perfidy

In response to this statement from Gephardt:

"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."

William Kristol had some things to say.

Are we not even a little safer now that the Taliban and Hussein are gone, many al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, governments such as Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's are at least partly hampering al Qaeda's efforts instead of blithely colluding with them, the opposition in Iran is stronger, our defense and intelligence budgets are up and, for that matter, Milosevic is gone and the Balkans are at peace (to mention something for which the Clinton administration deserves credit but that had not happened by July 1999)?

Is it reasonable to criticize aspects of the Bush administration's foreign policy? Sure. The initial failures in planning for postwar Iraq, the incoherence of its North Korea policy, the failure adequately to increase defense spending or reform our intelligence agencies . . . on all of these, and other issues as well, the administration could use constructive, even sharp, criticism. But that we were safer and more secure four years ago?
Gephardt has made a claim that will come back to haunt him and his fellow Democrats...

There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticize the Bush administration's foreign policy. But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's Democratic critics, they know no such thing.

This is some amazingly ridiculous thinking, from someone I've come to consider almost synonymous with ridiculous thinking. I think Kristol hits it here. If by some freak of nature Gephardt got the nomination, this would come back to haunt them.

But how many democratic candidates either believe or will say this in the future? If this is any measure of the Democratic leadership's mindset, they are in for a rude shock when they realize how far to the margins they've been pushed. And Gephardt is a centrist democrat!

It is not good for the Republic for one of its two major parties to go traipsing off into lala land. When you add in the conspiracy theories, virulant Bush hatred, and all the rest - you worry. Why can't we have a sane Democratic party, like we had back before '68?

Ralph Peters, an insightful military commentator (and former Army officer) said that the truism on military plans was reversed in the Iraq war - no Iraqi army was surviving contact with our battle plan.

The remarkable success of the war phase may have led to confidence that other plans were equally good. Of the things that Wolfowitz mentions, many could not have been easily foreseen, given the closed nature of Iraqi soceity before we arrived, and the precedent of the first gulf war.

Adaptability is key in winning wars, likewise in peacetime. As long as we don't delude ourselved, we will be able to adjust our plans and our thinking to meet problems as they are.

Once Iraqi oil starts flowing, that may reduce the financial burden somewhat. And 29.5 billion compared to the total US budget is not a deal killer.

Keep in mind though, Wolfowitz and others have often said that it would cost money, and problems would have to be detected and solved. This statement isn't the first. (Still welcome, though.)

Hopefully, the mudville nine will not fall over themselves criticizing the administration for problems that would have had to be solved regardless of whether they had been accurately foretold or not. Openness and accountability are all good, especially in this phase.

(As a side note, Clueless has a new post on why we never should have and still shouldn't reveal long term plans. This reasoning wouldn't apply to the civilian administration of Iraq, though.)

(Just kidding about that headline).

From CNN:

Pentagon admits Iraq mistakes

Back from a four-day whirlwind tour of Iraq, the Pentagon's number two civilian, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted that many of the Bush administration's pre-war assumptions were wrong.

Among the things Wolfowitz says the U.S. guessed incorrectly was the assumption that some Iraqi Army units would switch sides; that the Iraqi Police would help maintain security; and that regime remnants would not resort to guerrilla tactics....

Speaking to reporters this week, Acting Army Chief Of Staff Gen. John Keane said it was entirely possible for the military to stretch its forces beyond the limits.

But, he says, "we don't want to do that -- so we're working very hard to avoid that."

The U.S. says it also had no idea how badly Iraq's infrastructure had been neglected over the past three decades.

The cost of putting the country back on its feet will be billions. According to the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, it will take up to $13 billion "to rebuild and meet foreseeable power demands."

On top of that, he says, United Nations estimates indicate "we will have to spend $16 billion over the next 4 years just on water and getting decent water to the population."

My headline aside, I'm overjoyed that someone from the Bush Administration has the stones to address reality and the fact that it's Wolfowitz suggests that the NeoCon Leadership Coalition are finally willing to accept that they don't have all the answers. In any case, Wolfowitz's statement is miles better than the usual dissembling and selective amnesia. The best part is that the top brass admitting that mistakes were made means that the problems their mistakes created are being addressed.

The only bitter pill is the $13 billion dollar figure just for power, and the $16.5 billion dollar water bill. I guess by breaking the numbers down like that, they hope to keep us from adding them up.

But I'll put that aside for now. Despite my major problems with Bush's domestic agenda, I'm not so crazy that I wish for a continued cluster**** in Iraq just to spite the President. The faster Iraq gets back power, water, security, and stability, the happier I will be. Let's hope this only the first of many so-called 'honest' statements from Administration flacks that actually might deserve the name.

