Honor and Dignity?

Ol' Molly nailed the Bushies today. The media has spent more time trying to correct Michael Moore's disinformation than it has spent on ALL of the nonsense spinning out of the White House. When the Dickster uttered the F-Bomb on the floor of the United States Senate, that was the straightest talk out of the Bush administration in ages. Rant on, Molly. Rant on, Michael. W can dish it out, but he sure as hell can't take it. If this is (fair & balanced) polemicism, so be it.

[x Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
Combat rationales
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

As I.F. Stone used to say, "All governments lie," so that's no shockeroo. What's peculiar is the reaction in the media.

■ You may recall that when even the administration finally admitted that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, we were treated to the following rationales:

1.) Didn't make any difference because Saddam was a really, really bad guy anyway. He was, of course, and it was always the only decent rationale for getting rid of him. It was the argument made by Britain's Tony Blair but specifically rejected by the Bush administration. Paul Wolfowitz explained in Vanity Fair that human rights violations were not a sufficient consideration for invasion.

2.) It was all Saddam's fault that we thought he had WMD. The wily coot fooled us by repeatedly denying that he had any -- a fiendishly clever ploy.

3.) He probably shipped them all to Syria just before we got there.

4.) Get over it. We've heard enough from you people.

■ Torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere?

1.) No worse than fraternity hazing.

2.) Just some low-level, white-trash morons.

3.) We haven't tortured nearly as many people as Saddam.

4.) Al Qaeda never signed no stinkin' Geneva Conventions, so we have a right to torture them.

5.) "Shut up," they explained.

■ Torture was explicitly authorized at the highest levels of government.

See above, plus:

6.) Did not.

7.) So what?

8.) "I'm going to say it one more time. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of laws. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might comfort you." Problem is that the administration looked at the laws and decided to ignore them.

■ Ahmad Chalabi is not just a liar, con man, thief and faker of intelligence but also apparently a spy for Iran.

1.) Chalabi? Ahmad who? Never heard of him.

2.) We cut off all ties with Chalabi some time ago. (Last week.)

■ The 9-11 Commission reports that there is no evidence of collaboration between Saddam and al Qaeda, and in fact Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were all much bigger players with al Qaeda.

1.) The 9-11 Commission didn't say that.

2.) The media are overplaying the story and are also lazy and outrageous. (Never mind that it's the media's fault as much as the administration's that 70 percent of the American people were under the misimpression that Saddam was directly tied to 9-11.)

3.) We never claimed he was behind 9-11. No, we never did -- we may have implied it, we may have hinted, we may have suggested, insinuated, intimated, connoted, alluded to and said it between the lines, but we never said it, and you can't prove we did, and we have no idea how the great majority of Americans ever got that silly idea in the first place. So stop reporting that it's not true.

4.) We are tired of hearing from you people; this has been going on for almost 24 hours now. Back to Kobe Bryant and Laci Peterson.

All in all, I'd say these folks have their act down now.

On June 8, John Ashcroft was driven to the old Nixon defense -- stonewalling. He not only refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with Justice Department memos justifying torture -- he refused to explain why he refused.

The Washington Post then helpfully posted the memo on its Web site so we could all enjoy reading how our "Justice Department" explains why the president is above the law and above the Constitution and does not need to observe any treaties.

Also, we learned that it is not torture unless it is "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impaired bodily function or even death."

Water torture was a particular favorite of the Gestapo against the French Resistance.

I'm so glad that George W. Bush has restored honor and integrity to the White House. And I appreciate all his defenders in the media more than I can say. They are truly distinguishing themselves as patriots in this hour of need.

© 2004 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

A F*cking Meditation

The Dickster started it. W's favorite word—according to right-wing pundit and metrosexual, Tucker Carlson—is F*ck. And George Carlin is censured by the Right as foul and vulgar. I wonder if Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Donald Wildmon, Pat Robertson, and the rest say F*ck from time to time or with W's garrulous regularity? If this is (fair & balanced) obscenity, so be it.

