A Pox

Matthew Yglesias says:

[T]he president keeps insisting that one of his long-term goals in Iraq is to overthrow the governments of two of Iraq's neighbors. So--surprise!--they try to undermine his policies. And then the administration turns around and whines about it, before deciding down the road that he should once again re-iterate his goal of toppling the regimes.

Matt's basically correct here, although a little generous in the terminology department. Policies? I do, however, think it remains debatable that the Iranians are actively and specifically working to undermine the dauphin's excellent adventure. When Mahmuod Ahmedinejad says that if Iran wanted to fuck us in Iraq, Iran'd fuck us in Iraq with all the tendresse of Rick Santorum sodomizing a tranny hooker (10 Thick Reasons to Call!) in a Hotel 8, I think we ought to take him at his word, not because he evinces honesty, but because the statement soi-même is so palpably true. While the attention of our newstalkers turns to the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr and other metonymic stand-ins for the various sectarian militia groups making like Indochine on the day Pyle fell in love with Phuong, there remains a gentleman named Ali al-Sistani who's lately kept his trap shut to the clear benefit of our efforts, such as they are, in Iraq, and I do use the word benefit self-consciously. There's a lot of wind-making lately about just how badly Iraq is going. I've engaged in it myself. But to some degree, the rose-tinted right wing is right indeed: as hybrid insurgency-civil wars go, Iraq could be going much, much worse. (Of course, the war-porn division draws the conclusion that so long as things could be worse, things are going well, which is like the old joke: "So I says to the guy: 'My wife's cheatin' on me, my dog got run over, I got a rash on my ass the size of my hand, and my kids are takin' all my money. But you know me, I can't complain.'")

It's another example of the immense, swollen Me that is America: to presume that our acts and intentions are the sun around which all things in Iraq orbit. But while we're the proximate cause of plenty of misery and conflict there, it's an error of cultural egocentrism to suppose that whatever actions Iran takes in Iraq are taken in direct response to what we Americans fancifully call our policy in the region. Iraq isn't a stage drama, and Iran isn't a mere foil to America. It's a complex nation with its own largely mysterious desires vis-à-vis its neighbor, and in pursuit of its own policies it sometimes props, sometimes undermines, and sometimes entirely avoids the United States' own projects there.

Meanwhile back in Kansas, putative liberal columnists make hay that the Grand Ayatollah and his (sic) Shiites are insufficiently gratefuly to "the world's most powerful nation--a country that has generously sent 140,000 of its finest sons and daughters to fight, suffer and die to free Iraq from the Baathist grip." Which raises the serious question of just how much psilocybin they've got in the drinking water down in the District? Because it appears to we provincials that they ran out of activated charcoal and started purifying their water by passing it directly through cakes of dried magic mushrooms. I begin to suspect these guys would bitch that the Arawak never properly thanked the Euros for all the blankets.

The Power of the Purse

Let's begin with an unlikely premise: the Democrats take the House and go either 50-50 or one-up in the Senate, and after dickering around with the minimum wage or whatever, they manage, sometime in the run of the 110th Congress, to pass a resolution demanding the President issue a timeline-bound withdrawal from Iraq with a final deadline of, oh, say a full calendar year, at which point the last "troop," as the President likes to say, will wave a jaunty goodbye from somewhere other than a rooftop. An unlikely premise, as I said, but at least possible.

The President calls in the cameras and says, "The Democrat party, eh-heh-heh, says we gotta cut an run. They're demandin' that we leave the Iraqis in the hands of the tayerist." Then he says he's sorry, but there will be no "fixed timetable."

Will the Democrats cut off funding for the war?

No. They will not.

The habit of both committed and reluctant Dems is to read such statements, and though they recognize them to be true, to launch nevertheless into perorative claims that those of us who truly believe such policy to be criminal--to be indefensibly wrong and not merely a regrettable error on the part of policy makers with regrettably bloody consequences--are no better than lazy complainers, whose pristine leftie morals or utopian libertarian limits are nothing more than excuses for absenting ourselves from a messy, imperfect, frustrating, but still vital political process, which is, after all, the only one that we've got.

Speaking only for IOZ: I'm not a utopian. I've compromised my principles voting for Democrats and Republicans alike in every municipal, state, and national election since I was old enough to vote. Mostly, I've compromised in favor of Dems, though I think their economic ideas are boneheaded and their social progressivism a tissue long-since torn and balled up in order to grasp fitfully and fruitlessly at the votes of religious morons who believe that the resurrected and risen human incarnation of their goatherders' god takes an avid interest in the sexual politics of America in the twenty-first century. I've compromised even as they sell my fellow fags up the river time and again in order to appeal to a mythical moderation that seeks Booker T.-style incrementalism. I've compromised even as they fanatically continue a cruel, futile drug war that long before 9/11 or even Oklahoma City laid the groundwork for a militarized surveillance society that disaccords with every principle of privacy I hold dear. I made these compromises with "mere regret," in the words of Denise Levertov, because I considered, on balance, the Democrats to be more favorably disposed to protecting our few remaining rights, and because though they too are a party of foreign interventionism, they remained marginally more skeptical of the gross application of military force, although bomb-happy Bill Clinton was no piker where airstrikes were concerned.

