*ecstatic gasp*

Byron Hoyt Historic American Sheet Music Collection

Media and The Presidency

One quick snip from Buzzflash's interview with John Dean:

"In the aftermath of Watergate, the news media became highly vigilant of the presidency. Before Watergate, presidents were given the benefit of any doubts. After Watergate, they had to make their case, and quickly. But in late 2000, after the Florida election recount debacle, there was a collective mood change in the news media. While there are a few exceptions, as you mention, by and large, reporting has returned to its pre-Watergate status: Almost any news is more important than the potential of presidential failures or screw ups. "

[my emphasis -- Sid]

Why? Why this sea change? Or perhaps, the proper question would be "how"?

Let Some Truth Shine In, Baby

Dean: Investigate Bush Statements on Iraq Now that's what I'm talking about.

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Tuesday called for an independent investigation of President Bush and his justification for the U.S.-led war against Iraq, arguing that the commander in chief misled the country...

"We need a thorough look at what really happened going into Iraq," Dean said. "It appears to me that what the president did was make a decision to go into Iraq sometime in early 2002, or maybe even late 2001, and then try to get the justification afterward."

Keep pushing, goddammit. Lies of this magnitude cannot be swept under the carpet.

And before you think I'm a kneejerk Bush-hater, let me remind you of the following:

1. Bush and the Bush administration said, multiple times, in different ways, that Iraq had an active WMD program that posed an imminent threat to the U.S.

2. Any president who twists facts to fit what he wants to believe, consciously or unconsciously, to the point of conducting an undeclared war on another nation, is not someone I can trust to execute the duties of his office.

Now, turning a blind eye on, say, a relative's drinking habits, would be one thing, unless, of course, your job is to fix people's drinking habits.

So, if your job is to represent Americans on the stage of international politics, among other things, it is part of your job to pay close attention to what your intel actually says, not what you wish it did.

Iraq and 9/11


War poll uncovers fact gap

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

What a depressing article. Nestled inside, however, is a most intriguing quote:

"It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents.

He added: "Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

And what is cognitive dissonance, my friends?

if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know - particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge - they are likely to resist the new learning...

if learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are not likely to admit that the content of what has been learned is not valuable. To do so would be to admit that one has been "had", or "conned".

What that means is, the more people die, the more vociferously people here will assert it was for a good cause.

Well, you know what? There's a flip side to that, baby, and it's called "don't throw good money after bad".



Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance Theory, from A First Look at Communication Theory, by Em Griffin, 1997, McGraw-Hill.

Famine-struck N Koreans 'eating children'

Instinctively, I don't want to believe it, and when trying to trace down to the origin news releas(es), I keep finding the same two or three tales quoted in articles. Smells fishy. There's a lack of big-name press reports. And yet, I found a report regarding the late-90's famine that made reference to "isolated acts of cannibilism" during that time period, which implies a certain precedent. The article linked above, however, is pretty clear about the lack of substantiation.

World Food Programme - Korea (DPR)

French aid workers report cannibalism in famine-stricken North Korea (1998)

Famine Pushes North Koreans to Cannibalism (1999)

US Institute of Peace: North Korea's Decline and China's Strategic Dilemmas (1997)

Word History

Apropos of looking the word up at dictionary.com

assassin

1. One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.
2. Assassin A member of a secret order of Muslims who terrorized and killed Christian Crusaders and others.

[French, from Medieval Latin assassnus, from Arabic hassassin, pl. of hassas, hashish user, from hasis, hashish. See hashish.]

Word History: At first glance, one would be hard-pressed to find a link between pleasure and the acts of assassins. Such was not the case, however, with those who gave us the word assassin. They were members of a secret Islamic order originating in the 11th century who believed it was a religious duty to harass and murder their enemies. The most important members of the order were those who actually did the killing. Having been promised paradise in return for dying in action, the killers, it is said, were made to yearn for paradise by being given a life of pleasure that included the use of hashish. From this came the name for the secret order as a whole, hassassin, "hashish users." After passing through French or Italian, the word came into English and is recorded in 1603 with reference to the Muslim Assassins.

