brainrow

During his convention speech, George W. Bush didn’t smirk once. It was remarkable. I wondered whether he’d had a botox injection to keep his upper lip from curling into that old familiar sneer. He was undoubtedly coached to avoid smirking, but I didn’t think he could do that for a whole long speech.

Now I’m wondering how he avoided blushing during his speech. He said this about John Kerry’s proposals:

there are some things my opponent is for—he’s proposed more than two trillion dollars in new federal spending so far, and that’s a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts.

Today the Washington Post reports that Bush’s convention speech promises carry a three trillion dollar price tag:

A staple of Bush’s stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator’s campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.

We know how Bush will pay for his promises: send the bill to the kids and grandkids.

I don’t think I could run for President. I would blush.

Politics is a nasty business. No one should expect to run against a tough character like George W. Bush without getting roughed up a little.

To illustrate: here’s a political ad parody from MAD magazine. (I found this via Heli’s Heaven and Hell blog.)

An interesting ad from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Quoting from a purported al Qaeda training manual:

In countries like the United States it’s perfectly legal for members of the public to own certain types of firearms. If you live in such a country obtain an assault rifle legally, preferably an AK-47 or variations.

One website I like to visit is called As the Apple Turns. Like many other sites, they report news and rumors about Apple Computer, Inc., but they treat the whole thing as a soap opera, and they play it for laughs.

That site was not a place where I expected to find any particularly moving or insightful discussion of the events of September 11, 2001. But that’s what I found there. This piece might have started off as “Jack’s Bad Day,” but it was posted on the site under the title “This Too, Shall Pass?”

I’m really out of touch.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking at the Republican National Convention, called critics of Bush economic policies “girly men,” I thought: The American people are not going to sit still for this outrageous insult to their intelligence.

I was wrong.

While events in Iraq seemed to be spinning ever more wildly out of control, speaker after speaker assured us that we were safer because George W. Bush took us to war there. I thought: We’re more than 17 months into a war that the Administration said would be a “cakewalk,” and U.S. soldiers are being killed there almost every day. There’s no way the American people will fall for such obvious nonsense.

I was wrong.

When almost every speaker at the Republican National Convention spent more time attacking John Kerry than praising George W. Bush, I thought: Bush doesn’t dare to run on his record, because his record is indefensible. The American people will see right through this.

I was wrong.

When I saw the Convention trying to turn “9/11” into a registered trademark of the Republican National Committee, I thought: The American people will not tolerate this cynical exploitation of a national tragedy for political profit.

I was wrong. Polls show Bush got a big “bounce” from a Convention that should have had people holding their noses.

I am definitely out of touch.

Porter Goss, the Congressman Bush has nominated as CIA director has criticized John Kerry for proposing cuts in intelligence funding during the ’90s, so I found this Washington Post story interesting:

President Bush’s nominee to be the director of central intelligence, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), sponsored legislation that would have cut intelligence personnel by 20 percent in the late 1990s.

Goss … was one of six original co-sponsors of legislation in 1995 that called for cuts of at least 4 percent per year between 1996 and 2000 in the total number of people employed throughout the intelligence community…

The Bush reelection campaign has been blasting Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry as deeply irresponsible for proposing intelligence cuts at the same time. A Bush campaign ad released on Aug. 13 carried a headline: “John Kerry . . . proposed slashing Intelligence Budget 6 Billion Dollars.”

But the cuts Goss supported are larger than those proposed by Kerry and specifically targeted the “human intelligence” that has recently been found lacking. The recent report by the commission probing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks called for more spending on human intelligence.

Does the Bush campaign ever tell a straight story?

From a Los Angeles Times editorial about the anti-Kerry swift boat ads:

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus … make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal… But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy… And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

Earlier this year I went to see John Kerry speak at a campaign event. I had to pick up a ticket at local Democratic Party headquarters. I’d learned about this because I was on a mailing list for Kerry supporters. Unlike the folks who attended a recent speech by Dick Cheney, I wasn’t asked to swear fealty to the candidate or the Party—all I had to do was show up and ask for the ticket—but clearly the Kerry camp wanted a friendly crowd.

Kerry got a friendly crowd. We stood in the rain without umbrellas, because they would look bad on the TV news. Bush supporters raised big signs across the street from the park where Kerry spoke. Local TV crews talked to them, and showed the signs, but no dissenting voices disturbed Kerry’s speech itself.

Recently a West Virginia man managed to slip past the rigorous screening out of dissident thoughts at a Bush campaign rally. He heckled a Bush speech. He shouted out questions about outsourcing of jobs and about the Iraq war. It was not the highest form of political discourse. It did damage to the carefully-crafted illusion of unanimous support for El Presidente.

The heckler was shouted down at the rally. Then he was fired from his job as a graphic designer. (A Washington Post story is here.)