But there's a line, and in the last six years the Democrats crossed it. They sacrificed principles first for political exigency when the GOP ratings rode high and Bush was ephemerally popular, and then, even as the Republicans' ratings tanked and Bush returned to his pre-9/11 incarnation as a stuttering dimwit totally out of his depth as a Chief Executive, they still got-along, went-along. Their own members abandoned them in order to codify torture, secret prisons, and kangaroo courts. They grinned and voted for billions of dollars of war appropriations, lest some towheaded Republican backbencher in the house shout "doesn't support the troops!" They got steamrolled again and again, and their single political triumph was grumbling away the President's goofy Social Security pseudo-plan, which would have been more impressive if they hadn't managed to save a Rooseveltian hand-out while winking away the Bill of Rights.

Black People: Smarter than Whites

Gore Vidal has said some very brilliant and very boneheaded things in his time. In the former category, he once wrote, and I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the source this morning: Maybe it's not that black kids in the ghetto are stupider or less interested in education that white kids in the suburbs. Maybe it's that they're smarter and figured out faster just how much of a sham their education really is. This morning, the Times reported that the Donkle fears its house niggers, of whose every vote it feels innately entitled, may decline to rise and roll to the midterm polls, perhaps singing songs of praise and thanks along the way. But unlike the white liberals of Blogospheria, who will take the donkey punch and keep on comin' (so to speak), it appears that even in this, the most important election of our lifetimes since the previous most important election of our lifetimes before the following most important election of our lifetimes, black voters may be asking into the damned taboo of American two-party politics: What have you done for me lately?

Both Dennis Perrin and Michael J. Smith have good, related posts up, noting their respective disdain for the Democrats' solipsistic conviction that every person answering in the negative to the "right direction/wrong direction" poll query should end up in the blue camp, or else, lord help us, the Republicans might continue doing what they're doing, whereas with a Democratic congress the minumum wage will rise, the medicare prescription bill will return to the sun for more rotten bloating, and no one will ever again mention habeas corpus or torture, based on the presumption, perhaps, that something quiet is happening behind the scenes to stay tough but not stay the course, or whatever the slogan is these days.

In the last three election cycles, black folk have been disenfrancished. Poor people have been disenfranchised. The disenfrachisement continues unabated as Democrats yammer in public about the undemocratic, papieren-bitte laws mandating that voters show photo ID at the polls. Then they slink back to Washington and vote for the Real ID Act, as if the one thing has nothing to do with the other. John Kerry gets up and says, "Fuck you, Ohio! I lost! Hurrah!" Now Democrats say, "Vote for us, and we will ensure that your undereducated children, though condemned to a lifetime of menial labor and occasional condemnation by a Donkle seeking 'a Sister Soujah moment,' will at very least get seven and a quarter per hour and a government willing 'to negotiate drug prices with pharmeceutical companies.'"

Oh happy day.

Queer Contracts

The New Jersy Supreme Court said that the equal protections clause in the state constitution requires at least a separate-but-equal marriage-imago for fags. The usual suspects cheer. The other usual suspects lament the usually lamentable "judicial activism," by which they mean "judges arriving at conclusions with which I disagree," although the "I" in "I disagree" invariably finds itself cowering timorously behind that beefy brawler, "ordinary voters," whose essential cupidity (cf. The War in Iraq; The War on Terror; George W. Bush; Democrats; Republicans; Everything) becomes, on such "social" matters, a glacial judiciousness, a Talmudic attention to the applicable pros and cons of any given revision of the extant socio-moral order, an essential conservativism in the literal-lexical sense of the word. Within every windblown American Idol fan, an Oliver Wendell Holmes. Within every unshockable conscience, at least so far as weekly tube-presented serial killer-rapists are concerned, a Justice Frankfurter.

Were there really such a category as "social conservative," and, less likely still, were there really such a category as "honest social conservative," they'd all band together and work to repeal or amend the very equal-protections language that keeps dealing them defeat after defeat as they strive to preserve at least one breed of goat for the scaping. But that would be rhetorically imprudent, or, as our more dipshitty contemporary idiom puts it, bad framing.

Meanwhile, the New Jersey ruling strikes me as another steaming pile of evidence that the government ought to take its stinking hands out of the marriage racket altogther and leave that deal to the churches, who've crept--or leapt--much too far into the public sphere and really ought to get back to maintaining a couple of private rackets of their own. If the government is going to create a set-aside category of people to recieve certain economic privileges for their voluntary participation in a collective unit, then the only reasonable, feasible, and non-discriminatory path is to recognize a voluntary, contractual household, whether made of college roommates, loving couples, nuclear families, extended families, or merely, pace the junior senator from Pennsylvania, a man and his dog.

Such a policy also obviates the need for social engineering or moral meddling by the courts, which can get back to the old anglo-saxon business of settling contractual disputes and deciding where to bring the blade down when dividing up the baby. That probably sounds terribly glib, but it's also true: the courts get involved in social policy to the exasperation of so-called conservatives precisely because conservatives and liberals alike insist on using the power of government as a cudgel to advance their social agendas. Conservatives are probably guiltier than liberals these days, but at its heart the business of seeking government approbation for moral and personal choices is, in the parlance of our times, a bipartisan endeavor. It's a natural extension of the long-entrenched preference for a regulatory state, whose positive purpose is, say, to encourage equality, and whose negative purpose is, say, to discourage frivolous lawsuits.

