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CORNELL GAGGED FIGURE HOLDS JUSTICE SCALES
16 hours ago
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Just Say Know -II
I came across this item in Eric Alterman's Altercation Blog on MediaMatters.com. I thought you would enjoy it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We are pleased and proud here at Altercation to present, for your patriotic enjoyment and edification this Independence Day, the premiere publication of the following speech by the charming and handsome E.L. Doctorow:
Remarks on the theme of The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society, at a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, The Library of Congress, April 28, 2007:
What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts, and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if -- five hundred years into the Enlightenment and two hundred and thirty-some years into the life of this republic -- it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe ... how does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?
For some time now we have been confronted by a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East that advertises its values by suicidal bombings, civilian massacres, and the execution of arbitrarily selected victims by the sawing off of their heads. However educated and well-to-do and politically motivated the leaders of this conspiracy may be, they have invoked an extreme fundamentalist reading of their sacred text to mentally transport their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking life-contemptuous jihad.
So that history, as we look to that part of the world, seems to be running backwards, as if civilization is in reverse, as if time is a loop.
And here? The scientists this evening may have to correct me as I invoke the term quantum nonlocality. As I understand the term and make metaphorical use of it, electrons shot from an atom will mirror each other no matter how far apart they are driven, a mile, ten miles, a hemisphere apart -- you look at one and you have a reflection of the other --- a kind of weird subatomic dance in celebration of the mimetic proclivities of everything in the universe, is quantum nonlocality.
This is not to suggest that our water-board and sensory deprivation torture techniques, that Abu Ghraib and the incarceration in perpetuity without trial of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, is the moral equivalent of 9/11. Only that a declared enemy with the mindset of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts.
Apart from this uncanny synchronous spin, the domestic political fantasy life of these past seven years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making -- in this country, quite on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good but as something suspect, dubious, or even ungodly, as it was, e.g., in Italy in 1633 when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth is in orbit around the sun.
I am not a scientist and don't deal in formulas, but as a writer I would, in the words of Henry James, "take to [myself] the faintest hints of life and convert the very pulses of the air into revelations." That surely provides me with a line to unreason. And so when I read that the president of Iran denies the historical truth of the Holocaust, and when I hear the President of the United States rejecting the scientific truth of global warming, I recognize that no matter whatever distance they would keep between them, and whatever their confrontational stance, they are fellow travelers in the nether world.
Two things must be said about knowledge-deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.
But, you may say, am I not narrowing this issue, politicizing it by speaking of our president? In this discussion of knowledge as a foundation for a democratic society, am I not misusing this forum to broadcast a partisan point of view? Albert Einstein once said that even the most perfectly planned democratic institutions are no better than the people whose instruments they are. I would translate his remark this way: The president we get is the country we get. With each elected president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.
From those fundamentalist leaders who proclaimed 9/11 as our just deserts for our secular humanism, our civil libertarianism, our feminists, our gay and lesbian citizens, our abortion providers, and in so doing honored the foreign killers of nearly three thousand Americans as agents of God's justice ... to the creationists, the biblical literalists, the anti-Darwinian school boards, the right-to-lifer anti-abortionist activists, the shrill media ideologues whose jingoist patriotism and ad hominem ranting serves for public discourse -- all of it in degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows -- these phenomena are summoned up, and enshrined by the policies of this president. At the same time, he has set the national legislative program to run in reverse as he rescinds, deregulates, dismantles or otherwise degrades enlightened legislation in the public interest, so that in sum we find ourselves living in a social and psychic structure of the ghostly past, with our great national needs -- health care, public education, disaster relief -- going unmet. The president may speak of the nation in idealistic terms but his actions demonstrate that he has no real concept of national community. His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.
It will take more than the recent congressional elections and revelations of an inveterately corrupt administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. With our once upright democratic posture bent and misshapen, what rough beast are we as we slouch toward Bethlehem? What are we become in the hands of this president with his relentless subversion of our right to know -- his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war, his signing away of laws passed by Congress that he doesn't like, his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records, and email, his dicta time and time again in presumption total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government, his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state, his obsessive secrecy, his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified, his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access of documents to investigatory bodies, his use of the justice department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand ... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded, and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.
Now I realize that with these remarks I may be violating the linguistic proprieties of an academic convocation. I realize, in the tenor of these times, that anyone who speaks of the broad front of failure and mendacity and carelessness of human life in so much of our public policy, in terms any louder than muted regret, is usually marginalized as some sort of radical -- that is, as someone so "out of the mainstream" as not to be taken seriously.
But I believe what I have described so far is an accurate and informed account of the present state of the Union.
We must ask if this rage to deconstruct the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has any connection with the prevalence of God in the mind of this worshipful president. We must ask to what extent, and at however unconscious a level, a conflict arises in the pious political mind when it is sworn to uphold the civil religion of the Constitution.
The idea of the United States may have had its sources in the European Enlightenment, but it was the actions taken by self declared Americans that brought it into focus and established it as an entity. America is a society evolved from words written down on paper by ordinary mortals, however extraordinary they happened to be as human beings. When constitutional scholars speak of the American civil religion, they recognize that along with its separation of church and state, our Constitution and its amendments establishes as civil law ethical presumptions common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But if you have extracted the basic ethics of religious invention and found the mechanism for installing them in the statues of the secular civic order, but have consigned all the doctrine and rite and ritual, all the symbols and traditional practices to the precincts of private life, you are saying there is no one proven path to salvation, there are only traditions. If you relegate the old stories to the personal choices of private worship, you admit the ineffable is ineffable, and in terms of a possible theological triumphalism, everything is up for grabs.
Our pluralism cannot be entirely comfortable to someone of evangelical faith. But to the extreme fundamentalist -- that member of the evangelical community militant in his belief, an absolutist intolerant of all forms of belief but his own, all stories but his own. -- our pluralism has to be a profound offense. I speak of the so-called "political base" with which our president has bonded. In our raucous democracy fundamentalist religious belief has organized itself with political acumen to promulgate law that would undermine just those secular humanist principles that encourage it flourish in freedom. Of course there has rarely been a period in our history when God has not been called upon to march. Northern abolitionists and southern slave owners both claimed biblical endorsement. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement drew its strength from prayer and examples of Christian fortitude, while the Ku Klux Klan invoked Jesus as a sponsor of their racism. But there is a crucial difference between these traditional invocations and the politically astute and well funded activists of today's Christian Right who do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith.
Fundamentalism really cannot help itself -- it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy.
Now I value the point of view of Professor Mark Noll, who speaks of the "historical American merger of the forces of traditional Christianity with the forces of Enlightenment." It is a serious misreading of American history, he says, "to portray the tangled cultural and political conflicts of our time as pitting the pre-critical hordes of religion against the hyper-critical avatars of science." Historically, there has tended to be a religious accommodation of science, according to Professor Noll: In the 19th century, America theological conservatives could also be Darwinists. And even in the strident debates of today, fundamentalists still proclaim their allegiance to facts as loudly as their opponents. And theories such as intelligent design and creation science implicitly accept the modern scientific consensus on evolution while maintaining a confident belief in a traditional deity.
But all contrarian movements, like revolutions, devolve to their extremist expression, do they not? The theorists of creation science and intelligent design have marching on their right flank, with or without their approval, if not pre-critical hordes of religion, a militantly censorious well funded political movement that a president of the united states has tapped into for his and their benefit. I am not aware that American history invoked by Professor Noll has a precedent for this. Nor am I aware that the hyper-critical avatars of the secular scientific method have an equivalent hard-nosed political organization behind them. They don't even have a marching band.
The president has said the war with terrorists will last for decades and is a confrontation between "good and evil." Whether he means the evil of specific terrorist organizations or the culture from which they spring, he vision is necessarily Manichean. There is immense political power in such religiously inspired reductionism. Thus, no matter how he lies about the reason for his invasion of Iraq, or how badly it has gone, bumblingly and tragically ruinous, with so many lives destroyed, and no matter how many thousands of terrorists it has brought into being, to criticize his policy or the architects of it is said to aid the enemy. The president's inner circle of advisers, who conspire in this Manichean world view, have the unnatural vividness of personality of Shakespearean plotters. While the original think tank theorists and proponents of the war have quietly and understandably withdrawn from public view, the vice president and the president's chief policy adviser stand tall -- the first contemptuous of his critics, his denials of reality and obfuscations delivered in the dour tones of unquestionable authority, the second too clever by half, and because he has spent his years developing a theocratic constituency and wearing such blinders as an exclusive concern with party power has attached to him, most clearly has a future in the culture of anti-democracy he has so deviously and unwisely nurtured.
A Manichean politics reduces the relevance of knowledge and degrades the truth which knowledge discovers. The past seven years of American political life are an uncanny cycle we've slipped into, or slid into, that foresees the democratic traditions of this country as too much of a luxury to be maintained. We see, since the last election, the struggle now for the legislative branches to regain some of their constitutional prerogatives. They struggle not only with a recalcitrant president and vice president who impugns their motives but against the precedents of the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, each of whom added another conservative shock to the principle of separation of powers. Many of the executive practices today -- the blatant cronyism, the political uses of the justice department, the evisceration of regulatory agencies, and so on -- are empowered by these precedents. And so we have marched along from the imperial presidency, through four years of a one-party faux democracy, to plutocracy, to the borders of authoritarianism.
To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America, the metaphysical risks that are the heritage of the enlightenment, and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.
Melville in Moby Dick speaks of "reality outracing apprehension." Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet, but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesome complex white whale in our quantumized wave/particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.
What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water- wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy, and the righteous priorities of wealth.
I summon up the year 1787 when the Constitutional Convention had done its work and the drafted Constitution was sent out to the states for ratification. The public's excitement was palpable. Extended and vigorous statehouse debates echoed through the towns and villages, and as one by one the states voted to ratify, church bells rang, cheers went up from the public houses, and in the major cities the people turned out to parade with a fresh new sense of themselves as a nation. Everyone marched -- tradespeople, workingmen, soldiers, women, and clergy. They had floats in those days too -- most often a wagon-size ship of state called the Union, rolling through the streets with children waving from the scuppers. Philadelphia came up with a float called the New Roof, a dome supported by thirteen pillars and ornamented with stars. It was drawn by ten white horses and at the top was a handsome cupola surmounted by a figure of Plenty bearing her cornucopia. The ratification parades were sacramental -- symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society.
And with good reason: The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.
When the ancient Hebrews broke their covenant they suffered a loss of identity and brought disaster on themselves. Our burden too is covenantal. We may point to our two hundred some years of national survival as an open society, constitutionally sworn to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we may regard ourselves a an exceptionalist, historically self-correcting nation whose democratic values locate us just as surely as our geography....and yet we know at the same time that all through our history we have brutally excluded vast numbers of us from the shelter of the New Roof, we have broken our covenant again and again with a virtuosity verging on damnation and have been saved only by the sacrificial efforts of Constitution-reverencing patriots in and our of government -- presidents, senators, justices, self impoverishing lawyers, abolitionists, muckrakers, third-party candidates, suffragists, union organizers, striking workers, civil rights martyrs.
Because this president's subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone on before, and as it has created large social constituencies ready to support the flag waving ideals of an incremental fascism, we're called upon to step forward to reaffirm our covenant like these exemplars from the past.
The philosopher Richard Rorty has suggested in his book Achieving Our Country that the metaphysic of America's civil religion is pragmatism and its prophets are Walt Whitman and John Dewey "The most striking feature of their redescription of our country is its thorough-going secularism," says Rorty. "The moral they draw from the European past, and in particular from Christianity, is not instruction about the authority under which we should live but suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been."
To temporize human affairs, to look no up for some applied celestial accreditation, but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey, to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought, suppression of knowledge that is the public good --- is the essence of our civil religion.
It is Whitman, our great poet and pragmatic philosopher, who advises us not to be curious about God but to affix our curiosity to our own lives and the earth we live on, and then perhaps as far as we can see into the universe with our telescopes. This was the charge he gave himself, and it is the source of all the attentive love in his poetry. If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge, that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.
Portions of the above are drawn from Reporting the Universe (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) copyright, E.L. Doctorow. For the complete lectures, please go here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We are pleased and proud here at Altercation to present, for your patriotic enjoyment and edification this Independence Day, the premiere publication of the following speech by the charming and handsome E.L. Doctorow:
Remarks on the theme of The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society, at a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, The Library of Congress, April 28, 2007:
What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts, and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if -- five hundred years into the Enlightenment and two hundred and thirty-some years into the life of this republic -- it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe ... how does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?
For some time now we have been confronted by a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East that advertises its values by suicidal bombings, civilian massacres, and the execution of arbitrarily selected victims by the sawing off of their heads. However educated and well-to-do and politically motivated the leaders of this conspiracy may be, they have invoked an extreme fundamentalist reading of their sacred text to mentally transport their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking life-contemptuous jihad.
So that history, as we look to that part of the world, seems to be running backwards, as if civilization is in reverse, as if time is a loop.
