Out here in Southern California when you want to make your head spin, you drive out to Valencia for the rides at Six Flags Magic Mountain – the park considered by coaster enthusiasts to be one of the best in the country, if not the world. Yeah, they’ve had their problems with gangs and a murder here or there, but the rides are cool – particularly The Viper. Maybe you have to have grown up not far from an amusement park in Pittsburgh to appreciate how far the technology has come since the days of the wooden monsters like the Racing Whippet at West View Park. That park is long gone and a Giant Eagle supermarket sits where the coaster once stood, but, in the fifties, if you wanted to get a rush and feel all spatially disoriented and a little scared, and a bit wobbly afterward, it was worth the walk over there.
But for a baby boomer now sixty, driving out to Magic Mountain seems just sad. Best to sit by the pool and read the Magic Mountain book – Der Zauberberg – that odd novel by Thomas Mann first published in November 1924. That is a far more age-appropriate activity. It too is also disorienting and a bit scary. Or you could follow the news. That will do too.
On Wednesday, July 11, you could see what we’ve been up to for the last four or five years just hasn’t worked out –
U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the 2001 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned.
The conclusion suggests that the group that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to rebuild despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it.
Still, numerous government officials say they know of no specific, credible threat of a new attack.
A counterterrorism official familiar with a five-page summary of the new government threat assessment called it a stark appraisal that will be discussed at the White House on Thursday as part of a broader meeting on an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate.
Yeah, they probably will talk about it. We went into Afghanistan to get those guys good. We’re still there – and it looks like we’re back at square one. And we diverted efforts there to deal with Iraq, and we’re still there too. And we are where we started with al Qaeda. Those were the real bad guys – and we’ve been doing what? We’ve been doing others things.
The possible spin is that this new report is that it shows we must redouble our efforts, because what we’ve been up to didn’t work out, so we should do more of it. No, that won’t fly. Or you could spin it this way – this is really scary and means we cannot let up now, even if all we did made things worse, as this is really terrifying, and ominous, and horrifying, and just think what would happen if the wimp Democrats were in charge. You see, in that case we’d be in even more trouble. That will be the way to spin it. One suspects that will be discussed at the White House – not how to fix the problem, just how to explain it.
The president is, as they say, besieged. The bad news just keeps rolling in, and Andrew Sullivan sums up the situation this way –
The man has now officially lost two wars, almost every ally, and the moral high ground. Meanwhile, we are consigned to this leadership for another year and a half, in which the US military’s operational strength is worn to the bone in one last attempt to prove a fantasy reality. There is obviously some satisfaction at watching this man finally forced to observe the consequences of his own actions. But you could see this day coming for the past three years at least, and it should give no Westerner any pleasure to see it arrive.
We still have deadly, vicious, religious enemies. The military is tied down in a no-win Muslim civil war. Our cities are still dangerously vulnerable to another attack. And, thanks to this president, I’m not even sure the country can unite again as it united the first time, however briefly. This may turn out to be the Dunkirk of this war. We await a sober, serious, unifying leader. So does the free world.
And the bad news just keeps rolling in – “Nervous Senate Republicans beseeched the White House without apparent success Wednesday for a quick change in course on Iraq as congressional Democrats insisted on high-profile votes calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by spring.”
As the Republicans use the filibuster and other procedural wonders (like cloture calls) to force the passage of anything to require sixty votes in the Senate, the Democrats, with fifty-one votes on the best of days, can set up all sorts of high-profile votes that don’t mean a thing, and if one day they do get sixty-one votes, what they pass will be vetoed by the president, and you need sixty-seven votes to override a veto. Having a majority is pleasant. It doesn’t mean much.
As for the House, this is instructive –
Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) called for comity Wednesday during a meeting of the Republican Conference after House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) referred to Senate colleagues who have begun to favor a change in course in Iraq as “wimps.”
… According to sources, Boehner and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) were urging solidarity among House Republicans, explaining that they must distinguish themselves from their Senate colleagues.
Boehner’s spokesman isn’t denying the comment –
“The leader’s comments were intended to illustrate the fact that we just recently voted to give the troops our full support - including ample time for the Petraeus plan to work - and that too much is at stake for Congress to renege on its commitment now by approving what can only be described as another partisan stunt by Democrats,” Boehner spokesman Brian Kennedy said.
Yeah, it plays well in the nation at large. Everyone knows Democrats are cowards or, at best, fools.
Camille Paglia doesn’t see it that way –
You speak of my party wanting to “choose defeat,” while yours wants “victory.” Is that stark opposition truly our only choice? Or has your party painted itself into a rhetorical corner with its polarized talk of victory and defeat? Isn’t it possible that you have created a nightmare of words from which we cannot wake up? I don’t regard the prudent preservation of American lives and treasure as a “defeat” but rather as a sensible acknowledgment of the reality principle. Not all of our desires, hopes, and ideals can come to pass. That is the human condition.