[x New York Observer]
@#%*! It’s a Four-Letter Summer
The sex act it used to so scandalously denote is now barely conjured by the word.
by Alexandra Jacobs and Maria Russo

Once the English language’s most shocking, egregious, off-limits word, it’s become just another cultural noise, thrown around with the casualness of a summer softball, appearing on your TV, on your answering machine, at a newsstand near you, from the mouth of your son, your mom, your Congressman, your philosophy professor, your dentist, your waiter, your basic innocent virgin on the street. Remember gosh, golly and darn? They’re history! At least in the most civilized places.

Last week, at a political rally, Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island told a gathering of Young Democrats in Washington, D.C.: "I don’t need Bush’s tax cut, I have never worked a [bleeping] day in my life." And when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz received a mild taunt from Al Franken at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he responded with a simple, elegant, "[Bleep] you."

Snoop Dogg, the newly crowned king of television, jumps out of a pull-quote in Newsweek—Newsweek!—saying: "I guess I’m just a likable motherf—-er."

Of course, sometimes the word is just the thing for little outbursts of temper, as when George W. Bush called Wall Street Journal reporter Al Hunt in 1992 and told him, "You [bleeping] son of a bitch. I saw what you wrote. We’re not going to forget this." But lately, it’s been saved for more casual dinner-table use, as in "Willie, I can’t believe your [bleeping] report card!"

Note to the reader: Are we off page 1 yet? If we are, we might as well get on with saying what we mean:

It’s the Summer of Fuck!

The door slams too loud, the waiter comes too late, the drinks are mixed too strong, the traffic’s too bad on the L.I.E., the mother-in-law is coming, the Yanks are behind, the Mets are ahead, T-3 is good, The Hulk isn’t. You stub your toe—fuck! You hear good news—fu-uhck! You hear amusing news: You’re fucking kidding! You hear amazing news: No fucking way!

The sex act it used to so scandalously denote is barely conjured by the word any more; it’s a linguistic tailbone, the vestige of a previous incarnation. It’s the word that Superman would use for emphasis if he could have: What the fuck! It’s a stand-in for the black cloud that would rise above Charlie Brown’s head in Peanuts: Fuck me! But it’s lost its bite, its Anglo-Saxon threat. And what it’s gained in currency—and a new range of multi-expressiveness—it’s lost in its former beautiful, lupine lethality.

Pardon our French, but—what the heck is going on?

Darned if we know. But the ascendance of the word expresses our topsy-turvy, mish-mash moment like nothing else. It’s a non-stop cultural infusion in a culture pushed to the brink by infusion. Is our economy doing well, or terribly? Is your apartment the best investment you ever made, or a pitiful relic of a soon-to-burst bubble? Did we win the war, or not? Are we the luckiest nation on earth, or the most … fucked? If you’ve ever said, "Oh, fu-uck, honey," then you know what we’re talking about. Everything around us has been merged into one big sentimental glob—with a decided core of rage.

The roots of the word’s new currency are everywhere. Musical artists like Eminem and Snoop Dogg, of course, can take a lot of credit; so can the dozens of rap and hip-hop groups, good and bad, who are downloaded by the fuck-happy masses. Ozzy Osbourne, likewise, also did his share. They are the family-values fuckers: Their language is street, but they’re also perfectly sweet parents, family guys—perfect emissaries of the new usage of the word. Throwing "fuck" around skillfully, sharply, lovingly, these multicultural potty-mouthed dads show that you can express your inner rage and still be a good, concerned parent.

Fuck is au fait:

Customized versions of an "I fucked __" T-shirt (fill in the blank: Paris Hilton, Gisele, Anna Wintour, David Remnick … ) are flying out of Landing, a boutique on Wythe Street in Williamsburg, at $80 apiece. "Basically, they’re commentary on social climbing and star-fucking," said the shirt’s creator, Ken Courtney, 31, a Williamsburg artist. "They are the names that get fucked, that are overused by the media, as currency—like Matthew Barney. It’s commentary more on us than on the people whose names are on the shirts. I call it name-fucking."

Mr. Courtney added that high-end boutiques have been talking to him about stocking the shirts. "The word ‘fuck’ is almost so honest that no one believes it," he said.

