Category: Good Writing

This is a Question that Desperately Needs to Answered

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Charles Pierce wonders why Democrats refuse to call batsh%$ insane Republicans batsh%$ insane:

Back in 2010, as part of a biannual act of madness by which the magazine endeavors to analyze every congressional race in the country, I had occasion to talk to Tarryl Clark, who was challenging Michele Bachmann on behalf of the splendidly name Democratic Farmer-Labor Party for Bachmann’s job in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. How, I asked Clark, does one make good use of the rich trove of lunacy that is Bachmann’s entire public career.

“Well,” Clark told me. “I’m not going to call her crazy, if that’s what you mean.”

In fact, that was exactly what I meant.

The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party’s failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s. ………

Seriously.

Michelle Bachmann, for example, got started on politics by opposing the Disney feature Aladdin (the one with Robin Williams) because she felt that it promulgated witchcraft.

The so-called expert political operatives in the Democratic Party seem to think that it is either unseemly, or perhaps unnecessary, to point out the complete insanity of many Republican candidates.

I guess that they think it’s a loser, but if it is, why the f%$# did Bachmann get elected for anything?

Not only does it not serve the Democratic party to ignore this mishugas, it ends up defining deviancy down, because silence is most certainly perceived as assent.

People need to remember Hubert Humphrey’s stirring speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, and its refrain, “But not Barry Goldwater,” put the final nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign.

Calling out the crazy is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.

The Wisest Thing Said so Far this Year

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If regular Americans acted like corporations and the moneyed class, our country would collapse in a week from systemic theft, corruption and greed.

Donald Trump is going bankrupt for the 5th time, Richard Fuld is still a rich man, Goldman Sachs is still a going concern, airlines and other businesses routinely declare bankruptcy to cheat their workers.

It’s no surprise that recent studies have found the wealthy to be less ethical than the general populace.

And when a deal goes bad? They just walk away.

Basically, the much of the obscene levels of wealth that have been accumulated, particularly by the MBA class, come from their monetizing our ethics and their lack thereof.

John Oliver Certainly has a Way With Words

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John Oliver’s monologue about the US drone policy notes that US drone policies are like, “Harvey Keitel’s balls,” because, “From a distance you think, ‘Well, I understand the contours of those.’ But if you were to really examine them, you’d discover that they’re actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and gray areas. Much like the rules for our drone strikes.”

Barack Obama is giving Henry Kissinger some serious competition for “Worst American recipient of the Nobel Prize ever.”

Nope. Not at All Like a Brush War in Indochina.

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The inimitable Charlie Pierce pulls some quotes from the early 1960s:

My Esky colleague John H. Richardson whiles away the slow days by immersing himself in recently declassified CIA documents. (Buy his book to find out why, dammit.) This is a very valuable habit he has, at least to those of John’s friends who write political blogs for a living. So, the other day, he hipped me to some recently declassified CIA material, specifically National Intelligence Estimates dated April 17, 1963 and titled “Prospects In South Vietnam.” These concerned, among other things, the CIA’s assessment of the relative strength of the Viet Cong in our adopted Indochinese client state. There’s some material that seems almost unbearably sad in retrospect:

We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. Strengthened South Vietnamese capabilities and effectiveness, and particularly US involvement, are causing the Viet Cong great difficulty, although there are as yet no persuasive indications that the Communists have been grievously hurt.

………

For weapons, ammunition, and related supplies, the Viet Cong rely primarily upon capture from government forces.

………

Nevertheless, the heavy US involvement and close working relationships between US and Vietnamese personnel have fundamentally altered the outlook…Developments in the past year or two have gone some distance in establishing a basis for winning over the peasantry and in improving the efficiency and the civilian bureaucracy…

………

Developments during the last year or two also show some promise of resolving the political weaknesses, particularly that of insecurity in the countryside, upon which the insurgency has fed. However, the government’s capacity to embark on the broader measures required to translate military success into lasting political stability is questionable.

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

We are so f%$#ed.

Charlie Pierce Makes Chuck Norris his Bitch

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It appears that Mr. Norris, aficionado of martial arts, coarse acting, and promulgating historical myths, accuses President Jimmy Carter of appeasing the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Charlie pierce is having none of it:

You know what appeasing the ayatollahs looks like?

 Promising them if they hold the hostages, they’ll get a better deal from another president. Unfreezing the assets almost as soon as you take the oath. Secretly selling them advanced weaponry because you had use for the profits of this illegal arms sale to fund an illegal war.

 That’s what appeasement looks like.

 And that wasn’t Carter.

 That was the next guy.

That is an epic take-down.

