a beautiful mind wasted in the West Wing

March 18, 2003

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

— First Lady Barbara Bush telling Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer why she would not be watching televised coverage of the impending war

March 18, 2007

U.S. fatalities in Iraq reach 3217; Iraqi fatalities in excess of prewar death rates lie somewhere between 59,000 (IraqBodyCount.org) and 650,000 (British medical journal The Lancet — free registration required).

Iraq Four Years On | In Search of Moral Footing

Moonlight Beach vigil | March 19, 2007

In a biblical rebuke of the US President and the 109th Congress, the board of Directors of the National Association of Evangelicals endorsed An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture.

If you consider yourself an Evangelical I hope you'll read the declaration, run it through your crap detector and join the conversation about regaining our moral footing.

If you don't consider yourself an Evangelical, I think you'll find it useful to see the case spelled out for (and by) people who claim to know what Evangelicals claim to know about the God of the Bible.

it's not the end of civil discourse but you can see it from Ann Coulter

Council for National Policy ❤ Technical Virginity

This is rich.

The Council for National Policy is said to be a mandatory stop on the way to the Republican presidential nomination. That you probably haven't heard of The Council is due to the conceit that it's more or less a secret. Not really of course, else we wouldn't be having this conversation. But the members — a few hundred of them including Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Liberty University and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform — are not allowed to talk about it. The first rule of Fight Club . . . you know.

Anyway, The Council met last month at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Florida and, apparently, several people who weren't allowed to talk about it talked about it. Seems The Council — which I gather we're not supposed to know was founded by the Reverend Tim LaHaye — is disappointed by the the field of Republican hopefuls (which I think we're also not supposed to know).

The payoff in the New York Times piece comes from Mr Norquist who says he's open to the three candidates who have so far addressed The Council (Senator Brownback, Governor Huckabee and Representative Hunter) plus Governor Romney who has not. We pick up the Times story at the big finish:

[Mr Norquist] argued that with the right promises, any of the four could redeem themselves in the eyes of the conservative movement despite their past records, just as some high school students take abstinence pledges even after having had sex.

“It’s called secondary virginity,” Mr. Norquist said. “It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians.”

Honestly. You can't make this stuff up.

this just in | Anna Nicole Smith

Sources close to the Anna Nicole Smith case say the remains of the deceased woman will be dismembered (possibly in a televised procedure) and distributed among the claimants for final disposition.

All this amid rumors that Ms Smith's daughter and heir Daniellyn will be placed with monks of unknown provenance and raised in the ancient ways to be a defender of the dispossesed (or possibly an assassin or prescription drug addict or both).

Asked to elaborate on the distribution plan, a courthouse spokesperson would only confirm that Ms Smith's heart had been removed to an undisclosed location for safekeeping.

the weapons trade, for what it's worth

Today ends the IDEX 07 armament show in Abu Dhabi. The Associated Press reports an estimated 900 weapons manufacturers and security firms came anticipating over two billion dollars in contracts; with helicopters and electronic warning sensors expected to do particularly well.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

was this war in Iraq a mistake? a letter to Congress

Was this war in Iraq a mistake? Or was it just plain wrong? I believe we'll be splitting hairs over incompetence and wrongheadedness for a long time.

Meanwhile the Administration apppears to be conducting a slow bleed offensive against the obvious. If the White House or Congress could present a substantive reason to believe the President's surge will be saving lives and creating stability a week after US forces leave Baghdad and Anbar, we might be more resolute about sending additional young men and women, underfunded and lacking training and equipment (and facing an ineffective and hostile bureaucracy should they return home wounded) -- but none of us believes there is any such evidence. Everyone knows the game changes the moment the door closes behind us.

I don't believe there is a decent solution to this bloody conundrum. At this point all the solutions appear indecent. It's going to be relentlessly bad no matter what. The only question is, What kind of bad? The US government and the citizens it represents will be making amends for decades to come.

Our nation failed in this adventure. Whether through foolishness or hubris or overreaching or yet-to-be-revealed moral turpitude or some combination of all these (seasoned with ambition, tunnel vision, ass-covering and God knows what), will take time to sort out. We are lost in the woods. Look it in the face. Retrace your steps. Find your way back. Deal with it now.

TODAY, we call on you, our elected officials, to pursue the hard work of cleaning up as well as you can; ending further loss of life insofar as it is in your control; seeking genuine reconciliation among the parties insofar as that is in your control; voting across party lines wherever that is necessary to promote policies that tend to restore equilibrium and a return to sanity.