Fuck is young:

This week, for example, a barely five-foot-tall boy in a Red Sox cap was selecting comics at Alex’s MVP on 89th Street between Second and Third avenues. "I’m going to camp soon, so my mom’s letting me pick out a bunch of comics," he said. "Isn’t that cool?" There was an assent that it was. "Yeah," said the kid. "It is pretty fucking sweet."

Fuck is old:

At a senior center on the Upper East Side the other day, social worker Jen Maybar had to break up a physical confrontation between two elder ladies, one age 98 and the other 65. When Ms. Maybar pulled the younger woman aside to explain that it was inappropriate to get in a 98-year-old’s face, she was taken aback to hear the 65-year-old declare: "I don’t give a fuck how old she is, she is gonna show me some respect!" Or, as 78-year-old Elaine Stritch toasted Liz Smith at the Drama League’s annual benefit gala, "Fuck old age!"

Fuck is left: In language, if not in action, most of the Democratic party is right there with it.

Fuck is right: The President throws "fuck" around with the best of them. According to conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, George W. Bush is "a fan of ‘fuck.’ He’s a ‘fuck’ fan. It’s good, ’cause he’s American. He’s a fundamentally American man."

Fuck is happy:

"This is really, really fucking brilliant!" Bono yelled on live national television, on NBC in January 2003, as he bounded onstage to accept his award for best song at the Golden Globes. "We’re the best fucking band on the planet!" There was no bleep. And people were so unsurprised, so inured, there was almost no protest.

Fuck is angry:

At the corner of 86th and Lexington, a woman in her 30’s was hailing a cab. The cabbie slowed down. The woman tried to open the door. The cabbie kept driving.

The woman: "What the fuck do you think you’re doing?"

The cabbie: "What the fuck are you doing? I can’t stop in a crosswalk like that!"

Fuck is grateful:

Have you picked up your "Thanks a fucking lot" notecards at Papyrus yet? They’re on sale.

Fuck is friendly:

"Fuck you man," began an e-mail that Jay Cocks, the screenwriter of Gangs of New York and The Age of Innocence, recently received. "He means it as a compliment," Mr. Cocks said. "It’s a guy I bought some records from off eBay, and he said, ‘I paid so much money for these and you got them so fucking cheap, I don’t believe this. Thanks and good luck.’"

Fuck is witty:

Well, maybe not Noël Coward witty, or as witty as the first time the word was heard on television, when critic Kenneth Tynan said it live on the BBC in 1965. But dial the Nokia of Philip Stark, 30, a producer for That 70s Show, and you’ll get this message: "Hi, you’ve reached Philip, please leave a message at the fucking beep and I’ll call you back as soon as I can."

"It beeps and they’re like, ‘Uhhh … hey … fuck! Hey, what the—?’" Mr. Stark said. "Producers call me and say, ‘Fucking Stark, that’s hilarious!’"

Do we know how to be entertained any more without fuck? Not in the movies, certainly, except in Finding Nemo. Downtown at the Public Theater, Fucking A closed in April—and there was, of course, last year’s Shopping and Fucking. From the summer camps come stories of campers chanting the lyrics of 50 Cent and Eminem under the stars; to Madonna chiding file-sharers with "What the fuck do you think you’re doing?", sparking the inevitable remixes; to the destination TV of the moment, the entire HBO line-up—Six Feet Under ("Fuck my legless grandmother"), The Sopranos ("What, no fucking ziti?"), Sex and the City ("Abso-fucking-lutely")—but exempting most of Nickelodeon, so far.

Get good enough with the word, and some people might see you as Presidential material. Cursing, after all, has been consistent with authority, masculinity, toughness and Presidential leadership from Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson through the White House tapes of Richard Nixon. Andrew Jackson was never taped, but one can guess. According to Mr. Carlson, a facility with profanity is a not-insignificant part of Mr. Bush’s appeal. "Every American male over the age of 12 uses ‘fuck’ in daily conversation," Mr. Carlson said. "It didn’t detract, in fact it added to my feelings for him. The fact that Gore reined his impulses in so tightly made me think less of him. It implies a trust—you’re revealing something about yourself. It sort of suggests that he’s an ordinary guy, a towel-snapper, and if you like towel snappers—and I do—it’s good."