From a libertarian perspective, it is the frivolous lawsuit that will save our civilization. (All right, an overstatement, mais quand même . . .) Let people agree to whatever they want to agree to. Let them write it down. Let them sign it and countersign it. Let them make their deposits and promises. So long as they're not contracting to kill or to steal, to do measurable harm, let them agree to whatever they damn well please. If, in the interst of encouraging larger households, lesser consumption of energy, more carpools, denser cities, a more independent agriculture, the government can also say, household units meeting certain minimal requirements may receive what modest economic benefits a limited government is empowered to offer, then by dog, more power to the part-time legislature. The way to keep the government from affecting broad policies that influence your private business is to keep it private and to keep it business.

A Problem of Definitions.

I just listened to the latter half of an interview with Bill Maher by Joe Scarborough. Scarborough asks if he thinks Bush should be impeaced. Maher says, Well duh. Scarborough says, Hey, it's not like he got rid of habeas corpus with the stroke of a pen. Maher says, Well, actually, yeah, he did. Scarborough then says, You crazy, man, crazy! After all, we didn't offer habeas protections to the Nazis or the Japs.

This seems to be a common category error. Am I alone in feeling entirely unconfused about the definition of Prisoner of War? It's not that our nation has denied its detainees habeas; it's not that our nation has denied its detainees POW status; it's that we've denied them both, constructing out of papier-mâché, bubble gum, and the contents of Puff the Magic Dragon's unwanted-gifts box a shiny new non-category called "illegal enemy combatant," against whom we assert an indefinable illegality which denies the basic rights of Prisoners of War while simultaneously, incoherently, inhumanly, and uncivilly denying them the rights of every other prisoner accused of extralegal or illegal activity: the right to challenge their detention.

That, Inquisitor, is the problem.

Unfortunately, the easy conclusion that Joe Scarborough is just one more jackass in our nation of jackasses proves wrong. Bill defends his proposition that habeas has been stricken, and Joe comes back: How are the Donkles gonna impeach a guy for doing something that a bunch of em voted for?

How, motherfuckers, how indeed?

More Killin!

I don't usually dip into Ralph Peters Land for the same reason I don't usually dip my unsheathed cock into the ass of a dead boy-hustler with the rusty needle still extruding from the deep dorsal vein of his penis. It isn't safe.

Today, since Peters column is all the rage about the webs, I did, and hoo-boy.

If we can't leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies.

"We ain't killin' 'em fast enough," is a common enough refrain on the blood-n-guts side of the country, but is it really wise?

I mean, just because Jimmy woun't let you play with his dumptruck, that doesn't give you the right to throw his army men in the trash.

Dharma, or Is It Karma?

Americans are so fucking fat that we cost ourselves a billion surplus gallons of gas every year.

I sincerely hope Jim Kunstler doesn't read this article, since at present he's as close as a man can get to becoming a walking aneurism.

The Post article is rather poorly constructed, and underplays the irony. Allow IOZ:

In the last sixty or so years, the entire habitable landscape of America was reinvented for what Kunstler calls "the easy-motoring lifestyle" and what our politicians call "the non-negotiable American way of life." We spent a gajillion public dollars building a now-crumbling interstate highway system linking every secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and otherwise podunk American city in a great web of underconstructed and endlessly decaying concrete, which provided an arterial system whereby cities could empty themselves of everything but crime and poverty in a great Hegira to the promised land of parking lots, malls, and cul-de-sac'd subdivisions. We should've spent the money on sidewalks. Or bike lanes.

The carport became the one-car garage. The one-car garage became the two-car garage. The two-car garage became the three-car garage. It is now perfectly ordinary in a wealthier subdivision like the one where IOZ grew up to see vast new pastiche-homes with front elevations done up in bowlderized Colonial Revival, rooflines in bowlderized French Country, and wall-of-glass rears done up in ass-end Mies, all wrapped in a series of driveways as elaborate as the pathways of an English garden folly, leading to a side-mounted car-mouth with room for four, six, or eight vehicles: one for mom, two for dad, one for each kid, and a van for family car trips. Every vehicle except for dad's midlife sports package includes a DVD player and an Xbox. A Mexican cuts the grass.

They can't walk anywhere. When a neighbor just four doors and six half-acre lots down the street has a party, they all pile in the car and drive. The grocery store is five miles away. The mall is ten. School is twenty. The restaurants are all in mall parking lots.

Et cetera.

Affluent America built fatness into the very fabric of our society. Now fatness is adding a couple billion bucks a year to the cost of inhabiting that fraying fabric. What goes around, friends, comes around again.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Slate, where WaPo authors go to die, has an advice column: "Dear Prudence." Today, a doozy:

Dear Prudence,
I am a twentysomething American musician living in Europe. Part of my job is meeting new people—musicians with whom I play, sponsors, and the audience after a concert. I've been here about a year, and I repeatedly run into the same situation. I'll meet a group of people, we'll chat about two minutes, and someone will make some comment about how my president should be killed (really!) and seems to want to know how much I agree. I don't bring up politics before this happens. Regardless of my political views, I find it offensive to have anyone bring up the subject of how someone else should be killed. I'm still not sure what the best response is to this statement. I don't want to share my politics with a complete stranger, and I don't want to do anything to further any American stereotypes they already have. However, I want to convey how this statement is inappropriate and makes me uncomfortable.

