The Cobra's Baaaaaack!

The Cobra's right: The Dickster is bad, bad news. After a month-long hiatus while she shlocked her latest book (Are Men Necessary?) around the country, The Cobra returns to the NYTimes's Op-Ed page with a vengeance. The Dickster is the Prince of Darkness. Dub ("Junior" to The Dickster) is his naif. Shakespeare would have loved the scenario of The Dickster and Dub. During the Vietnam era, I remember Barbara Gerson's parody of Shakespeare ("McBird") that portrayed LBJ as McBeth. Unfortunately — as in Vietnam in 1966 — good men, women, AND children are dying in Iraq: both U.S. personnel AND innocent Iraqi civilians. Barbara Garson's parody of "McBeth" wasn't really funny then and The Dickster and Dub are not funny now. Dub, The Dickster, and their sleazeball minions deserve to be in the dock next to Saddam Hussein. A crime against humanity knows neither nationality nor religion. How long, O Lord?!? If this is a (fair & balanced) jeremiad, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
The Autumn of the Patriarchy
By Maureen Dowd

In the vice president's new, more fortified bunker, inside his old undisclosed secure location within the larger bunker that used to be called the West Wing of the White House, Dick Cheney was muttering and sputtering.

He wasn't talking to the pictures on the wall, as Nixon did when he finally cracked. Vice doesn't trust those portraits anyway. The walls have ears. He was talking to the only reliable man in a city of dimwits, cowards, traitors and fools: himself.

He hurled a sheaf of news reports with such force it knocked over the picture of Ahmad Chalabi that he keeps next to the picture of Churchill. Winston Chalabi, he likes to call him.

Vice is fed up with all the whining and carping - and that's just inside the White House. The only negativity in Washington is supposed to be his own. He's the only one allowed to scowl and grumble and conspire.

The impertinent Tom DeFrank reported in New York's Daily News that embattled White House aides felt "President Bush must take the reins personally" to save his presidency.

Let him try, Cheney said with a sneer. Things are nowhere near dire enough for that. Even if Junior somehow managed to grab the reins to his presidency, Vice holds Junior's reins. So he just needs to get all these sniveling, poll-driven wimps and losers back on board with the master plan.

Things had been going so smoothly. The global torture franchise was up and running. Halliburton contracts were flowing. Tax cuts were sailing through. Oil companies were raking it in. Alaska drilling was thrillingly close. The courts were defending his executive privilege on energy policy, and people were still buying all that smoke about Saddam's being responsible for 9/11, and that drivel about how we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. Everything was groovy.

But not anymore. Cheney could not believe that Karl had made him go out and call that loudmouth Jack Murtha a patriot. He was sure the Pentagon generals had put the congressman up to calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Is the military brass getting in touch with its pacifist side? In Wyoming, Vice shoots doves.

How dare Murtha suggest that Cheney dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged and dodged the draft? Murtha thinks he knows about war just because he served in one and was a marine for 37 years? Vice started his own war. Now that's a credential!

It always goes this way with the cut-and-run crowd. First they start nitpicking the war, complaining about little things like the lack of armor for the troops. Then they complain that there aren't enough troops. Well, that would just require more armor that we don't have. Then they kvetch about using incendiary weapons in a city like Falluja. Vice likes the smell of white phosphorus in the morning.

What really enrages him is all the Republicans in the Senate making noises about timetables. Before you know it, it's going to be helicopters on the rooftop at the Baghdad embassy.

Just because Junior's approval ratings are in the 30's, people around here are going all wobbly. Vice was 10 points lower and he wasn't worried. Numbers are for sissies.

Why do Harry Reid and his Democratic turncoats think they can call the White House on the carpet? Do they think Vice would fear to lie about lying about the rationale for going to war? A real liar never stops lying.

He didn't want to have to tell the rest of the senators to go do to themselves what he had told Patrick Leahy to go do to himself.

Now all these idiots are getting caught, even Scooter. DeLay's on the ropes and the Dukester is a total embarrassment, spending bribes on antique commodes and a Rolls-Royce. Vice should never have let an amateur get involved with defense contracts.