Needless to say, I am adding Mr. Pierce to the serene order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

Today’s Must Read

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Charlie Pierce notices something about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, specifically the treatment of the body:

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war. Bodies lie in the street for four hours on back roads where people fight over the bare necessities of simple living, where they fight over food and water and small, useless parcels of land. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in places in which poor people fight as proxies for rich people in distant places, where they fight as proxies for the men who dig out the diamonds, or who drill out the oil, or who set ancient tribal grudges aflame for modern imperial purposes that are as far from the original grudges as bullets are from bows. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street, as object lessons, or to make a point, or because there isn’t the money to take the bodies away and bury them, or because nobody gives a damn whether they are there or not. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street.

4 hours with his body lying in the street, with no effort to cover him.

This cannot be seen as anything but a demonstration of raw power to, and contempt of, the community, by which I mean the people of color in Ferguson, Missouri.

It may not say anything conclusive about what happened that day, but it does fairly clearly tell us that the police force of Ferguson do not see themselves as protectors of the poorer side of town. They see themselves as an occupying force.  (Of course, whole Mosul in Missouri thing that has been going has made this pretty clear anyway. )

That being said, read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s post. It is quite good.

Edward Snowden Still has a Lot to Say

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He gave a rather expansive interviewed with Wired. Here are the most recent revelations:

  • He left “bread crumbs” which should have let shown the NSA what he took. He ascribes the fact that they continue to be surprised to incompetence, but I am not buying it.  I think that acknowledging what was taken would put our state security apparatus in the position of validating some programs that have not yet come out:

    • Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy sh%$.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

  • Some of the leaks appear not to have come from Snowden, which points to a 2nd whistle blower.
  • The CIA’s IT infrastructure is archaic.
  • Syria did not shut down its internet at the beginning of their civil war, it was an NSA cock-up:

    • ………One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

  • The NSA has setup  a program called Monstermind, which would have it launching cyber-attacks against other nations without human intervention.
  • The final straw for him was when James clapper flat out lied to congress about spying on Americans.  (I liked his use of the phrase, “Banality of Evil,” to describe this, though I didn’t like his use of the boiling frog metaphor, which is scientifically inaccurate)

There are more revelations to come.

It is really worth the read.

Google+ Won the Internet Today

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No, this is not The Onion.

I just came across an account f%#$ing with telemarketers that should win the Nobel Price for f%$#ing with telemarketers:*

Today is a good day. I just had a call from a telemarketer. Did I yell and scream at them, you ask? Certainly not. Like a good IT administrator I put my skills to use for their benefit. Here’s how the conversation went:

Computer: “Press 9 to not be contacted in the future. Press 4 to speak to someone about your mortgage issues”
TM: “Hello, are you having problems paying your mortgage?”
Me: “Hi, this is the IT department. We intercepted your call as we detected a problem with you phone and need to fix it.”

………

That’s right. I made a telemarketer unwittingly factory reset his phone which means he will be unable to make anymore calls until someone is able to reconfigure his phone and that will take at least an hour or longer if they can’t do it right away!

Needless to say, I am following the author of this, Chris Blasko, like forever.

Read the rest.  I had never thought to do this, but now, I am considering donating a dime to the NRSC, the RCCC, the RNC, Newsmax, and a couple of Teabagger groups to get on their call lists so that I can f%$# with them this way.

*I know that there is no Nobel Prize for f%$#ing with telemarketers, but there should be. If they have prizes for Peace, Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Physiology, and Economics, they really should have one for f%$#ing with telemarketers.

This is a Remarkably Valid Point

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In various discussions of what the US should do to “fix” the Middle East, no one has asked a more basic question, whether the US should be involved at all: (as an aside, this also applies to the “West” more generally)

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Middle East is going from bad to worse these days.

 ………

 A string of events like this attracts critics and Cassandras like yellow jackets to a backyard picnic. In the Washington Post, neoconservative Eliot Cohen laments the “wreckage” of U.S. Middle East policy, blaming everything on Barack Obama’s failure to recognize “war is war” and his reluctance to rally the nation to wage more of them. (Never mind that the last war Cohen helped get the United States into — the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — did far more damage than anything Obama has done.) A far more convincing perspective comes from former Ambassador Chas Freeman who surveys several decades of America’s meddling in the region and comes to a depressing conclusion: “It’s hard to think of any American project in the Middle East that is not now at or near a dead end.”

………

 Since World War II, the meddling that Freeman recounts has been conducted in partnership with various regional allies. These alignments may have been a strategic necessity during the Cold War (though even that could be debated), but the sad fact is that the United States has no appealing partners left today. Egypt is a corrupt military dictatorship with grim prospects, and Erdogan’s AKP regime in Turkey is trending toward one-party rule, while its ambitious “zero problems” foreign policy has gone badly off the rails. Working with the Assad regime in Syria is out of the question — for good reason — but most of Bashar al-Assad’s opponents are no prize either. Saudi Arabia is a geriatric, theocratic monarchy that treats half its population — i.e., its women — like second-class citizens (at best). [Me: actually, when you count the Shia in Saudi Arabia, it’s more like 65% of the population] Iran is a different sort of theocratic state: it has some quasi-democratic features, but also an abysmal human rights record and worrisome regional ambitions.