—Speechless in Europe

Prudence goes all you-could-point-out-that-Cheney-is-next-in-line, but that's thin gruel indeed. She also says with an embarrassing lack of tongue in cheek:

One discouraging feature of today's political discourse is the assumption that if you and someone else share particular characteristics (a love of music), then you certainly must be like-minded on all things (the desirability of killing the president).

Vraiment ?

I frankly doubt that SiE is truly beset on a regular, or even semi-regular basis, by homicidal flautists dreaming blood, but then it is also true that European artists, in my experience, self-evince more self-regard and less self-satire than their American counterparts, so perhaps there really is a vast, orchestral conspiracy to undo and unmake the American president. Were I SiE, I'd aver to my would-be assassin colleagues that the best way to deal with his problem and ours would be to lock Merkel, Chirac, and Bush in a room with a single television camera. They'd tear each other to shreds as they each tried desperately to center themselves in the viewfinder.

Progress Is Our Product

Via Roy Edroso: Jeff Jarvis, a rocky planet orbiting a minor star in the Microsoft arm of our spiral galaxy, revels in the eRevolution in iPermanence and sets forth a shirt in the paradigm of consciousness. It is not, mothers and fathers, so much that the endless infotainment bombardment of our modern times rots your children’s brains so much as it composts them. From the warm, soft pile of eggshells, chicken bones, and carrot peelings: New consciousness, awake; arise!

So the kids these days can listen to music, text message, and IM all at once. Look, ma, no hands! Twenty thousand years ago, some cave-individual scrawled in wonder on the walls that the newest generation could use the mortar and the pestle at the same motherfucking time. There is nothing new under the sun. The question must be asked: Is our children learning? Oh brave, new world!

The odd leap is in Jarvis' Star-Ledger source material: from "kids are patriotic" to "kids don't read newspapers," the clear implication being that by removing themselves from Bad News and allowing only the dawn-lit glow of Progress to wash over them, our youth have succeeded in erecting a fierce barrier to the depredations of reality that their bra-burning parents and International ANSWER-joining older siblings never managed. If only I’d never listened to Ma when she shouted “Turn that racket down!” from the base of the stairs, the siren song of Morrisey’s laments would remain the preoccupation of my moral imagination, and of sorrow I’d only think: “Under the iron bridge we kiiiiised, and although I ended up with sore lips . . .”

The uncried cri de coeur: Stop paying attention! Meanwhile it is Jarvis’ generation, or mine at very least, penning the headline: “Face the Nation: Demure Madonna and Anxious President.” That’s precisely the sort of post-categorical bullshit that Jarvis is praising. Smiley face. Wink. Lol. Ttyl.

Great Charters

A diplomat says the pooch has been screwed (in Arabic no less!) and then walks it back as a translation error. A general says that when he called for more soldiers to pacify restive Baghdad, he was speaking in some sort of post-Latinate subjunctive conditional mood which indicates any subsequent declarative to mean precisely the opposite of what it means, until such time as precisely the opposite meaning is spoken directly, at which point the rules revert, the double-down is off the table, the scratched 8-ball zips back out of the pocket and onto the felt, the homerun unhits itself, the dead awake, the rain rises, the sun runs easterly, and the war, by god, wars onward, or wears onward, as the case may be.

The men and women of The Media are marginally less blinkered these days, and at least put "clarification" in doubting quotation marks when an opposite-day email arrives to disclaim the plain speech of the day before, and Democrats, at least so long as they remain in the nominal opposition, cry "Lawd God" like a racist archetype in a Penn Warren novel every time one of these laughable walk-backs occur, but it remains questionable, by which I mean false, to assume that such contradictions percolate into the general consciousness or conscience of the American people. When the gods of nations dispensed intelligence, they gave the United States a fixed share, so that when our nation was young and our population small we packed more men of genius than any state in historical memory, but as we grew, so diminished our smarts, until today, just past 300 million poor souls, the average share price, so to speak, is in penny-stock territory, which explains the persistent popularity, relatively speaking, of such American institutions as the Democrats, the Republicans, Dancing with the Stars, the Olde Country Buffet, Tom Friedman, and the waterbed.

Which is to say that while the factional fortunes of America's political parties slosh from one side to the other like the contents of a waterbed on prom night, it is not the skill and acuity of the slobs ostensibly on top that directs the modest tide, but rather dead weight and flailing. I've seen too much triumphalism lately. I've seen too much grinning at better Democratic fortunes, too many suggestions that people are "waking up" to the GOP's corruption, the war's mire, the economy's false and unmade promises. I've seen too many otherwise decently skeptical people snatch the passing wreckage of hope and cling to it against drowning, as if Nan Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Tabernacle Choir will come to power representing a shift in American opinion instead of what they actually do and will represent: the drift of America's insufficient attention.