That can only be cheering news for Senator Hillary R. Clinton, who would definitely know her way around a Sopranos script. "Stay the fuck back, stay the fuck away from me!" the Senator reportedly yelled at a Secret Service agent.

Needless to say, the word sells. Capitalism has welcomed it like a long-lost prodigal son into branding: the French Connection’s "FCUK" ad campaign refuses to go away, with a boppy "FCUKiki" layout in a recent New York Times Styles section. The MuchMusic USA Channel on Time Warner Cable is changing its name to Fuse, with a "Keep on fu**ing" marketing campaign. Urban Outfitters on Broadway in Soho has a display sign that reads: F*UCK TV, TAKE A HIKE. It’s an ad for CD’s that are meant to be a soundtrack for a New York walking tour.

Timothy Jay, a psycholinguist at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has written four books on cursing, said that he credits the intrusion of video into quotidian life (The Osbournes, etc.) with the infusion of a formerly forbidden four-letter word into the mainstream culture. "We’re under observation more than ever before," he said on his way to a panel on censorship and the Internet ("a real gold mine for my research!"). "We’ve got cameras all over the place—TV goes everywhere. Now we can go down in the locker room and hear Greg Lloyd say: ‘We’re going to bring home the fucking Super Bowl,’ whereas five years ago nobody did that—and believe me, the football players talked like that."

Philip Kaplan, 27, who founded Fuckedcompany.com—a Web site about corporations going under—in May 2000, thinks that "fuck" may be the legacy of the go-go 1990’s crowd, of macho Wall Street/tech talk. "It shows you that this isn’t run by a really big corporation," he said of his Web site’s name, which has propelled him to regular spots on CNN. "It makes it cool."

What the four letters express best, according to Aaron Karo, 23, a stand-up comic who lives in the Gramercy area, is "exasperation." He said he uses it promiscuously, in his act and in his everyday life: "There’s the war, the recession, everything sucks, and it just sums everything up nicely." Mr. Karo has found fortune in the word. He attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a monthly e-mail newsletter called "Ruminations on College Life," famously signing off each column with the phrase "Fuck me." After Simon & Schuster made it into a book (excising the F-word), he quit an investment-banking job and is in talks to do a sit-com.

"‘Fuck me’ means so many different things," he said. "It means … there’s nothing you can do about it. I use it even more so now since I don’t have a ‘real job’ anymore …. Instead of saying ‘Hmmmmm’ when I’m thinking, I say ‘Fuuuuckinnnnnnnn’.’

"I don’t think fuck is the new damn," said Mr. Karo. "I think it’s the new the."

Gosh.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Observer

Shame On The Dickster!

The Dickster needs a good mouth-washing. I wonder how the various Religious Rightists (Donald Wildmon, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, and on and on) are going to square this one with the piety of the Bush II administration? Of course, the Dickster directed his vile comment at a Democrat, so it probably doesn't count with the Religious Right. I hope that Senator Patrick Leahy replied, Same to ya! Of course, it would be better if Halliburton practiced self-abuse instead of sticking it to U. S. taxpayers. If this is (fair & balanced) obscenity, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
Cheney Dismisses Critic With Obscenity: Clash With Leahy About Halliburton
By Helen Dewar and Dana Milbank

A brief argument between Vice President Cheney and a senior Democratic senator led Cheney to utter a big-time obscenity on the Senate floor this week.

On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

Leahy's spokesman, David Carle, yesterday confirmed the brief but fierce exchange. "The vice president seemed to be taking personally the criticism that Senator Leahy and others have leveled against Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq," Carle said.

As it happens, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the "Defense of Decency Act" by 99 to 1.

Cheney's office did not deny that the phrase was uttered. His spokesman, Kevin S. Kellems, would say only that this language is not typical of the vice presidential vocabulary. "Reserving the right to revise and extend my remarks, that doesn't sound like language the vice president would use," Kellems said, "but there was a frank exchange of views."