And here? The scientists this evening may have to correct me as I invoke the term quantum nonlocality. As I understand the term and make metaphorical use of it, electrons shot from an atom will mirror each other no matter how far apart they are driven, a mile, ten miles, a hemisphere apart -- you look at one and you have a reflection of the other --- a kind of weird subatomic dance in celebration of the mimetic proclivities of everything in the universe, is quantum nonlocality.
This is not to suggest that our water-board and sensory deprivation torture techniques, that Abu Ghraib and the incarceration in perpetuity without trial of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, is the moral equivalent of 9/11. Only that a declared enemy with the mindset of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts.
Apart from this uncanny synchronous spin, the domestic political fantasy life of these past seven years finds us in an unnerving time loop of our own making -- in this country, quite on its own, history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good but as something suspect, dubious, or even ungodly, as it was, e.g., in Italy in 1633 when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth is in orbit around the sun.
I am not a scientist and don't deal in formulas, but as a writer I would, in the words of Henry James, "take to [myself] the faintest hints of life and convert the very pulses of the air into revelations." That surely provides me with a line to unreason. And so when I read that the president of Iran denies the historical truth of the Holocaust, and when I hear the President of the United States rejecting the scientific truth of global warming, I recognize that no matter whatever distance they would keep between them, and whatever their confrontational stance, they are fellow travelers in the nether world.
Two things must be said about knowledge-deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.
But, you may say, am I not narrowing this issue, politicizing it by speaking of our president? In this discussion of knowledge as a foundation for a democratic society, am I not misusing this forum to broadcast a partisan point of view? Albert Einstein once said that even the most perfectly planned democratic institutions are no better than the people whose instruments they are. I would translate his remark this way: The president we get is the country we get. With each elected president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.
From those fundamentalist leaders who proclaimed 9/11 as our just deserts for our secular humanism, our civil libertarianism, our feminists, our gay and lesbian citizens, our abortion providers, and in so doing honored the foreign killers of nearly three thousand Americans as agents of God's justice ... to the creationists, the biblical literalists, the anti-Darwinian school boards, the right-to-lifer anti-abortionist activists, the shrill media ideologues whose jingoist patriotism and ad hominem ranting serves for public discourse -- all of it in degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows -- these phenomena are summoned up, and enshrined by the policies of this president. At the same time, he has set the national legislative program to run in reverse as he rescinds, deregulates, dismantles or otherwise degrades enlightened legislation in the public interest, so that in sum we find ourselves living in a social and psychic structure of the ghostly past, with our great national needs -- health care, public education, disaster relief -- going unmet. The president may speak of the nation in idealistic terms but his actions demonstrate that he has no real concept of national community. His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.
It will take more than the recent congressional elections and revelations of an inveterately corrupt administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. With our once upright democratic posture bent and misshapen, what rough beast are we as we slouch toward Bethlehem? What are we become in the hands of this president with his relentless subversion of our right to know -- his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war, his signing away of laws passed by Congress that he doesn't like, his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records, and email, his dicta time and time again in presumption total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government, his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state, his obsessive secrecy, his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified, his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access of documents to investigatory bodies, his use of the justice department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand ... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded, and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.
Now I realize that with these remarks I may be violating the linguistic proprieties of an academic convocation. I realize, in the tenor of these times, that anyone who speaks of the broad front of failure and mendacity and carelessness of human life in so much of our public policy, in terms any louder than muted regret, is usually marginalized as some sort of radical -- that is, as someone so "out of the mainstream" as not to be taken seriously.
But I believe what I have described so far is an accurate and informed account of the present state of the Union.
We must ask if this rage to deconstruct the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has any connection with the prevalence of God in the mind of this worshipful president. We must ask to what extent, and at however unconscious a level, a conflict arises in the pious political mind when it is sworn to uphold the civil religion of the Constitution.
The idea of the United States may have had its sources in the European Enlightenment, but it was the actions taken by self declared Americans that brought it into focus and established it as an entity. America is a society evolved from words written down on paper by ordinary mortals, however extraordinary they happened to be as human beings. When constitutional scholars speak of the American civil religion, they recognize that along with its separation of church and state, our Constitution and its amendments establishes as civil law ethical presumptions common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But if you have extracted the basic ethics of religious invention and found the mechanism for installing them in the statues of the secular civic order, but have consigned all the doctrine and rite and ritual, all the symbols and traditional practices to the precincts of private life, you are saying there is no one proven path to salvation, there are only traditions. If you relegate the old stories to the personal choices of private worship, you admit the ineffable is ineffable, and in terms of a possible theological triumphalism, everything is up for grabs.
Our pluralism cannot be entirely comfortable to someone of evangelical faith. But to the extreme fundamentalist -- that member of the evangelical community militant in his belief, an absolutist intolerant of all forms of belief but his own, all stories but his own. -- our pluralism has to be a profound offense. I speak of the so-called "political base" with which our president has bonded. In our raucous democracy fundamentalist religious belief has organized itself with political acumen to promulgate law that would undermine just those secular humanist principles that encourage it flourish in freedom. Of course there has rarely been a period in our history when God has not been called upon to march. Northern abolitionists and southern slave owners both claimed biblical endorsement. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement drew its strength from prayer and examples of Christian fortitude, while the Ku Klux Klan invoked Jesus as a sponsor of their racism. But there is a crucial difference between these traditional invocations and the politically astute and well funded activists of today's Christian Right who do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith.
Fundamentalism really cannot help itself -- it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy.
Now I value the point of view of Professor Mark Noll, who speaks of the "historical American merger of the forces of traditional Christianity with the forces of Enlightenment." It is a serious misreading of American history, he says, "to portray the tangled cultural and political conflicts of our time as pitting the pre-critical hordes of religion against the hyper-critical avatars of science." Historically, there has tended to be a religious accommodation of science, according to Professor Noll: In the 19th century, America theological conservatives could also be Darwinists. And even in the strident debates of today, fundamentalists still proclaim their allegiance to facts as loudly as their opponents. And theories such as intelligent design and creation science implicitly accept the modern scientific consensus on evolution while maintaining a confident belief in a traditional deity.
But all contrarian movements, like revolutions, devolve to their extremist expression, do they not? The theorists of creation science and intelligent design have marching on their right flank, with or without their approval, if not pre-critical hordes of religion, a militantly censorious well funded political movement that a president of the united states has tapped into for his and their benefit. I am not aware that American history invoked by Professor Noll has a precedent for this. Nor am I aware that the hyper-critical avatars of the secular scientific method have an equivalent hard-nosed political organization behind them. They don't even have a marching band.
The president has said the war with terrorists will last for decades and is a confrontation between "good and evil." Whether he means the evil of specific terrorist organizations or the culture from which they spring, he vision is necessarily Manichean. There is immense political power in such religiously inspired reductionism. Thus, no matter how he lies about the reason for his invasion of Iraq, or how badly it has gone, bumblingly and tragically ruinous, with so many lives destroyed, and no matter how many thousands of terrorists it has brought into being, to criticize his policy or the architects of it is said to aid the enemy. The president's inner circle of advisers, who conspire in this Manichean world view, have the unnatural vividness of personality of Shakespearean plotters. While the original think tank theorists and proponents of the war have quietly and understandably withdrawn from public view, the vice president and the president's chief policy adviser stand tall -- the first contemptuous of his critics, his denials of reality and obfuscations delivered in the dour tones of unquestionable authority, the second too clever by half, and because he has spent his years developing a theocratic constituency and wearing such blinders as an exclusive concern with party power has attached to him, most clearly has a future in the culture of anti-democracy he has so deviously and unwisely nurtured.
A Manichean politics reduces the relevance of knowledge and degrades the truth which knowledge discovers. The past seven years of American political life are an uncanny cycle we've slipped into, or slid into, that foresees the democratic traditions of this country as too much of a luxury to be maintained. We see, since the last election, the struggle now for the legislative branches to regain some of their constitutional prerogatives. They struggle not only with a recalcitrant president and vice president who impugns their motives but against the precedents of the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, each of whom added another conservative shock to the principle of separation of powers. Many of the executive practices today -- the blatant cronyism, the political uses of the justice department, the evisceration of regulatory agencies, and so on -- are empowered by these precedents. And so we have marched along from the imperial presidency, through four years of a one-party faux democracy, to plutocracy, to the borders of authoritarianism.
To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America, the metaphysical risks that are the heritage of the enlightenment, and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.
Melville in Moby Dick speaks of "reality outracing apprehension." Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet, but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesome complex white whale in our quantumized wave/particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.
What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water- wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy, and the righteous priorities of wealth.
I summon up the year 1787 when the Constitutional Convention had done its work and the drafted Constitution was sent out to the states for ratification. The public's excitement was palpable. Extended and vigorous statehouse debates echoed through the towns and villages, and as one by one the states voted to ratify, church bells rang, cheers went up from the public houses, and in the major cities the people turned out to parade with a fresh new sense of themselves as a nation. Everyone marched -- tradespeople, workingmen, soldiers, women, and clergy. They had floats in those days too -- most often a wagon-size ship of state called the Union, rolling through the streets with children waving from the scuppers. Philadelphia came up with a float called the New Roof, a dome supported by thirteen pillars and ornamented with stars. It was drawn by ten white horses and at the top was a handsome cupola surmounted by a figure of Plenty bearing her cornucopia. The ratification parades were sacramental -- symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society.
And with good reason: The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.
When the ancient Hebrews broke their covenant they suffered a loss of identity and brought disaster on themselves. Our burden too is covenantal. We may point to our two hundred some years of national survival as an open society, constitutionally sworn to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we may regard ourselves a an exceptionalist, historically self-correcting nation whose democratic values locate us just as surely as our geography....and yet we know at the same time that all through our history we have brutally excluded vast numbers of us from the shelter of the New Roof, we have broken our covenant again and again with a virtuosity verging on damnation and have been saved only by the sacrificial efforts of Constitution-reverencing patriots in and our of government -- presidents, senators, justices, self impoverishing lawyers, abolitionists, muckrakers, third-party candidates, suffragists, union organizers, striking workers, civil rights martyrs.
Because this president's subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone on before, and as it has created large social constituencies ready to support the flag waving ideals of an incremental fascism, we're called upon to step forward to reaffirm our covenant like these exemplars from the past.
The philosopher Richard Rorty has suggested in his book Achieving Our Country that the metaphysic of America's civil religion is pragmatism and its prophets are Walt Whitman and John Dewey "The most striking feature of their redescription of our country is its thorough-going secularism," says Rorty. "The moral they draw from the European past, and in particular from Christianity, is not instruction about the authority under which we should live but suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been."
To temporize human affairs, to look no up for some applied celestial accreditation, but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey, to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought, suppression of knowledge that is the public good --- is the essence of our civil religion.
It is Whitman, our great poet and pragmatic philosopher, who advises us not to be curious about God but to affix our curiosity to our own lives and the earth we live on, and then perhaps as far as we can see into the universe with our telescopes. This was the charge he gave himself, and it is the source of all the attentive love in his poetry. If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge, that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.
Portions of the above are drawn from Reporting the Universe (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) copyright, E.L. Doctorow. For the complete lectures, please go here.
Just Say "Know"-I
A friend forwarded the following to me:
The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin
By John Timmer | Published: June 29, 2007 - 12:49PM CT
Back around the early 1900s, the universe was a fairly simple place. It was static, had always been there, and largely consisted of our own galaxy and a few neighboring bits of matter. Over the course of the 20th century, that view collapsed. Many sources of light were revealed not be stars, but rather galaxies like (and, in many cases, unlike) our own. Distant galaxies were found to be rocketing away from us, propelled by the unfolding of the universe itself, which has accelerated since the big bang. Modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation.
According to a paper that will appear in October (arXiv link), we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. The authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology.
The 100-billion-year figure was chosen because that's expected to be the lifespan of the longest-lived stars. By that time, only clusters of galaxies will be bound together strongly enough to resist the Hubble expansion. In our case, that means the Milky Way, Andromeda, and a number of smaller globular clusters in our neighborhood. By that time, we'll have collided and merged with Andromeda, making the local group one big galaxy. By then, however, everything else we can see will have been pushed so far away by the universe's expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them. All matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible, and our view of the universe will look suspiciously like it did in the pre-Hubble days.
The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise—the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin.
Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe. By 100 billion years from now, however, much of the deuterium will have been burned in stars, with lots of helium produced in the process, erasing this evidence of our history. Worse still, we currently measure early deuterium levels by checking its absorbence of light from distant quasars. In the future, those quasars will have vanished.
Observers would still be able to piece together the age of our local cluster, based on a combination of knowledge about how elements are produced in stars and measuring their current abundance. But, in the end, the rest of the universe will vanish, taking with it any evidence of the Big Bang and some of its fundamental properties, such as dark energy.
The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that's got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there's another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle because we came along at the right time. Too much earlier, and we wouldn't be able to detect that the universe is in a new inflationary era, which tells us that it's dominated by dark energy. Too much later, and we wouldn't be able to know that there's a universe at all. As the authors put it, "we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe: the time at which we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!"