Do this as if your next campaign depended on it for it almost certainly does.

narrowing the religion gap

The February 18 New York Times Magazine includes this from Gary Rosen:

Try a quick political thought experiment. First, form a mental picture of the Democratic front-runners for president — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now do the same for the leading Republican contenders — John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Next (and this is the key step), imagine each of them in church, sitting in a pew, head bowed, or better still, at the pulpit, delivering a homily or leading the congregation in worship.

Strange, no? It’s not hard to envision Clinton and Obama among the faithful. She is a lifelong Methodist and self-described “praying person,” and he belongs to a church where some years ago he found himself (in his own words) “kneeling beneath that cross” in submission “to His will.” Both slip easily into the earnest, humble-of-the-earth mode of liberal God talk.

But McCain and Giuliani? You somehow imagine them fidgeting during the hymns and checking their watches. The senator is an Episcopalian, the former mayor a Catholic, but neither man, you have to think, would be caught dead in a Bible-study group or could possibly declare, à la George W. Bush, that his favorite philosopher is “Christ, because he changed my heart.” In the piety primary, the Democrats win hands down.

It's a twist on America's political road that would have been difficult to imagine at the turn of the century. Political conservatives may now find themselves splitting hairs about the private faith of their candidates as supporters of John Kerry and Al Gore did so recently.

Is it too much to hope for a broader, more substantive, less doctrinaire and demonizing conversation about governance than we've had in recent election cycles?

Barack the Vote

Before you've heard too many people dissect and spin bits and bites and of the announcement, take 20 minutes to watch the unedited video of Barack Obama's declaration that he is a candidate for US President. I found it quite remarkable.

If you would prefer to read Senator Obama's speech (or follow along while you watch the video) here's the text.

Camp Pendleton Crossing

Northbound Surfliner,
Upper deck.
Rain on sprouting field
Separates track from sea.
Attack helicopter traces the shore,
Churning,
Climbing.
Guy across from me dozes, beer wedged between his thighs;
Half past ten;
Doesn't mean he won't be thirsty
When he wakes.
A girl talks loud on her phone:
"Are you gonna get kicked out?"
Landing craft takes a run at the beach, flanked by rubber Zodiacs.
Dark copter edging away,
Toward something I cannot see.
"I'm sorry you're sad," the girl says to her phone.

what's wrong with this picture: no. 3,084

Marge: Revenge never solved anything.

Homer: Then what are we doing in Iraq?

— The Simpsons, January 28, 2007

in Iraq, the later it gets, the later it gets

in response to a calling in a debt at the White House prioritizewisely said...

unfortunately, jim, when we pull out, and massive slaughters occur and baghdad becomes a militaristic haven breeding ground for evil, it will not only rest on bush's conscience, but also yours, for you champion the withdrawal, you sicko. why not let the military, who signed up to do this, and bush the instigator, and freer of the people of iraq, follow through with their promises to the iraqis. Yes, america is hurting a little, but iraq needs us more, you selfish sicko. You should be writing childrens poems or something, where your propaganda can do less harm.

It already weighs on my conscience. Somewhere near 35,000 Iraqi dead in 2006 . . . over 600,000 excess Iraqi deaths since the Shock and Awe campaign in 2003. Shock and Awe . . . you tell me who the propagandists are . . . about 50,000 Iraqis displaced every month . . . Nearly every session of the Iraqi Parliment since November adjourned for lack of a quorum . . . former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi no longer in Iraq, reportedly splitting his time betwen Amman and London . . . Adnan Pachachi said to be living in Abu Dhabi . . .

I'm sick that I failed to mobilize fellow Americans stop our part of this madness before it began.

I'm frustrated that I failed to moblize enough voters in 2004 to put the brakes on The Bush Doctrine.

I lament that others reap what my elected representatives have sown by action and inaction.

Mr or Ms Prioritizewisely, Baghdad is presently the 'militaristic haven breeding ground for evil' you fear because evildoers fill the vacuum created by Mr Bush's misadventure. A bad thing is today much worse because we as a people failed in our duty. I am horrrified to be a part of that.

The harm is done, friend, with more to follow no matter what.

I'm convinced we need to swallow hard and engage every stakeholder in the region to make the best of what is just godawful in every dimension. Shia, Sunni, Iraqis, Turks, Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, Kuwaitis . . . the whole lot.

The most strident get out now advocates I've heard, acknowledge that disengagement will take months — force protection alone guarantees that. It's time to break our engagement in this Lose/Lose scenario and get on with what the American president likes to refer to as hard choices. The later it gets, the later it gets.