Litigate

Believing that the costs of litigation are relevant in the slightest to corporations like AT&T and Verizon -- as Hiatt obviously does, or at least pretends to -- is to display exactly the lack of Seriousness and Sophistication which The Washington Post Editorial Page believes itself to embody.

-Greenwald, again

Dear Glenn,

It's almost as if the Washington Post Company (NYSE:WPO) is a diversified media and education company whose principal operations include newspaper and magazine publishing, educational and career services, television broadcasting, cable television systems and electronic information services.

Fiscally,
IOZ

Pigs

It's been brought to my attention that the dauphin has been crooning about Kooba. This in itself is unremarkable, for it has been the pasttime of every President since that bloodthirsty pantywaist Teddy Roosevelt did what he done. Then I heard some State Department drone on NPR talking about how it was totally unacceptable for a Fidel-Raul, brother-to-brother power transfer. Then I heard President Bush try to roll an R in a Miami speech ending on ¡Viva Cuba libre! It was like a Didion novel as recorded by Terry Gilliam. Anyway. Let me write four words. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. I'm just saying.

Theses on the Epistemology of Who Is IOZ?

The title is a lie. There's only one.

Beginning from the premise that whatever you're reading or hearing at any given time is probably bullshit, there's very little that you won't understand.

Mahavishnu

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind.

-Bobo Brooks

Wow, man. Whoa. And, like. This whole solar system might be, just, like, one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being.

Folks, I am obviously no opponent of recreational drug use. Indeed, I recommend it. On the other hand, I've got precious little patience with those who make claims under the banner of, "It expands your mind, man." You know the sort. They believe that their cannabinoids, their tryptamines, their lysergic acid diethylamide don't simply jigger with the brain chemistry in interesting, unusual, sometimes frightening, sometimes eye-opening ways, but that these chemicals actually "break open the head," in the famous phrase, and expose the mind to the springs of the source of all understanding. In other words, they confuse the amusement park for the library, and therefore fully benefit from neither. I have had many revelations, I'll tell you, while smoking pot, and not-a-one of them held up in the harsher light of sobriety. That isn't an insult. I love me some roller coasters. But I accede to the transcendental limits of the experience.

I bring this up because similarly transcendental claims are often made by technologists. Glenn Reynolds and his squad of undersexed transhumanists indulge such fantasies, as do many writers of science fiction, people who use the term "singularity," and gadget enthusiasts like Brooks for whom technology is essentially magic--who look at a television, say, or worse an iPod as sui generis, impenetrable, and, to use the popular word, transformative. They could just as easily convince themselves that the path to enlightenment involved going to Africa and chewing on some iboga. Futurism and primitivism are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Earthling

The one thing we cannot do is to stop fighting for what is right, what is just . . . for a more perfect union. The Founders of this nation of ours knew that tyrants and greedy SOBs were always going to exist, but they counted on us--the American public--to stand with one voice and say “enough!” when the tipping point had occurred and the wrongs became so excessive that they demanded being pulled back from the brink. We are at that point and beyond. We must decide: will we have the courage of our convictions, or slink off with our tails between our legs and foist this battle onto future generations?

I stand for liberty. And I intend to keep on fighting for a more perfect union. What say you?

-Christy Hardin Smith at FireDogLake

Really? I mean, really?

The Founders were smart cookies, and most of them were damned rich, and none of them, neither the Jeffersonians nor the Hamiltonians, counted on "the American public" for much of anything other than bovine stupidity. I'm pretty sure that no one still weeping with joy for His Uselessness Patrick Fitzgerald spends a great deal of time nosing through Nichomachean Ethics, but the Founders set these United States up as a timocracy, ladies and gents, in order to forestall any one-voiced peopledom doing anything crazy. One might go back and actually read Articles I and II to see just how Presidents and Senators were selected.

Those protections loosened with years and amendments, and look where it got us. The seventeenth amendment gave the Senate to the people, and the people gave us a Senate that gave us Prohibition. The great, if partial, moral and political victory of the past century--civil rights--ultimately had to be fought in the undemocratic courts, and when at last legislators were dragged kicking and screaming to the Civil Rights Act, well, they were dragged kicking and screaming. It is an uncomfortable truth, rarely confronted by internet Democrats, that the wise American People elected Reagan twice, Bush Jr., and the Newt Gingrich Republican congress. They then continued electing a mad Republican congress for more than a decade, and in that period also elected George W. Bush at least one time. Then they elected a Democratic congress, and look at it! This, readers, is the people's voice.

