Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/26/gay-marriage-republican-wedge-issue/
I read something on the BBC today that gave me hope. You know how John Kerry and John Edwards are scared to say anything nice about gay marriage because the Republicans would use it as a wedge issue to deny Democrats the bigotry vote? Well, the thing I read made the point that if Bush is going to come out, so to speak, on the Straight Marriage Amendment, then the rumors that he could replace Evil Dick Cheney with Gay-Friendly Hero of 9/11 Rudy Guliani were entirely pointless. And it occurred to me that, in this scenario, Gay Marriage could cost the Republicans the election.
It is hard to hold a big tent up when your specialty is driving wedges.
Yeah, well, I should get back to work. A little bit of reading for those interested:
If anyone is doing some sort of pink pride parade, I’m down with that.
If people want to love each other, I’m down with that.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/18/count-me-in/
He will not be our next President, but he has already helped change our country. Put best by Robert Menendez, House Democratic Caucus chair, via Thomas Ferraro, of Reuters:
“He gave a stiff spine to a lot of Democrats.”
Menendez said he and other members of Congress who had backed Dean had a conference telephone call with him shortly before his speech in Burlington. Dean first disclosed his plans to drop out about an hour earlier in an online message to backers.
Menendez said Dean told him many of his supporters backed consumer advocate Ralph Nader in the 2000 White House race.
Democrats with stiff spines, who oppose George Bush instead of appeasing George Bush. Bringing disaffected liberals who voted Green in the last election. I’d like to think that even though he’s not the candidate, he has already helped his party to win this year’s election.
I’m still disappointed that he didn’t get anywhere.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/08/pictures-artastic-adventures-howard-dean-and-fireworks/
Yesterday I dropped Yayoi off at Harold Washington so she could join a ski trip to Wisconsin. Not a big fan of skiing myself, I returned home, and it being a pretty nice day, I struck off in search of adventure, or at least a quiet coffee shop to have a sit and read through my magazines.
I made my way to a coffee shop I like, Filter, in the Flat Iron building at Milwaukee and Damen. The place was crowded, and a poster in the window accounted for it – there was one heckuva artist’s exhibition going on upstairs. I wandered for hours the serpentine hallways of the Flat Iron building, visiting studio after studio, and all along the hallways were artists who didn’t have their studios there, but had brought their art to show and tell and sell as well.
It was a great time.
On my way back, I read through a New Yorker article that talks about Howard Dean, and his biography, which he has avoided sharing with us so much. He’s the eldest of four brothers, from a wealthy family, so of course he went to Yale, just like George, where he was also an underachiever, getting a B- average, just a little higher than George. Except, well, Howard’s kind of different. He requested black roommates, because the place was integrating. Those roommates recall that, unlike many white liberal contemporaries, Howard was approachable and open-minded, and not at all uncomfortable with open racial dialogue.
After Yale he went into the stock market business, but he wasn’t really enjoying it. He had this weird notion that maybe he wasn’t put on this Earth to make money. Well, what then? He hadn’t been a big fan of 1960s radical politics, and figured that the way to change things for the better was to help one person at a time. He’d done some volunteering at a hospital. He went to his Dad and said “I want to become a Doctor.” His Dad thought he was crazy, but didn’t say so, and gave Howard the support he needed.
And, well, he met a girl, moved to Vermont, eventually got engaged in politics, almost as a hobby, ended up Lieutenant Governor, which is pretty much a ceremonial position, then the Governor died, and he found himself with a full-time gig and a great big budget deficit. He turned that around by pretty much just being smart and sharp and persistent and listening to the right people.
Hey. I like the man. Whenever I see him talking, I feel like I’m really hearing him, and not John Kerry’s focus-grouped, campaign-managed message. Howard Dean is complicated enough as he is without having other people tell him who he should be. What I dug was his bizarre explanation as to why he isn’t in to dishing his biography out:
“That I don’t talk about my background, I have a feeling, is what makes me as passionate as I am. If I laid out the biography for everyone to kind of ooh and ah, it would be gone. I know this is sort of Zen-like. I don’t really have it down. The fact is, the experiences that are the most intense in my life are the ones that are not readily available to me, so they come out in a different way. I think that has a lot to do with my desire to have social justice, the passion I have about fairness and truthtelling. The two are connected. The fact that I’m the least autobiographical is very much connected with the fact that I’m the most passionate. Experiences that I don’t have access to consciously are what drive me — personal experiences that I can’t tell you about because I haven’t processed them.”