Republican moderates are running scared in the House, worried about re-election. Even senators seem to have forgotten which side their bread is oiled on. Ted Stevens let oil company executives get caught lying about the energy task force meeting, while Vice can't even get a little thing like torture chambers through the Senate. What's so wrong with a little torture?

And now John Warner wants Junior to use fireside chats to explain his plan for Iraq. When did everybody get the un-American idea that the president is answerable to America?

Vice is fed up with the whining of squirrelly surrogates like Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson on behalf of peaceniks like George Senior and Colin Powell. If Poppy's upset about his kid's mentor, he should be man enough to come slug it out.

Poppy isn't getting Junior back, Vice vowed, muttering: "He's my son. It's my war. It's my country."

(And the bad news is: this man is our vice president.)

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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No Foreigners Allowed (Unless Your Roof Leaks)

Dub was in Arizona on a Tucson Air Force Base yesterday. He doesn't dare speak in a civilian setting because the streets of Paris suburbs during the recent rioting would look like Mayberry in comparison to the streets outside Dub's speaking venue. In his comically earnest high-school-sophomore debater's speaking pattern, Dub proclaimed us both a nation of immigrants and a nation of soft-hearted folk with sympathies for the immigrant underdogs who swarm our southern boundaries. Dub is out of step with a substantial portion of his base: the Minutemen and a large portion of white Republicans. These quasi-militiamen and closet supremacists are rabidly xenophobic. Dub's "guest worker" proposal is anathema to the militiamen and their KKK-ilk. Of course, Dub wants braceros or "guest workers" who are registered with the INS or whatever the hell the Department of Homeland Security calls the Border Patrol these days. Homeland Security is another boondoggle for hacks and quacks. See how Homeland Security handled the natural disaster crises on the Gulf Coast. See how Homeland Security has made us safer by forcing us to take off our shoes in airports. In a way, the wacko militiamen are just as effective as Homeland Security employees. Dub is proposing a schizophrenic policy on immigration: keep 'em out and let 'em in — all at the same time. If this is (fair & balanced) lunacy, so be it.

[x TNR Online]
Outside In: The Minutemen Are More Mainstream Than You Think
by Eve Fairbanks

What "anti-immigration cranks such as the Minutemen ... are really up to," The Washington Post judged in an editorial this month, "is simple harassment." But on a recent Friday morning the Herndon Minutemen--a new Northern Virginia chapter of the notorious Arizona-based Minuteman Civil Defense Corps--are mostly just being harassed themselves. "Minutemen, go home!" commuters yell from cars careering down Alabama Drive, the no-man's land between the Herndon 7-11 where the day-laborers gather and the strip of sidewalk where the Minutemen keep watch. At one point, a white SUV pulls up to the curb where that morning's group of six Minutemen, five men and one woman, are standing with camcorders, binoculars, and walkie-talkies. "You are racist," its driver tells the bundled, defiant band. "You don't represent the people of Herndon. Go home."

The problem is, these Minutemen are home. Two weeks ago, I joined the Herndon Minutemen on one of their missions to photograph and videotape employers hiring day-laborers from the Herndon 7-11 expecting to be highly entertained by a gaggle of nutty retirees who'd piled into their Buicks before dawn for the chance to shake a shotgun at any varmint Mexicans they could find. After all, this is the image of the Minutemen held by many Americans, from commuters hurling insults to members of the media. A recent Post headline explained that "ON PATROL IN VT., MINUTEMEN ARE THE OUTSIDERS," while The Nation described a Minuteman rally as a "fringe political event." In short, the Minutemen are widely regarded both as outside agitators to the areas they patrol and as politically marginalized extremists.

But most of the Herndon Minutemen I met live just minutes away from the 7-11 they watch, next door or down the street from the day-laborers who cluster opposite them across Alabama Drive. And, while their actions are obnoxious, their concerns, far from being fringe, echo decidedly mainstream anxieties about cultural questions raised by uncontrolled illegal immigration. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that a full 54 percent of Americans actually have a "favorable impression" of the Minutemen, while only 22 percent have an "unfavorable" view. For liberals to dismiss the Minutemen as a tiny minority of racist throwbacks, loathed by the communities in which they operate, isn't just inaccurate. It's also naïve--and politically dangerous.