As brother Aaron pointed out in comments the other day, the idea that democracy was ever going to work out above and beyond the municpal level was always a pretty silly idea. There are 300 million people in America, yet somehow The American People always agree with whatever scribbler is presently employing the phrase. As usual, Bowie said it best. I'm afraid of Americans.

At Least It's an Ethos

Remember the Wehrmacht? It was a formidable fighting force.

-Roger Cohen, presumably a Jew, memorializing

Dear Roger,

Kuck ind faall, Nafke.

Shalom,
IOZ

Render Unto

This will be the second time today that I like to Jim's post, Stark Weather, and I do so because you've got to read the comments. Megan McArdle linked it, and some folks dashed over to aver that it really was horrible to suggest that a president might get some martial pleasure out of kids getting blown up in a war. Historically, of course, the world's most powerful men have quite enjoyed wars, which fill them with a sense of something or other. But the outrage, the utter conviction that not only does this president not take pleasure from war and death, but that it is categorically impossible for this to be the case--that a president simply cannot, could not, would not, has not, shall not indulge a lust for blood--is, comment dit-on, evidence that more than a few lights need more than a few higher-wattage bulbs. Over to you, Gore Vidal:

The unifying Leitmotiv in these lives [the lives of the twelve Caesars as told by Suetonias] is Alexander the Great. The Caesars were fascinated by him. He was their touchstone of greatness. The young Julius Caesar sighed enviously at his tomb. Augustus had the tomb opened and stared long at the conqueror's face. Caligula stole the breastplate from the corpse and wore it. Nero called his guard the 'Phalanx of Alexander the Great.' And the significance of this fascination? Power for the sake of power. Conquest for the sake of conquest. Earthly dominion as an end in itself: no Utopian vision, no dissembling, no hypocrisy. I knock you down; now I am king of the castle. Why should young Julius Caesar be envious of Alexander? It does not occur to Suetonius to explain. He assumes that any young man would like to conquer the world. And why did Julius Caesar, a man of the first-rate mind, want the world? Simply, to have it. Even the resulting Pax Romana was not a calculated policy but a fortunate accident. Caesar and Augustus, the makers of the Principate, represent the naked will to power for its own sake. And though our own society has much changed from the Roman (we may point with somber pride to Hitler and Stalin, who lent a real Neronian hell to our days), we have, nevertheless, got so into the habit of dissembling motives, of denying certain dark constants of human behavior, that it is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.

The emphasis is mine.

This is a point I made recently:

The myth of altruistic intent is irrepressible but false. The President of the United States is the most powerful man in the world. The Office of the Presidency is the single most powerful human institution in the entire history of mankind. Fuck the "Iraqi Quagmire" and the limits of American power. No king, no emperor, no potentate, no general, no premier, no commissar, no pope, and no messiah during his lifetime has ever wielded more power over more people over a wider geography than the President of the United States. To pursue that office is to pursue that power. That is true of Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, and the rest of that passel of madmen and lunatics.

In the immortal words of Walter Sobchak: Are we gonna split hairs here?

Are there really people so naive as to believe, then, that it is quite impossible for the nearest thing the world has to a ruler to enjoy a few fractured bodies? Sure. They're commenting on Jim's blog even as we speak. What's the source of the disconnect?

The source is plain and twofold. Both are matters of perspective. First: people read their own private morals and ethics onto rulers unconstrained by morality. Morality and ethical behavior are at their roots nothing more complicated than getting-along. What are they but mutually-agreed, if vague constraints on our actions for the broad purpose of accomodating others? And why, pray tell, should that concern Caesar? Power corrupts--that's a bland nostrum hiding a more interesting truth. Why does power corrupt? Because it removes others from consideration. To whom does the President answer for his actions? History? God? Here, friends, I have a fine piece of swampland to sell you.

The second error is the belief that enjoying cruelty means that, given the opportunity, the President would plunge the knife into some 18-year-old private's ear himself, and laugh as the brains leaked out. The President isn't quite that mad--I don't believe so anyway. I suspect that he would be horrified at the sight of a mangled body. Yet the exercise of power with the inevitable end of producing precisely such bodies is his stock in trade. It is, by his own constant admission, the central purpose of his presidency: to fight a vast, neverending, expanding conflict, whose end result has been hundreds of thousands of deaths. How can it be farfetched to say that he likes it a little bit? So he doesn't like to see blood in person. So what? Eichmann, remember, was desperately squeamish.