You say that if we don’t stay and win in Iraq, we’ll be back there in 10 years. I think you might well be correct. The Iraq chaos, which we instrumentally helped foment, will probably spread and destabilize the entire Middle East - a momentum that has already begun. By removing that despicable autocrat, Saddam Hussein, we conveniently did Iran’s work. There’s no stopping the jockeying of power now - Iran eyeing Iraq’s Shiite territories; Turkey ready to smash the independence movement among Kurds (who have been playing the United States for a fool).
But next time around, we will hopefully have the support of other powers in the region, such as Saudi Arabia (a corruption-riddled regime with strong Bush ties), which can’t afford the implosion of Iraq. Meanwhile, the massacre of our hapless soldiers, along with the waste of billions of our tax dollars, must stop. There is no clear way to define “victory” in this folly - which tried to jump-start Western democracy in a country with none of our long traditions of civil law or free speech.
Does that sound too sensible? You can attack her ad hominem – she has been variously called the “feminist that other feminists love to hate,” a “post-feminist feminist,” one of the world’s top 100 intellectuals by the Prospect magazine (UK), and by her own description “a feminist bisexual egomaniac.” What can she know? Add that she was born in 1947 also - and is thus another too old for the Viper.
But Iraq is getting there, right? There is the seventy percent unemployment, but we are winning. Don’t ride the Viper. Watch CNN, Anderson Cooper talking with Michael Ware, the CNN man in Baghdad, about the winning business. That too is a bit disorienting –
COOPER: Michael, I want to play something that Senator Lieberman said about the war in Iraq. Let’s - let’s listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: The war is not lost in Iraq. In fact, now American Iraqi security forces are winning. The enemy is on the run in Iraq. But, here in - in Congress, in Washington, we seem to be, or some — some members seem to be on the run, chased, I fear, by public opinion polls.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Is the enemy on the run in Iraq, Michael?
WARE: No, certainly not. And I think we need to be aware that it is “enemies.” I mean, America doesn’t face just one opponent in this country, but a whole multitude, many of whom are becoming stronger, the longer the U.S. occupation here, or presence here, in Iraq continues. So, unfortunately, I’m afraid that Senator Lieberman has taken an excursion into fantasy.
And Ware is a bit of a hawk, even if a realistic one.
Senator Lieberman does have that fantasy thing going – “If we start military operations against Iran alone, then Europe and the US will support us,” Lieberman told Army Radio following a meeting earlier in the week with NATO and European Union officials. He’s been calling for nuking them, as it’s time, as he sees it, for a third war.
He may have misunderstood the NATO and European Union officials, and may be reading the American people wrong, but he means well. He just wants to get all the bad guys, everywhere. He senses everyone agrees, or will, or ought to.
As for what Ware suggests we really face in just Iraq alone, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes the options have evaporated, at least the options for guys like Lieberman –
The president’s shaky political consensus for the surge in Iraq is in danger of collapsing after the recent defections of prominent Senate Republicans such as Richard Lugar (Ind.), Pete Domenici (N.M.) and George Voinovich (Ohio). But this growing opposition to the surge has not yet translated into support for outright withdrawal - few lawmakers are comfortable with abandoning Iraq or admitting defeat. The result has been a search for some kind of politically moderate “Plan B” that would split the difference between surge and withdrawal.
The problem is that these politics do not fit the military reality of Iraq. Many would like to reduce the U.S. commitment to something like half of today’s troop presence there. But it is much harder to find a mission for the remaining 60,000 to 80,000 soldiers that makes any sense militarily.
… The more we shift out of combat missions and into training, the harder we make the trainers’ job and the more exposed they become. It is unrealistic to expect that we can pull back to some safe yet productive mission of training but not fighting - this would be neither safe nor productive.
If the surge is unacceptable, the better option is to cut our losses and withdraw altogether. In fact, the substantive case for either extreme - surge or outright withdrawal - is stronger than for any policy between. The surge is a long-shot gamble. But middle-ground options leave us with the worst of both worlds: continuing casualties but even less chance of stability in exchange. Moderation and centrism are normally the right instincts in American politics, and many lawmakers in both parties desperately want to find a workable middle ground on Iraq. But while the politics are right, the military logic is not.
The emphasis is added. It’s fish or cut bait time. Or as “mcjoan” puts it –
I’ve thought for some time that the basic premise Biddle lays out is what we face in Iraq. The number of troops we have in Iraq now, even with the surge, isn’t enough to squelch sectarian violence across the nation. We can focus forces in one area, for instance Anbar province and the violence moves into the vacuum created in another region.