“I know this is kind of Zen-like. I don’t really have it down.”
Folks, the man is in it because trying to make the world a better place is what gets him off. Yeah, he’s prone to get carried away and let loose a war scream, and that’s because he really wants to fix your country bad.
Or, I’m just believing the hype. I’m ascribing what I will to Howard Dean, because, slacker college student kind of drifting through life as I am, I identity most readily with Howard Dean. My friend Jesse, a Marine Corps Veteran, digs Wesley Clark. Southerners dig Edwards, and his syrupy drawl. There are at least a few black folk who dig Sharpton for being an eloquent black man. And, well, there are plenty of squares in our nation that identify with Kerry.
At any rate, I hope Dean pulls through Wisconsin, and at least keeps the primary interesting. I’ve read some analyses that win or loose, he has made a great contribution to invigorating the Democratic party. It is important to get people who might vote excited about the idea of voting. That is what Al Gore failed to do. John Kerry’s riding around on his motorcycle, and dropping his Senatorese, and inviting George to “Bring it On”, where “it” is a debate as to which party is better at national security. So if he is the nominee, he ought to get not only the “Anyone But Bush” crowd, but also the “Damn, I’d like to feel maybe just a little inspired by our leaders” crowd as well.
Anyway, I went an picked up Yayoi at around six. Took forever to get my car out of its slippery, snowed-in spot. But after I picked her up and turned the corner we saw what looked like a big fireworks show inside of the Sun Times building. Huh? Gotta be a reflection in the windows. So, I swung right on to Wacker, and there were fireworks lighting up the scene, and well, Yayoi loves fireworks, and she squealed that this was indeed a very very good day, and I pulled to the curb so we could watch the fireworks.
A cop shooed me away. I left Yayoi on the street to enjoy the show as I slowly navigated the wagon up the road a bit, pulled a u-turn, picked Yayoi back up, and we cruised up the pretty winter lights of Michigan Avenue.
Yes, folks, Chicago is truly the greatest city on Earth.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/04/dennis-kucinich-is-a-tofu-eatin-liberal/
On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 12:50:06PM -0500, Ed Burns wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:19:44 -0800, Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com> said:
> > On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 06:48:56PM -0000, David Jeske wrote:
> >> — Rev. Joe Doyle Ardent wrote:
> >> > (all other candidates pale in comparison to Kucinich in my eyes).
> >>
> >> Why is that?
>
> > Openly anti-war.
> > Advocate of single-payer healthcare.
> > Concerned with equitable trade agreements.
>
> > He’s a solid liberal. The Ralph Nader of the Democratic party.
>
> Here’s a digression. Could anyone please explain to me why it seems
> that “liberal” is a bad word in today’s America? I don’t understand
> why being seen as “too liberal” would be such a bad thing.
Liberals are reluctant to kill the enemy.
Liberals would have protested at the systematic extermination and expulsion of the Native Americans.
Liberals would have questioned the Spanish American War that brought us half our territory.
Liberals are responsible for the socialism of Roosevelt, and the evil 1% rate-of-return from Social Security.
Liberals like French Wine.
Liberals would just as soon have seen a Red America where labor unions control the means of production, instead of free market capitalism. This is why Germany sucks.
Liberals hate nuclear power.
Liberals want you to walk.
Liberals eat tofu.
Liberals live in cities.
Liberals are well educated.
Liberals think they are better than you.
You need to hate somebody, and it sure shouldn’t be your patriotic corporate overlords. And you can’t openly hate black people anymore. So, you have to hate Arabs, Muslims, foreign migrants, and Liberals, who are responsible for the existence of Arabs, Muslims, and those “illegal” foreign migrants, who might speak to you in Spanish. They also made racism passé.
