Challenges

Justin has written a definitive account of the significance of the so-called purge of US Attorneys, which is that it’s not significant. The point of interest, if there is one, is entirely the position of the President in the matter, which is to withhold the testimony of his aides, or, if they are to testify, to require that it be done in secret and without oaths. Jon Stewart summarized it neatly: “Why can’t Karl Rove go up to Capitol Hill, put his hand on a bible, and tell the fucking truth?” Stranger things have happened, but not many.

After dismissing this tawdry Washington snit, Justin mines a telling quotation from General Peter Pace, the jaw line currently presiding over our inability to preside over Iraq. The General gives the Defense Department version of “Fuck it, Dude, let’s go bowling,” but instead of pooping off to the lanes, he lists a series of “challenges” for the US military, by which he means countries of course, many of which we have already bombed, invaded, massacred, coup’d, contained, controlled, or otherwise fucked every day of the week and twice on Sundays for at least as many decades as George Bush has fingers, toes, and prehensile tail.

Now Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both believe that The Troops™ should stay in Iraq forever, although they differ on the numbers. John Edwards is less clear, but presumably also means something other than withdrawal when he says withdrawal. All agree on Crisis: Iran, and despite some noises about “shifting” troops to Afghanistan “to finish the job,” all three share the general que sera sera attitude to that particular fuck-up, everyone having basically conceded already that the gentlemen who played casus belli in our little drama, 9-11 Changed Everything, have long since shuffled over to “the tribal regions of Pakistan.” In Pakistan, meanwhile, it seems increasingly likely that Pervez Musharraf, our presently favored strongman, is going to go the way of the Bhuto, to be replaced by a government that actively supports our pre-post-Saddam Hitlers of the Month, rather than merely offering tacit refuge and safe passage as does the current regime.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the halls of government, from the janitors on up, with the lonely exception of Dennis Kucinich, who remains a Democrat for unfathomable reasons, who doesn’t affirm that it’s important to “send a message” that we “won’t abandon the Middle East,” to which the residents of the region think the Persian or Arabic equivalents of oy vey is mir.

Jim says he’s not as hard on the Donkle as I am because, timorousness aside, at very least some light now penetrates some of the murkier corners of the Bush Administration, but I must honestly ask what good that does any of us. Jim basically shares my feelings about the Democratic platform of more effectively managed imperialism, and even if they surprise us and do erect some sort of impediment to an Iranian conflict (doubtful, since many of them quite clearly favor one, but for argument’s sake), there remains the essential fact of American military bases in Iraq forever, and everywhere else on earth besides, with a Democratic Party that will, in 2008, face a nation increasingly "demoralized” by its “lack of success” in Iraq, increasingly conflicted about whether or not it “should play an active role in world affairs.” Expect some Reagan-style tough-guy campaigns against smaller, even more harmless non-enemies should Democrats take the full reins of government in 2008. Our only hope for avoiding such conflicts lies in the bottomless hypocrisy of the Republican Party, which may yet go back to its Clinton-era hatred of “nation building” and humanitarian aerial campaigns and the lack of “exit strategies.”

I’ll be eager to see how the fabled Netroots responds to that development. Personally, I suspect that the big-boy Donkle bloggers will be singing a very different tune than the current antiwar anthem when a President Obama or H. Clinton or Edwards decides to show off our indispensibility.

Electric Sheep

John Bolton is "damned proud" of blocking a cease-fire or truce in Lebanon during the Israeli bombing campaign. Jonathan Shwarz explains that while this would make him monster in most scenarios, "forunately they're highly lifelike animatronic robots." It wasn't bombing, it was retirement!

No Comment

Gag.

At Least It's an Ethos

"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source."

-Peter D. Keisler, Guvmint Lawyer

I know I'm just a crazy faggot anarcho-libertarian gasbag, ever-searching for a dream of a chimera of an hallucination of a utopia, one-half bathhouse and one-half Galt's Gulch, full of selfish bastards who care for nothing but low taxes, little bother, and lowered impediments to fornication in general, but honestly, is there anything left on this not-so-good and not-so-green earth that the United States federal government doesn't claim within its infinite damned ambit? Is there but one thing, one thought, one action, somewhere out beyond the horizon of the observable universe, curled in a lost corner of a galaxy of dark matter, that is so bland, mundane, and unimpeachably unobjectionable that a government lawyer, if he should encounter it on a starship ride some day hence, would give it a glance and a shrug and go on, conceding that it's not really his problem? I holler all day about The War on the World, but it is this nonsense, this clean-living, prohibitionist, grimy, concrete-apartment, Soviet, police-state hackery that fills me with the real dread for the future of the ever-more-bovine American people. I tell my vegetarian friends, the few that I have been able to keep and abide anyway, that the real flaw in their reasoning is the cows. "When the last steak has been foresworn, what are you going to do with the cows?" I ask. "Have you ever seen a cow in the wild? You're talking about consigning the species to extinction." That, friends, is the fear that lurks in the last pity-producing nerve in my curdled libertarian brain: that when at last the cattle prods are cast down and the gates are thrown open and the rails of the fences cleaved to rot in the fields, we will munch up the rest of the grass on the pasture, chew our cud, and die.