One reason the Minutemen have acquired a crankish reputation is their obsession with legal technicalities. The Herndon group does not harass the day laborers themselves; rather it seeks to nab their employers for minor violations of the law and, further, insists that it is these kinds of violations that really bother them. George Taplin, the organization's founder, tells me that he plans to file reports on employers for operating a business without a license, operating without a valid contractor's license, non-payment of business taxes, and improper registration of a motor vehicle. This concern for the proper application of law pervades group members' behavior while on patrol. They never step back onto the grass behind their strip of sidewalk because it is technically illegal to snap photographs of unwilling subjects while standing on private property. "Bottom line is, we have laws in our society," Bill, a short, affable Minuteman who declined to give his last name, tells me. "Are we going to selectively choose which we follow?" This sanctimonious concern about the corollary legal issues raised by illegal immigration is part of what makes the Minutemen seem, well, a little weird.

But over the course of the morning, as the Minutemen speak about why they joined the group, and why they soldier on the in face of such abuse, it becomes clear that such legalistic concerns are often a veil for deeper dissatisfaction with the way an expanding immigrant population is affecting the social fabric of their communities. This discomfort manifests itself as concern both about crime and about broader changes in the local culture--i.e., how the local immigrant community lives and socializes. Bill explains that he "slid into the Minutemen" because he was disturbed by the way his neighborhood was changing, and the other Minutemen standing with him nod in agreement. "Dormitory-style homes" have popped up on their streets, Bill says, and the residents come and go at strange hours. Their neighbors' children are intimidated and no longer like to play outside, in part because "we've got about 17 cars coming and going from our neighbors' houses." Matt, another Minuteman who lives in nearby Manassas, claims that the police have busted prostitution rings operating out of nearby properties. Bill doesn't want his name printed, he tells me, because he worries about retaliation from the local Hispanic gang, MS-13. Pointing to the cluster of day-laborers across the street, he explains to me that the Herndon 7-11 is "a social gathering place, too." Taplin has publicly objected to a regulated day-laborer site set to open in Herndon on December 19--proposed in order to combat the trespassing, litter, and nuisance complaints that have arisen in conjunction with the informal 7-11 site--because he worries that even a regulated locale wouldn't change "their behaviors." Even on the coldest mornings, more than 50 workers often convene at the 7-11, and Bill judges that sometimes only 10 or 20 get hired. "When," he asks me, "is it ever a good thing for 40 men to hang out together?"

These anxieties may be overblown, in some cases borderline racist; but they are not, unfortunately, outside the mainstream. In Mount Pleasant, the predominantly Hispanic, rapidly gentrifying Washington neighborhood where I live, complaints have begun to surface about the groups of men that congregate on stoops or outside of convenience stores at night. Those who have complained call it loitering, but one Hispanic resident told the Post that when the men gather outdoors, "[t]hey're having coffee; they talk about issues. ... It's part of our community." For the neighborhood's Hispanic population, this practice is a cultural tradition; for its newer batch of hip, ostensibly liberal urbanites, it is disturbing, and too closely resembles something American law designates a crime.

