I THOUGHT HE WAS AFTER NATIONAL GREATNESS David Brooks has a surprisingly snide and glum rundown of the possible responses to the success of the war so far. First, he dismisses Cheney's right to gloat:
For example, in making his gloat, the vice president had to overlook a few inconvenient facts that indicate that perhaps the administration wasn't exactly omniscient during the course of the war. A few days ago, the administration told us that this would not be a war of instant gratification, though this part of the war certainly has been. A few days ago, the administration took the extraordinary step of hiring an outside advertising team, so convinced were they that the United States was not doing well in the court of public opinion. At the end of October, the administration shifted its bombing strategy after critics rightly pointed out that the bombing campaign up to that point had been tepid.
Who's having the delusions here? I seriously doubt the step-up in bombing had anything to do with the grousing we heard from The Weekly Standard. It was more likely the result of a decision to trust the Northern Alliance to take the country without atrocities, which they have done. And none of the other things Brooks suggests-- the warnings that the war will be long or the engagement of the PR firm-- indicate that the administration did not know that their strategy would succeed. Of course, no one is omniscient, but only the press ever claims to be so. Cheney and company have every right to gloat, because they made the military decisions which have resulted in the rout of the Taliban.
Brooks then dismisses the Afghans' happy exercise of new but basic freedoms as getting "shallow."
They're enjoying all the crass commercial pleasures that have been denied them for the past few years. They're watching television. They're listening to pop music. They're playing soccer. They're showing off their movie star baseball cards. They are going shopping. Come to think of it, this is what President Bush wants America to do.
Ha, ha. What's so crass about the pursuit of happiness, be it soccer or listening to music? What a freakin' sourpuss.
EVIL BERT STRIKES AGAIN! Stephen Den Beste, who constantly lives up to his name, noticed this hilarious bit of information in The Daily Rotten: the nuclear bomb plans that the Taliban left behind in Kabul, which everyone has been fretting over, were downloaded from a joke website! A casual glance at the shots of the documents taken by the BBC reveal them to be a printout of the scientific parody, "How To Build An Atom Bomb," which first appeared in the satirical journal, The Journal of Irreproducible Results (now called The Annals of Improbable Research) in 1979.
Here's a little sample of the "Construction Method," which it notes is written in the same format as the previous week's issue: "How to Build a Time Machine."
1. First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons grade Plutonium at your local supplier (see NOTE 1). A nuclear power plant is not recommended, as large quantities of missing Plutonium tends to make plant engineers unhappy. We suggest that you contact your local terrorist organization, or perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood.I don't know how helpful this could have been to Al Queda since they were the local terrorist organization. It goes on to suggest such useful tips as holding the plutonium together with rubber cement and packing TNT around it with Play-Doh.
NEWS FLASH: Ramadan is a lot more fun without the Taliban. Part of Ramadan is the fasting through the day, but the other part is the partying after sundown, which goes on through the night. Now Afghans are permitted to laugh and play music. Praise Allah!
UNDER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER: From NJ.com the first pictures I've seen of the underground parking garage underneath the rubble and of the PATH station. I've been wondering about these areas since the attacks. How many people were in there?
MORE LOVELY AFGHAN LADIES UNBURDENED BY BURQAS at the photo site. Plus, a soccer shot from the stadium the Taliban used like the Colosseum.
AS USUAL, ANDREW SULLIVAN ROCKS If you didn't already go to andrewsullivan.com this morning, you should. In fact, you should look at him first thing every morning, long before coming here, because he's so damn good. Today, he's got the following awesome quote from, of all people, the Unabomber, which I only post here for my own future reference:
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
A TERRORIST AT BARNES AND NOBLE WSJ's Opinion Journal has a great story on an Evanston, Illinois book signing at Barnes and Noble by unrepentant domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. Ayers is now even more famous for saying in an ill-timed September 11th NYT puff piece that he wished he'd set off more bombs.
THEY'RE GORGEOUS! Inspired by PhotoDude, I've created a photo blog, where I've posted some pictures of Afghan women unveiled. It's clear they weren't wearing those bags because they're ugly.