I know that more even than Drugs, Which Are Bad, the Children, Who Are Our Future, must at all costs, unto the ends of the republic and doomsday, be protected from precocious knowledge of the pleasurable functions of penises and vaginas, that to allow a minor to understand even vaguely that there exist categories of physical intimacy that they also may one day come to engage in and enjoy, is to cause them irrevocable harm, for it will stunt forever their capacity to feel ashamed of their natural desires. I know that, worse yet, to allow a youth to see a photograph or video clip of a couple of humans doing the same damned thing that little Jack and Jill can see--and have seen--in any hamster cage or on any dog walk or on any nature show, is the actual, literal equivalent of raping them, torturing them to death, and dumping their vivisectioned bodies into fields and dumpsters all over town. And yet.

I'm glad this minor stone in the edifice of the state will likely be struck, but the very fact that it's become an issue, as goes the saying, is insane. The streets are full of potholes. The power grid stinks. There must be a dam to open somewhere, a ribbon to cut with giant scissors, a Rotary Club in search of a speaker, a puppy-saving orphan in need of an honor. Jesus, Mary, and Mohammed: If we must have a government, can't it busy itself with something useful and unobtrusive.

Bastinado

Who could have imagined, in September 2001, that one of the masterminds of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would make his confession and the world would hear it with indifference?

So wails Anne Applebaum, the lone lady manning the oars of the Post's opinion page, where almost all the rowers sit on the same side of the boat with predictable results. Hell, Anne, I could've imagined it, and the Malign Mistress Sontag could have imagined it, and so could Ol' Marginal Noam, but my offices look down on the Allegheny, not the Potomac nor the Hudson, and no one who knew the US practiced torture before September 2001 and knew it'd practice ever harder thereafter counts anyway, moral judgment being an option open only to the wide-eyed and incredulous in this great republic of ours, which has lost its innocence more times than a a teenage hooker with an urge to the Evangel in the off hours of the day. (A prayer: Lord, do not save the innocent, but save us from them.)

That's deserved gloating. Here is the real answer: If you cared about a confession in the first place, you were already betting on the horse named Torture. Americans have a curiously Soviet affection for the confession. Maybe medieval is the better word. The spectacle of it appeals to us. We are not a proceduralist people by nature, the process of justice appeals to us less and less every day. A confession can have evidentiary value, of course, but that's not what Applebaum is talking about. Nor is she talking about a judicial process determining guilt and passing sentence. She's talking about the cathartic circus of some Arab in shackles saying, Yes, I brought the towers down, Inshallah. Then we can all feel better than the animals, and that purpose is served.

But we already knew whodunnit. It was no mystery. They claimed responsibility. They announced it to the world. Was Shaikh Mohammed the "mastermind"? Maybe, maybe not. That fact is irrelevant. We understood him to be a member of the organization that undertook to attack the United States on September 11. We understood his significance in that organization. So, to circle back, it was not confession-as-evidence, confession-as-information that Applebaum and her ilk wanted. It was Confession in the old medieval sense, in the Inquisition sense, in the thumbscrew sense: confession as a spiritual acknowledgement of guilt; confession as submission. I'll repeat myself: they wanted to see a broken Muslim in shackles, abased before American might, now at last harmless. They wanted what torture produces, but they're made squeamish by the fact of the torture, and they regret that something already sick and discredibatle was made more so by the grotesquely public facts of its execution.

Bong Hits

Justice Antonin Scalia, ridiculing the notion that schools should have to tolerate speech that seems to support illegal activities, asked about a button that says, "Smoke Pot, It's Fun."

Or, he wondered, should the court conclude that only speech in support of violent crime can be censored. "'Extortion Is Profitable,' that's okay?" Scalia asked.

-"Bong Hits for Jesus," the Times-

If you stand next to a man wearing an "I'm with Stupid," tee-shirt, and the arrow is pointing in your direction, can you sue him for defamation? Is the tee-shirt a positive affirmation that he is, in fact, with stupid? Does the arrow present a concrete indication that the most proximate individual is stupid-designate? Would such defamation be considered libel, because the message is textual and durable, or is it slander, because the act of dressing and the proximity of the bearer of the shirt to the object of the arrow is gestural?

The issue before the Supreme Court is whether or not a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," displayed during school hours but off school property, can be censored by school officials. Actually, the issue is whether or not display of said banner can be punished by school officials after the fact of its display, but that's probably a distinction without a difference. The question, as always, is whether or not students in public schools are subject to a different standard for free expression, and whether or not those limits extend beyond the boundaries of school property. Can students be punished for parodying or insulting teachers on personal websites? Can students be punished for fighting when not at school? The courts have given plenty of contradictory answers, full of expediencies and caveats, but that's what modern supreme courts seem to prefer--clarity and enunciated principles are not their current preferences.