It Was a Fine Affair, but Now It's Over

In the wake of Pete Stark's Moscow Trials moment on the floor of the House, Henley calls one-party rule and rues a caveat in a pre-election post in which he otherwise predicted exactly this eventuality. Looking back through my archives, I'm happy to report that I was writing posts with titles like "First, Kill the Democrats." So, you know, my ass is covered, clairvoyantly speaking.

Now I know we all live happy-happy lives full of nice-nice things, that the wind still blows and the rain still falls, that coffee still warms your belly on a fall morning and whiskey on a fall eve, that the earth still goes 'round the sun, that there are still beautiful books, lovely melodies, artworks transcendent of their mere moment, that the touch of skin to skin is still pleasure, that, after all, it's still possible to have some small measure of happiness in our lives. So long as there exist orgasms, red wine, and the works of Bach, let it not be said that I'm a cynic. On the other hand.

On the other hand, I think it's high time to face a set of uncomfortable facts, all of which are best expressed in that Orwell line I've lately quoted: There are no laws in Oceania. Curiously enough, though, there are plenty of jails. We live in a nation that practices the most vicious and unforgivable forms of torture. We live in a nation of men, not of laws, in which what is or is not prohibited depends on the day of the week, the inclination of the earth's axis, the waxing or waning of the moon, the steam from the chicken entrails, the grotesque boondoggledom of the venal Democratic congress, and the halting utterances of the Warlord. Our laws are even more imaginary than our money, and that's saying something. We live in a nation that has effectuated the death of a million people in Iraq. A million! The displacement of millions more. God only knows what we'll do in the next year. But it don't take no God nor angels to know for durn sure it'll be a sight worse. To some degree, these things have always been true of America. To some degree, they're true of all societies, everywhere, anytime. But as the saying goes, that don't make it right.

Meanwhile, Jim links Libby at the Newshoggers, a blogger I like on a site I admire. And yet:

Stark's emotional apology was admirably gracious. But I'm with Jane. I find a Democratic machine that would not only allow, but require, such humilation to one its own deeply offensive. If we're ever going to save the Democratic [party] from itself, we have got to get rid of these people.

I mean, if we're ever going to save rape-murder torture-cannibals from themselves, we're going to have to get rid of everyone who rapes, murders, tortures, and cannabalizes. You cannot save a thing from what it is. I don't mean to sound a note of alarm, here, but if the brighter lights among us are still crowing "more and better Democrats," then I . . . I . . . I . . .

GuLOLag

The issue here for Clinton and Obama is clear and simple and permits no equivocation: Will you support a filibuster of any bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecoms for enabling the Bush administration to spy illegally on Americans? There is absolutely no reason why they should be unable to answer that question in a clear, straightforward and unconditional manner. What they ought to be doing is leading on this issue -- taking a principled stand for the rule of law and our constitutional liberties and leading the Senate in a filibuster to stop this travesty. But since they are leaving that to Dodd, they ought to at least issue a clear statement as to their positions here.

-Glenn Greenwald, mooing

Dear Glenn,

Love,
IOZ

Fagz

I can't take issue with Wolcott's broader point here, but his literary judgement leaves something to be desired:

No last name in American literature stands taller or more shoulder wide than that of Hemingway. It represents stoic endurance, grace under pressure, sentences without commas, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing, and many rides in jeeps.

When I think of Hemmingway, I think only of Vidal's famous line on TR: Give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight.

All of the People, All of the Time

A third of Americans still think that Saddam remote-piloted the planes into them Twin Towers an' 'at. Matthew Yglesias says:

This is a big structural failing of the American elite. It reflects in part the fact that conservative elites have refused to play the role of honest brokers, the preference of the right's main institutions to propagandize their audience rather than seeking to inform them with an honest, factually accurate presentation of the hawkish view of Middle East policy. It also reflects a large failure of our non-ideological institutions, a completely inability of "the establishment" to succeed in setting national discourse on an even keel. And last it reflects the fact that for several years the main opposition institutions in the United States--most of all the Democratic Party--failed for years to aggressively push back. For the year months or so after 9/11, "respectable" folks were expected to spend more time and energy worrying about marginal leftists than about the dangerous radicals peddling made-up facts who just so happened to control the institutions of government.

And so we arrive once more at our favorite intellectual inadequacy: the perennial confusion between ability and intent.

Like many young aspirants to the imagined technocracy, Yglesias sees himself as a potential member of the "American elite" he mentions and laments. Smart, articulate, Washington-saavy, literate, versed in policy, loosely acquainted with the principles of economics, something of a polymath, reasonably well-travelled, cosmopolitan but not too cosmopolitan. Were he in the chair on the Sunday morning talk shows; were he penning the articles in Foreign Affairs; were he advising the candidates directly; then surely the People would be better informed. The deranging affects of fear-mongering and panic-pimping would be drained from our politics. People would sanely debate the issues, arrive at consensus, act accordingly. The best and the brightest, but without the irony inherent in that title.