An increased American force in Iraq isn’t an option, politically or militarily. A draft would really be the only way to increase our military to the extent it would have to be increased for an operation that would allow us to “win” in Iraq. Even George Bush knows that a draft isn’t going to fly in today’s political climate. Probably only John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and John Boehner would follow Bush down that particularly path.
Thus the middle ground approach, represented in the current debate by Salazar’s ISG amendment, could only lead to a greater disaster. Military, a residual force in the tens of thousands stuck in the middle of sectarian violence and doing little more than training the Iraqis to more effectively kill each other, would probably result in nothing more than a lot of American casualties.
Withdrawal is the only and the inevitable option. How much longer do we have to wait for it?
A year and half, at best – that’s the answer.
How’d get here? Ross Douthat suggests misguided good intentions about the threat Iraq posed –
Cheney may have misled the public about how solid the intelligence was that led him to draw the conclusions he did - and I don’t mean to defend such conduct - but I’m willing to bet that he believed those conclusions as strongly as Bush did, if not more strongly.
Andrew Sullivan is not ruling that out –
The threat of WMDs after 9/11 was obviously grave and one can understand why many in the administration with access to the internal intelligence decided that they couldn’t risk a misjudgment similar to that of 1990. But my point was a subtler one, I hope. It is that Cheney may have thought that removing Saddam was critical to national security, but that he also knew from the data that we didn’t have solid proof and that many parts of the government were skeptical of what proof we had. In a matter as grave as going to war, even if you want to make the case for action, it seems to me to be very important to be totally candid with the American people. If Bush had said: look, we don’t know what WMDs he has for sure, but we need to make sure he’s no threat down the road, then he’d be in a much better place today. Either the public would not have bought it, and we would have held back; or the public would have bought it, and the war would not have been so fatally damaged by the revelations of no WMDs after the invasion. Honesty is always a better policy. In going to war, it is the only morally defensible policy.
I think Cheney knowingly took a risk in papering over the caveats, was profoundly embarrassed after the fact and terrified that the evidence would prove his own lack of prudence and indeed cherry-picking of the data. That’s the only convincing explanation for the reckless Wilson-Plame over-reach – when he should have been focusing on the incipient insurgency in Iraq instead of Beltway hardball in Washington. I should also add that the war-plan itself, while it did include some minimal protective armor for troops, in no way prioritized securing suspected sites of WMDs. Many were indeed left to looters. That’s a pretty good sign, I think, that the president and his generals were not too worried about WMD use. If they had told us before the war what the WMD premises were for the invasion, i.e. not to worry, the invasion might never have happened.
Something smells here. I wish it didn’t. But the trust has gone. And Cheney, more than anyone, destroyed it.
That will make your head spin, or on the matter of these guys hot for war, this will –
For those who liked that kind of stuff, there were whips, chains and a lot of leather. Jeanette says that most of the clients who wanted to be dominated were Republicans. She cracks a smile, then adds, “They wanted to be spanked and tortured and wear stockings - Republicans have impeccable taste in silk stockings - and these are the people who run our country.”
Who needs an amusement park? As for the senator from Louisiana whose name showed up in the client list of the latest “DC Madame” embarrassing him mightily, Mark Kleiman, out here at UCLA, has some commentary –
1. Yes, in general a politician’s sex life is his or her own business, meaning none of mine.
2. However, if a politician uses “the sanctity of marriage” as an excuse for gay-baiting, then he deserves to be taunted mercilessly if he ignored his own wedding vows.
3. Hiring the services of a prostitute may or may not be a sin, and God may or may not have forgiven David Vitter. (Apparently he has a direct line to Heaven, but I don’t.) But it’s certainly a crime. It’s bad for lawmakers to commit crimes.
4. If Sen. Vitter thinks that hiring prostitutes shouldn’t be a crime, does he plan to propose repealing the law? (Even under Home Rule, Congress has the power to change the laws in the District of Columbia.) If he thinks it should be a crime, does he plan to confess and plead guilty?
5. The Bush Administration is so fervently opposed to prostitution that it opposes providing HIV-prevention services to workers in the sex trade, putting them, their customers, and their customers’ spouses at risk of what remains an incurable disease. Does Sen. Vitter think he and his wife deserve to get AIDS from his interactions with prostitutes? If not, would he like to reconsider his support for that stupid and vicious policy?
6. It turns out that the escort or escorts Vitter hired from the Palfrey service weren’t his only experience with commercial sex. Vitter carried on an affair of several months’ duration with a prostitute - pardon me, that’s “sex worker” - from the French Quarter. (The lady’s surname sounds Hispanic; perhaps, as a friend suggested, Sen. Vitter’s fervent opposition to immigration reform reflected a general disposition to screw Latinas.)
And he adds news –
It isn’t yet public, though apparently it’s widely known in Louisiana political circles, that Vitter’s commercial romance was blessed with issue. Reportedly his natural child now lives with her mother in Alexandria, VA. That they are receiving financial support from the Senator has not been shown.