In my recent perusal of Die TäglichKos, I came across some speculatin' on the Donkle's plans for the Congress, should he take it. First: "Break the link between lobbyists and legislation," as if there is a mystical bond which, once severed, will forever free the clones from their psychic puppetmasters. Second: Raise the minimum wage. Third: Negotiate drug prices.

Until someone says: Take out the Ouija and raise the wailing spirits of Runnymede, then, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest that the battle hasn't even been joined.

The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital

Working on things. In the meantime, here is a poem by Delmore Schwartz:

The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital


The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aquaducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation's celebration.

"Call us what you will: we are made such by love."
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?

For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only heart, at harp o'clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus - and returning as suddenly . . .

I Feel Good. Duh-nu-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuhhh. Like I Knew I Would.

The problem with the GAP, from the perspective of a fag, is not so much that the clothes are ugly and unflattering, nor that little Asian children are chained to sewing machines and forced to sew to the rhythm of a DeMille extra banging the animal-skin drum in the aft of the galley, but rather that the underwear are made of such cheap cotton that the crotch blows out as soon as you put them on, leaving the dick to hang as if you're wearing natty boxer shorts, instead of nestling, properly supported, so that the twink, bear, hot jock, etc. whom you've been staring at all night can have something to stare back at when you casually lean your back against the bar, arch out your pelvis . . .

Anyhoo, C.R. Hardy, "a mother of four small adorable kids and a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard University," the sort of gaggy self-authored bio that makes the membership of Actor's Equity sound like Ambrose Bierce, is distressed because the GapKids in Cambridge, MA has gone Dodo in favor of a GapBody, which she seems to believe is a store dedicated to "sexy" clothing, although it is, in fact, dedicated to the underdeveloped scent preferences of the adolescent high-school theater club homo, who goes in for show tunes, embarrassed mutual masturbation, and too much sweet-citrus in his body sprays. This all has to do with Tom Wolfe's recent discovery that college students will put their penisis an 'ginas in/on anything, a discovery made after may months of dedicated research that could've been accomplished just as easily by ponying up the three bucks to rent American Pie.

C.R. Hardy finds sociological insight in the fact that whereas she is not only a graduate student, but also a roiling primordial soup of human fecundity, a cauldron of life-essence awaiting a spark, a bearer of broods, some of her fellow grad students prefer phallo-vaginal stimulation without the necessary consequence of a wee bairn, or a dozen of 'em. She describes several encounters that an ordinary person would consider Genre: Pleasant Encounter with Stranger, while Ms. Hardy finds them more along the lines of Hitler Sterilizing Retards. Someone sees her, great with child, pushing a double stroller and asks good-naturedly how she's going to get around with a third. Here is the upshot:

“Didn’t you think over the transportation issue before you got pregnant again?” As if getting around by stroller would ever figure into my calculations over whether to have a third child.

Perhaps that’s just the way in which blue America looks at childbearing — as a cost-benefit analysis performed with the most rudimentary and imbecilic tools of measurement. The benefits are somewhat obscure: How, for example, do you measure the benefits for society of a child that grows up to join the Sisters of Charity of Mother Theresa, ministering to the poorest of the poor around the world? Or how do you measure the benefit to society of a child that will spend 18 years studying and 50 or more years thinking, producing, working, and paying taxes? Or what about the child that will grow up to cure cancer, negotiate peace in the Middle East, or discover a renewable clean source of fuel? The fact is, it’s impossible and silly even to think about it. What’s the value of a human life, considered ex ante?

But the costs — oh, the costs are so easy to calculate! So many diapers, so much formula, so many inconvenient trips around Harvard Square with one extra little guy who doesn’t fit into my double stroller.

This all leads somehow to forced abortion, gay marriage (Look, Ma, no kids!), and illegal immigration. Presumably also to the Death's Head and the crematoria, but I wouldn't want to put words in the mouth of a prego saint. The argument, so far as argument exists, seems to be that if a young couple decides they can't yet afford another child, or perhaps simply don't fucking want one, then they must balance that harsh, utilitarian materialism against the not-unlikely chance that little Suzy will save the world from famine and little Johnny "grow up to cure cancer, negotiate peace in the Middle East, or discover a renewable clean source of fuel." Or maybe all three. At once and with one hand. I mean, what's the value of one potato chip or lottery ticket, ex ante? All things may bear miraculous fruit; must we therefore acquire each indefinitely and ad infinitum?

The Kampf, my friends, without the Kultur, is what we used to call spinning one's wheels.

Doing Stuff in Order to Achieve Things at Certain Times

"Iraqi leaders must step up to achieve key political milestones," Khalilzad said. "Key political forces must make difficult decisions in the coming weeks to reach agreement on a number of issues."

Over at WaPo, Debbi Wilgoren and Howard Schneider write another one of those easy-bake Iraq recipes, this time entitled, "U.S. Officials: Iraqi Security Could Be Ready in 12-18 Months." They will be ready for putting a stop to conflict, disarming militias, encouraging a "national compact," bringing parties to the table, self-sufficiency, bridging divides, taking steps, building timetables, making committments, easing situations, coming together. They will be ready, in other words, to take precisely the same vague, tenuous steps they took prior to their last elections and constitutions, and to precisely the same ends, which is to say no end at all. Were it not so ordinary, I'd call it extraordinary that some of our nation's principle reporters on US policy abroad report all this without mention of the fact that the same story appeared last year, the year before that, the year before that.