But the failure of the "elites" to inform Americans, and the failure of the opposition to actually oppose, aren't "structural failures." Not from the inside. The fortunes of everyone directly involved in the Iraq adventure, from the TV pundits to the campaign advisors to the polticians themselves, haven't suffered. There are more harpies on TV than ever. There is more military pork than ever. Fantastic amounts of wealth have been shifted into the hands of a very small segment of the State economy by means of our imperial venture. And, hovering above it all like the shadow of the spectre of the ghost of the spirit of the essence of the incarnation of the muttering angel of death, there's the old Iron Law of Institutions on which La Nan, General Petraeus, Dick Cheney, the editorial board of the Post, Eric Prince of Blackwater, and a few thousand others sharpen their pointy little teeth.

Matt, my friends, looks at the project of empire and sees that it's bad for America. And in a vague, idealistic sense, it is. If you believe all the hooey they fed you back in civics class; if you believe that once upon a time our continental empire, despite the slaves and all the dead injuns, was some very weepy, poetical new birth of freedom; if you subscribe, in other words, to nostalgia and sentiment as valid analytical frameworks; then yes, true dat motherfuckers, conquering, killing, enslaving, subordinating, democratizing, Gitmoizing foreigners is a nasty bit of business. Bad for children. Bad for flowers. Bad for the Constitution. If, on the other hand, you percieve that imperial projects are hugely profitable for a particular group of people, then your chagrins and confusions and worries that this or that holy, sacrosanct institution of American uniqueness isn't doing its job will evaporate quick as morning dew on a warm spring day. Consider Rome. From the founding of the Republic till the sack of the city, there were many ups and downs, victories and defeats, expansions and contractions, triumphs and disasters. But through it all, the patricians remained patricians, although the later emporers expanded their ranks to include, oh, all sorts of office-holders and, ahem, "retired generals" and the like.

The elites that Yglesias identifies--partisan and "establishment"--profit materially and vocationally from empire. It isn't a structural failure that somehow prevents them from levelling with the grazing people of the heartandhomeland; it is the structure. These people are the harbingers of death. It enriches them. What have they got to gain within their little world from telling you the truth, Yglesias, or me, or anyone? We're in it together, Matt, you and I. The only difference is that come the next election you'll pull the lever for Hillary, but prattle on endlessly nevertheless about the relentless catastrophe in Tehran.

The Enemy of My Enemy of My Enemy of My Enemy. Take One Down, Pass It Around.

Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker have concluded that Shiite extremists pose a rising threat to the U.S. effort in Iraq, as the relative influence of Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq has diminished drastically because of ongoing U.S. operations.

-The Post

If it's a new "rising threat," then it must be time for one of our pattented summations.

Oh, hell. Why bother. Look, this has all already happened. Last year. The year before.

Dear General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker,

A rising threat to whom?

Best,
IOZ

Slaterbate

You know, I'm no big fan of Bombs-Away Gore, and you'll hardly find me leaping to his personal defense, but nonetheless. Is this is or is this ain't the single stupidest thing ever written? Anywhere. By anyone. (A hint, Reader: Yes.)

Bonus killer stupid happy line:

First, I'll make the extreme assumption that our environmental recklessness threatens to shave 1 percentage point off economic growth forever.

Right. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Will no one rid me of these people?

Look. All of my assumptions about the ideal future development of the human race hinge on a global population of under 1 billion peeps, so I'm not even averse to a little man-made environmental catastrophe. But you know, in the meantime, I think it would be awesome if you hopped out of the Suburban and took a stroll to work, fatty.

Good Morning, Vietnam

BAGHDAD (AP) -- U.S. forces backed by airstrikes raided Sadr City, Baghdad's main Shiite district, killing 49 militants on Sunday as they targeted a militia leader accused in high-profile kidnappings, the military said. Iraqi officials said women and children were among the dead.

The Iraqi reports followed other recent claims of civilian deaths as a result of U.S. military action or shootings by private Western security teams protecting American diplomats and aid groups. The military said it was not know of any civilians killed.

-The Times

It's not necessarily the case that Iraqis killed by Americans are "militants." Nor is it necessarily the case that "women and children" are "civilians." When you consider the American occupation of Iraq, you must confront the most elementary fact of this or any occupation: you've got no idea whose side anyone is really on.