And remember, even though freeing the slaves was arguably a liberal act, it was a backwoods hickerbilly named Abraham Lincoln who founded the Republican party and yes, fought a long and bloody war to bring it about. That is the threshhold for when liberalism can be tolerated.
All other liberalism is anti-American. And you know where that belongs: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba!
-danny
P.S. Or if you prefer footnotes on why GWB is Evil, ask Dave.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/01/30/tom-brokaws-nation-of-islam/
| <dman> |
Oh and the debate was funny last night. |
| <dman> |
When TOM BROKAW repatedly referred the “the Muslim world” as “the Nation of Islam” |
| <recursive> |
hahaha |
| <dman> |
Then he asked Al Sharpton about the conflict between the West and the Nation of Islam. |
| <OG2> |
oh funny |
| <dman> |
And Sharpton perked up, like “I can’t believe he just said that” |
| <dman> |
And he goes “First of all, when you say ‘Nation of Islam’ I assume you mean ‘Islamic Nations’ because we already have a ‘Nation of Islam’ in the United States’ …” |
| <bun-bun> |
good, I hope he smacked down Tom |
| <OG2> |
what he meant was the conflict between the White Man and the Nation of Islam |
| <dman> |
And Tom Brokaw recovers from his Gaffe with “Well, I mean the Islamic movement, in general, which in many ways, transcends nations.” |
| <dman> |
It is worth grabbing that on TiVo. |
| <dman> |
Well, Sharpton let tom be after that and stuck it to the Right Wing. |
| <Scola> |
because Islam is a “movement” |
| <dman> |
A beautiful answer about how right wing Christians are no more representatives of Christianity that terrorists are representatie of Islam. |
| <Scola> |
heh, I would have liked to have heard that |
| <dman> |
Yes, Islam is so in these past few years. Must be riding the wave of Hip Hop. |
I mean, this is funny, because Tom Brokaw is like a big-time news anchor. You’d think he’d be aware of “The Nation of Islam” movement in the United States. Maybe he’s seen the movie “Malcom X”? Okay, well, maybe not. But maybe he’d understand that, aside, possibly, from Saudi Arabia, there is no Nation of Islam. As Al points out, there are Islamic nations …
Okay, but then he tries to pass as sophisticated by sliding under the words “movement” and “transcend” … like all over the world, people are coming together under the banner of Islam as a response to contemporary challenges of globalization and the excesses of the right wing policies of the Bush administration.
Well, actually, I don’t know what he was thinking. I’m just highly amused that he’s running a Presidential debate, mistaking contemporary world Islam with a 1960s era black power movement, and choosing to deploy the term in a question to Reverend Sharpton.
No wonder we are so doomed.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/01/23/damn-its-cold/
I’m exchanging IMs with my father, and I’m reminded of his brother, Uncle Bill, and I’m getting set to tell some strange and wonderful story here, and I’m reminded that you know, mad rambling on and on kind of runs in the family. And it must be genetic because I wasn’t raised by my father, but he imparted that gene for rambling on and on, constantly shifting between obscure topics, he imparted that into me before I was even born.
Well, if you’re going to inherit a quirk, it might as well be mildly entertaining.
Yayoi is out for the evening. She’s spending the night in Champaign. This is just as well, as I’ve got some leftovers to consume. She has a thing for cooking new foods. That’s not such a bad quirk, but with her out of the way for the evening, I can clean the fridge out a little.
Part of my job is checking the Technical Support voicemail in the morning. I called one lady who seemed like she was kind of still in bed, or wish’t she was. I apologised with my understanding that we had a few customers in California, but she said actually she was an hour behind California, up in the great white wilderness of Alaska.
She didn’t call it the great white wilderness, that’s just my penchant for flourishing embellishment. I ramble a bit like a mad man, if you’ll recall.
And I said to her, how cold is it up there? We’ve got twenty five below windchill here. As I explained to Yayoi last night, twenty five below means fifty seven degrees below the freezing point of water. She’s used to thinking in Celsius. But, you figure if we’re fifty seven degrees below the freezing point of water, that’s opposite of fifty seven degrees above the freezing point of water, or ninety degrees Farenheit.