The most fantastical quotation comes in the final paragraphs of the article:

In response to a question from a reporter, Khalilzad said that the current situation -- however bleak -- was better for Iraq than the reign of Saddam Hussein.

"During Saddam, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis were killed as a result of government policy," Khalilzad said. "Now these killings are taking place by the terrorists, by death squad, and the government is trying to bring that to an end."

Translated: it is better to be killed by not-the-government than by the government. It remains tendentious, to say the least, to continue to claim that Hussein's dictatorship was deadlier than the currently ongoing internecine conflict. But why be coy? It remains false. And though I'm rarely one to offer up defenses of centralized governments, I will say this: even the most mercurial dicatatorial power is more predictable than the chaos of a multipolar civil war. In the most viciously Stalinist absolutism, there are nonetheless steps you can take to mitigate your chances of disappearing; there are nonetheless actions you can take to ameliorate the threat of death or imprisonment; there are nonetheless systems of oppression and repression that can be gamed and understood. None of these offers more than a tissue of protection, perhaps, but there it is, nonetheless. And even if you don't take such steps, even if you engage in revolutionary subversion, at least you know, when the black-gloved hands come for you in the middle of the night, why it is they've come.

I've been harping on the same point too much recently, but it really bears repeating: At this point, even offering up as a conversational caveat that yes, for the thousandth time, Saddam Hussein was a "murderous dictator," is engaging the common moral cowardice, based in exceptionalism, that says, No matter what the U.S. does, its actions retain some measure of inherent righteousness. If we hold any continued moral superiority over Iraq's former dictator, it's only because we haven't--yet!--launched a bloody regional conflict with Iran, but, hey, we're working on it.

Kos!

The first impression is that it is very orange. The borders are orange. The hyperlinks are orange. Below the MSNBC banner ad, the masthead carries an all-orange picture of what appears to be a newsie raising old glory in a vaguely socialist-realist pose, the sort of thing you'd expect on a playbill for a revival of Waiting for Lefty. There's an ad exhorting purchase of the paperback Crashing the Gates, which "is one of the two best books I've read in years about the Democratic Party, its myriad problems and challenges," a blurb that implies more time--years!--spent pursuing explications of the most self-evident phenomena in American politics than anyone should spend. Below that this morning is an open thread dedicated to a YouTube video "of Ned Lamont walking to the debate site." Perhaps that sounds oddly prosaic for its own video feature. I assure you, it is not.

It begins with bagpipes and bagpipers in full kilt regalia. A crowd follows with signs, clapping and cheering. At 0:19 seconds, what appears to be a large crucifix passes, carried by someone in the crowd. Then a chanting crowd: "WE WANT NED!" Then a pickup truck with its flashers on, driving very slowly, with some sort of papier-mâché model in the bed, though it never gets close enough to make out. The effect is of the local lodge of Scotch Rite Freemasons taking a group of Democratic supporters through the Stations of the Cross. The header text crows, "Lieberman can only dream of generating this much attention and excitement over anything he did." If I were to dream such a parade, meanwhile, I'd seriously consider cutting back on the spicy food before bed. But it impressed the Kossites. "I can't believe that Lieberman is winning," seems to be the common thread in the thread, and this from a site that frontpages poll numbers all day. ("I don't believe the polls." "Wait till the real poll--the election!" That sort of thing.)

I followed a link to a recommended "diary" entry titled "Gullible Kossacks make asses of themselves." This sounds promising, I thought. It begins: "The TANG scandal should have taught us that we should not read stuff into stories that simply are not there." Not promising. I followed another link to something in the more panegyrical vein, which is the more common and accepted form of self-expression on DailyKos. "Thank You, Markos." "Forgive the title," writes nyceve, "it's what I feel. And if you don't like it, just imagine life without Daily Kos. Too awful to contemplate, right?" It's Heaven's Gate territory, and it degernerates:

For some time, I've wanted to write a diary, simply to thank Markos for all he has done to change the course of history. Make no mistake, history is being shaped here, every single day.

Daily Kos is a lifeline, a megaphone, a platform to press for deeply necessary change in the United States. Use it well, because millions of Americans are hurting.

I suppose I'm also saying for example to anyone who has a problem with say, the banner, forget about it. If Markos needs twelve banners so our voices will be heard, then let's have twelve banners

And lest I sound too emotional, I recognize as Markos says, DKos is not about him--he's correct. But though Daily Kos has his brilliant imprimatur stamped all over it, his voice, his megaphone is but one of many.

This leads to the next point. Are they listening? They damn well better, because we mean business.

A lifeline, a megaphone, and a platform. A bowl of shells, a spoonful of pudding, a pizza oven. A rocketship, and iceberg, a pine tree. It ends beatifically:

Thank you again Markos, for giving us the opportunity to take back our country.