Dear Friend:
I have read and re-read your submission of John Timmer’s article “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin.”
Thanks for the fun read.
It may very well be true that we live at a point of confluence between our ability to construct instruments to measure the data of the universe, our ability to interpret such data, and the availability of this data to be collected, measured and interpreted.
However, our understanding of the universe is, and perhaps always will be limited. We view the universe through what can only be a narrow slit of the perceptual spectrum of both our devices and our selves. That being said, what is possible today was not possible years ago as our spectrum has expanded over time. As our appreciation of the universe changed at the beginning of the 20th century, it will change and change again as our understanding, knowledge and techniques improve.
So if part of the universe redshifts away, and if deuterium will burn with the stars, perhaps we will still be around in one form or another, with some device or another, to continue our exploration.
Perhaps the better title for Mr. Timmer’s article is “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin as we perceive it today.”
Thanks for the intriguing article.
TRM
The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin
By John Timmer | Published: June 29, 2007 - 12:49PM CT
Back around the early 1900s, the universe was a fairly simple place. It was static, had always been there, and largely consisted of our own galaxy and a few neighboring bits of matter. Over the course of the 20th century, that view collapsed. Many sources of light were revealed not be stars, but rather galaxies like (and, in many cases, unlike) our own. Distant galaxies were found to be rocketing away from us, propelled by the unfolding of the universe itself, which has accelerated since the big bang. Modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation.
According to a paper that will appear in October (arXiv link), we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. The authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology.
The 100-billion-year figure was chosen because that's expected to be the lifespan of the longest-lived stars. By that time, only clusters of galaxies will be bound together strongly enough to resist the Hubble expansion. In our case, that means the Milky Way, Andromeda, and a number of smaller globular clusters in our neighborhood. By that time, we'll have collided and merged with Andromeda, making the local group one big galaxy. By then, however, everything else we can see will have been pushed so far away by the universe's expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them. All matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible, and our view of the universe will look suspiciously like it did in the pre-Hubble days.
The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone. Its wavelength will have been shifted to a full meter, and its intensity will drop by 12 orders of magnitude. Even before then, however, the frequency will reach that of the interstellar plasma and be buried in the noise—the stuff of the universe itself will mask the evidence of its origin.
Other evidence for the Big Bang comes from the amount of deuterium and helium isotopes in the universe. By 100 billion years from now, however, much of the deuterium will have been burned in stars, with lots of helium produced in the process, erasing this evidence of our history. Worse still, we currently measure early deuterium levels by checking its absorbence of light from distant quasars. In the future, those quasars will have vanished.
Observers would still be able to piece together the age of our local cluster, based on a combination of knowledge about how elements are produced in stars and measuring their current abundance. But, in the end, the rest of the universe will vanish, taking with it any evidence of the Big Bang and some of its fundamental properties, such as dark energy.
The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that's got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there's another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle because we came along at the right time. Too much earlier, and we wouldn't be able to detect that the universe is in a new inflationary era, which tells us that it's dominated by dark energy. Too much later, and we wouldn't be able to know that there's a universe at all. As the authors put it, "we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe: the time at which we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!"
Dear Friend:
I have read and re-read your submission of John Timmer’s article “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin.”
Thanks for the fun read.
It may very well be true that we live at a point of confluence between our ability to construct instruments to measure the data of the universe, our ability to interpret such data, and the availability of this data to be collected, measured and interpreted.
However, our understanding of the universe is, and perhaps always will be limited. We view the universe through what can only be a narrow slit of the perceptual spectrum of both our devices and our selves. That being said, what is possible today was not possible years ago as our spectrum has expanded over time. As our appreciation of the universe changed at the beginning of the 20th century, it will change and change again as our understanding, knowledge and techniques improve.
So if part of the universe redshifts away, and if deuterium will burn with the stars, perhaps we will still be around in one form or another, with some device or another, to continue our exploration.
Perhaps the better title for Mr. Timmer’s article is “The universe will destroy the evidence of its origin as we perceive it today.”
Thanks for the intriguing article.
TRM
Monday, July 2, 2007
NYCLib Writes Again..
For accuracy sake- here's Senator Clinton's Sudan response~~
SEN. CLINTON: There are three things we have to do immediately. Move the peacekeepers that finally the United Nations and the African Union have agreed to into Sudan as soon as possible. In order for them to be effective, there has to be airlift and logistical support, and that can only come either unilaterally from the United States or from NATO. I prefer NATO. And finally, we should have a no-fly zone over Sudan because the Sudanese governments bomb the villages before and after the Janjawid come. And we should make it very clear to the government in Khartoum we’re putting up a no-fly zone; if they fly into it, we will shoot down their planes. Is the only way to get their attention. (Applause.)
SEN. CLINTON: There are three things we have to do immediately. Move the peacekeepers that finally the United Nations and the African Union have agreed to into Sudan as soon as possible. In order for them to be effective, there has to be airlift and logistical support, and that can only come either unilaterally from the United States or from NATO. I prefer NATO. And finally, we should have a no-fly zone over Sudan because the Sudanese governments bomb the villages before and after the Janjawid come. And we should make it very clear to the government in Khartoum we’re putting up a no-fly zone; if they fly into it, we will shoot down their planes. Is the only way to get their attention. (Applause.)
Sunday, July 1, 2007
"A Mighty Heart" Meets Hecules
I had a strange experience on Saturday. I went to Times Square to see the movie “A Mighty Heart”. I got to the “Crossroads of the World” in time to see a police surge, an event in operation Hercules, where NYPD sends scores if not hundreds of police cars to one area, just to shake things up. I admit I was pretty shaken by the site of all these police cars parked on the sidewalk at 90 degrees to the street, all lights flashing. I hope potential terrorists had the same reaction that I did.
It made sense of NYPD to do this in the aftermath of the attempted Piccadilly bombings. MSNBC reports on NYPD’s assessment.
I believe that a great sense of my unease lies in the fact that should something happen I would be totally defenseless. I was but two blocks from the World Trade center on September 11th, and I remember my reactions: shock, rage, and yes, feeling defenseless. There was absolutely noting I could do in the immediate aftermath of that horrible event. I wished there was something that I could do to get back at those bastards. Until this day, I have this fantasy: Osama bin Laden has been captured, tried and convicted. I win a national lottery that gives an ordinary citizen the right to execute bin laden in whichever way he or she feels appropriate. I wonder whether I would go for something slow and painful or quick.
I suppose it is a way to make up for my sense of vulnerability. I ride the subways every day. I go through Grand Central Terminal everyday. I have no doubt that I am a target.
BONUS MOVIE REVIEW
I thought “A Mighty Heart” was a vehicle to show that Angelina Jolie was a “serious” actress. The center of the movie was Jolie, as reporter Daniel Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who waits while Pakistani police try to find her husband before terrorists murder him. While Jolie performed admirably, I thought the movie itself lacked focus and led the viewer to the forced conclusion that we are all evil, but others might be just a little more evil.
I give “A Mighty Heart” 3.5 stars out of four.
It made sense of NYPD to do this in the aftermath of the attempted Piccadilly bombings. MSNBC reports on NYPD’s assessment.
I believe that a great sense of my unease lies in the fact that should something happen I would be totally defenseless. I was but two blocks from the World Trade center on September 11th, and I remember my reactions: shock, rage, and yes, feeling defenseless. There was absolutely noting I could do in the immediate aftermath of that horrible event. I wished there was something that I could do to get back at those bastards. Until this day, I have this fantasy: Osama bin Laden has been captured, tried and convicted. I win a national lottery that gives an ordinary citizen the right to execute bin laden in whichever way he or she feels appropriate. I wonder whether I would go for something slow and painful or quick.
I suppose it is a way to make up for my sense of vulnerability. I ride the subways every day. I go through Grand Central Terminal everyday. I have no doubt that I am a target.
BONUS MOVIE REVIEW
I thought “A Mighty Heart” was a vehicle to show that Angelina Jolie was a “serious” actress. The center of the movie was Jolie, as reporter Daniel Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who waits while Pakistani police try to find her husband before terrorists murder him. While Jolie performed admirably, I thought the movie itself lacked focus and led the viewer to the forced conclusion that we are all evil, but others might be just a little more evil.
I give “A Mighty Heart” 3.5 stars out of four.
NYC Liberal writes...
Here is his comment:
NYCLiberal said...
Well perhaps you should have set your alarm clock for the debate a few days ago. While nothing earth shattering occurred, there were some interesting moments. At least some topics not previously 'debated' in the primary season came up. (New Orleans recovery/Katrina, Sudan, trade agreements, health care, school integration/last week's Supreme Court decisions) My favorite 'handled' moment was when Clinton put forward a 'no-fly' zone concept for the Sudan and, if that didn't work, she would bomb. I thought she hit a home run with that--tough woman who would do battle in Africa for human rights!
Sure, Lib, but where would she get the troops and forces to do this? And where is all the talk about forming coalitions and not acting unilaterally? I don't believe a word she says.
TRM
NYCLiberal said...
Well perhaps you should have set your alarm clock for the debate a few days ago. While nothing earth shattering occurred, there were some interesting moments. At least some topics not previously 'debated' in the primary season came up. (New Orleans recovery/Katrina, Sudan, trade agreements, health care, school integration/last week's Supreme Court decisions) My favorite 'handled' moment was when Clinton put forward a 'no-fly' zone concept for the Sudan and, if that didn't work, she would bomb. I thought she hit a home run with that--tough woman who would do battle in Africa for human rights!
Sure, Lib, but where would she get the troops and forces to do this? And where is all the talk about forming coalitions and not acting unilaterally? I don't believe a word she says.
TRM
Money For Nothing
Let’s be honest, things are pretty boring right now. As the presidential campaign meanders onward, the only significant news lies in numbers.
The democratic candidates released their campaign contribution numbers today and the big surprise came from barrack Obama’s camp, which announced that the candidate had raised a record $32.5 million dollars for the second quarter. This is an astonishing figure in both an absolute sense and in because he beat the so-called front runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who raised $27 million dollars. Is Hillary fatigue starting to set in?
John Edwards had a poor showing at $9 million, while New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is staring to show surprising strength relative to the other second tier candidates, raising $7 million. Richardson may be in the process of breaking into so-called top tier of candidates, at least on a dollar basis.
One note on the national polls: FORGET THEM. The only national poll that really means anything happens on Election Day, and even then, it is less significant than many people think since their electoral college representatives actually cast the votes that matter.
The primary system is a series of hurdles that must be jumped one at a time. Therefore, it is more instructive to look at the individual state polls in the order of their primaries. The standings will change once the process starts in earnest (sort of like the baseball season) but let’s look at Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, in that order. (Results are aggregated by the Votemaster at http://www.electoral-vote.com/ . This is an incredibly valuable site for poll analysis)
In Iowa a Mason-Dixon poll conducted on June 16 shows Hillary and John Edwards in a statistical dead heat:
Clinton 22% Obama 18% Edwards 21%
Giuliani 15% McCain 6% Romney 25%
The polls recorded by the Votemaster since January show considerable strength for Edwards since the beginning of 2007. As MSNBC reported:
On the republican side, you can put a fork in McCain; he’s done! Unless of course Mitt Romney does something stupid, and we have never seen a politician do anything stupid, have we?
I still believe Giuliani’s numbers will evaporate once his total record comes under proper scrutiny. As I have said many times, he was mayor for eight years and a great mayor for eight weeks.
Obviously, the winner in Iowa will start to see more money flowing his or her way. But has Clinton tapped out her big money raisers? Has Obama tapped out the little guy?
Move from Iowa to the next state in the primary hurdles, New Hampshire. Clinton has shown consistent strength. In a Suffolk University poll of June 24th:
Clinton 37% Obama 19% Edwards 9%
Giuliani 22% McCain 13% Romney 26%
These numbers can become very fluid coming out of Iowa.
Finally, Lets look at June 15 South Carolina poll conducted by Mason-Dixon:
Clinton 25% Obama 34% Edwards 12%
Giuliani 21% McCain 7% Romney 11%
While Clinton has led, Obama has taken a strong lead in the last poll. On the Republican side, Giuliani shows strength.
What does this all mean? For the Democrats, Clinton has reasons to worry. Hillary Clinton will not be the shoo-in that she wants everyone to believe. Edwards leads her in Iowa, Obama leads her in South Carolina. Her support is not firm in important individual states. Her money raising machine may be running out of steam. Meanwhile, the unannounced Al Gore continues to upstage the others with great publicity and an op-ed article in the NY Times that tackles global warming. Is Gore running just by acting presidential?
On the Republican side Romney and Giuliani both show strength. But Fred Thompson might upset those apple carts once he announces.
So continue the snooze fest until the end of summer.
The democratic candidates released their campaign contribution numbers today and the big surprise came from barrack Obama’s camp, which announced that the candidate had raised a record $32.5 million dollars for the second quarter. This is an astonishing figure in both an absolute sense and in because he beat the so-called front runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who raised $27 million dollars. Is Hillary fatigue starting to set in?