Mmmmmm... glasnost!

I'm a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson. In my halcyon college days, I read all his classic books in one short stretch of the summer of 1995. I would sit in the shade after six hours of washing dishes for rich summer-band-camp brats, drink gallon jugs of Gin & Tonic, smoke big Mexican cigars until my teeth were brown, and read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, F&L on the Campaign Trail, and his collected shorter pieces until I could no longer put together a coherent sentence, much less stand on my own. It's not the gin. It's the cigars that will get you every time.

For a long time, HST was one of the best topical writers in America. Even as late as 1995 he would occasionally emerge from his vague rehashing of old, er, hash, to issue a diamond-clear, cutting demolition of the latest Clinton foolishness.

So naturally I was very happy when HST started writing a periodic column for espn.com. Some of them were great-- HST is a huge football fan, and he usually has enough money riding on college basketball for him to write something weird impassioned.

But what the hell is this?!

In his latest piece, Welcome to the Big Darkness, Thompson rambles on about spine and hip replacement surgery, Kobe Bryant, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness in America, and then makes it clear that someone's been slipping him massive doses of Ibogaine:

When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

Guh? Wuzzah? Is this screeching hate-fit a clever satire of the far left's alternate reality, or has the Doc finally severed mind from reality and plunged into the Void?

That's the damned thing about modern aesthetics. Sometimes you can't tell the difference between art and bullshit.

According to this article, "One-third of Germans under age 30 believe the U.S. government may have sponsored the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington."

"Asked whether they believed the U.S. government could have ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, 31 percent of those surveyed under the age of 30 answered "yes," while 19 percent overall gave the same answer.

Die Zeit said widespread disbelief about the reasons given by the United States for going to war in Iraq and suspicion about media coverage of the conflict had fostered a climate in which conspiracy theories flourished.

"The news is controlled," 17-year-old Kenny Donaubaur was quoted as saying. "You could see that in the Iraq war. It doesn't seem to me that you get the full truth."

My instinct is that if you ask a 17-year old a question, you get a 17-year old's answer. I know at least one of our regular correspondents is in Europe right now... any ideas what gives?

[moreover] Matthew Yglesias nails it: "I believe that that's smaller than the proportion of Americans who believed that the Iraqi government was behind the 9/11 attacks, so you've got ill-informed people everywhere.... The point... is that people everywhere are shockingly ill-informed about almost everything."

Buckethead, John Cole posted recently about how stupid the Democrats are (actually, he posts on that like twice every ten minutes, but when you strike gold, you mine it, right?), and came up with a loooong list of things he is angry with the President over. I think he and you (and well, I) have some things in common.

There are so many damned things I am pissed off at this administration for that if it were not for the never-ending sniping on the left, I probably wouldn't even think about voting for Bush if there was a credible alternative. In no short order, these issues piss me off royally-

• the stand on stem cell research
• faith based initiatives
• continuing the war on drugs
• the fact that the WMD are probably in terrorist hands or in the hands of other unsavory regimes
• not placing enough pressure on Iran
• failing to increase domestic oil production
• the deficit
• caving on the education bill
• failing to push social security privatization
• caving to Democrats and trying to get the House to pass tax cuts for people who only pay payroll taxes
• putting too much pressure on Israel
• the deficit
• even toying with the notion of a prescription drug plan
• Ashcroft's intervention into state affairs regarding the death penalty and medical marijuana
• the ridiculous Homeland Security Department
• Norm Mineta
• not publicly addressing the failures of Clinton foreign policy, thus providing Democrats with an opportunity to blame Bush for everything
• the deficit and the bloated budgets

I can't say as I agree with all these-- I never do with John Cole-- but man! If a President can do all these things in direct contradiction of the principles he was elected to uphold and the opposition is still more odious to him...

In an interview in The Atlantic Unbound:

I left the English department twenty-six years ago. I just divorced them and became, as I like to put it, Professor of Absolutely Nothing. To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies. But there has always been an arrogance, I think, of the semi-learned.

Ow!

Love him or hate him, Harold Bloom knows what he is talking about.

I almost wrote this: "His scholarship is motivated by the purest thing of all: love of the material. " Yet that's not right. Harold Bloom does love what he does, and what he studies, but so do many rat bastid deconstructionists. Good intentions are no indicator of results, in academia or anywhere else. No, Harold Bloom is just a fiercely articulate, extremely intelligent, discerning and iconoclastic scholar who just happens to have a sense of perspective that ecofeminism tends to lack completely.