That one was admirably covered by Michael J. Smith of Stop Me Before I Vote Again:

I. Lost Eden

Howard Dean may not be the very worst way to start your day, but anything worse would have to involve physical injury. His speech -- greeted with great enthusiasm, of course -- was interesting chiefly as a little tour through the alternative thought universe inhabited by liberal Democrats. Howard kept talking about "taking back" the country, "taking back" the party, "taking us back" to the high ideals -- of John F. Kennedy, forsooth. He must have used this phrase "take back" a hundred times. He even said the upheavals of the 1960s were an exercise in "taking back" America. He said we want open and honest government --or no, he said we want it "back."

Now this is very bizarre, when you think about it. When did "we" ever have the Democratic Party, or the country? When did they get taken away? By whom? How did that happen? Open and honest government -- when did we ever have that? Never, you say? Then how can we get it "back"? When did we live in this Eden that Howard wants to restore?

If God did not exist, Candide observes, man would have to invent him. This imaginary former state of grace is a necessary invention too. The Kosniks know that sometime in the last half-century, the Republicans acquired a decisive upper hand, and they know the country is going to hell in a handbasket. So far so good; but then they make a false step. They start with a conclusion -- restoring the Democrats to power would make things better -- and for there they reason backwards to the necessary premise, namely that we once enjoyed all these things they quite rightly want, and we lost them when the Republicans took over.

That's how it works for the audience, I think. But it doesn't seem likely that Howard Dean himself, or his colleagues in the Party apparatus, are subtle enough to have crafted such an appeal on the basis of their deep psychological insight. No, this "take back" mantra, for them, is simply a kind of Freudian slip. The takeback they have in mind is simply to take back a place at the trough for their office-seeking snouts. So the wish-fulfilment dream of the troops, and the unconscious self-revelation of the pols, dovetail in one of those beautiful, overdetermined conjunctures that nobody could ever have designed.

Smith doesn't come right out and say it, but there's a name for a political ideology based on a projected, utopian past that can only be reacquired through political acts whereby the cultural radicals are ousted and an imaginary old order restored: conservative.

Kos and his followers imagine themselves bolsheviks of Democratic liberalism, but their political ideology, such as it is, is deeply conservative. It serves up a unidentifiable, unspecified time of general well-being and social harmony, a status quo in which the only change that occured was "progress" in an exceedingly vague sense of a general improvement to the social and economic wellbeing of the society as a whole. It locates the rupture with that vision in certain political triumphs of its opponents, whom it accuses of revolutionarism. It dedicates its political actions to the recapture of such a past, which was taken away, and which must now be taken back. Things were better before, and once we go back, they'll be better in the future again.

In that confusion of verb tenses you find the abject failure of the dreaming insurgents of the Democratic party.

Obama, Antichrist.

Oh dear. It appears that some speculation, if I may apply a word that usually applies to a higher function of the mind, is afoot regarding the possibility that Barack Obama is the charmingly Tolkeinian Antichrist.

i wouldnt be suprised if he wins in 2008 and i wouldnt be suprised if he gets killed and comes back to life

Since this blog is all about drawing fine distinctions, I'm going to wade into the ontological shallows: if you "wouldn't be surprised" when someone "gets killed and comes back to life," then the coming of the antichrist is the least of your motherfucking problems.

Get Out of Africa, You African

Stipulated: I don't care for Barack Obama.

Anyway, Obama's got a golden autobiography, and because he is the only black Senator in America, and because he's one of the only people of direct (by which I mean, within a single generation) African descent to acquire high elective office in the U.S. in living memory, he's also something of a celebrity in his father's native Kenya. So in September he goes to Kenya, and other than basking in the adoration, he says some nice, hard-to-argue-with things about African governments overcoming corruption and African economies benefitting more from working to develop industry and thus trade with the rest of the world than merely waiting for more handouts, which encourage corruption, and back down into the circle. Here was Marquis (read: Markwiss) Kipling Westminster Abbeyshire's loutish humbug:

Radio Derb on Obama [John Derbyshire]

(Sept. 8 broadcast): "Here is the U.S. Senate's only black member, Barack Obama, on a visit to Kenya. Senator Obama's Dad came from a village in Kenya, so naturally the Senator has a sentimental attachment to the place. Since Obama Senior actually abandoned the family when Obama Junior was two years old, you'd think the Senator had even more of a sentimental attachment to Kansas, the native place of his mother, who actually went to the trouble of raising him. But hey, this is America, where one black parent entitles you to victim points, even if that parent didn't stick around very long. You could ask Halle Berry. So... here's the junior Senator from Illinois, in Kenya, lecturing the Kenyans on the need to crack down on corruption. Let me just say that again: Senator Obama went to Africa bringing a message of clean, honest government with him . . . all the way from Chicago."

You can only care about a place if you was born there, laddies. How Obama is hereby claiming "victim" points escapes me. It seems, rather, that Obama is using his African heritage as a neat justification for speaking harshly to Africans about their own messes and mires. It seems, rather, that he's saying very directly: you will never be empowered by claiming victimhood.

But not enough for the Corner's parish priest, who cannot abide an uppity nigger, and slams Obama not only for going to Africa and talking, but also for what I presume are some sort of Chicagoan roots. Jokes about political corruption in Chicago have all the currency of jokes about political corruption in . . . "Kansas, the native place of his mother." Maybe instead of smearing Obama with his once-and-future residence in, after all, the third largest American city, Derbyshire could smear him with the Pendergast machine. Obama and Harry Truman, tools of the boss, slaves to the Democratic machine.