Maybe that isn't the real issue, though. Maybe the real issue is, as averred by Chief Justice Roberts: "I thought we wanted our schools to teach something, including something besides just basic elements, including the character formation and not to use drugs." Presumably these "basic elements" are things like reading, writing, and 'rithematic. Science and history. Biology, geology, trigonometry. How a 4-year college degree with a couple courses in pedagogy, a state certification, and a union card confer expertise in "character" is perhaps the question. Why our schools, which already labor to teach kids anything at all, and which seem stretched beyond their capacities when it comes to getting an 8th-grader to do long-division and a 10th-grader to read something more complex than a heavily-redacted--strike that, an "abridged" version of some boilerplate classic, Huck Finn without the "niggers" or Anne Frank without the sex, should spend time trying to teach little Suzy and Johnny how to be good little Americans is another relevant line of inquiry. To paraphrase the inimitable Coen Brothers creation, "Who's the fuckin' conservatives here?" There was a time when things like sex and character and moral standing were to be taught "in the home," or "in the church," or in some other permutation of the natural community, the civic space, "communities of faith," and suchlike. The idea that "our schools," by which we mean our public schools, by which, in the conservative imagination, we mean our government more or less directly, are the agents through which "character" and "values" are transmitted was for a long time viewed with suspicion--rightly, in my mind. Certainly school is a place to learn some social discipline and basic skills for functioning in a civic society, but the notion that they are equally a venue for molding the morals of the youth should provoke some sidelong glances, to say the least.

The idea likewise that "don't do drugs" should be a curricular imperative is distinctly odd. It's one thing for schools to prohibit drugs on their campuses, and it's probably harmless--if useless--for, say, health classes to prosyletize the bland advantages of clean living, even if they're preaching these days to rooms full of mood-altered test tubes: "our children, the future." It's quite another to suggest that "just say no" ranks with the transmission of the rudiments of knowledge: literacy, numeracy, some basic history, the elementary principles of physical and biological sciences. It's a pretty staggering claim, from a Chief Justice of the United States.

But it's Scalia's tee-shirt nonsense that jumps out at me the most, because I ask you to imagine that a student walks into a school wearing a shirt bearing the label "Extortion Is Profitable." No sane administrator or teacher would see that as an incitement for students to extort each other; no one would read that as positive advocacy of extortion as a career or lifestyle. No one would suspend that student, and that case would never come to the Supreme Court. No one is hysteical about extortion. There is no "War on Extorition." The Chief Justice does not believe that schools should make it a central concern to teach our children not to extort each other. As for "Smoke Pot, It's Fun," well, it is. Truth, at last, in advertising. Still, because this case has to do with drugs, it will likely spin on some permutation of the unique evil that is addiction, even though the drug in question is not addictive. If the kid had been a little wiser, he would have quoted General Washington:

Make the most of the Indian hemp seed,
and sow it everywhere!

The Reuinion Tour

My loneliness
is killin' me.
I must confess
I still believe.

-Britney Spears-

Incroyable mais vrai ! Waleed bin Attash, "a suspected key al-Qaida operative," and "the scion of a prominent terrorist family," has confessed in Guantanamo to a bunch of terrorist shit!

Bin Attash also confessed to being the Lindbergh Baby, Martin Bormann, Tim McVeigh's "others unknwon," and the little-known "Third Anarachist" in the popular early-century ensemble, Sacco and Vanzetti (feat. Attaci).

Simple Math

There was a two- or three-year moment when George W. Bush made a stab at oratory. A Canadian brass band named David Frum wrote speeches full of the sort of vague biblicalisms that Americans mistake for eloquence. Bush played them like a reasonably talented mouth-harpist confronted with a Sousa score. There was an unmistakable hometown enthusiasm for these efforts, the way there is a certain homegrown enthusiasm for high school musicals and losing local football teams.

That moment passed with the declining fortunes of the material counterparts to his slogans, and Frum, by then, had departed for the greener pastures of private sector greenbacks. I don't know who's been writing the President's speeches since then, but they have lost their grandiloquent, millennial boom. I suspect he's taken a greater interest in his own speeches, because they have the blank, blinking, undergraduate quality of his extermporaneous remarks. In this most recent speech, asking for more time, more money, more patience, more perserverance, and a generally blinder eye to be turned by the American people, there is the sense of reading a freshman thesis: the absence of an idea puffed into a thousand words. Each sentence has a subject and a verb, and each paragraph has a topic sentence. It opens assertively and ends sentimentally, but neither the beginning nor the end bears any particular relation to the airy center, where declarations float like particles in a suspension.

Toward the conclusion of his speech, he says, "Prevailing in Iraq is not going to be easy. Gen. Petraeus says that the environment in Iraq is the most challenging that he has seen in his more than 32 years of service." Do the math. This is the most substantive moment in the whole song, an unwitting, but perfectly fitting, summation of everything that's wrong with the Iraqi venture. 32 years later, a man not paying attention to the lesson being learned on the embassy roof is resolutely opposed to the possibility that the same lesson haunts America's steps in Iraq.

Reductio ad nihilum

The Washington Post editorial board rejects both induction and deduction In Re: the matter of Iraq. I feel like Joe Pesci as Vinny Gambini:

Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than any place on the face of the earth? [...] Perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove. Were these magic grits? Did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?