OF KYOTO AND TERRORISM Fredrik Norman points out this great article by British historian Paul Johnson in Forbes (free registration required). Johnson argues that the War on Terrorism has created compelling security reasons for the US to continue to reject the Kyoto Treaty:
The world has been roused and, led by America, is now taking international terrorism seriously for the first time. It is attacking terrorist bases and host states; it is arming against terrorism by creating new forces, weapons and intelligence systems. But these efforts are going to cost a vast and increasing amount of money and resources, most of which will be supplied by the U.S. Now is not the time to diminish America's ability to make this effort against an overwhelmingly obvious threat to humanity by paralyzing its muscle-power in order to meet an unproven--possibly imaginary--one. That is why I say there is a direct connection between Bush's reasonable refusal to implement Kyoto and his decision to wage war on terrorism.The scientific reasons for rejecting the treaty, of course, stand as well.
FINALLY A USE FOR THE HUMAN TENT You may be wondering, how did those special forces helicopters find the aid workers in the dark? Well, The Hindustan Times reports they were guided by a bonfire of the women's burquas, just as rogue Taliban fighters were closing in on them. Let's hope all women in Afghanistan will soon burn theirs!
AND PEOPLE WORRIED ABOUT BUSH'S SKILLS OF DIPLOMACY? Roll Call reports that Tom Daschle arrived late for a meeting with Putin Tuesday and then proceeded to joke around with the Russian President about his height. Daschle reportedly said it was nice to work with a world leader of similar size and then ran his hand over his head to emphasize just how short he is. Putin apparently didn't find this very amusing. At least Daschle didn't offer the Russian president one of those phone books he sat on to avoid being upstaged by Dick Gephardt in a joint press conference this summer.
BOY, WERE SOME FOLKS WRONG If you haven't seen them already, Andrew Sullivan has a fine selection of many nominees for his new Von Hoffman Award for embarrassingly unprescient pundits. It's named in honor of Nicholas von Hoffman, who published this gem in The New York Observer, several days after the fall of Kabul:
We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. In the history of aerial bombardment, can you think of a single instance of the bombed embracing the bombers? Bombing always unites the bombees against the bombers, and-duh!-guess what the reaction has been in Afghanistan? You don't need to speak Urdu to figure it out, which is good since none of us does ... Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we've been trying to make common cause-and who, we've been hinting, will take part in a postwar government.
HOORAY! I am a little surprised at how overjoyed I am that those fool aid workers were rescued. I'm just so happy that there will be eight fewer grieving families than anticipated. And the two girls from Waco will be home for Thanksgiving.
IDIOCY UPDATE: The New Republic has been running a poll on a selection of some of the most asinine statements made since September 11th and they've published the results. It was damn hard choosing, but I ended up picking Sunera Thobani's unbelievably moronic claim,
"There will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the Western domination of this planet is ended."
I went back and forth between Thobani and Alice Walker who blathered:
In a war on Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden will either be left alive, while thousands of impoverished, frightened people are bombed into oblivion around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he seems quite prepared. But what would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love.Alas, Michael Moore won with:
Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!Though I'm tempted to demand a hand recount (can they do that with javascript?), I have to admit Moore's really stupid, too.
SABOTAGE? According to Aviation Week, there's no sign of a bird strike in the engines of Flight 587, which are themselves in good condition considering they fell off the airplane. And the first thing to go was the vertical stabilizer which was found in pristine condition in Jamaica Bay. Without the stabilizer, there was no way to control the plane. Maybe some bastard loosened its screws?
KALAMATH FALLS UPDATE Looks like there may be legal recourse for those farmers. The Yakima Herald-Republic reports they have retained an attorney who specializes in protecting property owners from government "takings" of water rights. Last year he successfully argued that the government should compensate a group of Central California farmers as much as $50 million for the loss of their water rights, which were reduced to protect endangered salmon.
The problem with the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act is that the main costs for protecting the species have not been shared throughout society. They have been shouldered for the most part by unlucky property owners in loss of land value and utility. Under the Fifth Amendment, the government is not supposed to be allowed to take property without just compensation. It's nice to see that it is not just the Tories who are fighting for their rights in court and winning.
