Archives for January 2004
George Tenet made me do it
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More to the point, though, is that even if we accept that the president was given faulty intelligence, that doesn’t justify going to war. First, war was unjustified even if Iraq had had WMD. Second, this President was hell-bent on going into Iraq from the get-go. He didn’t reluctantly accept intelligence estimates that, after long reflection, led him to believe that unilateral preemption was the only option. No, he campaigned for war. He resisted any notion of inspections, which might have reached the same conclusions as David Kay, but without the intervening death and spoiled treasure. He lobbied Congress hard to abdicate their war power to him.
The bottom line is that Bush didn’t invade Iraq because of WMD; that was merely a convenient pretext. He invaded for a complex set of reasons, which include the neocon vision for the Middle East. The media (and, God help us, voters) can’t give him a pass. President Bush is responsible for the mess we’re in and should be held accountable. Simply firing George Tenet shouldn’t exonerate him.
See the paw!!
It’s not until you’re an alumni that you realize that you want the stock of your school to go up. Not only has FIU produced such luminaries as Gloria Estefan and Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.) (a.k.a. “The Cuba Lobby”), but it now also has Dennis Lehane under its belt. Lehane graduated with an MFA from the school’s Creative Writing program and went on to write the book on which the movie “Mystic River” (which just got a gazillion Oscar nominations) is based on. It goes to show that if you pass out 30,000 degrees a year, you’re bound to hit paydirt every once in a while. Hit it, maestro:
From the green fields of Tamiami,
To to north shore of Biscayne Bay,
Here’s a place where we can gather,
Where Golden Panthers hunt their prey!
Anyone who tries to defeat us,
Better think twice and stand aside;
Bring them here with their fear to Miami,
And when they come, we will show our Panther Pride!Golden Panthers, see the paw,
We will fight, you’ll feel the claw!
Let’s go Panthers, Gold and Blue,
Fight for FIU!
EPA on just a billion a day
From Slate’s “Today’s Papers“:The Wall Street Journal goes high with congressional investigators doubting that Iraq and Afghanistan are really costing the Pentagon the roughly $4 billion and $1 billion per month respectively that Congress has appropriated. “The fact of the matter is, it’s tough to come up with $1.1 billion a week of incremental costs,” said the head of the non-partisan General Accounting Office. “I’m not sure it’s [all] being spent.”
Now there’s an idea. Grow the size of government so large that it won’t be physically able to spend all the money budgeted to it. It’ll be like Brewster’s Millions. But one can hear Bush’s giddy reply to the challenge: “Bring it on.”
The ‘Federal Page’ with a trucker hat
The D.C. version of Gawker has been launched. It’s called “Wonkette“. Could this mean Washington is the next New York? Don’t hold your breath, but I was wondering that after the recent blog-meme-burst about “hipsters”. (See here, here, and here.)Wonkette’s going to have some catching up to do after the meteoric success of Swamp City, which I notice is graciously linked-to. The word on the street is there might even be cooperation between the two sites. God bless ‘em. This city needs as much help as it can get. D.C. is a town populated by valedictorians, class presidents, and prom-queen runner-ups who all want to be president, TV anchorpersons, or, worse yet, “work in policy”. It’s also full of bloggers.
UPDATE: It didn’t take long for this post to make it to the “what they’re saying about Wonkette” column on that site’s front page. She sure has figured out the formula: castigate the pols and pundits, but stroke the bloggers’ egos. Except John Marshal; he gets made fun of.
Sharpton: Against “mass production”
From tonight’s debate:JENNINGS: If … you have the opportunity to nominate someone to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, what kind of person would you consider for the job? … And maybe just take a minute or so to give us a little bit about your views on monetary policy. …
SHARPTON: Oh, in the Federal Reserve Board, I would be looking for someone that would set standards in this country, in terms of our banking, our — in how government regulates the Federal Reserve as we see it under Greenspan, that we would not be protecting the big businesses; we would not be protecting banking interests in a way that would not, in my judgment, lead toward mass employment, mass development and mass production.
But don’t anybody dare say he’s not a serious candidate that shouldn’t be in the debate. Oh, and Dean was lack-lack-lackluster.
Yeeeargh!!!
The L.A. Times has a good piece assessing how much damage Dean’s concession speech antics has done to his campaign. Although the body’s not cold yet, it reads like a post mortem and makes the case that it’s so bad he won’t recover from it.The round-the-clock broadcasts of that isolated appearance come at a time when many voters nationwide are just tuning in to the election now that the balloting has actually started. … Republicans were delighted, characterizing Dean’s manic performance as everything from wild-eyed to mentally unstable.
They also insist that you “think of the irony” of how the very medium that propelled him to center stage (the “interweb”), has now become his undoing (listen for yourself). But the Republicans can’t really be that thrilled. They would have given anything for this to have happened to Dean later, during a general campaign against Bush. To my libertarian friends who are rooting for Dean I say, there’s no one Bush would rather have as an opponent than Dean, except maybe Kucinich. This guy was never electable.
P.S. I’ll add this: looking at the whole of the video, it looks like he just went nuts for the brief state-naming-yeeeargh moment in order to match the loudness of the crowd. So, he may be getting unfairly slammed. But you know what? Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, but yet if you ask me I’ll tell you he did. Let’s see how Dean does in the debate tonight.
The Internet was just a threat
The surprise result in Iowa today might teach us one thing: the limits of the Internet. Us bloggers and assorted Net-geek-types are who we are for one reason: we don’t like to get off our fat asses and would sooner Tuesday-morning-quarterback. (See how postmodern of me to do right now the very thing I’m writing about? Notice my use of colons?) From the Post:
Dean’s aides say he is the candidate best positioned to mount a lengthy war for the nomination. He has signed up nearly 600,000 supporters over the Internet and built powerful political operations in New Hampshire and several of the states holding votes on Feb. 3, including Arizona and New Mexico.
It is so easy to click a link at Meetup and say that you are an activist. Smart mobs are very good at making themselves seem much bigger than they really are. So maybe what we learn tonight is that your (our) (my) fancy laptops and text messages mean nothing in Iowa (or the rest of middle-America). This is now Clark’s nomination to lose.
Words you can’t say on Amazon
Amazon.com censored me. I write little book reviews that I post on that site, and I just saw that one of my reviews, which had been previously published in its entirety, now has “[…]” where “whore” used to be. They don’t touch “pimps” in the same sentence, but I guess “whore” was over the line. I wonder what other words Amazon censors? Maybe it’s like Rep. Doug Ose’s (R-Cal.) H.R. 3687, which aims to punish “certain profane broadcasts” and defines profane as:`(b) As used in this section, the term `profane’, used with respect to language, includes the words `shit’, `piss’, `fuck’, `cunt’, `asshole’, and the phrases `cock sucker’, `mother fucker’, and `ass hole’, compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).’.
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