These are people who would never admit they share anything in common with the Herndon Minutemen. But like it or not, the Minutemen are acting on anxieties many Americans share--anxieties about the challenge of enforcing the law in towns that are swelling in size due to immigration; anxieties about the challenge of integrating and accommodating an immigrant culture. Border states like California have been grappling with these issues for years, in court battles about day-laborer sites and debates over concepts like bilingual education. Often in these conflicts those who have presented cultural, as opposed to legal, objections to uncontrolled immigration are condemned as xenophobic or racist. But as my Mount Pleasant neighbors have shown, it can be tricky to disentangle legal from cultural discomfort. Bill O'Reilly, who consistently reaches the largest number of viewers of any cable television pundit, lectured his viewers (and guest Geraldo Rivera) on the evil consequences of immigration last month: "You know, there's the slumlords are stacking 60 men in one house out on Long Island, and then the whole neighborhood is devastated. When you have no supervision of sexual predators who come from other countries, as you don't, all of those unintended consequences frighten people." And it's not just O'Reilly. In a Democracy Corps poll this month, 49 percent of respondents said they have a generally "cold and unfavorable" feeling towards immigration, while just 23 percent said they have a "warm and favorable" feeling. Keep in mind that this poll was measuring Americans' views on immigration as a general concept, not on illegal immigration specifically.

Our national debate on immigration tends to focus on economic issues, namely job loss, and scrupulously to avoid the kind of cultural anxieties that the Herndon Minutemen, the residents of Mount Pleasant, and Bill O'Reilly are bringing to the fore. After all, anxieties about how immigration will affect national culture seem like more of a European thing, springing from a deep-seated and distinctly un-American nativism and yielding byproducts like the headscarf dispute and Jean-Marie Le Pen. But on this side of the Atlantic, little Le Pens are beginning to flourish. Jim Gilchrist, who founded the Minuteman Project, has forced a California House of Representatives contest into a December 6 runoff by standing for office as an independent on a platform almost exclusively dedicated to combating immigration. He will not win, but he received an impressive 15 percent of the initial vote, nearly twice as much as the leading Democrat. Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who broke party ranks and stumped for Gilchrist in California this month, is writing a book about immigration, tentatively titled In Mortal Danger, which he suggested to The New York Sun could serve as his campaign platform for a possible presidential run in 2008. Many pundits and election scholars have judged that immigration will be a key issue in the elections in 2006.

Surely, even if an immigration-dominated election were to take place, most Americans would not support a Tancredo. Immigration is a proud feature of our cultural fabric in a way it has never been in Europe, and the United States has a long history of successfully absorbing immigrants. In August, despite heavy opposition, the Herndon town council voted 5-2 to approve the construction of an official day-laborer site to replace the 7-11. Slated to open on December 19, the site will be run by a non-profit and will provide access to water, bathrooms, and, for laborers who are not hired for the day, English classes and job training. Defeated, those who agitated against the site had to resort to becoming Minutemen--reduced from taking part in a serious debate to bragging about an exploit in which they chased a pickup-driving contractor in circles around a parking lot "like in a Three Stooges movie."

In a certain way, it is nice to see these people making themselves a little ridiculous. But to write them off as ridiculous, as the Post, The Nation, and plenty of others have done, is to make a serious political miscalculation. Only a few years ago, the European political establishment largely ignored concerns about an immigration wave overwhelmingly originating from one region--only to be stunned as fanatics rose to prominence by championing an issue that mainstream politicians had refused to touch. To prevent the same thing from happening here, liberals will have to recognize that immigration, often considered a "conservative" topic, is now a potent political issue. Concern is no longer confined to California, Arizona, and Texas; nor is it confined to Republicans. Liberals will need to make an affirmative case for immigration as a concept--but also concede that our current system is deeply flawed. They will have to acknowledge that many Americans have legitimate worries about immigration--but that there are better ways to approach the issue than skulking around day laborer sites with a camera. Wherever they come down on the issue, and whatever they propose, liberals will have to acknowledge that immigration is not a fringe concern. And telling the Minutemen to "go home" isn't going to make it go away.

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at TNR.

Copyright © 2005, The New Republic

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Journalists, Take A Leak!

Viveca Novak of Time magazine has been subpoenaed to the grand jury investigating the leak of the indentity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Viveca Novak is not, by the way, related to Robert Novak.

Special Counsel Fitzgerald is interested in Novak's testimony about conversations she had with Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, beginning in May, 2004.

Novak, part of a team tracking the CIA case for Time, has written or contributed to articles quoting Luskin that characterized the nature of what was said between Rove and Matthew Cooper, the first Time reporter who testified in the case in July.