It is really god damned awfully fucking cold in Chicago these past days. Not just like, really really bad god damned cold, but like, worse than that. Real bad. And I asked the lady in Alaska, and she spoke of zero, and twenty degrees, and maybe even getting up towards freezing, but you know, while it is definately really cold in Alaska, “we don’t get that kind of brutal wind chill you get.”
I don’t know if she was just trying to humor me. “Oh that poor midwesterner wants to believe it is that cold down there.” But, well, anyway, it makes a good story at any rate that it is so cold here that people in Alaska say it is warmer up there.
And we don’t even get oil revenue checks merely for living here six months out of the year. Nosiree. But, I can’t complain if they’re giving Yayoi resident tuition.
I have innovated. We got Yayoi’s stuff up here this weekend, and among her inventory was an electric space heater. Well, now we get to do it Japanese style at night. We turn the main heat off and just warm the bedroom. Cutely enough, we’re already sleeping on a futon. So, the rest of the house gets down to about 45 when I get out of bed to turn the heat on. This poor garden apartment just sort of leaks heat. But we’ve got a gas fireplace and a space heater so it aint so bad. Yayoi points out that we probably lose out on the bottom, since heat rises.
Oh yeah, what other random things to share real quick? Moveon.org! I wrote a few words of my own on that matter today:
I am not a football fan. As far as I am concerned, half the fun of the Super Bowl is watching the commercials. If you want people to watch the Super Bowl, you should provide us with entertaining, compelling, and topical commercials that raise interest in the institution of popular culture that is the Super Bowl. The White House anti-drug ads suck – give us all something to get excited over!
First off, if you have broadband, and you haven’t seen them already, see these awesome commercials. Well, they were going to go and air one during the Super Bowl, but in our land of Free Speech, where the Founding Fathers carefully crafted a weak Federal Government that would have limited access to the Abuse of Absolute Power, in this very same nation of ours CBS has declared that it doesn’t air “issue ads” unless of course the issue is whether the big beer companies think men should be inspired to drink more beer by the image of skinny, bikini-clad hot hot babes getting wet to help you cool your manly self off, or, unless, of course, the President of the United States, this very same man who has had one hard-drinkin’, coke-snortin’ year of his life expunged down the memory hole, well, if his office of whatever it is wants to scare kids into thinking that one toke off of one joint of marijuana will destroy you for the rest of your life, that’s okay, but if some collection of citizens wants to remind us all that maybe, oh maybe, lordy lordy lordy god almighty maybe you know, running up this massive Federal budget deficit for no good reason is going to have ill consequences for our childen?
I lost my train of thought.
But you know where I’m going.
And where I went, where I went was over to http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/ to help sign the petition and tell those silly people who make those silly decisions that you know what? It only makes sense to air a cool commercial!
As Howard Dean would say, “YEAH!”
Now, I’m going to get some dinner.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/13/more-iraq-and-more-iraq/
Jesse lost his non-paying job last week, so I bought him an abundance of beer. I drank enough beer that I don’t remember much of the actual beer drinking, but he did lend me a book I had long wished to read. It’s a biographical account of a Marine Corps grunt who made it through the Gulf War in one piece. I’ll share a couple of paragraphs from Anthony Swofford’s _Jarhead_, along with my own commentary. Here we find him marching through a valley filled with bombed-out Iraqi equipment, and dead, burnt, and surrendering Iraqi soldier:
This is war, I think. I’m walking through what my father and his father walked through — the epic results of American bombing, American might. The filth is on my boots. I am one of a few thousand people who will walk this valley today. I am history making. Whether I live or die, the United States will win this war. I know that the United States will win any war it fights, against any country. If colonialism weren’t out of style, I’m sure we’d take over the entire Middle East, not only safeguard the oil reserves, but take the oil reserves: We are here to announce that you no longer own your country, thank you for your cooperations, more details will follow.