John Edwards had a poor showing at $9 million, while New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is staring to show surprising strength relative to the other second tier candidates, raising $7 million. Richardson may be in the process of breaking into so-called top tier of candidates, at least on a dollar basis.
One note on the national polls: FORGET THEM. The only national poll that really means anything happens on Election Day, and even then, it is less significant than many people think since their electoral college representatives actually cast the votes that matter.
The primary system is a series of hurdles that must be jumped one at a time. Therefore, it is more instructive to look at the individual state polls in the order of their primaries. The standings will change once the process starts in earnest (sort of like the baseball season) but let’s look at Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, in that order. (Results are aggregated by the Votemaster at http://www.electoral-vote.com/ . This is an incredibly valuable site for poll analysis)
In Iowa a Mason-Dixon poll conducted on June 16 shows Hillary and John Edwards in a statistical dead heat:
Clinton 22% Obama 18% Edwards 21%
Giuliani 15% McCain 6% Romney 25%
The polls recorded by the Votemaster since January show considerable strength for Edwards since the beginning of 2007. As MSNBC reported:
A new Mason-Dixon poll shows that Clinton, Edwards, and Obama are all in a dead heat in Iowa. But the actual leader in the survey is someone who isn't even running -- and isn't even a person: It's "undecided".
In the poll -- which was taken of 400 likely Democratic caucus-goers from June 13-16, and which has a margin of error of +/- 5% -- Clinton is at 22%, Edwards is at 21%, and Obama is at 18%. Richardson comes in fourth at 6%, and Biden gets 4%; no other Dem gets more than 2%. But a whopping 27% say they are undecided.
On the republican side, you can put a fork in McCain; he’s done! Unless of course Mitt Romney does something stupid, and we have never seen a politician do anything stupid, have we?
I still believe Giuliani’s numbers will evaporate once his total record comes under proper scrutiny. As I have said many times, he was mayor for eight years and a great mayor for eight weeks.
Obviously, the winner in Iowa will start to see more money flowing his or her way. But has Clinton tapped out her big money raisers? Has Obama tapped out the little guy?
Move from Iowa to the next state in the primary hurdles, New Hampshire. Clinton has shown consistent strength. In a Suffolk University poll of June 24th:
Clinton 37% Obama 19% Edwards 9%
Giuliani 22% McCain 13% Romney 26%
These numbers can become very fluid coming out of Iowa.
Finally, Lets look at June 15 South Carolina poll conducted by Mason-Dixon:
Clinton 25% Obama 34% Edwards 12%
Giuliani 21% McCain 7% Romney 11%
While Clinton has led, Obama has taken a strong lead in the last poll. On the Republican side, Giuliani shows strength.
What does this all mean? For the Democrats, Clinton has reasons to worry. Hillary Clinton will not be the shoo-in that she wants everyone to believe. Edwards leads her in Iowa, Obama leads her in South Carolina. Her support is not firm in important individual states. Her money raising machine may be running out of steam. Meanwhile, the unannounced Al Gore continues to upstage the others with great publicity and an op-ed article in the NY Times that tackles global warming. Is Gore running just by acting presidential?
On the Republican side Romney and Giuliani both show strength. But Fred Thompson might upset those apple carts once he announces.
So continue the snooze fest until the end of summer.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
On Lute
And I am still trying to figure out why a smart guy like Gen. Lute took the job as "war czar". Unless of course he either has a strong masochistic streak or an ego larger than his supposedly immense IQ.
He took the job even though he disagreed with the president's methods and objectives.
Other than that, he seems a perfect candidate to carry out the administration's plan
Read this latest:
He took the job even though he disagreed with the president's methods and objectives.
Other than that, he seems a perfect candidate to carry out the administration's plan
Read this latest:
War Adviser Was Skeptical of Strategy
Jun 6 05:39 PM US/Eastern
By ANNE FLAHERTY
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, picked by President Bush as his White House war adviser, said Wednesday he had been skeptical of Bush's decision to send thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq.
In a written response to questions by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lute confirmed news reports that he had voiced doubts during a White House-led policy review that led to Bush's Jan. 10 announcement that 21,500 more combat troops would go to Baghdad and Anbar province.
The buildup was hotly contested in Congress, including among several Republicans who favored greater pressure on Iraqi security forces to take over combat.
"During the review, I registered concerns that a military 'surge' would likely have only temporary and localized effects unless it were accompanied by counterpart 'surges' by the Iraqi government and the other, nonmilitary agencies of the U.S. government," Lute wrote in a document obtained by The Associated Press.
"I also noted that our enemies in Iraq have, in effect, 'a vote' and should be expected to take specific steps to counter from our efforts," he added. "The new policy took such concerns into account. It is too soon to tell the outcome."
Lute was scheduled to testify in public for the first time Thursday since being picked for the position.
If confirmed by the Senate, Lute would hold the title of deputy national security adviser. He would report directly to the president—briefing Bush daily—and work with other government agencies, including the Pentagon and the State Department.
White House officials said Lute's challenge would be to cut through bureaucracy and deliver fast responses when requests come in from military commanders and ambassadors.
"In practical terms, this will mean taking a sober view of where we are now and focusing fully on the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan, even though there is a full range of competing global commitments," Lute wrote committee members.
Several senators were expected to question whether putting a three- star general at the White House now amounts to too little, too late to salvage a deeply unpopular war.
"I think there's a lot of questions that need to be answered as far as what his role is" and his relationship to other administration officials, said the committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. "Where does he fit in precisely?"
The position was difficult to fill, given the unpopularity of a war in its fifth year and uncertainty surrounding the clout that the war coordinator would have.
The search was complicated given Democrats' demands that Bush bring U.S. troops home from Iraq and Republican's skepticism over the troop buildup. The White House tried for weeks to fill the position and approached numerous candidates—including retired four-star generals who turned the job down—before settling on Lute.
At the confirmation hearing, Lute was expected to tell senators that early results of the troop buildup have been mixed.
"No one is satisfied with the status quo: not the Iraqis, not key regional partners, not the U.S. government, and not the American public," according to his prepared remarks.
Lute noted that "conditions on the ground are deeply complex and are likely to continue to evolve—meaning that we must constantly adapt."
Lute has meet in private with committee members. While Lute's position has drawn questions, lawmakers said his character has not.
"He has a lot of stature," said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. "This is a very good general."
When asked whether he thinks Lute could make a difference in the war effort, Levin indicated he had his doubts.
"Look, the policy is set by the president," the chairman told a reporter shortly before meeting with Lute.
Another concern is whether Lute would be exempt from testifying before Congress in future hearings on Iraq because of his role as a presidential adviser. White House officials have not guaranteed the war adviser will be made available, claiming executive privilege.
Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., "believes this is a position that has a strong role in this war ... and that the people's representatives ought to have the ability to talk to and ask questions" of the individual, said Byrd's spokesman Tom Gavin.
Lute has been director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff since September. Before that, he served for more than two years as director of operations at U.S. Central Command, during which he helped oversee combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last month, when Bush announced that Lute was his choice, the president described him as an "accomplished military leader who understands war and government and knows how to get things done."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Apologies
As i said when i started this endeavor, i have a real life which sometimes must take precedence over my beloved blog. For the past few weeks I have been unable to post new material. Face it, the political world right now is in the equivalent of the "phony war" (look it up). The Iraq situation is just more depressing. I am looking for signs of hope in the fact that US and Iranian diplomats have and are talking, and the fact that nutty Iran president Ahmanijad seems to be on a short lease, held closely in check by his real masters. Oh , he will bark now and then when the clerics who run Iran want to stir up the population with patriotic and nationalistic rantings, but so far, he is pretty quiet.
More later.
More later.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Michael Writes...
Could you please assess Al Gore's reasons to run or not for the Presidency in 2008. It seems to me that the Dem's have a lock. They just have to pick someone who will give voters a reason not to vote for them. I cannot imagine the DNC risking a bold move like nominating a woman or a black man.
Michael:
This year the issue isn't "bold", but dollars (Ka--chingg!). This is especially true with the political season having been moved up to such an early date this time around. (I think that when Florida moved up their primary, they decided to bite the bullet and say "what the heck, let's hold the 2012, and 2016 primaries on the same day).
Talk about "bold", what about a Latino?
Money and organization are key, but not the ultimate deciders. A great amount of free press coverage can make up for a lack of dollars. That is what has happened to Barak Obama. But money, organization, and a candidate who controls his or her image are key. Kerry lost control of his image last time around. Damned fool had to go windsurfing. Couldn't provide a simple declarative sentence. No, it had to be "I was for it before i was against it." Sheesh!
The DNC doesn't pick the candidates, it just tries to keep the potential for Democratic political suicide down to a reasonable level (you know the old joke: a Democratic firing squad forms up into a circle so they could shoot themselves!)
Hillary supposedly has, or had a lock on the nomination, but yesterday's news of the leaked campaign memo suggesting that she pull out of Iowa to save her money for later campaigns could indicate that the cash register isn't ringing for her like she wants. We will be able to tell during the next round of Federal Election Commission reports.
Barak Obama, I believe, ultimately will be seen as the media creation he is. John Edwards could win Iowa, and ultimately win the nomination.
My personal favorite, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, has just moved up into double digits in Iowa polls. I've heard a lot of talk about slotting Richardson for the VP position, but geez, I think this guy is so superior to the rest of the pack.
By the way, if you read the national polls, the candidates will be Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Besides the fact that I think Giuliani's record can not really endear him to a Republican constituency (especially to that party's right wing), I can't conceive of the possibility that both national tickets will be headed by New Yorkers.
Finally, I would ignore the overall national polls> all they reflect right now are the warm fuzzies. They do not reflect the strength each candidate has to exhibit at each caucus or primary along the way. Candidates can blow up (see: Howard Dean). The best practice is to look at the individual state results, such as those that David Yepsen in Iowa reported on.
As for Al Gore, this is what I wrote on March 3, 2007:
I hope I've answered your question.
Yours,
TRM
Michael:
This year the issue isn't "bold", but dollars (Ka--chingg!). This is especially true with the political season having been moved up to such an early date this time around. (I think that when Florida moved up their primary, they decided to bite the bullet and say "what the heck, let's hold the 2012, and 2016 primaries on the same day).
Talk about "bold", what about a Latino?
Money and organization are key, but not the ultimate deciders. A great amount of free press coverage can make up for a lack of dollars. That is what has happened to Barak Obama. But money, organization, and a candidate who controls his or her image are key. Kerry lost control of his image last time around. Damned fool had to go windsurfing. Couldn't provide a simple declarative sentence. No, it had to be "I was for it before i was against it." Sheesh!
The DNC doesn't pick the candidates, it just tries to keep the potential for Democratic political suicide down to a reasonable level (you know the old joke: a Democratic firing squad forms up into a circle so they could shoot themselves!)
Hillary supposedly has, or had a lock on the nomination, but yesterday's news of the leaked campaign memo suggesting that she pull out of Iowa to save her money for later campaigns could indicate that the cash register isn't ringing for her like she wants. We will be able to tell during the next round of Federal Election Commission reports.
Barak Obama, I believe, ultimately will be seen as the media creation he is. John Edwards could win Iowa, and ultimately win the nomination.
My personal favorite, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, has just moved up into double digits in Iowa polls. I've heard a lot of talk about slotting Richardson for the VP position, but geez, I think this guy is so superior to the rest of the pack.
By the way, if you read the national polls, the candidates will be Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Besides the fact that I think Giuliani's record can not really endear him to a Republican constituency (especially to that party's right wing), I can't conceive of the possibility that both national tickets will be headed by New Yorkers.
Finally, I would ignore the overall national polls> all they reflect right now are the warm fuzzies. They do not reflect the strength each candidate has to exhibit at each caucus or primary along the way. Candidates can blow up (see: Howard Dean). The best practice is to look at the individual state results, such as those that David Yepsen in Iowa reported on.
As for Al Gore, this is what I wrote on March 3, 2007:
Gore Redux
So some Democrats are unhappy with the possibility of a Hillary candidacy and they are looking for a hero. With upturned eyes and adoring faces, they turn to the failed 2000 candidate, Al Gore. That’s the Democratic party: fail once and then get to fail again.
Gore is Gore. Sure, they said he was groomed for the presidency, but maybe everyone believes it except Al Gore himself. His 2000 campaign was a disaster. He didn’t know what he was , what he stood for or where he wanted to go . He allowed everyone to tell him which clothes to wear, what to say, what to do. Remember the articles which said he wasn’t an “alpha male”? He wasn’t. He was picked apart and hen-pecked like Prometheus on the rock. Only Gore didn’t seem to require chains to bind him. He was a willing victim. Did he ever really want to be president?
On the other hand, Bush wanted the presidency. Oh yes, Bush and his handlers knew what was involved. (I’ll never forgive my leftist friend for saying Bush and Gore were Tweddledee and Tweedledum and since there was no difference between them, he would vote for Nader! NADER! I begged him. I pleaded with him—The Supreme COURT! Bush will pick justices for the Supreme Court! Didn’t work. Hell, if all of the voters in Florida who voted for Nader voted instead for Gore, our history for the last eight years would be markedly different!) Bush et.al. went and got family consigliore Jim Baker and they went to the Republican-picked and packed Supreme Court, which handed the election to GWB.