The key to why this is comes in what Blooms says next:

You know, the term "philology" originally meant indeed a love of learning—a love of the word, a love of literature. I think the more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know. And, of course, we have this nonsense called Theory with a capital T, mostly imported from the French and now having evilly taken root in the English-speaking world. And that, I suppose, also has encouraged absurd attitudes toward what we used to call imaginative literature.

Bloom here makes a point that I have made far less gracefully in the past: capital-T Theory is a crutch. It allows students (and professors!) to move forward arrogantly in a state of semi-comprehension, reading a work only deeply enough to discern how they may fit it into the framework of their choice. Of course, Theory only exists because some French smartasses hoped to find a way to observe the universe "objectively," that is, divorced from the innate prejudices of their own perceptions. Bloom, rather ingeniously (but, sadly, not obviously), cuts through the problem of objectivity by reveling in the experience of reading and understanding-- he places the self, the way that literature works on you the reader, front and center. Maybe this is as it should be, because if all interpretation is ultimately bullshit, why shouldn't you stick to your own rather than use someone else's?

Anyway, read the whole thing. It's great. I leave you with one last bit:

Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible mélange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentment—the so-called multiculturalists and feminists who tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author. 

Feminism as a stance calling for equal rights, equal education, equal pay—no rational, halfway decent human being could possibly disagree with this. But what is called feminism in the academies seems to be a very different phenomenon indeed. I have sometimes characterized these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them.

This isn't scholarship! This isn't learning! This is lazy!

And this is why I will not go back for my Doctorate.

if this limited study is correct. Results suggest that a vegetarian diet can cut cholesterol as much as perscription drugs can.

Also, if this study is correct, my wife will live to be 250.

This probably shouldn't surprise anyone. The one constant in the last twenty years of diet wisdom, right behind "eat less and exercise" has been "eat your vegetables and whole grains, and don't eat that steak every single day." I eat oatmeal and soy every day, and I bet that if eggplant cuts cholesterol, the other nightshades can too (tomatoes, all peppers...). I am so set!! Vegetarian, yeah!!
Not that I don't love meat, mind you. Pulled pork. The New England delicacy they call "steak tips." Pork of any kind. Steak of any kind. Buffalo. Buffalo wings. Rabbit. Smoked pork. Lobster. Mmmmmmmm.... I love these things, but I'm just to poor to afford them regularly, and years ago adjusted to eating a vegetarian diet at home. It has worked really well so far, and for a few years my total grocery expenditures per week were between $12-$15(!).

The following is a public service announcement:
Any meat eaters, who through guesting or accident, are faced with eating soy products, note the following.

Tofu is fine. Sometimes it's even delicious. Just like sweetmeats, brains, or insects, you need to develop a taste for it. Quit your whining and eat it! Tempeh, on the other hand, tastes like rat droppings pressed into a cake.

Fake meats are generally excellent and can be eaten without compunction. Boca-burgers taste just like the real thing, and Morningstar Farms Soy Breakfast Patties are very good, if a little dry. Avoid fake bacon (as if you had to be told!).

However, certain products suck mightily unless you already like the taste of soy extract. These include: soy margarine (as if you had to be told!), soy ice cream (ditto, and ugh!), and homemade soy milk. The cartoned stuff is actually pretty good, and is great in cereals.

Another, unconnected thought. The one thing I miss most about not having meat in the home is being able to cook it. I'm a fairly admirable home cook, and sometimes I even aspire to greater things. But my skills are limited when it comes to meats. I can braise, I can grill like a beast, and I can roast, saute, and panfry. But it's all a little shaky. As a sad side effect, my saucing skills aren't so hot. By rights I should be able to whip up a hollandaise or bearnaise sauce without thinking, but I can't. I mean, give me a cookbook and I'm fine, but I'm a proud sort and like to work without a net. Not that this is such a big deal, but I'm a geek about every single thing I do in life and therefore this is an irritant.

Ah well. I still make a damn fabulous pork and beef chili.

Mark Kleiman has been all over a disturbing and little-known story.

It's official: the Bush Administration deliberately blew the cover of a secret agent who had been gathering information on weapons of mass destruction, endangering the lives of her sources and damaging our ability to collect crucial intelligence. (And, not incidentally, committing a very serious crime.) The apparent motive: revenge on Joseph Wilson, her husband, for going public with the story of his mission to Niger, which blew a hole in the Yellowcake Road story.

The facts of the case seem legit. I sincerely hope this wasn't a Nixon-moment.
 

The Washington Post is reporting that US Forces in Iraq have dental record matches and several eyewitness IDs on the two sons of Saddam. 

Meanwhile, in In Baghdad, people break curfue to celebrate the news that Uday and Qusay were pushing up daisies. It seems that the most common regret was that because they were dead, no further harm could be done to them.

Good riddance.