More than illustrating a high point, a moment of victory, this excerpt also touches on a real problem of America’s ambivalence. Are we the colonial empire, or aren’t we? What responsibility do we have beyond having great military power? If we are to conquer, should we also rule?
Which is why I favored the second invasion of Iraq … the first time around, we were afraid to rule, to expropriate, administer and engage in prolonged occupation — we were unable to own up to the imperial ambitions that put us there in the first place. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t bother going to war for the sake of domestic economic stability, but once we bomb the heck out of a country, we ought to finish the really hard work of trying to put the pieces back together, as best we can. Yes, occupation is far bloodier than the invasion itself, but without occupation, the invasion itself is pointless. We are the imperial authority in Iraq, the conquering, hopefully benevolent empire, and beyond the fact that we are a lesser evil than the rule that preceeded it, the people there owe us no love.
Swofford’s next paragraph sums it up:
Our rucks are heavy with equipment and ammunition but even heavier with the burdens of history, and each step we take, the burdens increase.
A long hard slog, indeed, long delayed, and all the worse for it.
I hope the frustrations and the blood that will continue to be spilt in Iraq will discourage the Americans at home from engaging in further military adventurism. Syria? Iran? France? Not worth it. They can regime change themselves, as we can regime change ourselves, since none of us are especially encumbered by economic sanctions and a regime that controls the UN food rations, as a consequence of our previous militaristic dalliances.
The hope that one dubious bloodbath will deter future bloodier, even more pointless massacres, is the ultimate hope that we took from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My reassurance is that after the Cold War we are more concerned with Global Warming than Nuclear Winter.
-d
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/09/changing-spectacles/
Former U.S. Senator from Illinois, and Democratic candidate for President, Paul Simon, has died.
Former U.S. Senator and Democratic candidate for President, Al Gore, has endorsed former Vermont Governor and Democratic candidate for President, Howard Dean.
Dean referred to Gore as “the last elected President of the United States.”
2004 should be exciting.
I’ve got some more job possibilities in the water.
And my glasses broke this weekend. Got some new ones. Pretty sharp, I think, if a bit expensive.
Maybe I’ll type some more, later.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/09/fearless-failure/
In case you haven’t already received some e-mail from your favorite nerds about it, it is noteworthy that if you visit Google, enter the phrase “miserable failure” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” you’ll be treated to the official biography of our featured American President.
Well, I felt it my patriotic duty help elevate the status of our Fearless Leader by posting this. Huzzah!
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/01/trans-atlantic-thinking/
I will share a few paragraphs I found recently that help me understand some of the important ways in which European political thinking is different from American political thinking:
At the risk of overgeneralization, we might say that for Europeans (that is, for those Europeans not joined in the Axis cause), World War II, in which almost 60 million people perished, exemplified the horrors of nationalism. Specifically and significantly, it exemplified the horrors of popular nationalism. Nazism and fascism were manifestations, however perverse, of popular sovereignty. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini rose to power initially through elections and democratic processes. Both claimed to speak for the people, not only before they assumed dictatorial powers but afterward, too, and both were broadly popular, as were their nationalism, militarism, repression, and, in Hitler’s case, genocidal objectives. From the postwar European point of view, the Allies’ victory was a victory against nationalism, against popular sovereignty, against democratic excess.
The American experience of victory could not have differed more starkly. For Americans, winning the war was a victory for nationalism — that is to say, for our nation and our kind of nationalism. It was a victory for popular sovereignty (our popular sovereignty) and, most fundamentally, a victory for democracy (our democracy). Yes, the war held a lesson for Americans about the dangers of democracy, but the lesson was that the nations of continental Europe had proven themselves incapable of handling democracy when left to their own devices. If Europe was to develop democratically, it would need American tutelage. If Europe was to overcome its nationalist pathologies, it might have to become a United States of Europe. Certain European countries might even need to have democratic institutions imposed upon them, although it would be best if they adopted those institutions themselves, or at least persuaded themselves that they had done so.