So when it came time to let it all hang out and challenge the Florida vote count, Gore dithered and diddled away the time and tried to pick and choose which districts required the recount and which didn’t. I want my candidate to know when the time comes to fight for something like a starving junkyard dog. Gore didn’t. He should have demanded a recount for the entire state. Then he played the gentleman, and quietly withdrew “for the good of the country
Gore’s adherents now look to him as the party’s savior; the anti-Hillary, if not the elected one, then the electable one. The guy who was right all along. Gore doesn’t put a stop to the speculation so that the party can move along with it’s quadrennial circular firing squad thing. Nope. Instead he plays the tease with a mock announcement of his candidacy at the Academy awards. When given the chance for a Sherman-esque declaration, he declines to do so.
Maybe Gore feels that he can bide his time and put himself into a winning position. Let’s look at the possibilities: Gore is not a fan of the Clintons because he felt they screwed him out of the possibility of becoming president. Perhaps he thinks that he can wait and pick up an Academy Award here, a Noble Prize nomination, if not a prize itself, there, and then waltz in and save the party from Hillary. For Gore, there would be more and better media coverage then any candidate possibly could garner, and all without the muss and fuss of raising money, putting an organization together, and actually running a campaign.
They used to call him “Prince Albert.” Maybe that’s the secret: Gore doesn’t want to be elected. He wants to be coronated!
I hope I've answered your question.
Yours,
TRM
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Iran Math
Here are some interesting story threads to ponder:
1.Nine US military ships enter Persian Gulf Wednesday, assembling off Iran’s coast in largest American naval move since 2003
May 23, 2007, 6:56 PM (GMT+02:00)
They sailed through the Strait of Hormuz by day - according to US Navy officials for training exercises. The vessels carry around 17,000 combat and marine personnel. They include the two aircraft carriers, USS Nimitz and USS Stennis, as well as the USS Bonhomme Richard LHD 6 Group, the world’s biggest amphibious strike force. Iran was not notified of the planned arrival.
DEBKAfile reports the maneuvers take place less than two weeks after Vice President Dick Cheney visited the region and informed Saudi King Abdullah and fellow Gulf rulers that President George W. Bush has determined that if Iran refuses to waive a nuclear weapon capability, the US will attack its nuclear, military and economic infrastructure before he leaves the White House in Jan. 2009.
2. (CNN) -- U.S. and Iranian officials will meet in Baghdad later this month to discuss issues involving Iraq, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters that the date would be May 28. Both officials were speaking from Islamabad, Pakistan, where an Islamic conference of foreign ministers was being held.
According to Zebari, the discussions will be a part of three-party talks, involving the United States, Iran and Iraq.
3.The US House of Representatives last week allocated another $25 for the Arrow’s joint production and integration; and $45 m for the US-Israeli short-range David’s Sling, which is under development for countering high trajectory projectiles, such as Hizballah’s Katyusha rockets.
US and Israeli anti-missile systems are scheduled to be fully integrated by the year 2013. A further American investment of $1 bn in the Israeli programs will top up the $2.8 bn already spent.
Israel’s defense minister Amir Peretz said on May 19 that he hopes David’s Sling will be ready in two years. This leaves Israel unprotected against the Palestinian Qassam, Hizballah’s Katyusha or mortar attack before 2010.
4. Iran is estimated to be 3-8 years from possessing an atomic weapon, according to teh International Atomic Energy Agency, states the Houston Chronicle:
5. United Nations Security Council permanent members Russia and China have been most active in opposing world-wide sanctions against the Iranian government to halt nuclear development. See this March Washington Post report.
6. As Janes reported in 2005, Russia and China are driven more by their economic interests than by concerns for international security:
And take a look at this 2005 item from Asia Times:
I'll have some analysis by Sunday.
1.Nine US military ships enter Persian Gulf Wednesday, assembling off Iran’s coast in largest American naval move since 2003
May 23, 2007, 6:56 PM (GMT+02:00)
They sailed through the Strait of Hormuz by day - according to US Navy officials for training exercises. The vessels carry around 17,000 combat and marine personnel. They include the two aircraft carriers, USS Nimitz and USS Stennis, as well as the USS Bonhomme Richard LHD 6 Group, the world’s biggest amphibious strike force. Iran was not notified of the planned arrival.
DEBKAfile reports the maneuvers take place less than two weeks after Vice President Dick Cheney visited the region and informed Saudi King Abdullah and fellow Gulf rulers that President George W. Bush has determined that if Iran refuses to waive a nuclear weapon capability, the US will attack its nuclear, military and economic infrastructure before he leaves the White House in Jan. 2009.
2. (CNN) -- U.S. and Iranian officials will meet in Baghdad later this month to discuss issues involving Iraq, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters that the date would be May 28. Both officials were speaking from Islamabad, Pakistan, where an Islamic conference of foreign ministers was being held.
According to Zebari, the discussions will be a part of three-party talks, involving the United States, Iran and Iraq.
3.The US House of Representatives last week allocated another $25 for the Arrow’s joint production and integration; and $45 m for the US-Israeli short-range David’s Sling, which is under development for countering high trajectory projectiles, such as Hizballah’s Katyusha rockets.
US and Israeli anti-missile systems are scheduled to be fully integrated by the year 2013. A further American investment of $1 bn in the Israeli programs will top up the $2.8 bn already spent.
Israel’s defense minister Amir Peretz said on May 19 that he hopes David’s Sling will be ready in two years. This leaves Israel unprotected against the Palestinian Qassam, Hizballah’s Katyusha or mortar attack before 2010.
4. Iran is estimated to be 3-8 years from possessing an atomic weapon, according to teh International Atomic Energy Agency, states the Houston Chronicle:
LUXEMBOURG — The head of the U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday he agreed with CIA estimates that Iran was three to eight years from being able to make nuclear weapons and he urged the U.S. and other powers to pursue talks with the Islamic country.
The best way to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear arms is "through a comprehensive dialogue," International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told a news conference in Luxembourg. "One way to do that, rather than to continue the rhetoric, is to ... sit down together."
On Wednesday, the IAEA reported that Iran's uranium enrichment program was expanding in defiance of U.N. demands that it be suspended, findings that could lead to new sanctions against the country.
The report also warned that the IAEA's knowledge of those activities was shrinking.
"We are moving toward Iran building (nuclear) capacity and knowledge, without (the IAEA) in a position to verify the nature or scope of that program," ElBaradei said.
5. United Nations Security Council permanent members Russia and China have been most active in opposing world-wide sanctions against the Iranian government to halt nuclear development. See this March Washington Post report.
6. As Janes reported in 2005, Russia and China are driven more by their economic interests than by concerns for international security:
An Iran-Russia-China axis?
The decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer Iran's nuclear programme to the UN Security Council has thrown into sharp focus relations between Iran and Russia. Moscow may soon have to choose whether to back Iran or align itself with the US and the European Union (EU) in reining in Iran's nuclear intentions.
Russia appears ready to co-operate with both the USA and Iran in order to boost its trade relations with the two countries. Although Russia is also a leading oil exporter and therefore unlikely to be intimidated by Iranian threats to reduce oil sales, the Russian nuclear industry is dependent on the completion of Iran's USD1 billion Bushehr project, which Moscow hopes will be followed by future billion-dollar contracts. Russia's defence industries, also badly in need of an economic boost through exports, have also been selling weapons systems and aircraft to Iran.
Meanwhile, China is becoming even more dependent on Iran for energy. A November 2004 deal to supply China with gas worth USD100 billion is likely rise to a total of USD200 billion after a similar oil agreement is finalised. Iran will export 10 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) annually for 25 years in return for Chinese investment in exploration and drilling. This energy co-operation is rendering the US administration's economic sanctions on Iran ineffective. However, the Russians must now assess the likelihood of being supplanted by China if they appear willing to trade favours with Washington and lose the confidence of Tehran. Iran may yet emerge as a leading member of a post-Cold War alliance which will work to undermine US regional objectives.
And take a look at this 2005 item from Asia Times:
China lays down gauntlet in energy war
By F William Engdahl
On December 15, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) inaugurated an oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan to northwest China. The pipeline will undercut the geopolitical significance of the Washington-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)oil pipeline which opened this past summer amid big fanfare and support from Washington.
The geopolitical chess game for the control of the energy flows of Central Asia and overall of Eurasia from the Atlantic to the China
I'll have some analysis by Sunday.
Dweeb of the Week
The Dweeb of the Week non-award is in danger of being permanently retired in the hands of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Due to his continuing role in politicizing the Justice Department, Gonzalez has been nominated for the John Mitchell Memorial Award
Check this out in today's Washington post:
Check this out in today's Washington post:
A former senior aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales leveled serious new accusations against him and his deputy yesterday, describing an "uncomfortable" attempt by Gonzales to discuss the firings of U.S. attorneys as Congress and the Justice Department were intensifying their investigations of the issue.
Monica M. Goodling, who resigned last month as Gonzales's senior counselor and White House liaison, also told the House Judiciary Committee yesterday that she "crossed the line" by using political criteria in hiring a wide array of career professionals at Justice, including looking up political donations by some applicants.
In a day-long hearing that afforded her immunity from prosecution, Goodling minimized her role in the controversial firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year and joined a long line of Justice officials who say they were not responsible for adding names to the lists of those to be dismissed.
But Goodling's appearance also opened broad new avenues of inquiry for congressional Democrats, who think Gonzales has presided over intensifying political meddling at the Justice Department. It also provided fresh evidence of the deepening rifts between current and former Justice officials, who have increasingly turned on one another since the prosecutor firings.
Goodling, 33, alleged that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty was "not fully candid" with Congress about his knowledge of White House involvement in the firings. McNulty, who tendered his resignation last week, disputed that.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
IOWA-- Polls for Pols
New polls in Iowa have less than good news for some of the perceived presidential candidate front-runners. Rudy ain't doing as well as he thought he would, and Hillary's charm is lost on some of the farmland crowd. Read the linked David Yepsen article.
By the way , does anyone really understand how the heck the Iowa caucuses really operate? And why it is important for a sophisticated pol, someone who is running for president, to be seen sitting on some farmer's bale of hay while chewing on a piece of straw?
Let's think about the importance of all of this.
On the Democratic side, John Edwards leads Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton among likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers. He gets 29 percent of the Iowa vote. Obama gets 23 percent, and Clinton comes in third with 21 percent. Nationally, Clinton leads in most polls of the Democratic race.
On the Republican side, Mitt Romney has taken the lead with an impressive 30 percent of the vote among that party's likely caucus-goers. John McCain is in second at 18 percent, and Rudy Giuliani is in third with 17 percent.
By the way , does anyone really understand how the heck the Iowa caucuses really operate? And why it is important for a sophisticated pol, someone who is running for president, to be seen sitting on some farmer's bale of hay while chewing on a piece of straw?
Let's think about the importance of all of this.
Family Values
Thanks to the Votemaster (see previous blog) for pointing me to The Daily Irrelevant.
If the Republicans use the term "family values" once more, well, they were laughable to begin with, so this absolutely shows their utter hypocrisy.
I tried to copy some material from The Daily Irrelevant into this blog, but without success. Please check out TDI directly
If the Republicans use the term "family values" once more, well, they were laughable to begin with, so this absolutely shows their utter hypocrisy.
I tried to copy some material from The Daily Irrelevant into this blog, but without success. Please check out TDI directly
The Horse Race
Every political horse race needs an announcer. Over the past few years I have found http://www.electoral-vote.com/ to be one of the most interesting. It is run by an expatriate American math and computer sciences professor living in Amsterdam. His work is outstanding from many aspects: he keeps the big pollsters honest, he is informative, his analysis is free of political slant, and the page is quite humorous.
The site is excellent for all the congressional elections and it is especially fun for the presidential contests.
Consider bookmarking it and referring to it regularly.
The site is excellent for all the congressional elections and it is especially fun for the presidential contests.
Consider bookmarking it and referring to it regularly.
Edmund Burke, You Have a Call
I find this extremely disturbing. So a significant number of young AMERICAN Muslims believe that suicide bombing is an acceptable act? It's not enough that we have our own forms of insanity, now we import it! I keep hearing that Islam is a peaceful religion, but there seems to be a serious disconnect between that statement and actions.
Or are the peaceful people so terrorized that they cannot take action? It would not be the first time.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"-Edmund Burke
Or are the peaceful people so terrorized that they cannot take action? It would not be the first time.
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"-Edmund Burke
Sunday, May 20, 2007
On.....A War
War is a lot of things to a lot of people. Generals strategize, armchair generals criticize, diplomats talk, companies make money, government leaders do whatever the hell they do, soldiers fight, and angels descend from the heavens to become nurses.
I pass this along from the website "The Sandbox"
Check out The Sandbox
I pass this along from the website "The Sandbox"
ONE OF THOSE DAYS
Name: RN Clara Hart
Posting date: 5/18/07
Stationed in: a military hospital in the U.S.
