In the 1973 made-for-television movie Hunter (CBS), footage from the Wizard of Oz is used to brainwash a race-car driver and get him to do very bad things. This terrorizes him until he screams the line – “Stop the monkeys! PLEASE Stop the monkeys!” That’s where we get that catch phrase “Please, stop the monkeys!” In certain circles it’s a bit of shorthand. Everyone knows what you mean. They get the joke. Everyone else is puzzled.
But now and then you want to do the little ironic scream about the damned monkeys, even if no one gets it.
As you recall, when the terrorists brought down the World Trade Center and smashed a 757 into the Pentagon, the late Jerry Falwell claimed that God had allowed it because he was angry at America for putting up with all “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians” in our midst. Well, he did. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, a right-wing religious group called the Columbia Christians for Christ claimed that God had sent the storm to punish Louisiana for allowing abortion clinics to operate there, as you might remember. Back then the group said that God had already punished California with forest fires and earthquakes, but with the great Southern California firestorm of 2007 they have been silent. Enter Fox News, Wednesday, October 24 - the fires in California aren’t the wrath of an angry God at all. They may be the work of – are you ready? – al Qaeda!
Yep, there was a 2003 FBI memo that wondered if those terrorists might be planning something like that one day, but doesn’t mention California – the FBI had vague evidence someone was considering setting off fires in Montana and Colorado, in the summer of 2003, so…. “Stop the monkeys! PLEASE Stop the monkeys!”
But then, Fox News has its job to do. The other news outlets just aren’t letting Americans know the truth about the worse-than-anything-ever-before, worse-than-you-can-even-imagine threat America faces – so they must. At least they didn’t tell us the fires were started by the flying monkeys from the movie. Perhaps that comes later, when they reveal the Monkey Madrassa in Burbank.
Or maybe Rudy Giuliani will let us know of the “real” danger, the man who would be president, the candidate Jimmy Breslin captured in a very few words – “A small man in search of a balcony.” That’ll do.
Many conservatives like the guy, of course. Andrew Sullivan once liked him –
I’ve long had a soft spot for Rudy Giuliani. I’d have gladly supported him for Mayor if I’d lived in Gotham. For all his many faults, he turned a city around. I like his social liberalism, his refusal to pander to the pro-life lobby because, on the critical issue of a woman’s right to choose in the first trimester, he disagrees with them. But any cursory look at his record reveals the real danger of electing him to the presidency. If you think Bush has been too loyal to incompetent or corrupt subordinates, Giuliani’s record is far worse.
Sullivan suggests that “if you worry about Bush’s and Cheney’s unprecedented seizure of expansive executive power” then Giuliani is simply unthinkable. Sullivan has been reading the Washington Monthly’s review of that man’s leadership history –
As mayor, Giuliani tried to rewrite the city’s governing document on multiple occasions to enhance his power, at the expense of the City Council’s.
He repeatedly attempted to eliminate or obstruct agencies charged with oversight of his administration - often successfully.
He flouted the First Amendment to crush dissent inside and outside government. And he shrouded his administration in secrecy (at one point, his government even denied a Freedom of Information request inquiring how many Freedom of Information requests had been denied.)
Embedded in his operating style was a belief that rules don’t apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances.
Sullivan –
A man with this record, a hotheaded temperament and an inability to deal with foes without waging pre-emptive war on them is not someone we should risk in the White House in the perilous days ahead. We need calmer minds and less compromised souls.
Well, yes, when the Washington Monthly item has this –
What is most disturbing is the likelihood that a Giuliani administration would venture beyond the expansive claims of executive authority staked out by the Bush White House. For instance, though Bush has demanded that Congress fund the war in Iraq, he has never openly questioned Congress’s power of the purse. Giuliani, however, told a reporter that the president has the right to provide money for the troops to stay in Iraq even if Congress withdraws funding. Similarly, Bush has implied that critics of his Iraq policy are unpatriotic, but he has not declared that the government can silence their voices. This September, echoing the sentiments that he repeatedly attempted to enforce as mayor, Giuliani said that the “General Betray Us” ad paid for by the left-wing group MoveOn “passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass.”