This is a sign that Fitzgerald is still considering charges against Karl Rove (aka Turd Blossom).

Viveca Novak appears on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on MSNBC tonight at 6:00 PM (CDT).

If this is (fair & balanced) joyful anticipation, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
Political Trivia (Quiz)

Which of the following journalists has not testified in the CIA leak case?

Bob Woodward, The Washington Post
Tim Russert, NBC News
Bob Schieffer, CBS News
Matthew Cooper, Time magazine

Copyright © 2005 Washington Post

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Lord, Deliver Us From Dub!

How anyone can read Bob Herbert's Op-Ed piece in today's NY fishwrap and still support Dub is beyond me! Dub is a war criminal. The Dickster is a war criminal. All of their minions who do their evil policy-making bidding are war criminals. The only cutting and running being done right now are military surgeons amputating mutilated limbs and the troops running from the latest mortar or IED attack. ¡Basta ya! If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Cut Our Losses
By Bob Herbert
Washington — Jack Murtha is as tough as they come, but he's seen enough of the misguided, mismanaged, mission impossible war in Iraq to know that it's not sustainable, not worth the continued killing and butchering and psychological maiming of thousands of American G.I.'s.

"I mean, this was a war done on the cheap and we're paying a heavy price for it," he said in an interview just before Thanksgiving.

Mr. Murtha is the Pennsylvania congressman, former marine and traditional war hawk whose call for a quick withdrawal of American troops from Iraq has intensified the national debate over the war. He makes weekly visits to wounded troops in military hospitals, and when he talks about their suffering it sometimes seems as if his own heart is breaking.

"These kids are magnificent," he said. "They've done their duty."

He talked about the former Notre Dame basketball player Danielle Green, a left-handed guard ("heck of a player") who lost her left hand in a rocket attack in Baghdad. And he recalled a young marine who was trying to defuse a bomb when it exploded. "It blinded him and took his hands off," said Mr. Murtha. "It killed the guy behind him."

In Congressman Murtha's view, the troops who have displayed so much valor and made so many sacrifices in Iraq deserved better from their leadership here at home. "We went in with insufficient forces," he said. "We had people in the wrong [specialties], people driving trucks who couldn't back trucks up. We had security forces without radios. I found 40,000 troops without body armor."

He has no faith in President Bush's repeated calls to stay the course. "The number of incidents have gone from 150 a week to 772 a couple of weeks ago," he said. As additional U.S. forces have been deployed, casualty rates have increased, not decreased. And his many conversations with G.I.'s have convinced him that American fighting men and women don't have much confidence in their Iraqi allies.

"They don't trust them - that's all there is to it," said Mr. Murtha. The disparagement of Iraqi security forces by American troops was so widespread that Mr. Murtha was surprised when one soldier "started talking about how good they are, how much they've improved, and so forth."

It was a miscommunication. The congressman soon realized that the soldier was talking about how much the insurgents had improved; how they had become more sophisticated, and thus "more deadly."

Mr. Murtha, 73, is a Democrat who has maintained good ties over the years with Republicans and has extraordinary contacts within the Defense Department and the military. He's a decorated Vietnam War veteran (Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts) who retired as a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves after 37 years of service.

He said he's convinced that there is nothing more the military can accomplish in Iraq. It's the presence of the American troops themselves, inevitably seen by the Iraqis as occupiers, that continues to fuel the insurgency.

"Our military captured Saddam Hussein and captured or killed his closest associates," he said. "But the war continues to intensify."

When he went public with his proposal to pull American troops out of Iraq (he would establish a "quick reaction" force elsewhere in the region, perhaps in Kuwait), he said:

"Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say that the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care."

Equipment shortages at premier military bases in the U.S., including Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, are so severe, Mr. Murtha told me, "that the troops don't have the equipment they need to train on."

We need to cut our losses in Iraq. The folly of the Bush crowd and its apologists is now plain for all to see. Congressman Murtha is right, the war is not sustainable. Even Republicans in Congress are starting to bail out on this impossible mission. They're worried - not about the welfare of the troops, but about their chances in the 2006 elections.