Email: clarahart2@yahoo.com
I knew Monday was not going to be one of my finer days when I put both contacts in the same eye then had to spend 20 minutes prying them apart. In the end it turned out to be one of those days that was overwhelming, irritating, exhilarating and heartbreaking all at the same time. Tired from a busy weekend packed full of “must do” chores, I came sluggishly into the recovery room. Answering called-out greetings from my coworkers, I stowed my things and wandered to the postings board. As I stood there and reviewed the cases it was apparent we had inherited a new crop of OIF wounded over the weekend.
Feet shuffling, I headed to the computer to check the email and assess how many unimportant messages I could immediately delete without bothering to read. Mentally trying to get myself back into the nursing game I looked across the room to see a young man, lying in a hospital bed, yank at the blankets trying to better cover himself. Realizing the room was far colder for him than for me as I wasn’t the one in an “oh so chic” hospital gown, I grabbed a blanket from our blanket warmer and took it over to him. As I tucked it around his shoulders, he thanked me profusely and we started to talk.
Injured in Iraq when he was thrown off balance carrying a heavy load, he was now on the list for surgery to repair a broken leg. He'd arrived from Germany over the weekend only to be told today that his leg was too swollen, so they would not do his procedure until later in the week. He told me it had taken a week to get him back to the States from Germany. He shook his head and said, “I’m really glad to be here and not still in Germany." I asked why. “In Germany I shared a room with two other guys who had each lost a leg. They cried a lot and it was really hard to listen to them. I felt bad for them, but I was glad at the same time. I can’t relate.” He went on to say that one of his buddies from boot camp had been killed while on patrol in Iraq. We chatted a little while longer, then work called me away.
Halfway through my day the charge nurse asked me to cover another nurse’s patient while she went to lunch. “No problem," I replied, as my patient was stable and I was just waiting for her to wake up. The patient in question was also a wounded OIF, injured last year in a mortar attack. Blind in both eyes, with multiple facial, chest, back and arm injuries, he was doing well now and had a great attitude. I introduced myself, putting my hand on his shoulder to let him know where I was. Working to get his pain under control from the surgery he'd just had, we talked and joked.
He asked me if I was married and had children, and when I responded in the negative he said, “What’s wrong with these men? You’re a good-looking woman."
“Thank you," I replied. “How bad is the damage to your vision?”
“Totally gone, can’t even see a glimmer of light”, came his rueful answer, only to be replaced with a grin. “I could just tell you were good looking.”
Smiling, I shook my head as he began to talk about wanting to run the Marine Corp Marathon.
“Are you running it, Clara?”
“Hell no!” was my ardent response. “I might do the Army 10-miler, but 26 miles? Uh-uh, ain’t noooo way!” He told me he wanted to run both races, but he needed a partner, and that person he did not have. I asked him how that worked and he explained to me about “tethering” and how this partner would help him with direction and keep him on track. As I bounced back and forth between my two patients Joe kept up a running commentary, keeping me entertained and laughing as we together battled his pain and finally won.
My coworker returned and as I gave her an updated report Joe called out to me: “Clara?”
“Yep, I’m here” I said, crossing to the bedside and placing my hand on his shoulder.
“I think I need a good-looking woman to run with me. It would be fun to be tied up to as fine a woman as you, Clara. Why don’t you run with me?” Speechless, I could only stand and stare down at this man who had been through so much. Regaining my composure I told him I would come and visit him in his room tomorrow and we could talk more about it. He seemed satisfied with that answer, and later as he was wheeled down the hall he called out, “See you tomorrow, Clara.” Somehow I think I will be running the Army 10-miler this year, “tied up” to one of America’s most awesome and amazing sons of freedom.
Because I had spent too much time talking with Joe, I forfeited part of my lunch period. Inhaling my food in 15 minutes I was back on the floor just in time to hear “Clara, got a patient coming into 14, OIF, arriving now.” I walked back to my corner with a sense of irritation as my patient arrived. Placing him on the monitor, I apologized for my hands being cold.
“Yeah, they are”, came the soldier's surly reply. As I finished the task, I listened to the report from anesthesia and completed my assessment. Taking in the dressings wrapped around both his legs, the shrapnel wounds that peppered his face, hands and arms, I started to document my findings.
As I was writing, I was interrupted by my patient, who rudely said, “I want some water.” Since water is never an option for a right-out-of-surgery patient, I started to explain to him that as soon as we had finished some things with his care I would get him some ice. Belligerently he snapped at me, “I don’t want ice, I want water!”
My irritation was now at an all time high. I stepped closer to his beside, leaned down and sternly said, “Mark, this is not acceptable behavior. I respond much better to polite, respectful tones of voice and the words 'please' and 'thank you.'" As I held his eyes I added, “We will get along much better if you remember that.”
Turning my back to him I finished reviewing his chart, orders, and writing down my assessment and his vital signs. That completed, I once again asked him if he was in pain. He nodded, and gauging his pain I began to medicate him. As the tech brought me a cup of ice and I scooped it into his mouth he mumbled, “Thank you,ma’am”. Okay then, here’s to new beginnings. My irritation started to wane until I noticed a note stuck to the front of his chart: “Please change IV when in OR”. Wham! The irritation and anger returned; I was pissed off that OR/anesthesia had once again not changed an IV while the patient was asleep, and I stomped off to get the necessary supplies. As I returned to the bed another nurse came over.
"Need any help?” she asked.
“Yeah, definitely,” I grudgingly admitted. “Can you set up his PCA (pain pump) while I start a new IV? Anesthesia didn’t do it in the OR. Again!"
As she went to work I explained to Mark what I needed to do, reaching out and taking his arm. He thanked me.
“For what?” I asked.
“Well, they keep putting the IV in this arm and it’s really sore. You’re the first one to put it in my other arm.” Noticing his arms had no hair I questioned him, he smirked and said, “Yeah, with all the tape you people use you were yanking it all out anyway so I just shaved it off. Makes my life easier and a whole lot less painful.” Again shaking my head in bemusement I set about to do my job. IV completed, PCA hooked back up, I re-evaluated my wounded patient. He told me he was still having significant pain. Maxing out his pain medications, I put another call into anesthesia and was told they would be by to see him.
As we waited, Mark again asked if he could please have some water. After he promised he wouldn’t vomit I gave in and brought him a small cup. Anesthesia arrived, made some adjustments in his pain meds, and said they would be back in 20 minutes. The time passed slowly and Mark continued to complain. Irritated, frustrated and simply wanting my day to end, I took a deep breath and resigned myself to actually having to converse with my patient. Distraction can be a wonderful tool to use when someone is lying in a hospital bed with nothing else to think about other than how bad they feel.
As I medicated him, I asked Mark where he was from. Was his family here with him? (They were, but they’d had to leave today.) Did he like sports? (He did, mostly pro football, basketball and baseball.) Who were his favorite teams? (Too numerous to list.) How long had he been in the military? (Five years.) As conversation turned to his military career he told me he was on his third tour in Iraq and this time had only been there for six weeks before he was hurt.
Having been told that another squad was dropping something off at their outpost, he gathered his soldiers and moved outside the building to wait. Carefully watching as the other squad drove up and exited the vehicle, Mark moved out from cover to meet them. As he did he and his men, as well as the men in the other squad, were hit with an RPG.
Medevaced out of Iraq to Germany and then on to the States, it took him almost a week to reach us. He continued to tell me his story, and as he did his voice took on a tone of anger. He looked at me and exclaimed, “I’m embarrassed, pissed off and depressed I got taken out.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the leader, I’m supposed to watch out for these guys, the inexperienced guys. They look up to me and here I am the one who gets hurt!”
“Did you step in front of that RPG?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if I had grown two heads and snidely. "Of course not.”
“So what’s there to be embarrassed about? Do you think the other guys are saying, 'Yeah, Mark, what an idiot! Got hit with an RPG!'"
“Naw”, came his reluctant reply.
“Could you have done anything differently?” I pushed on.
“Yeah I could have gotten more guys killed," and he began to diagram for me how that would have happened.
“In the end, could you have done anything else to prevent what happened?”
“This just SUCKS!” he cried.
“Absolutely it does! One hundred percent sucks!” I commiserated.
His face started to get red. “I’m stuck in this fucking bed all the time. I can’t even get up to take a shit! I gotta go in a pan and then wait for someone to come to get rid of it. I’m supposed to be the one in charge, the one responsible, and here I am, in the hospital.” The angry words poured from his mouth as a single tear trailed down his cheek. Lowering the siderail on the bed, I wrapped my arms around him and held him, rubbing his shoulder and wiping the tears that he could not keep from escaping. As I held him I felt his composure slowly return.
“Thank you” he simply said, I nodded my head to show I had heard and then turned away.
“Hey Clara, do you think dinner will be there for me when I get back to my room?” I later heard him ask.
“I’ll make sure of it”, I promised. Time passed and I was able to transfer him back to the floor. As I gave report, I told his nurse what had transpired here in the PACU and how upset he was. She thanked me for the heads-up, and assured me she would keep an eye on him and make sure he had dinner waiting for him. As Mark was rolled out of the recovery room he asked if I would come visit him.
“Of course I will." With a quiet swish of the doors he was gone. I cleaned up my bay and walked over to the nursing station to finally sit down. When one of the other nurses looked at me with a question in his eyes I said, “I hate it when they cry."
He nodded his head. “Yeah, I do too.”
That evening I was sitting at home talking on the phone with my significant other. “How was your day?” he asked.
“Amazing."
Check out The Sandbox
Saturday, May 19, 2007
GITMO Lawyer Guilty
A Navy court found LCDR Matthew Diaz guilty after he gave the names of 550 GITMO detainees to a "human rights lawywer".Diaz took the "Nuremberg" defense, claiming that his actions were morally correct because he thought the detainees were being abused at the military installation prison on the island of Cuba.Here is CNN on the story
So Diaz gets six months in prison, without loss of rank or pay.He could have been imprisoned for up to 14 years. He got off way too easy for engaging in what used to be called " dime store novel" tactics.As for motive, CNN says:
Diaz may well be right about the actions of the Bush administration, but his own actions were just as illegal.
So Diaz gets six months in prison, without loss of rank or pay.He could have been imprisoned for up to 14 years. He got off way too easy for engaging in what used to be called " dime store novel" tactics.As for motive, CNN says:
But in an hour long interview after the opening day of his trial Monday, Diaz said he believes the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror is illegal. He accused officials of violating international law, such as the Geneva Conventions on the humane treatment of war prisoners, and the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of due process.
Diaz may well be right about the actions of the Bush administration, but his own actions were just as illegal.
Friday, May 18, 2007
On Iran
The pot is slowly bubbling for US-Iran relations.
After 27 years, the United states and Iran are-gasp!- talking. Without a doubt, there have been back channel negotiations over the years on issues of mutual benefit, but now the talks are slowly emerging from the shadow world.
Al Jazeera's English edition web site has this story buried on their cover page (Of course it leads with the latest Israeli attacks on Hamas as well as a story that the United States plans a missile shield with Israel
I can't for the life of me think that this is a BAD thing!
Stratfor is a website that does "analysis" of the world's hot spots. Here is a recent Stratfor paper on US-Iranian talks. I disagree with the Stratfor assessment that the Iranians prefer to deal now with a weakened President Bush. I think they know they could get the best deal possible from the perpetually weak-kneed Democrats, who are almost sure to come into the White House in '08. No, what I think the Iranians have in mind are those US aircraft carriers that currently are in the neighborhood with the capacity to destroy the nascent Iranian nuclear bomb. And they know that GWB is fully capable of using US airpower while telling the world to go to hell, which it well might. Sort of like what Menachem Begin did when he ordered the IDF to destroy that Iraqi reactor at Osirak. Israel was publicly scourged for its action , but behind closed giverment office doors in various parts of the world collective sighs of relief were exhaled.
I think the Iranians are playing a game: keep things under a medium heat for Bush in Iraq and give the appearance of "almost cooperating" in that theatre and "almost talking", thereby preventing the US from pressing the issue in the United Nations to take strong action against the Iranian nuclear program which every day grows more capable of producing a nuclear weapon. Mao-Tse-Tung said it a long time ago, "Talk, Talk, Fight, Fight"
I like to check out this website, which purports to contain blogs by Iranians both inside and outside that country. I do not doubt that some are by private citizens. On the other hand, I have no doubt that some are placed by the government as disinformation, as well as by anti-government people. Read some of these blogs, take a guess, reach out and see if anyone responds.
*********************************************************************************
Here is the Stratfor piece
Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2007
The United States, Iran and the Iraq Negotiation Process
By George Friedman and Reva Bhalla
At long last, the United States and Iran announced May 13 that they
will engage in direct public bilateral talks over Iraq. From
Washington, it was the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and the
National Security Council that broke the news. From Tehran,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirmed that the two sides will
meet in Baghdad in a few weeks, most likely at the ambassadorial
level. That makes these talks as officially sanctioned as they can
be.