AL-JAZEERA SMOOSHED BY GIRL POWER? I haven't seen this anywhere else but The Telegraph reports that people on the ground in Kabul heard that it was a female pilot who took out the office of Al-Jazeera. The station owner's son-in-law reports:
"We're astonished. How could they hit one building in the centre of town? This accuracy is something beyond our comprehension. When the Russians attacked us they hit everything all around."
LET'S GLOAT! Christopher Hitchens says "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" in The Guardian. One of the most irritating mantras of the peaceniks in the past few weeks has been the faux contrast-- "The poorest nation on earth is being attacked by the richest." As though warfare should be means-tested. Hitchens offers some contrasts of his own:
What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime."
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that Afghan women find new freedom in the newly liberated Kabul. And The Washington Post reports on how one man in Kabul feels about his fleeing oppressors:
"These Taliban are dogs!" he said. Then he added, "I'm sorry I abused the dogs, because a dog is a very faithful animal."
RIGHTS FOR THE RIGHT: Fascinating article in the Spectator about how British conservatives are learning to play the rights game. While many of them condemned the European Convention on Human Rights as an attack on the British way of life, it is now actually proving to be a useful tool in defending traditional values.
THE END OF THE ORIENTALIST CRITIQUE: Charles Paul Freund has a brilliant must-read piece in Reason Online which finds Edward Said and company definitely guilty of... Occidentalism! So how does Occidentalism differ from Orientalism? It doesn't!
Orientalism, the systematic stereotyping and degradation of Easterners that dehumanized them in the eyes of the West, enabled the colonial powers not only to mistreat whole populations, but also, in some of the Westıs blackest moments, to slaughter them in horrifying numbers. What makes it possible to commandeer passenger planes filled with innocent travelers, including children, and use them as bombs to murder thousands of people in office buildings? It is a systematic stereotyping and degradation of Westerners that dehumanizes them, and makes their death a pious deed for some and a cause for celebration for others. It is Occidentalism.
BAMIYAN UPDATE: Not content with destroying its ancient Buddhas, the Taliban decide to lay the city to waste on their way out, according to the BBC.
GOOD NEWS AT HOME: Welfare reform is still working, if by working you mean reducing poverty among children and adults. According to Ron Haskins in The Washington Post yesterday:
For the seventh year in a row, poverty was down. Further, black and Hispanic households had their lowest poverty rates ever, and the overall child poverty rate was lower than in any year since 1976. Similarly, black and Hispanic households both set records for all-time high incomes.How is the nation making such remarkable progress against poverty and low income? The Census Bureau report shows that an important part of the answer is that welfare reform has led to huge increases in work and earnings by single mothers and a revolution in how government helps the poor. No longer does government help the poor primarily by giving them welfare benefits. The new approach is to encourage, cajole and, if necessary, force poor and able-bodied parents to take jobs. Then, once they are employed, government provides help through a system of work supports that includes cash earnings subsidies, primarily through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), medical insurance, food subsidies, child care and housing.
The Census Bureau data show how this new approach works. Consider the group of about 2 million families headed by mothers with incomes under $13,000. In 1993 this group earned on average only $1,400 and had welfare benefits (primarily cash and food stamps) of $4,400 (all figures are adjusted for inflation). By 2000, their earnings had increased by 130 percent, to $3,100, and their welfare benefits had declined by a quarter to $3,300. In addition, they enjoyed a 300 percent increase in EITC income. The net effect was that total income for these mothers and children rose by a quarter, to $8,600.
Now consider the group of 2 million mothers with incomes between $13,000 and $21,000, a group that includes many mothers leaving welfare. Earnings increased from $4,900 in 1993 to $11,700 in 2000. Similarly, EITC income increased by nearly 200 percent. Although the welfare income of mothers in this group fell by nearly 60 percent, their total income increased by more than $4,000, to $17,600.
Progress against poverty over the 1993-2000 period is equally remarkable. Child poverty declined by nearly a third to 16.2 percent, its lowest level since 1976. Moreover, for three of the past five years, poverty among black children declined more than in any year before 1995 and has now reached its all-time low. Deep poverty, defined as income at half the poverty level (about $7,000) or less by the Census Bureau, has also declined sharply and is now well below its previous historical low.