Sometimes, knowledge for knowledge's sake is just damn cool.


hassassin, hassis, hasas are poor renderings of the actual images displayed in dictionary.com's entry. YMMV.

Compassionate Conservatives

What they like to say:
"I've become a much better person since I let Jaysus into mah heart as my Own Personal Savior."

What's closer to the truth:
"I let Jaysus into mah heart, I didn't let in anybody else."

Dismayed, but not Shocked

Unfound Weapons Put Bush, Blair Political Career At Stake

British MPs said Sunday that Blair and his strategy and communications adviser Alastair Campbell should be forced to appear before a parliamentary committee to explain why an intelligence dossier produced in March last year on Iraq was shelved, the Independent reported Monday, June 9.

The six-page report, from the Joint Intelligence Committee staff, said there was no evidence Saddam posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991.

It was written in the same month Campbell told journalists in America the Government would produce evidence within two weeks proving Saddam was building WMDs.

The report was delayed, but six months later Blair said Saddam was continuing to produce chemical and biological weapons.

Campbell admitted Sunday that the U.K.-drafted second dossier on Iraq?s alleged weapons had been embellished to justify war.

He wrote a personal letter apologizing to Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, for discrediting the service with the release to journalists last January of the "dodgy dossier." The dossier "had not met the required standards of accuracy", he said.

Definitions

I was reading an article on horror fiction by Douglas Winter in the latest issue of Weird Tales magazine last night when I came up with the following:

revulsion is what we feel when we see "something ugly";
horror is what we feel when we realize "something ugly" could happen to us;
terror is what we feel when we realize it's about to.

Non-Haiku For You

Sitting zazen,
the cat in my lap
has soft fur.

Sex Spam

Apropos of nothing at all, what will digital archeaologists determine about 21st century Americans based on the spam we all receive? That we were obsessed with sex, our weight (see #1), and, and, and, -- no, wait, that's it.

Huh.

*drums fingers on desk a moment*

Well, at least they'll be right.

Gay Families

After reading an article where a same-sex couple was denied adoption rights (after progressing down the adoption path to some extent), I was struck with a sudden understanding of the Right Wing Whacko's point of view on the subject.

I hate that. Don't you?

RWW's want to keep gays from becoming parents (or teachers, or politicians for that matter) because they are afraid "gay cooties" might rub off.

Well. They will, so no wonder RWW's spaz at the thought of some poor defenseless child being raised by one of Them! (Or, two of Them, more likely.)

Gay Cooties, is, of course, a euphemism for acceptance of what's generally referred to as "the gay lifestyle", another euphemism designed to get the point across of "being gay" without having a squick-inducing (or worse for an RWW, arousing) visual float behind your eyes.

Because, see, if a child is raised by gay parents, they are going to have to work very hard, one hopes, to hate them for being gay, regardless of any loud idiotic assertions made around puberty, especially if they're followed by statements like "You Don't Understand" and the slamming of any nearby doors. Gay parents, will, in fact, inculcate their children with the devastating-to-RWW's yet entirely reasonable idea that GAY=OK.

Now, what this means to RWWs is that it is better for a child to have no parents at all, than to have parents who might raise them with "The Wrong Ideas".

[Note, if you take this concept to its utmost extreme, one could be surprised by the fact that RWWs don't agitate to remove children from the homes, of, say....Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, internet programmers, or people who watch public television on a regular basis, in order to ensure that the ideological purity -- er, safety -- of these children is maintained.]

So, let me reiterate, of the gazillion children desperately in need of loving homes, caring parents, and stable home lives, RWWs would rather those children suffer than receive their just due, if the alternative is to have them raised by people who might teach them tolerance.

And Right Wing Whackos claim to be pro-family-values.


RWW -- the incredibly apt term coined by Medley.