Jed Rubenfeld
“The Two World Orders”
_Wilson Quarterly_, Autumn 2003
So, let us look, once again, at Iraq, through this sort of lens. The American point of view is that many nations of the Arab and Muslim world are failures, and Iraq is the most spectacular failure in the pack. In this time of increased danger, it is necessary for America to impose its style of nationalist popular democracy on a region where it is most needed. This is where we find ourselves at the moment.
The European view is that there is one very powerful nation, a well-meaning, if short-sighted, somewhat ditzy hyperpower called America. America is strongly, even annoyingly nationalistic. America has a fearsome, awesome military. America has a strong nationalist leader in the President, who is democratically elected in accordance with popular whimsy.
The view from Europe and on the American Left is that America is currently led by a drooling idiot who can not pronounce the word “nuclear”, is tutored by powerful, self-serving oligarchs like Dick Cheney, and finds itself in an unanticipated situation where the amazingly complex puzzle of “why did 9/11 happen” is ignored for the puzzle of “on this pretext, how much of our wacko, right-wing, neo-Conservative agenda can we shove down the world’s throat?”
Damn, I just scared ourselves. What do we do? Well, we put our shoulder to the wheel. Let us hope, and if the opportunity presents itself, apply our talents toward these objectives:
- That we successfully remove George W. Bush from office in next year’s election. Hopefully we get someone clever in there, capable of independent, strategic thinking, who can work with Congress and the world on a more progressive nation in a more just world.
- That the occupation of Iraq leads to a democratic government that is able to serve its people. I hope that the next generation in Iraq will look upon this period as one of liberation from tyranny and the birth of a modern, just democracy, and that they may look on us with some gratitude, after the fact, for the meddling we engage in today.
On the one hand, you’ve got a powerful, cocky, reckless leader. On the other hand, you’ve got a capable world that lacks the vision and temerity to offer a better route. The sanctions were a terrible joke that strengthened Saddam’s hand, and the alternative to American Imperialism was something like European Appeasement, where we gradually forgot our hatred of Saddam, and returned to normalcy, as he nurtured his insane ambitions against whomever he could reach. Hussein had to go, and George Bush was an implement of this larger purpose. Now that we’ve removed the one we can free ourselves of the other. It’s a tough world, but once in a while someone has to lead it.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/25/worth-a-chuckle/
From an item in The Register, on Dell’s efforts to off-shore tech-support calls to India:
Customers had complained of “thick foreign accents” and “scripted” exchanges – although this proved to be a winning combination for Arnold Schwarzenegger in his successful bid to become California’s gropenführer last month.
EETS NOT UH HARDAWUH ERA!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/10/dean-clark/
So, last night I figured it out. If Dean and Kerry are the front-runners, at least for me, then you’d balance the ticket with one of the pretty Southerners who are running for Vice President. Since Kerry’s a veteran, and not all that handsome, he gets Edwards, who is pretty enough to be in a girly magazine and can woo women with his Southern drawl. Howard Dean needs Wesley Clark as his wingman. A southerner and a general.
Which leaves me admitting that Kerry-Edwards is the more viable campaign, because Dean and Clark are both pale, white-haired stiffs. But maybe the old folks would feel nostalgic and vote for them anyway because “Dean Clark” sounds like one of those ancient old movie stars. But then John Kerry looks like one of those ancient old movie stars, preserved to the modern day. I don’t know.
As long as we don’t get another four years of George.
How’s this for in-depth political analysis?
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/10/08/recalling-demolition-man/
Those who live in California ought to be grateful, in that when their government is seized in a coup d’etat, the replacement is not a military general, but a Hollywood actor who has played one. At least the rest of the government is still in the hands of Democrats.
Perhaps the classic Stallone-Snipes-Bullock movie “Demolition Man” may be more than just a great movie, but also prophecy. In this movie, Stallone plays a cop who gets framed for a crime, and cryogenically frozen until such a time as he can be reformed by society. He is thawed in to a future in which Los Angeles and San Diego have merged in to a single administrative region named San Angeles, sex is entirely virtual, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has served at least one term as president, thanks to the sixty-second amendment, which was passed specifically for him.
It turns out that in July, Orrin Hatch sponsored an amendment to the Constitution, stipulating that, “a person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.”