Here in the Land of the Free™, if you have something to say—well, you’d just better watch your ass.

The Democratic Convention takes place next week. I’m hoping for word that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri have been captured or killed.

The White House is pressuring our Pakistani allies to deliver terrorist high-value targets (HVTs) during the Democratic Convention, according to this article in the New Republic. The White House reportedly told a Pakistani intelligence officer that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”—Al Qaeda as counter-programming to the Democratic Convention.

If the Democratic Convention is what it takes to get the Bush Administration to move against Al Qaeda, then let’s have a Democratic Convention every week.

Just forty-four days after D-Day, a group of German military officers made their move to assassinate Adolf Hitler and take control of the German government from the Nazi Party.

One of the conspirators, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, planted a bomb in a briefcase in a conference room where Hitler was reviewing war plans. The briefcase got underfoot, and someone moved it to the other side of one of the sturdy wooden supports that held up the conference table. The bomb exploded on schedule, but Hitler survived, shielded from the full brunt of the blast by the table support.

Most of the conspirators were rounded up, paraded through abysmal show trials, and executed in a variety of sadistic ways. The executions were filmed for Hitler’s private amusement.

Hitler took his escape as a good omen. A little more than nine months later, with Germany in ruins, Hitler killed himself.

Today, on the 60th anniversary of the bomb plot, the German Goverment is honoring the men who conspired to assassinate Hitler.

History sits in judgment of us all.

Every year, on Memorial Day, multiplex theaters across the United States should dedicate their biggest screen and their best sound system to showings of Saving Private Ryan.

No other film I’ve seen shows the terrible face of war nearly as well as this one. Everyone old enough to vote should see it. It’s an education for those fortunate enough never to have served in battle themselves.

No television can do this movie justice. This is what the big screen was made for.

It would be a fine Memorial Day tradition to try, year after year, to understand the sacrifices that have been made to safeguard our country and our liberty.

The New Yorker considers Unconventional War. The short piece covers a little of the history of the Geneva Conventions, and the Bush administration’s decision to ignore them.

[T]he Geneva Conventions have been surprisingly successful, given that the activity they regulate is in many ways inherently lawless. The reason is not just that gentlemen prefer to slaughter each other in the most ethical way possible. To the extent that the Conventions have been observed, they have been observed mainly because it was in the interest, mutual or individual, of warring entities to observe them. If you took their soldiers prisoner, they might take yours; and if you tortured theirs they might torture yours. If you made a habit of torturing and killing enemy prisoners, then enemy soldiers and enemy units would be reluctant to surrender. As long as the other side was still strong enough to fight, mistreatment of prisoners was, in theory, deterrable; once the other side was too weak to carry on, it was pointless.

I’ve just watched A Man for All Seasons. I recommend it highly. The following scene between Sir Thomas More and hot-headed Will Roper sent a shiver of recognition down my spine:

Roper: So, now you give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

What seems to be coming out of the administration is the idea that public information is a dangerous thing.
—Tom Connors, Society of American Archivists

The Bush-Cheney administration may be the most secretive in U.S. history.

Soon after the administration took office, Vice-President Cheney chaired a National Energy Policy Development Group, which met in secret and issued policies that seemed purpose-built to satisfy a handful of big Bush-Cheney contributors. National energy policies affect the economy, the environment, and our relations with oil-producing nations, but the administration has fought hard to prevent the American people from learning how those policies were decided, and who was invited to participate in the process. They’ve fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep their secrets.

Bush’s Executive Order 13223 attempts to repeal, by executive fiat, the 1978 Presidential Records Act. It lays down new rules to prevent journalists, historians and other scholars from seeing any presidential documents that a sitting or former president doesn’t want them to see. The shroud of secrecy can outlive a former president—he can pass his veto power over the release of information on to his heirs.

The administration resisted the creation of an independent commission to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Congress created the commission anyway, and the administration’s consistent response has been to throw roadblocks into the commission’s course. For a long time they refused to allow testimony from White House officials. Under tremendous public pressure, they eventually allowed a few officials to testify, in exchange for guarantees that the commission would not seek testimony from others. The administration is blocking access to Clinton-era documents that might show what the government knew, and when the government knew it. Clinton wants the documents released to the commission. Bush wants more secrecy.

Emily Miller, deputy press secretary to Secretary of State Colin Powell, “pulled the plug” while Powell was being interviewed for the Sunday morning news program Meet the Press. I don’t know what she was trying to hide, but her bizarre behavior is entirely in keeping with Bush-Cheney policy.

The entire administration seems to be afflicted with a kind of gag reflex.

A good line, from a Slashdot comment by someone who calls himself “Frigid Monkey“:

No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don’t feel safe.

Rush Limbaugh stands behind U.S. soldiers who are carrying on Saddam Hussein’s unfinished work torturing and degrading the Iraqi people:

I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?