One might minimize the significance of these kinds of statements as the loose talk of a candidate trying to impress conservative primary voters - indeed, that is how the press has generally treated them. To believe that Giuliani is merely grandstanding, however, is to ignore his history. If he reaches the White House, he will almost certainly do what he did at City Hall: punish dissent, circumvent the law, conceal the workings of the government in secrecy, and use his litigator’s gifts to obstruct mechanisms of oversight and accountability.
Kevin Drum puts it nicely –
Choosing the best presidential candidate among the 2008 contenders is a tough job. Picking the worst is easy. Rudy Giuliani is the guy you’d get if you put George Bush and Dick Cheney into a wine press and squeezed out their pure combined essence: unbounded arrogance and self-righteousness, a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood, a studied contempt for anybody’s opinion but his own, a vindictive streak a mile wide, and a devotion to secrecy and executive power unmatched in presidential history. He is a disaster waiting to happen.
Of course Rudy Giuliani has said this – “I took a city that was full of pornography and licked it to a large extent.”
No. He could not possibly have meant it THAT way. As we say here – “Stop the monkeys! PLEASE Stop the monkeys!” He’s leading in the polls.
Then there is the case of an Egyptian national, one Abdallah Higazy, who was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11, 2001. Of course the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found, in the closet of his room, a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this fellow had something to do with what happened, so they questioned him. And they did a bit more.
Andrew Sullivan offers this framing –
You think coerced confessions are only part of Third World justice systems? Not under this US president. Check out the full and bizarre account of an arrest and conviction of a man subsequently proven innocent of alleged ties to 9/11 terrorists. The case was written up by the US Court of Appeals in New York. The case hinged on the FBI’s threat of torturing a man’s family in Egypt.
And so it did –
Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t - yeah, probably about torture, sure.”
Higazy later said, “I knew that I couldn’t prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger.” He explained that “[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family’s in danger. If I say this device is mine, I’m screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”
The Court tried to keep this part of the judgment classified – they pulled it from the official site after mistakenly posting it, but the cat was out of the bag. All the “interrogation details” had been shown.
Higazy’s false confession that he was using a radio transmitter in his hotel room to converse with terrorists in airplanes was rendered moot by the owner of the transmitter, an airline pilot who had also stayed in the room. The pilot returned and asked if he could have it back – but a funny thing, the FBI kept telling Higazy that he and his family would be tortured if he didn’t confess, and then they got their conviction.
So why did this guy confess? That’s easy -
The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is - they’re suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force - as they later on were called his henchmen - a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to… My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word “torture” comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.
And there’s more –
Let’s just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be —might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself, what could I say that he would believe? What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay.
So this is how we get “intelligence” in the Bush-Cheney era.
Sullivan – “Yes: this is America. And what Higazy claims was done to him is a war crime.”
Yeah, so? Consider the Maher Arar case, that Canadian who was arrested during a stopover in New York in 2002 and deported to Syria where he says he was tortured and imprisoned for a year. The Canadian government has cleared the guy of any links to terrorist groups and apologized – and paid him millions of dollars in compensation. Ottawa has called on Washington to remove the guy from our security watch list, but we will not. But then, on Wednesday, October 24, it got a bit absurd – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “admitted on Wednesday the United States had mishandled” his case but “stopped short of an apology.”
Matthew Yglesias is puzzled –
So, what, it was mishandled but she’s not sorry it was mishandled? Why not? Meanwhile, if she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s maybe she ought to resign.
Well, it did go down like this –
Rice did not apologize in the hearing and avoided directly answering a question from Massachusetts Democrat Rep. William Delahunt who asked if she knew Arar was tortured in Syria.
“You are aware of the fact that he was tortured?” Delahunt asked.
“I am aware of claims that were made,” she responded.
But when asked if the United States had received any diplomatic assurances from Syria that Arar would not be tortured, Rice said her memory of the events had faded and she would have to respond later to the question.
Yglesias –
Uh huh. It’s kind of shocking how this administration ricocheted so quickly between outsourcing torture to Syria to refusing to have any diplomatic relations with Syria. There’s a happy middle ground where you show a willingness to conduct diplomacy with “bad guy” regimes but don’t actually engage in the practices that make them bad guys.
He might have just said the magic words – “Stop the monkeys! PLEASE Stop the monkeys!” Enough is enough.
See Mark Twain –
Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place - the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
Ah, get used to it. And watch out for those nasty flying monkeys.