SO THEY'RE NOT BOY SCOUTS: The New York Times claims that Executions of P.O.W.'s Cast Doubts on Alliance. By POWs, they mean surrendering Taliban troops, many of them foreign fighters from Pakistan and Chechnya. I suppose this does violate the Geneva Convention, but it pales in comparison to the atrocities the Taliban has committed after taking cities. And isn't this matter of dealing with captured troops something of a moral grey area? They were, after all, quite recently shooting at the Northern Alliance, and may very well have killed some of their men. Unlike The New York Times, I weep no tears for dead Taliban.
NEED SOMETHING ELSE TO WORRY ABOUT AT 2:30 AM? How about terrorists concealing plastic explosives in their own body cavities? It's a yucky thought, but entirely doable. In this report from Wired, an Israeli terrorism consultant claims that:
It's not appropriate for an analyst of terrorism to consider anything absurd that is technically very feasible, and I would say yes, this is. I have not heard this scenario discussed, but Tom Clancy wrote up a plot that involved crashing a jet into a building, and the federal authorities classified it as a low probability.I would claim it is now entirely appropriate to consider even the absurd threats now. In an asymmetrical war, creativity is one of their weapons, as is the ability to commit unthinkable acts.
AMERICA THE OMNIPOTENT: Last Week in the New York Press, Andrey Slivka had some fine insight into our hero, Noam:
What's maybe most worthy of contempt in the Chomskyan attitude that the U.S. is ultimately to blame for 9/11 is the Babbittry at the core of it. The Chomskys of the world seem to believe that the U.S. is, in some mystical way, the source of all power, all energy, all motion on this planet and in the universe. The U.S. is the primum mobile--everything originates here, there are no other sources of energy or volition in the whole of the universe. No one and nothing else has any power to accomplish anything. If fruit drops from a tree on the other side of the world; or an iceberg cleaves in the Arctic Ocean; or children starve in Bosnia; or maniacs steer jetliners into the World Trade Center towers, then somehow the U.S., being the ultimate cause of all value and reality on Earth, must be responsible for it.This is very similar to the view to which subscribes the proverbial ignorant, arrogant, jingoistic American patriot who haunts the collective consciousness of the editors of Le Monde and of the European intellectual class. The difference is that the Chomskys see this mystical power as a dangerous one, while the patriots consider it an unimpeachably good one. But itıs the same attitude in each case, and itıs a flabby, decadent onethe product of coddled people who inhabit a civilization thatıs been so obliteratingly strong for so long, that they canıt imagine that anything outside of it could possess the power of agency. You wonder if, at the secret core of the Chomskyan position, there doesnıt lurk a racist disbelief that the worldıs turbaned or dark-skinned people are capable of anything at all. After all, only America can cause things. Only our system is effective enough to do anything. Yesterday Jim Knipfel mentioned in this space that thereıs a 1 in 5000 chance that a doomsday asteroid could hit Earth in the next century. I imagine that, if it does so, the Chomskys will spend their last minutes on Earth wondering what the U.S., in the mystical omnipotence they flatter it with, could have done to cause this.
RUMORS OF WAR: After gloating about how Seymour Hersh was duped by a source, Alexander Cockburn falls for the Nancy Oden story (scroll down), which is already on the invaluable urban legend site, snopes2.com.
AFGHANISTAN'S HIJACKERS: When I heard on 9/11 that a plane had gone down in Pittsburgh, and before I knew about the passenger revolt, I secretly hoped that we had been able to shoot it down. Not only would shooting down our own civilian plane foil whatever evil the hijackers on board had planned, but it would show the world what cold American resolve and determination looked like. As it turns out, President Bush gave orders to shoot down Flight 93 if it threatened targets on the ground. Before the F-16s which were tailing it could carry out Bush's order, though, the passengers overtook their captors and destroyed the plane themselves. When I heard about the heroism of those passengers, I stopped being disappointed that the Air Force didn't take it down, but I was still proud that Bush had given the order.