At least he’s not a wimp. Democrats are wimps, you know? And Vitter is Giuliani’s campaign coordinator for all the southern states, and we all now Rudy is not a wimp – he told us so. He wants more wars than Lieberman does.
Head spinning – must stop now – but there is also this –
Titusville police say they have arrested Florida State Rep. Robert “Bob” Allen, of Merrit Island, on second degree misdemeanor charges for solicitation for prostitution. Allen, 48, was arrested Wednesday afternoon at Veteran’s Memorial Park on East Broad St. in Titusville.
… Officers say they noticed Allen acting suspicious as he went in and out of the men’s restroom 3 times. Minutes later, he solicited an undercover male officer inside the restroom, offering to perform oral sex for $20. Officers realized he was a public figure after the arrest.
Ah, Republicans, so droll. These folks will fix everything for us and make us safe. Just don’t think about George Michael.
These folks will keep us safe, or not –
Detailed schematics of a military detainee holding facility in southern Iraq. Geographical surveys and aerial photographs of two military airfields outside Baghdad. Plans for a new fuel farm at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
The military calls it “need-to-know” information that would pose a direct threat to U.S. troops if it were to fall into the hands of terrorists. It’s material so sensitive that officials refused to release the documents when asked.
But it’s already out there, posted carelessly to file servers by government agencies and contractors, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
In a survey of servers run by agencies or companies involved with the military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Associated Press found dozens of documents that officials refused to release when asked directly, citing troop security.
Such material goes online all the time, posted most often by mistake. It’s not in plain sight, unlike the plans for the new American embassy in Baghdad that appeared recently on the Web site of an architectural firm. But it is almost as easy to find.
And experts said foreign intelligence agencies and terrorists working with al-Qaida likely know where to look.
Head spinning – must stop now – but for Michael Scherer with Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus, noting that “in the Democratic presidential pack, the leading man is a woman and the leading woman is a man.”
No!
But consider –
Throughout history, American presidents have been men’s men who puff their out chests against evil. Think Teddy Roosevelt on safari, Jack Kennedy in PT-109, Ronald Reagan on his horse, or George W. Bush with a chain saw clearing brush. If leaders show any slackening of testosterone, especially in wartime, they are quickly derided as wimps (George H.W. Bush), a Frenchmen (John Kerry) or weaklings (Jimmy Carter). But on the Democratic campaign trail these days, where the first woman in U.S. history is making a serious run at the White House, gender roles are being swapped.
When Obama travels the country, he does not appear to worry much about posing with guns or wearing those khaki workman jackets that made Kerry look so silly in 2004. Instead, he sings an empowerment ballad on the stump that would make most lady folk singers proud. “The decision to go to war is not a sport,” he tells crowds, rejecting the male metaphor. “We can discover the better part of ourselves as a nation,” he says. “We can dream big dreams.”
On the other side –
Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with all the muscular vision and authority of the macho candidates of yesteryear. “I’ve seen her stand up to bullies,” announced Christine Vilsack, the former first lady of Iowa, when she introduced Clinton at a rally in Des Moines last week. On the stump, Clinton repeatedly tells people that they should let her take control of the country, eschewing Obama’s more abstract calls for national soul-searching. “If you are ready for change, I am ready to lead,” she says. “I want to be the president who sets goals again.”
Clara Oleson, an Iowa Democrat and former labor lawyer, explained all these distinctions on a riverbank in Iowa City last week, while waiting to hear Clinton speak to a crowd of about 1,000. “Obama is the female candidate. Obama is the woman,” she said, after admitting that she was one of his supporters. “He is the warm candidate, self-deprecating, soft, tender, sad eyes, great smile.”
So what does that make Hillary Clinton? “She is the male candidate - in your face, authoritative, know-it-all.” To be clear, Oleson was not doubting the symbolic power that Clinton retains as a woman. But she was calling it as she saw it, using the language of Iowa City, a university town. “It’s what the academes would call the difference between sex and gender,” Oleson explained.
Oh that! Academics, we’re told, have long defined gender as a culturally constructed concept that exists independent of the human body –
Though the terms “masculine” and “feminine” are not easy to define, they indisputably represent clear battle lines in presidential politics. Gendered differences have played central roles in the last two presidential elections, with Republican leaders making a concerted effort to claim the masculine high ground, by branding the GOP as the party of dominance, or what the linguist George Lakoff calls the party of the “strict father.” Democrats, on the other hand, have classically approached politics as what Lakoff calls the “nurturant parent,” with far more interest in the caretaking role of government, adopting more feminine positions on helping the underprivileged and choosing diplomacy over conflict.
You might find the rest of the analysis interesting, or not. It ends with this – “May the best woman win.”
Head spinning – must stop now –
