Category: Politics

As I blogged earlier, we went to see Control Room yesterday. When we got home, the DVD of Outfoxed that I’d ordered had arrived. We watched it this evening. It was good (though not as good as Control Room, which was quite brilliant), and it left me feeling very angry – which is the point, isn’t it? It’s worse than Berlusconi in Italy, because at least everyone knows that he’s a crook who uses his media empire for illegal purposes.
Anyway, the next time some slimy Fox pundit-masquerading-as-a-journalist begins a comment with “Some people say…”, watch out – a bunch of people are liable to throw up.

In today’s New York Times there was an op-ed piece by Nicolas Kristof entitled Jesus and Jihad. In this piece, which Kristof admits he had reservations about writing, he shares with us some scenes from the Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers. He writes:
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is Glorious Appearing, which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it’s time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In “Glorious Appearing,” Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.”
He concludes:
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah’s son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God’s word – but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people’s religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don’t think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That’s not what America stands for, and I doubt that it’s what God stands for.
Obviously as an atheist I find the last couple of words incoherent, but overall this seemed like a very sensible – and very relevant – commentary. And so, as an inveterate blogger, I wanted to blog about it. And then I wondered who might read it. I think that most of the people I know well would agree with Kristof that the popularity of these books says something important and disturbing about America. But would any Left Behind enthusiasts read this, and if so what might they say? Could any kind of dialogue follow, or is that a futile idea? Would we even speak the same language?
Curious. And troubling. [Cached]

We went to see The Control Room today. Highly recommended. If you didn’t realize that the Jessica Lynch story was released in order to bury another news item, you need to see this film. If you didn’t realize that the US deliberately targeted three separate groups of journalists in Baghdad, and why, you need to see this film. If you’ve already forgotten the things that people were saying at the time of the invasion, and need to be reminded of how they sound against the backdrop of over a year of fighting, occupation, torture, and chaos, you need to see this film. In fact, you just need to see it. Period.
(And don’t just take my word for it. Last time I looked, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film was 97% fresh – 75 critics positive, 2 negative.)
Update: If you have seen the film, you might be interested in this piece in Salon about Lt. Josh Rushing, the press officer at CentCom.

Back on June 11 I posted an entry entitled This is a blog entry I hope I’ll be able to delete. Weeks went by, and I began to hope that Sy Hersh had got it wrong after all; that the things to which he’d alluded were unsubstantiated. But today Salon Magazine has posted a piece entitled Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape.
WARNING: It’s pretty upsetting stuff.
UPDATE More info here at Boing Boing, including new info from European sources.

Telling the real story about unemployment is tough. Anna Marie Smith’s piece in Zmag is excellent on the complexity, but really hard to summarize (although the cartoon, right, captures one angle very nicely). Paul Krugman’s July 6th op-ed in the NYT focusses on one measure – the percentage of adults who have jobs. In Salon, J. K. Galbraith discusses the “Manchester index”, which “multiplies the number of unemployed by the average duration of their unemployment. In this way, it captures one of the most important features of being without a job: that the situation gets worse the longer it lasts.” And not all jobs are equal: as the EPI points out, real wages have been falling for the last six months. All of these articles tell a part of the story, but none of them clearly supports the kind of memorable slogan that is essential in political rhetoric.
Maybe Kerry’s best approach is to stick with the simple words of Reagan: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” For the majority of people, the answer is crystal clear.
Update July 9, 2004: FactCheck.Org has put out an interesting analysis which suggests that the “quality of jobs” issue may not be as straightforward as most people think. Essentially there seem to be two inconsistent sets of data coming out from the BLS. FactCheck normally does good, careful work, so I’m going to watch this. One omission: they don’t mention benefits, which could be a significant factor.

While searching Google’s Usenet archives looking for an old friend, I stumbled across the first Usenet posting that I ever made on the subject of politics. It was in April, 1986, and I ventured into a heated discussion in net.followup about Reagan’s bombing of Libya.
The sense of déjà vu is weird. Take this bit, for instance:
It’s ironical, isn’t it? Over the last year or so the “Great Communicater [sic]” has presided over an absolutely disastrous slide in the world perception of the U.S. […] A good indication of this is the fact that last week the Soviets felt able to launch a massive series of air strikes against the Afghan rebels, knowing that compared with the Libyan raid it would be a non-event.
Substitute Bush for Reagan, and Chechnya for Afghanistan….

Terry Karney just posted a blog entry about the IRR, the Individual Ready Reserve. Worth reading, including the comments. As he says, “we are pulling water from deeper in the well, someday it will run dry.”.

On Tuesday, according to the Washington Post, Bush uttered the following absurdity: “Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion.”
If any other politician had said this, there would have been an uproar. With Bush: nothing. Its the kind of inanity to which we’ve become accustomed. How pathetic.
P.S. Given Bush’s recent attempts to tell the EC what to do about Turkey, it’s worth noting that the USA would not qualify for EC membership. No state that employs the death penalty is eligible to join. The 13th Protocol of the ECHR is the operative text. [And thanks, Gene, for pointing out my Freudian slip.]

Remember the old HHGTTG quote about proving black is white and….? Well, on Lisa Rein’s Radar she has QuickTime clips of the 6/21/04 Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart shows exactly how Cheney contradicted himself over The Mythical Connection Between Saddam And Al-Qaeda. (Of course this was the same show in which Stewart nailed Stephen Hayes, author of the mind-bogglingly stupid book The Connection.)
I wonder what Cheney’s reaction might be? (And apropos of Cheney’s new attitude towards Congressional decorum, Juan Cole suggests that if a $275,000 fine is appropriate for Howard Stern, it should be good enough for the Vice President.)

Cognitive dissonance: A feeling of tension experienced when certain cognitions are contradictory or inconsistent with each other
For example, in this morning’s news:
“I think the bitter differences over the war are over,” said Mr Bush. [iC SouthLondon]
While at the same time, the level of peaceful demonstrations – and threats of violence – is such that:
About 4,000 police and 2,000 soldiers ­ more than a third of Ireland’s security forces are being deployed… In addition, 700 US security personnel and four naval ships are being called in…. In Istanbul… Turkish police are expected to deploy more than 23,000 officers for the Nato leaders’ summit. [Belfast Telegraph]
I’m definitely experiencing “a feeling of tension” about contradictory cognitions. How about you?