Already there have been two brief public meetings -- albeit on the
sidelines of two international conferences -- between senior
officials from the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State
Department in March in Baghdad and in May in Sharm el-Sheikh ,
Egypt. The upcoming meeting in Baghdad, however, will be the first
official bilateral meeting. After months of intense back-channel
discussions, both sides have made a critical decision to bring
their private negotiations into the public sphere, which means
Tehran and Washington must have reached some consensus on the
general framework of the negotiations on how to stabilize Iraq.
Why Now?
The U.S. political situation illustrates why both sides are willing
to come to the table right now. Both Iran and the United States are
closely eyeing each other's busted flushes , and they understand
that time is not on their respective sides.
From the U.S. perspective, it is no secret the Iraq war has soaked
up an enormous amount of U.S. military bandwidth. With the 2008
presidential election fast approaching, the Bush administration is
left with little time to put a plan in action that would
demonstrate some progress toward stabilizing Iraq. It has also
become painfully obvious that U.S. military force alone will not
succeed in suppressing Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militias
enough to allow the government in Baghdad to function -- and for
Washington to develop a real exit strategy. But by defiantly
sending more troops to Iraq against all odds, Bush is sending a
clear signal to Iran that it is not in the Iranians' interest to
wait out this administration, and that the United States is
prepared to use its forces to block Iranian aspirations to dominate
Iraq.
From the Iranian perspective, Tehran knows it is dealing with a
weak U.S. president right now, and that the next U.S. president
probably will have much greater freedom of action than Bush
currently does. The Iranians learned that dealing with former U.S.
President Jimmy Carter would have been preferable to dealing with
his successor. If you know negotiations are inevitable, it is
better to negotiate with the weak outgoing president than try to
extract concessions from a strong president during an increasingly
complicated situation. The Iranians also know that the intensely
fractious nature of Iraq's Shiite bloc -- which Iran depends on to
project its power -- makes it all the more difficult for Tehran to
consolidate its gains the longer Iraq remains in chaos.
U.S. and Iranian Demands
And so the time has come for both Iran and the United States to
show their cards by laying out their demands for public viewing.
U.S. demands for Iraq are fairly straightforward. Our understanding
of what Washington wants from Tehran regarding Iraq rests on these
key points:
1. The United States wants Iraq to be a unified and independent
state. In other words, Washington knows a pro-U.S. regime in
Baghdad is impossible at this point, but Washington is not going to
permit an Iranian-dominated state either.
2. The United States does not want jihadists operating in Iraq.
3. The United States wants to be able to withdraw from security
operations, but not precipitously, thereby allaying Sunni Arab
states' concerns .
Essentially, the United States is looking to create an Iraqi
government that, while dominated by the Shia, remains neutral to
Iran, hostile to jihadists and accommodating to mainstream Sunnis.
Iranian Demands
Iran's answers to these demands were publicly outlined in a paper
at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit. The Saudi-owned, U.K.-based daily
newspaper Al Hayat established the details of this paper in a May 5
article. The key points made in the presentation include the
following:
1. Iran does not want an abrupt withdrawal of coalition forces from
Iraq for fear this would lead to reshuffling the cards and
redistributing power. Instead, there should be a fixed timetable
for the withdrawal of U.S. and British forces from Iraqi cities and
relocation at bases and camps inside Iraq, provided the Iraqi
forces have reached the point at which they can provide security.
The Iranians also stated that they would extend all possible
assistance so that foreign forces could exit "honorably" from Iraq.
The U.S. decision to surge more troops into Iraq forced Iran to
think twice about placing its bets on a complete U.S. withdrawal.
An abrupt withdrawal without a negotiated settlement leaves more
problems than Tehran can manage in terms of containing Iraq's
Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, and Iran does not want to be
left to pick up the pieces in a country that is already on the
verge of shattering along sectarian lines.
It is important to note that Iran is not calling for a complete
withdrawal from Iraq, and actually acknowledges that U.S. forces
will be relocated at bases and camps inside the country. Though
this acts as a blocker to Iranian ambitions, the presence of U.S.
bases also provides Iran with a stabilizing force placating the
Sunnis and Kurds. Moreover, the Iranians are sending assurances to
the United States that they are willing to cooperate so the Iraq
withdrawal does not look like another Vietnam scenario for the U.S.
administration to deal with at home.
2. Iran is "strongly opposed to all attempts to partition Iraq or
impose a federal system that allows for regional autonomy." No
region should be allowed to monopolize the resources in its
territory and deprive other regions of the revenues from these
resources.
Iran is essentially saying that Tehran and Washington have a common
desire to see a unified Iraq. The U.S. insistence on a unified Iraq
takes into account Sunni concerns of being left with the largely
oil-barren central region of the country. Iran is signaling that it
is not interested in seeing Iraq get split up, even if such a
scenario leaves Tehran with the second-best option of securing
influence in a Shiite-dominated, oil-rich southern autonomous zone.
3. Iran wants a plan, involving the Kurds and Sunnis, drawn up to
root out the transnational jihadist forces allied with al Qaeda in
Iraq. Sunni tribes should also assume the responsibility of
confronting jihadists, whether they are Iraqi citizens or are from
other Arab and Muslim countries.
In this demand, Iran and the United States share a common goal. The
jihadists will use every attempt to sow sectarian strife in Iraq to
prevent a political resolution from developing. The United States
does not want to provide al Qaeda with a fertile base of
operations, and Iran does not want its ideological nemesis gaining
ground next door and working against Shiite interests.
4. Iran clearly states that the negotiations over Iraq cannot be
separated from other regional issues and Tehran's nuclear file.
Stratfor has extensively discussed the nexus between Iran's nuclear
agenda and its blueprint for Iraq. Iran is trying to link the
nuclear issue to its dealings with the United States on Iraq as a
sort of insurance policy . Iran does not want to reach an
agreement on Iraq and then leave the nuclear issue to be dealt with
down the road, when the United States is in a stronger position to
take action against Tehran.
Iran basically is looking for a deal allowing it voluntarily to
agree to freeze uranium enrichment in exchange for political
concessions over Iraq, but without it having to dismantle its
program. That would leave enough room to skirt sanctions and
preserve the nuclear program for its long-term interests.
Washington is not exactly amenable to this idea, which is what
makes this a major sticking point. The United States already has
made it clear that it is leaving the nuclear issue out of the Iraq
discussions.
5. Iran wants a new regional formula that would make Iraq a region
of influence for Tehran.
While it does not appear that Iran explicitly stated this in its
presentation, a majority of participants at the conference got the
message. Washington cannot afford to allow Iraq to develop into an
Iranian satellite, but it is looking for assurances from Iran that
a U.S. withdrawal will leave in place a neutral, albeit
Shiite-dominated, government in Iraq.
Iranian Offers
The Iranian paper outlined several key concessions it would offer
the United States and Iraq's Sunni faction if its demands were met.
1. Iran would help the Iraqi government rein in the armed Shiite
militias and incorporate them into the state security apparatus.
2. The de-Baathification law can be revised to allow for the
rehiring of former Iraqi army personnel, the bulk of whom are tied
to the Sunni nationalist insurgency. However, Iran wants assurances
that former Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and other
former Baathists will not be allowed to hold the position of prime
minister when the time comes to replace current Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki.
3. Iran would be willing to see fresh parliamentary elections, the
formation of a new Cabinet and the amendment of the Iraqi
Constitution to double the Sunni seats in parliament to 40
percent, with the Shia retaining 60 percent. Tehran has said
nothing about what would be left for Kurdish political
representation, however.
4. Iran has proposed the "fair" distribution of oil revenues in
Iraq to satisfy all parties, especially those in "central Iraq,"
the Sunni-dominated, oil-deprived heart of the country.
Tehran's offers illustrate the Iranians' open acknowledgment that
they are not going to be able to have their cake and eat it too.
Instead, they are going to have to guarantee Iraqi neutrality by
giving the Sunnis a much larger slice, leaving the Kurds to get
screwed yet again.
Back in Washington, the Bush administration is looking at the
Iranian withdrawal plan skeptically. Right now, the United States
wants assurances that a withdrawal plan worked out with the
Iranians does not simply leave a longer-term opportunity for Iran
to gradually take control of Iraq once the major roadblocks are out
of the way. In other words, the United States needs guarantees
that, as it draws down its troop presence, the Iranians will not
simply walk in. The Iranian proposal to expand Sunni representation
is a direct response to these concerns, provided the relevant
parties can actually deliver on their promises.
This is still highly questionable, though significant developments
are already taking place that reveal the United States, Iran and
various Iraqi players are making concrete moves to uphold their
sides of the bargain. With Iran's blessing, the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has announced it will undergo a
process of "Iraqization" -- a largely symbolic demonstration that
SCIRI will not operate simply as an Iranian proxy. Meanwhile, the
Sunni tribes and clans in Anbar province are increasingly
broadcasting their commitment and progress in combating
transnational jihadists. And finally, numerous reports in the Arab
media suggest the United States would be willing to heed the
Iranian demand that the Iraqi military not have offensive
capabilities allowing it to threaten its Persian neighbor.
The negotiations are moving, and it is becoming more and more
apparent that a consensus is emerging between Tehran and Washington
over how the Iraq project should turn out. With enough serious
arrestors in play for this deal to fall through, it is now up to
all players -- whether those players call Washington, Tehran,
Riyadh or Baghdad home -- finally to put their money where their
mouths are.
So much for Stratfor.
After 27 years, the United states and Iran are-gasp!- talking. Without a doubt, there have been back channel negotiations over the years on issues of mutual benefit, but now the talks are slowly emerging from the shadow world.
Al Jazeera's English edition web site has this story buried on their cover page (Of course it leads with the latest Israeli attacks on Hamas as well as a story that the United States plans a missile shield with Israel
US plans Israel missile shield
Israel already used US-made Patriot missiles to defend against missile attacks [GALLO-GETTY]
The US House of Representatives has adopted a measure aimed at weaving closer US and Israeli defences against ballistic missiles of the type that could be fired by Iran.
The measure, part of a $504 billion defence spending bill passed on Thursday, would redirect $205m in defence department funds toward projects already underway in Israel.
It would provide $25m more for Arrow missile co-production and integration, $45m for a US-Israeli short-range missile defence system dubbed "David's Sling" and $135m to buy a Theater High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, fire unit.
All three projects involve interceptors rockets designed to shoot down ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of their flight paths.
I can't for the life of me think that this is a BAD thing!
Stratfor is a website that does "analysis" of the world's hot spots. Here is a recent Stratfor paper on US-Iranian talks. I disagree with the Stratfor assessment that the Iranians prefer to deal now with a weakened President Bush. I think they know they could get the best deal possible from the perpetually weak-kneed Democrats, who are almost sure to come into the White House in '08. No, what I think the Iranians have in mind are those US aircraft carriers that currently are in the neighborhood with the capacity to destroy the nascent Iranian nuclear bomb. And they know that GWB is fully capable of using US airpower while telling the world to go to hell, which it well might. Sort of like what Menachem Begin did when he ordered the IDF to destroy that Iraqi reactor at Osirak. Israel was publicly scourged for its action , but behind closed giverment office doors in various parts of the world collective sighs of relief were exhaled.
I think the Iranians are playing a game: keep things under a medium heat for Bush in Iraq and give the appearance of "almost cooperating" in that theatre and "almost talking", thereby preventing the US from pressing the issue in the United Nations to take strong action against the Iranian nuclear program which every day grows more capable of producing a nuclear weapon. Mao-Tse-Tung said it a long time ago, "Talk, Talk, Fight, Fight"
I like to check out this website, which purports to contain blogs by Iranians both inside and outside that country. I do not doubt that some are by private citizens. On the other hand, I have no doubt that some are placed by the government as disinformation, as well as by anti-government people. Read some of these blogs, take a guess, reach out and see if anyone responds.
*********************************************************************************
Here is the Stratfor piece
Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2007
The United States, Iran and the Iraq Negotiation Process
By George Friedman and Reva Bhalla
At long last, the United States and Iran announced May 13 that they
will engage in direct public bilateral talks over Iraq. From
Washington, it was the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and the
National Security Council that broke the news. From Tehran,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirmed that the two sides will
meet in Baghdad in a few weeks, most likely at the ambassadorial
level. That makes these talks as officially sanctioned as they can
be.
Already there have been two brief public meetings -- albeit on the
sidelines of two international conferences -- between senior
officials from the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State
Department in March in Baghdad and in May in Sharm el-Sheikh ,
Egypt. The upcoming meeting in Baghdad, however, will be the first
official bilateral meeting. After months of intense back-channel
discussions, both sides have made a critical decision to bring
their private negotiations into the public sphere, which means
Tehran and Washington must have reached some consensus on the
general framework of the negotiations on how to stabilize Iraq.
Why Now?
The U.S. political situation illustrates why both sides are willing
to come to the table right now. Both Iran and the United States are
closely eyeing each other's busted flushes , and they understand
that time is not on their respective sides.