To continue sending people to their deaths under these circumstances is worse than pointless, worse than irresponsible. It's a crime of the most grievous kind.

Bob Herbert's op-ed pieces on the Tulia (TX) drug bust scandal blew the coverup of one of the worst law enforcement scandals in this country's history.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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The Slickster & Dub: Birds Of A Feather?

Full disclosure: in 1992, I voted for Ross Perot I-TX). In 1996, I voted for Bob Dole (R-KS). In 2000, I voted for Al Gore (D-TN). In 2004, I voted for John Kerry (D-MA). My voting pattern may seem lunatic, but I was repulsed by the sleaziness of both The Slickster and Dub. No wonder Poppy likes The Slickster; Dub is The Slickster's clone. Dub calls the Calamity Fighters (Poppy & The SLickster), "The Odd Couple." Instead, The Slickster and Dub are an odder couple, joined at the lip. Neither of the sons-of-bitches can tell the truth! Dub promised to bring integrity and dignity to the White House and he has supplied a lifetime dose of the opposite! If this is (fair & balanced) fear and loathing, so be it.


Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Copyright © 2005 Salon

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How Long Is Dub's (Or The Dickster's) Nose?

I remember seeing Disney's "Pinocchio" as a small child. The puppet told a lie and his nose grew each time he lied. Dub and The Dickster look like Dumbo; the animal totem of the Red State wackos is the elephant. The Dumbos believe the bullshit their President and Vice President spout! The Frankster gives the Dumbos (especially Dub and The Dickster) no rest. Every Sunday, The Frankster kicks Dumbo butt. The Dumbo true believers spout the Vietnam era nonsense of supporting the president all all costs. Check out the 58K names on the Vietnam Memorial; supporting the president put most of those names on the black walls of the Memorial. How soon will we be delivered from this mass psychosis? If this is (fair & balanced) hope, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By Frank Rich

George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

Before he became a Dumbo hunter, Frank Rich was the drama critic for The New York Times.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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Agnew Had Pat Buchanan; Who's Writing This Stuff For The Dickster?

The Dickster is moving into Agnew territory ("Nattering Nabobs of Negativism" and "Pusillanimous Pussyfooters") in terms of political ranting. The Trickster's Veep (Spiro T. Agnew, convicted felon) read speeches written by Pat Buchanan in the late '60s and early 70's. Buchanan is an anti-Semitic sleazeball. Who is Buchanan's spiritual successor (and likely anti-Semite) in the early 21st century? (Answer: David Wurmser?) The Dickster is reaching for the same Agnew-like alliterative sneer at the opponents of Dub's "policy" in Iraq. If only history repeated itself: Agnew was forced to resign the Vice Presidency when he was found to be a crook. Agnew managed a plea bargain that kept him out of the slammer. Now, if only The Dickster would suffer the same fate (without the plea bargain). If this is (fair & balanced) sanguinity, so be it.

[x Austin American-Statesman]
Cheney launches nuclear attacks on his foes
by David Sarasohn

In what reporters actually called an easing of the rhetoric on Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday called 57 percent of the American people "dishonest and reprehensible."

Speaking to the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute — these days, the president and vice president speak mostly to conservative groups, if they can't find a military base — Cheney attacked claims of manipulation of prewar intelligence as "dishonest and reprehensible," and launched his legendary sneer at the senators who suggested it.

But earlier this month, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked the question, "Do you think President Bush gave the country the most accurate information he had before going to war with Iraq, or do you think President Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq?" Of the sample, 57 percent thought the president misled them.

That's a lot of reprehensibility.

It may be that on Iraq, the vice president needs more than a new American policy. He may need a new American people. And he may have to look hard.

As Cheney also explained, anyone saying that American troops were sent into battle in Iraq on a lie were committing "revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety."

But a survey taken in early November by the Pew Research Center asked whether leaders of the United States and Britain claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction "mostly because they were themselves misinformed by bad intelligence, or ... mostly because they lied to find a reason for invading Iraq?"