………

 Faced with this unpromising environment, what would be the sensible — or dare I say realistic — thing for the United States to do? The familiar answer is to say that it’s an imperfect world and that we have no choice but to work with what we’ve got. We hold our noses, and cut deals with the least objectionable parties in the region. As Michael Corleone would say, it’s not personal; it’s strictly business.

But this view assumes that deep engagement with this troubled area is still critical to U.S. national interests, and further assumes the United States reaps net benefits from its recurrent meddling on behalf of its less-than-loyal partners. In other words, it assumes that these partnerships and deep U.S. engagement make Americans safer and more prosperous here at home. But given the current state of the region and the condition of most of our putative allies, that assumption is increasingly questionable.

 In fact, most of the disputes and divisions that are currently roiling the region do not pose direct and mortal threats to vital U.S. interests. It is admittedly wrenching to watch what is happening in Syria or Gaza, or to Israel’s democracy, but these events affect the lives of very few Americans directly. Unless, of course, we are foolish enough to throw ourselves back into the middle of the maelstrom.

………

 Some will argue that we have a moral responsibility to try to end the obvious suffering in different places, and a strategic imperative to eradicate terrorists and prevent the spread of WMD. These are laudable goals, but if the history of the past twenty years teaches us anything, it is that forceful American interference of this sort just makes these problems worse. The Islamic State wouldn’t exist if the neocons hadn’t led us blindly into Iraq, and Iran would have less reason to contemplate getting nuclear weapons if it hadn’t watched the United States throw its weight around in the region and threaten it directly with regime change. [I would also add, that if we hadn’t overthrown Iran’s democracy in the 1950s at the bequest of the BP oil company, there would not be a  theocracy there at all, and a prosperous and democratic Iran might have forced the House of Saudi to be a bit less repulsive over the years.]

So instead of acting like a hyperactive juggler dashing between a dozen spinning plates, maybe the best course is to step back even more than we have already. No, I don’t mean isolationism: What I mean is taking seriously the idea of strategic disengagement and putting the whole region further down on America’s list of foreign policy priorities. Instead of constantly cajoling these states to do what we think is best — and mostly getting ignored or rebuked by them — maybe we should let them sort out these problems themselves for awhile. And if any of them eventually want American help, it should come at a steep price. {I’d kind of like to know what sort of price he is suggesting that we should be demanding]

Among other things, the policy I’m suggesting would mean the United States would stop its futile efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve argued against such a course in the past, but it is now obvious to me that no president is willing to challenge Israel’s backers here in the United States and make U.S. support for Israel conditional on an end to the occupation. Until that happens, even well-intentioned efforts to broker a peace will keep failing. Instead of continuing to squander valuable time and prestige on a fruitless endeavor, the U.S. government should disengage from this thankless task until it is ready to do more than just palaver and plead. If Israel’s leaders want to risk their own future by creating a “greater Israel,” so be it. It would be regrettable if Israel ended up an apartheid state and an international pariah, but preventing that tragedy is not a vital U.S. interest. (If it really were, U.S. policy since Oslo might have been rather different.)

………

 To be sure, the course of action I’m sketching here is likely to leave the Middle East in a pretty messy condition for some time to come. But that is going to be the case no matter what Washington decides to do. So the question is: should the United States squander more blood and treasure on a series of futile tasks, and in ways that will make plenty of people in the region angry and encourage a few of them look for ways to deliver some payback? Or should the United States distance itself from everyone in the region, and prepare to intervene only when a substantial number of American lives are at risk or in the unlikely event that there is a genuine and imminent threat of regional domination?

………

One final thought: this argument would not preclude limited U.S. action for purely humanitarian purposes — such as humanitarian airdrops for the beleaguered religious minorities now threatened with starvation in Iraq. That’s not “deep engagement”; that’s merely trying to help people threatened with imminent death. But I would not send U.S. forces — including drones or aircraft — out to win a battle that the Iraqi government or the Kurds cannot win for themselves. The United States spent the better part of a decade chasing that elusive Grail, and the end result was precisely the sort of chaos and sectarian rivalry that has produced this latest crisis. We may be able to do some limited good for the endangered minorities, but above all, let’s do no further harm: not to the region, and not to ourselves.

(emphasis mine)

This is an interesting idea, and one that is further reinforced by the hyperactive bellicosity of our current Secretary of State, John Kerry.

I do not think that we have seen a positive intervention by the United States, or by its former colonial rulers, France and the UK, in the past 100 years.

When you consider how poorly their actions compare to those of the prior power in the region, the Ottoman Empire, it boggles the mind.