From the U.S. perspective, it is no secret the Iraq war has soaked
up an enormous amount of U.S. military bandwidth. With the 2008
presidential election fast approaching, the Bush administration is
left with little time to put a plan in action that would
demonstrate some progress toward stabilizing Iraq. It has also
become painfully obvious that U.S. military force alone will not
succeed in suppressing Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militias
enough to allow the government in Baghdad to function -- and for
Washington to develop a real exit strategy. But by defiantly
sending more troops to Iraq against all odds, Bush is sending a
clear signal to Iran that it is not in the Iranians' interest to
wait out this administration, and that the United States is
prepared to use its forces to block Iranian aspirations to dominate
Iraq.
From the Iranian perspective, Tehran knows it is dealing with a
weak U.S. president right now, and that the next U.S. president
probably will have much greater freedom of action than Bush
currently does. The Iranians learned that dealing with former U.S.
President Jimmy Carter would have been preferable to dealing with
his successor. If you know negotiations are inevitable, it is
better to negotiate with the weak outgoing president than try to
extract concessions from a strong president during an increasingly
complicated situation. The Iranians also know that the intensely
fractious nature of Iraq's Shiite bloc -- which Iran depends on to
project its power -- makes it all the more difficult for Tehran to
consolidate its gains the longer Iraq remains in chaos.
U.S. and Iranian Demands
And so the time has come for both Iran and the United States to
show their cards by laying out their demands for public viewing.
U.S. demands for Iraq are fairly straightforward. Our understanding
of what Washington wants from Tehran regarding Iraq rests on these
key points:
1. The United States wants Iraq to be a unified and independent
state. In other words, Washington knows a pro-U.S. regime in
Baghdad is impossible at this point, but Washington is not going to
permit an Iranian-dominated state either.
2. The United States does not want jihadists operating in Iraq.
3. The United States wants to be able to withdraw from security
operations, but not precipitously, thereby allaying Sunni Arab
states' concerns .
Essentially, the United States is looking to create an Iraqi
government that, while dominated by the Shia, remains neutral to
Iran, hostile to jihadists and accommodating to mainstream Sunnis.
Iranian Demands
Iran's answers to these demands were publicly outlined in a paper
at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit. The Saudi-owned, U.K.-based daily
newspaper Al Hayat established the details of this paper in a May 5
article. The key points made in the presentation include the
following:
1. Iran does not want an abrupt withdrawal of coalition forces from
Iraq for fear this would lead to reshuffling the cards and
redistributing power. Instead, there should be a fixed timetable
for the withdrawal of U.S. and British forces from Iraqi cities and
relocation at bases and camps inside Iraq, provided the Iraqi
forces have reached the point at which they can provide security.
The Iranians also stated that they would extend all possible
assistance so that foreign forces could exit "honorably" from Iraq.
The U.S. decision to surge more troops into Iraq forced Iran to
think twice about placing its bets on a complete U.S. withdrawal.
An abrupt withdrawal without a negotiated settlement leaves more
problems than Tehran can manage in terms of containing Iraq's
Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, and Iran does not want to be
left to pick up the pieces in a country that is already on the
verge of shattering along sectarian lines.
It is important to note that Iran is not calling for a complete
withdrawal from Iraq, and actually acknowledges that U.S. forces
will be relocated at bases and camps inside the country. Though
this acts as a blocker to Iranian ambitions, the presence of U.S.
bases also provides Iran with a stabilizing force placating the
Sunnis and Kurds. Moreover, the Iranians are sending assurances to
the United States that they are willing to cooperate so the Iraq
withdrawal does not look like another Vietnam scenario for the U.S.
administration to deal with at home.
2. Iran is "strongly opposed to all attempts to partition Iraq or
impose a federal system that allows for regional autonomy." No
region should be allowed to monopolize the resources in its
territory and deprive other regions of the revenues from these
resources.
Iran is essentially saying that Tehran and Washington have a common
desire to see a unified Iraq. The U.S. insistence on a unified Iraq
takes into account Sunni concerns of being left with the largely
oil-barren central region of the country. Iran is signaling that it
is not interested in seeing Iraq get split up, even if such a
scenario leaves Tehran with the second-best option of securing
influence in a Shiite-dominated, oil-rich southern autonomous zone.
3. Iran wants a plan, involving the Kurds and Sunnis, drawn up to
root out the transnational jihadist forces allied with al Qaeda in
Iraq. Sunni tribes should also assume the responsibility of
confronting jihadists, whether they are Iraqi citizens or are from
other Arab and Muslim countries.
In this demand, Iran and the United States share a common goal. The
jihadists will use every attempt to sow sectarian strife in Iraq to
prevent a political resolution from developing. The United States
does not want to provide al Qaeda with a fertile base of
operations, and Iran does not want its ideological nemesis gaining
ground next door and working against Shiite interests.
4. Iran clearly states that the negotiations over Iraq cannot be
separated from other regional issues and Tehran's nuclear file.
Stratfor has extensively discussed the nexus between Iran's nuclear
agenda and its blueprint for Iraq. Iran is trying to link the
nuclear issue to its dealings with the United States on Iraq as a
sort of insurance policy . Iran does not want to reach an
agreement on Iraq and then leave the nuclear issue to be dealt with
down the road, when the United States is in a stronger position to
take action against Tehran.
Iran basically is looking for a deal allowing it voluntarily to
agree to freeze uranium enrichment in exchange for political
concessions over Iraq, but without it having to dismantle its
program. That would leave enough room to skirt sanctions and
preserve the nuclear program for its long-term interests.
Washington is not exactly amenable to this idea, which is what
makes this a major sticking point. The United States already has
made it clear that it is leaving the nuclear issue out of the Iraq
discussions.
5. Iran wants a new regional formula that would make Iraq a region
of influence for Tehran.
While it does not appear that Iran explicitly stated this in its
presentation, a majority of participants at the conference got the
message. Washington cannot afford to allow Iraq to develop into an
Iranian satellite, but it is looking for assurances from Iran that
a U.S. withdrawal will leave in place a neutral, albeit
Shiite-dominated, government in Iraq.
Iranian Offers
The Iranian paper outlined several key concessions it would offer
the United States and Iraq's Sunni faction if its demands were met.
1. Iran would help the Iraqi government rein in the armed Shiite
militias and incorporate them into the state security apparatus.
2. The de-Baathification law can be revised to allow for the
rehiring of former Iraqi army personnel, the bulk of whom are tied
to the Sunni nationalist insurgency. However, Iran wants assurances
that former Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and other
former Baathists will not be allowed to hold the position of prime
minister when the time comes to replace current Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki.
3. Iran would be willing to see fresh parliamentary elections, the
formation of a new Cabinet and the amendment of the Iraqi
Constitution to double the Sunni seats in parliament to 40
percent, with the Shia retaining 60 percent. Tehran has said
nothing about what would be left for Kurdish political
representation, however.
4. Iran has proposed the "fair" distribution of oil revenues in
Iraq to satisfy all parties, especially those in "central Iraq,"
the Sunni-dominated, oil-deprived heart of the country.
Tehran's offers illustrate the Iranians' open acknowledgment that
they are not going to be able to have their cake and eat it too.
Instead, they are going to have to guarantee Iraqi neutrality by
giving the Sunnis a much larger slice, leaving the Kurds to get
screwed yet again.
Back in Washington, the Bush administration is looking at the
Iranian withdrawal plan skeptically. Right now, the United States
wants assurances that a withdrawal plan worked out with the
Iranians does not simply leave a longer-term opportunity for Iran
to gradually take control of Iraq once the major roadblocks are out
of the way. In other words, the United States needs guarantees
that, as it draws down its troop presence, the Iranians will not
simply walk in. The Iranian proposal to expand Sunni representation
is a direct response to these concerns, provided the relevant
parties can actually deliver on their promises.
This is still highly questionable, though significant developments
are already taking place that reveal the United States, Iran and
various Iraqi players are making concrete moves to uphold their
sides of the bargain. With Iran's blessing, the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has announced it will undergo a
process of "Iraqization" -- a largely symbolic demonstration that
SCIRI will not operate simply as an Iranian proxy. Meanwhile, the
Sunni tribes and clans in Anbar province are increasingly
broadcasting their commitment and progress in combating
transnational jihadists. And finally, numerous reports in the Arab
media suggest the United States would be willing to heed the
Iranian demand that the Iraqi military not have offensive
capabilities allowing it to threaten its Persian neighbor.
The negotiations are moving, and it is becoming more and more
apparent that a consensus is emerging between Tehran and Washington
over how the Iraq project should turn out. With enough serious
arrestors in play for this deal to fall through, it is now up to
all players -- whether those players call Washington, Tehran,
Riyadh or Baghdad home -- finally to put their money where their
mouths are.
So much for Stratfor.
Navy GITMO Lawyer's Valentine to Terrorists
From NPR's website
Navy Lawyer's Guantanamo Leak Trial Begins
Listen to this story... by Ari Shapiro
All Things Considered, May 14, 2007 · The military trial has begun for U.S. Navy lawyer Matt Diaz, who is accused of leaking classified information to a civilian human rights lawyer. Diaz gave the names of 550 Guantanamo detainees to an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The prosecutor told the jury that on Jan. 2, 2005, Lt. Cmdr. Matt Diaz sat in his office at Guantanamo Bay late at night, logged into his classified computer — and called up a spreadsheet: 39 pages containing the names of all 550 detainees at the prison camp, along with their serial numbers, nationalities and other data.
The prosecutor stood in front of the jury and held up a Valentine's Day card with a picture of a droopy-eyed Chihuahua.
"The accused cut the document so the nation's secrets would fit inside this card," he said. Diaz dropped the envelope in the mail on the last day of his six-month assignment at Guantanamo, the prosecutor said.
The defense team acknowledges that Diaz sent that Valentine to Barbara Olshansky, a civilian human rights lawyer.
But the defense lawyer told the jury, "Diaz did not send classified information — even if the government intended to classify it."
The defense says that because the document was not marked "Secret," it was not classified. That's half of the argument. The other half is about intent. For Diaz to be guilty of the crime, he has to have intended to harm the United States or advantage another country. His lawyers say Diaz had no such intent.
The first witness was Olshansky, the human rights lawyer who received the Valentine from Diaz. She heaved a big sigh as she walked to the front of the courtroom.
Olshansky said that when she got the Valentine, she didn't know what the document was. There was no indication that the spreadsheet came from the government. But the postmark was from Guantanamo, so she wondered whether the names were detainees.
The roster is public now, but it wasn't two years ago. Olshansky had been asking the government for the names, hoping to name the detainees in her lawsuit on their behalf. But the Pentagon had been resisting.
Olshansky testified that she didn't know the information was secret, but she gave it to the judge overseeing her detainee lawsuit. It then went to court security personnel, who conducted an investigation.
After fingerprint and computer analysis, the arrows pointed to Diaz.
So what the defense is saying is that he reduces a print-out of 500 names plus other datat items to the size sufficient to place into a Valentine's day card, and he din't have intent to harm the united states. The man sure know he was doing something wrong!
Navy Lawyer's Guantanamo Leak Trial Begins
Listen to this story... by Ari Shapiro
All Things Considered, May 14, 2007 · The military trial has begun for U.S. Navy lawyer Matt Diaz, who is accused of leaking classified information to a civilian human rights lawyer. Diaz gave the names of 550 Guantanamo detainees to an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The prosecutor told the jury that on Jan. 2, 2005, Lt. Cmdr. Matt Diaz sat in his office at Guantanamo Bay late at night, logged into his classified computer — and called up a spreadsheet: 39 pages containing the names of all 550 detainees at the prison camp, along with their serial numbers, nationalities and other data.
The prosecutor stood in front of the jury and held up a Valentine's Day card with a picture of a droopy-eyed Chihuahua.
"The accused cut the document so the nation's secrets would fit inside this card," he said. Diaz dropped the envelope in the mail on the last day of his six-month assignment at Guantanamo, the prosecutor said.
The defense team acknowledges that Diaz sent that Valentine to Barbara Olshansky, a civilian human rights lawyer.
But the defense lawyer told the jury, "Diaz did not send classified information — even if the government intended to classify it."
The defense says that because the document was not marked "Secret," it was not classified. That's half of the argument. The other half is about intent. For Diaz to be guilty of the crime, he has to have intended to harm the United States or advantage another country. His lawyers say Diaz had no such intent.
The first witness was Olshansky, the human rights lawyer who received the Valentine from Diaz. She heaved a big sigh as she walked to the front of the courtroom.
Olshansky said that when she got the Valentine, she didn't know what the document was. There was no indication that the spreadsheet came from the government. But the postmark was from Guantanamo, so she wondered whether the names were detainees.
The roster is public now, but it wasn't two years ago. Olshansky had been asking the government for the names, hoping to name the detainees in her lawsuit on their behalf. But the Pentagon had been resisting.
Olshansky testified that she didn't know the information was secret, but she gave it to the judge overseeing her detainee lawsuit. It then went to court security personnel, who conducted an investigation.
After fingerprint and computer analysis, the arrows pointed to Diaz.
So what the defense is saying is that he reduces a print-out of 500 names plus other datat items to the size sufficient to place into a Valentine's day card, and he din't have intent to harm the united states. The man sure know he was doing something wrong!
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