stopped in 1998, and when they went back in 2003 they found nothing whatsoever had changed — nothing had been added, nothing had been taken away. The same barrels were still there, with the same seals.
Wilson’s trip to Niger in 2002 was to investigate an alleged sale of uranium in the late 1990s. The alleged Niger uranium had nothing whatsoever to do with the Tuwaitha uranium.
In fact, one of my arguments all along about the 16 words and the alleged Niger yellowcake was that it made no sense for Saddam Hussein to purchase more yellowcake when he was already sitting on a huge pile of yellowcake that he didn’t have the technology to enrich.
Patterico just went into negative IQ points. The accumulated IQ drops to 38.