All I Can Say Is

It must be totally fucking awesome to be Victor Davis Hanson. Had he been at the helm in 279 BC, Plutarch would've reported rather differently:

"The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that it was totally awesome, and quit harshing my fucking buzz, man. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war."

. . . in which the game of king of the hill continues . . .

Kevin Drum asks, "I wonder how long it will take America to recover from George Bush's uniquely blinkered and self-righteous brand of ineptitude?"

For Democratics and those Republicans who've turned against the war, it's a common and, apparently, quite pressing question. Often the related question--What does "recover" mean in this context?--finds itself unasked and unanswered, but Drum is at least honest and a moderately more rigorous writer, if not thinker, than his friends among America's so-called liberals, and he spells it out neatly a paragraph later:

So how long will it take--after George Bush has left office--for our power and influence on the world stage to return to the level it was at in 2001? When I'm in a good mood, I figure five years. Realistically, ten years is probably more like it. And when I'm in a bad mood? Don't ask. It's really all very depressing.

How long will it take until we can return to the top-dog days when the rest of the world hewed, or at least made like it was hewing, to our every national whim?

For the following I'll probably stand accused of calumnious decontextualization, but frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn. For all the cry and bluster about the human toll of America's current war regime, the principle concern of the mainstream opponents of the George W. Bush foreign policy apparatus is that it has diminished American power. Whereas some of us--libertarians and far leftists principally--opposed the foreign meddling from the outset as immoral and illegal, the mainstays of the current opposition opposed it at first only because they felt that the specific public justifications were dishonest and later because it additionally didn't work. I remain entirely unconvinced that the majority of Democratic opposition to the war in Iraq would have either materialized or lasted long if Baghdad were less bloody today, even though, as Arthur points out to infinity and beyond, it was murder with the first death, a crime increasing only in magnitude as time went by.

The rationale is that American democracy remains the number-one model for free society, and we must lead, as they saying goes, by example. I ask you: given the current fruits of American democracy, and who can honestly argue that the current government is anything other than the native fruit of that thorny tree, how on earth do you propose that it would be valuable for the US to reacquire whatever influence it may have lost? Shall we turn every other country on to our example, so that a few centuries hence each and every nation on earth can be ruled by a blood-soaked moron who dreams the King James but doesn't understand a word because they all talk so fuckin' funny?

Mistakes Were Made

Matthew Yglesias writes about Fred Kaplan's analysis of the newest Lancet study of the excess death rate in Iraq. He quotes Kaplan's lament:

Let's say that the study is way off, off by a factor of 10 or five—in other words, that the right number isn't 655,000 but something between 65,500 and 131,000. That is still a ghastly number—a number that, apart from all other considerations, renders this war a monumental mistake.

I'm so tired of this exculpatory euphemism. It doesn't make the war a mistake, nor yet a monumental one. It makes this war a crime.

It is the persistent delusion of American liberals, from the perceptive and relatively non-aligned Yglesias to the Democratic bubbleheads at Daily Kos, that our invasion and occupation of Iraq represents a policy error, that no matter how miserable in execution and tragic in outcome, no matter the lies that undergird every second of the planning and "selling" of the war, the war itself was ultimately no more or less than one wrongly selected option of the many options for how the United States could have, would have, and should have engaged with that abstraction we call "the world." To them, it represents a bad policy advocated by lucky electoral victors, supported by the opposition (at first, at least) for unseemly political gain. It was an error with poor consequences, but it can be corrected by a "change of course," by setting withdrawal dates or benchmarks, by offering the Iraqis a plebiscite to ask, in the immortal words of The Clash, "Should I stay or should I go?"

Well the war wasn't a mistake, a bad outcome from a bad policy drawn from a shelf of possible policies. It was a crime. It is a crime. It was an act of aggression by a stronger nation against a weaker one. It was the destruction of a society--and how dare we even comfort ourselves with bromides about the repression and political tyranny of that society: it was not ours; it was not ours to smash and do away with. The war was a crime. It requires punishment and it requires repentence. It isn't a mistake to be rectified. There is no policy that will make it better. There is no other course to take. The tanker has run aground. The oil is already in the water and lapping onto the beach.

To the extent that political power has long since devolved away from "We, the People," as they saying goes, there remain arguments about the degrees of guilt borne by each of us for the American crime of invading Iraq. But there should be no confusion about the fact that this crime belongs to all of us nonetheless. If you read of the postwar German population, you find that even those Germans who behaved the most heroically, who resisted the most assiduously, who saved the most lives, even they felt compelled to participate in those acts of repentence, contrition, and self-examination that continue to this day. None of us did enough. None of us is doing enough, and it's too late for us to ever do enough, but if we wish to claim one shred of moral dignity in our future, for our society and for ourselves, then the imperative is this: to ask forgiveness and to reconcile ourselves to the likelihood that it will never come. To claim fault. To claim guilt. To claim disgrace.

The war was not an a monumental mistake. It was a violation of every standard of law, ethics, humility, and humanity. It was a crime, and we are guilty.