WMDs in Iraq, or the lack thereof

I just love this. Buried after a rather tongue-in-cheek start, The Guardian today quoted Donald Rumsfeld regarding the lack of any weapons of mass destruction found thus far in Iraq.

In an effort to explain why no chemical or biological weapons had been found in Iraq, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday the regime may have destroyed them before the war.

Like. They. Were. Supposed. To.

Speaking to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, he [Rumsfeld - Sid.] said the speed of U.S. advance may have caught Iraq by surprise, but added: "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict."

So, the reason we're not finding any WMDs is because they were destroyed. Oh, yes, I love it. We invade another nation, justifying the action in part with claims that they

1. have WMDs that might be used against us!
2. refuse to hand over information on these alleged WMDs that they are supposed to destroy/to have destroyed that might be used against us! In violation of UN directives!

But in the shortest conflict in the history of humankind (with the exception of Cain v. Abel, sudden death in less than three rounds), Iraq had time to "decide" to destroy all those pesky weapons.

Oh, oh, yes. It all makes sense if you have the IQ of head cheese.

Only One Thing Bugs Me

Remarkable interview with Sidney Blumenthal (tip from Medley) about his book, The Clinton Wars, among other things.

There's one, and only one thing, that bothers me, and I'm suddenly reminded of various characters in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged when I think this. I can't believe in my heart that what he's describing is true, because I can't understand why someone would prefer a crippled nation over a self-reliant one. And that's a perspective articulated more than once in AS, how can anyone prefer the darkness when they can shine?

Because looking at the Clinton and Bush administrations, everything Blumenthal says makes sense. It hangs together. But I can't grasp the key element.

Method, yes. Opportunity, sure. But motive.

The only motives for deliberate destruction that I can name off the top of my head are jealousy, hate, and greed. Those are so personal, I have difficulty ascribing them to the socio-economic policies of a political party and President. It just doesn't make sense.

And yet, what Blumenthal describes,

They want to starve the public sector. That’s part of their overall strategy.

That’s what they’re doing through their budget, through their creation of these deficits.

They’re very clear in calculating, in my view, of how they’re using the deficits to crush the social gains and social progress and programs that were built up, not only during the Clinton Administration, but all the way back to Roosevelt.

[...]

Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems.

And they worked.

And those are the markers. That history. To apply against Bush. They work. Bush's programs are not working.

22 million new jobs under President Clinton. 3 million lost under Bush.

The greatest surplus in our history versus the greatest deficit.

Money to spend on education and health care and new and innovative proposals.

Under Bush, cuts. The worst fiscal crises of the states. And destruction of education programs and health care institutions throughout the country, as a result of his programs.

Which are not simply misguided but deliberate. They intend to do this. The Democrats need to say that.

Makes perfect sense.

But I still don't get why they intend to do this, and now that I think about it, that's going to be a major stumbling block for the Democrats. How to communicate a motive for dismantling America.

And the more I think about it, the obvious answer - which still doesn't really make sense, can be summed up in one word: power.

Not misguided civic duty. Not poor decisions. Not an economy that 'just happens'. Certainly not principles. Power.

But what underlies that thirst for control, for power, over me, over my fellow citizens?

Fear.

Fear of change. Fear of the future. Fear of what others might do with their self-determination. Other people, other nations. Fear of being wrong.

Suddenly this all makes far more sense than I'd like.

Hope Yours Was A Good Weekend, Too

If not, better luck next time.

I did something this Memorial Day weekend raging extroverts can't comprehend -- stayed at home, worked on one long-standing project, finished another, baked from scratch, and locked the entire rest of the world on the opposite side of my front door, dammit. I did not speak to another human being, for two whole days, Taco Bell drive-thru [sp] and one small phone call notwithstanding.

That's what we introverts like to call...relaxing.

If you're one of us, you'll get it, if you're not, learn to deal. Besides, I got to eat homemade sugar cookies in the bargain. And they were good.

Mwa ha ha ha.