In Slate (which is almost unreadable these days, except in Print view), William Saletan raises the question of why, if we are willing to kill our own civilians to stop terrorists from attacking people and buildings on the ground, the prospect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan should keep us from destroying the terror-making capabilities of Al-Qaida.
Al-Qaida and its Taliban agents have hijacked a nation, making it a base of operations for mass murder and terror. They're using the civilian inhabitants of this base as human shields. If we refuse to attack the terrorists, many more civilians around the world will die. So we have attacked, and some of our bombs have killed innocent people. Each of those deaths is terrible and tragic. But we're no more responsible for them than we would have been for shooting down that plane full of innocent Americans. We didn't put the lives of Afghan civilians at risk. Afghanistan's hijackers did.
GOOD NEWS ON A BAD DAY Matt Welch had a link to this from The Economist this morning regarding rising Third World longevity:
People are living longer for many reasons: better food, cleaner water, more effective medicines. How did they get these things? It helps that the poor are getting richer: average annual incomes in developing countries doubled between 1975 and 1998, from $1,300 to $2,500 (in 1985 dollars at purchasing-power parity). It does not hurt, either, that their rulers are getting less despotic: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 100 developing countries have ended military or one-party rule. (Angola was an exception to both these trends.)
ART OR HATE OR BOTH? There was an uproar at the Boulder Public Library a few weeks ago when the library director refused at first to hang an American flag inside the library for fear of offending people who find the flag offensive. This uproar intensified when it was noted that this same library had an art exhibit of 21 brightly colored phalluses (phalli?) hanging in its lobby. Then, over the weekend, the exhibit was stolen and Old Glory was left in its place. Within the day, it was recovered in the home of the thief, a man who said he found the art offensive.
I'd have to agree with him. The exhibit, which was called "Hanging 'Em Out to Dry," consisted of painted ceramic penises nestled inside of knitted "cozies" hanging from a clothesline with a noose tied at one end. According the library, it was placed there in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
Now, I'm no semiotics expert and I haven't seen the piece, but it appears to me, from the descriptions, to advocate the sexual mutilation and possible lynching of men in retaliation for domestic violence. What's more, there's nothing in the description that directs these threats at particular abusers, rather it seems to be addressed to anyone with a penis to be "hung out to dry."
This is offensive, if anything is. Yet there is a segment of the Left that sees this instead as a brave artistic statement. If men are offended, well, that would be the point. Only certain groups, such as haters of the American flag, have a right not to be offended in a public library.
Many Voters Simply Did It Wrong, according to the LA Times:
Floridians wrongly drew stars, circles and Xs on ballots. They used pens instead of pencils, or red ink instead of blue. They tried to erase errors, or fix them with tape or staples. They tried to vote for pro golfer Tiger Woods and Cuban shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez. Many tried in vain--and in error--to vote for two, three or even all 10 presidential candidates.
BUSH WINS IF ILLEGAL VOTES NOT COUNTED Oh, to be back in Mexico, where we watched the recounts from our honeymoon suite... Well, Tuesday was our first anniversary, and it's nice to hear that they've finally finished counting chads in Florida. Good thing we went ahead and inaugarated a president in the meantime, since this little matter of a war came up before they put away their abaci. Thank God for the Electoral College, which limited the debacle to Florida, rather than every close-matched state. And let's hear it for the Supreme Court, who only hastened the inevitable, as The Washington Post makes clear:
Under any standard used to judge the ballots in the four counties where Gore lawyers had sought a recount-- Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Volusia-- Bush still ended up with more votes than Gore, according to the study. Bush also would have had more votes if the limited statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and then stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court had been carried through.
CALLOUS NEWS NETWORK? Protests in Atlanta at CNN over their war coverage. Strangely enough, it's not because they're waging a propaganda war for the Taliban. Seems some folks who like to wear bandanas over their faces and who did not receive the Isaacson memo think CNN is neglecting the plight of the starving Afghans. Unfortunately, while there isn't a law against pointy hoods, it's illegal to mask your face while protesting in Georgia. In a freak instance of fairness, three arrests were made.
Of course the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is tragic, but the Taliban have been causing it for years. Why didn't Georgia's anti-globo element protest before, if it cares so much for the Afghan people?