Those who live outside California ought to watch out, for they may be next; Schwarzenegger became a citizen in 1983. I think this might be a good time to invest in Taco Bell, as this was the only restaurant to have survived the Franchise Wars that took place while Stallone’s character was playing popsicle.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/28/colin-powell-saddam-not-a-threat-so-why-did-we-lie/
Joe Conason points to a press conference in February, 2001, in which Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction:
“He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”
I am happy to see the administration discredited, since a year and a half after he claimed that Iraq was not a threat, Colin Powell was in front of the U.N. with pictures explaining all the secret weapons Saddam had developed and was ready to deploy right away, and claiming that we have even more secret evidence that we can not share, but it is imperative to go to war now. Personally, I never bought the WMD argument – it sounded to me like the classic American strategy of creating the perception of an imminent enemy threat as a pretext for military aggression. I am unhappy that the administration damaged American credibility with this strategy.
On the other hand, I like to look at the larger statement, as Powell was addressing a question about sanctions:
“… the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction.“
I agree with the idea that we needed to invade Iraq to free the Iraqi people of their tyrant. Because, much more than other tyrants, we helped make him strong, and unlike other tyrants, we had seen fit to wage war against him, even if I did not agree with Desert Storm.
Wouldn’t it have been nice, if instead of making incredulous claims about WMD, which will likely fall flat, we had enough humility to admit that sanctions weren’t all that effective – that the Iraqi people were being hurt by sanctions, and whether Saddam was actually acquiring WMD or not, they were not an effective tool at keeping his hands off of imported materials? That would have been nice. Sure, the world would question our motives – America is in it for the oil, and to shore up domestic support for the President who seeks a distraction from a recession and his “War on Terror” – but we get that flak anyway. But … wouldn’t it have been nice if our justification for war was to free Arab people from the tyrant that we had helped to install, instead of our claims that the secular Arab tyrant was part and parcel of a wacko Muslim fundamentalist conspiracy typical of brown-skinned men with beards and turbans? I think Arabs might have appreciated the distinction.
I guess you could try and blame Powell’s insistence on a U.N. mandate for this dishonesty. I believe some conservative pundits have. If you go before the Security Council and say “we want to invade Iraq to rid that nation’s people of a bad man” the French, with their economic ties to the bad man, will laugh at you even harder than if your threaten them with fairy-tales about Anthrax and Dirty Bombs. Maybe we lied to the world in a futile attempt to get the U.N. on our side. Why would we do that? Because we weren’t confident in our ability to do such a large and protracted peace-keeping mission after the invasion? Because we were too cheap to shoulder the full financial burden of reconstruction? Given the strain that our military is under today, perhaps this was a laudible strategy, except that it failed.
Being an empire isn’t easy.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/22/wesley-clark-v0019a-not-yet-fully-implemented/
An excerpt from an article on Salon.com:
In an interview with the Miami Herald, he seemed to endorse a moratorium on the death penalty, because there has been “a lot of discrimination and a lot of injustice,” and suggested cases be reviewed with DNA evidence. But when the reporters asked if he’d back a halt to executions, they noted, “Clark sat up straight. ‘Stop. Stop,’ he said. ‘I promised I wasn’t going to take a strong position.’”
In programmer speak, Clark threw an exception when presented with a case he was not yet programmed for. Something like:
ERROR: candidates.democratic.clark: deathPenalty.moratorium not yet defined
The other great catch-phrase from this article refers to the “top-down groundswell” behind Clark … if Howard Dean is from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, Wesley Clark is from the fully re-programmable wing of the democratic party that yields us charismatic automatons like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joseph Lieberman. Clark may have the charisma of Clinton to pull it off against his charismatic, right-wing-programmed nemesis, George Bush. All the same, I have a lot of nostalgia for man versus machine … I’d just as soon send Dean in there against Bush and see him inexplicably flailed by Bush’s mighty buzz-saw pincers and lose a little bit more of my faith in America than to see him toppled by the mightier android.
But then I’d also like to just see Bush gone. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see what Clark looks like a few revisions from now. It’s too bad he’s still in Alpha.
/danny
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