Gleeful Democrats pointed out that the White House has not always been so forgiving of obscenity. In December, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry was quoted using the same word in describing Bush's Iraq policy as botched. The president's chief of staff reacted with indignation.

"That's beneath John Kerry," Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said. "I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language. I'm hoping that he's apologizing at least to himself, because that's not the John Kerry that I know."

This was not the first foray into French by Cheney and his boss. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pointed out a New York Times reporter to Cheney and said, without knowing the microphone was picking it up, "major-league [expletive]." Cheney's response -- "Big Time" -- has become his official presidential nickname.

Then there was that famous Talk magazine interview of Bush by Tucker Carlson in 1999, in which the future president repeatedly used the F-word.

Tuesday's exchange began when Leahy crossed the aisle at the photo session and joked to Cheney about being on the Republican side, according to Carle. Then Cheney, according to Carle, "lashed into" Leahy for remarks he made Monday criticizing Iraq contracts won without competitive bidding by Halliburton, Cheney's former employer.

Leahy, Carle said, retorted that Democrats "have not appreciated White House collusion in smears" that Democrats were anti-Catholic for blocking judicial nominees such as William H. Pryor Jr. Democrats demanded that Bush disavow the allegations by conservative groups, but the White House did not.

The Democratic National Committee has declared this to be "Halliburton Week" to portray administration ties to the controversial company. "Sounds like it's making somebody a little testy," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said.

Republicans did their best to defend the vice president. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), while pointing out that he was unaware of the incident, described Cheney as "very honest" and said: "I don't blame anyone for standing up for his integrity."

There is no rule against obscene language by a vice president on the Senate floor. The senators were present for a group picture and not in session, so Rule 19 of the Senate rules -- which prohibits vulgar statements "unbecoming a senator" -- does not apply, according to a Senate official. Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Michael Moore Is More On Target Than You Think

Film maker Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") is taking a lot of heat for errors in his portrayal of W and his minions conducting the war on terror. Paul Krugman's op ed piece in the NYTimes makes Moore's case from a different direction. If this is (fair & balanced) W-bashing, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Errors on Terror
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location. Our government must have the very best information possible." Thus spoke President Bush in the 2003 State of the Union address. A White House fact sheet called the center "the next phase in the dramatic enhancement of the government's counterterrorism effort."

Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government's annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making major errors. In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak.

How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of the "war on terror."

Credit for uncovering the report's errors goes to Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist, who are studying patterns of terrorism. Mr. Krueger tells me that as soon as they looked at the latest report, they knew something was wrong.

All of the supposed decline in terrorism, they quickly saw, resulted from a fall in the number of "nonsignificant" events, which Mr. Krueger and Mr. Laitin say "are counted with a squishy definition." Even the original report showed significant attacks — a much less squishy category — rising to a 20-year high. And the list of significant attacks ended on Nov. 11, 2003, but there were several major terrorist incidents after that date. Sure enough, including these and other omitted attacks more than doubled the estimated 2003 death toll.

Was the report's squishy math politically motivated? Well, the Bush administration has cooked the books in many areas, including budget projections, tax policy, environmental policy and stem cell research. Why wouldn't it do the same on terrorism?

The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment. The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush was on a "Winning the War on Terror" campaign bus tour in the Midwest.

Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.

In any case, the incompetence explanation is hardly comforting. In a press conference announcing the release of the revised report, the counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black attributed the errors to "inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated." Remember: we're talking about the government's central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a "dramatic enhancement" of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can't input data into its own computers? (It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to — and botched by — private contractors.)

Think of it as just one more indication that Mr. Bush isn't really serious about this terrorism thing. He talks about terror a lot, and invokes it to justify unrelated wars he feels like fighting. But when it comes to devoting resources to the unglamorous work of protecting the nation from attack — well, never mind.

Speaking of numbers: in 1980, middle-income families with children paid 8.7 percent of their income in income taxes, not 8.2 percent, as I reported on June 8. But it's still true that their combined income and payroll taxes rose under Ronald Reagan.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company