The survey found 43 percent thinking the U.S. and British leaders lied, and only 41 percent thinking the leaders were just misinformed themselves. If 43 percent of Americans are "corrupt and shameless," Democratic senators may not be Cheney's biggest problem.

Still, the vice president insists that what's really hurting his Iraq policy is politicians not being nice about it.

"The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough," he admitted, "but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

It's a ringing declaration, and an impressive display of Cheney's mastery of the synonyms for dishonesty. But underneath the charges of political conspiracy is a real problem big enough to be picked up by U.N. inspectors, or even by the CIA.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll this month asked, "In making its case for war with Iraq, do you think the Bush administration told the American public what it believed to be true, or intentionally misled the American public?" By a margin of 55 percent to 44 percent, those surveyed went for "intentionally misled."

Whether that 55 percent — the general standard of a political landslide — were "dishonest and reprehensible," or "corrupt and shameless," or maybe all four, was not made clear.

What's clear is that this administration's problems with the American public and Iraq aren't about other politicians. They're about realities that Americans have seen, and discoveries that have led them to their own conclusions.

One of those conclusions seems to be that if you spend a year whipping up support for a war — including the flat statement that the country you want to fight is close to developing nuclear weapons — and that statement turns out to be not at all true, you're not the one who gets to be outraged and indignant afterward.

Also, if you said confidently that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, and three years later their casualty rate is still rising and a gathering of your own Iraqi politicians declares that killing U.S. troops is "legitimate resistance," it may not matter how many West Wing speechwriters are busy piling up insulting adjectives.

That seems to be another complication for the vice president. The most recent CNN/USA Today poll found that 36 percent approved of the job he was doing, against 54 percent disapproval. A Harris poll this month discovered just 30 percent thinking Cheney was doing an excellent or pretty good job, against 65 percent thinking his performance was fair or poor.

Even that was better than a recent Newsweek poll result that only 29 percent of Americans consider him honest and ethical.

But the vice president has gotten one big break. So far, no pollster has asked whether Americans consider Cheney "dishonest and reprehensible."

David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, OR.

Copyright © 2005 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P. All rights reserved.

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Bret Chenkin (VT) and Julie Fitzpatrick (WI) , Teachers Of The Year!

Teachers are getting into the act, now. Principals and superintendents in Bennington, VT and Madison, WI are reaching for the antacid tablets. Dumbos in both states are frothing at the mouth and I LOVE IT! If this is (fair & balanced) unbridled joy, so be it.

1.
[x Boston.com]
The Associated Press
Teacher under investigation for alleged liberalism

November 25, 2005

BENNINGTON, Vt. --The school superintendent whose district includes Mount Anthony Union High School has labeled "inappropriate" and "irresponsible" an English teacher's use of liberal statements in a vocabulary quiz.

"I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes," said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.

The question referring to the president asked students to say whether coherent or eschewed was the proper word. The sentence would be more coherent if one eschewed eschewed.

Another example said, "It is frightening the way the extreme right has (balled, arrogated) aspects of the Constitution and warped them for their own agenda." Arrogated would be the proper word there.

Chenkin, 36 and a teacher for seven years, said the quizzes are being taken out of context.

"The kids know it's hyperbolic, so-to-speak," he said. "They know it's tongue in cheek. They know where I stand."

He said he isn't shy about sharing his liberal views with students, but invites vigorous debate in the classroom.

"Never once have I said, 'OK, you're wrong,'" he said. "Instead, it's, 'OK, let's open this up. Let's see where this can go.'"

Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union Superintendent Wesley Knapp said he would not want his children subjected to such teaching.

"It's absolutely unacceptable," he said. "They (teachers) don't have a license to hold forth on a particular standpoint."

Knapp said he was recently informed of the situation and that it was a personnel issue that he took seriously.

Principal Sue Maguire said she hoped to speak to whoever complained about the quiz and any students who might be concerned. She said she also would talk with Chenkin about the context of the quiz.

"I feel like this needs to be investigated," she said.

Information from: Bennington Banner
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

2.
[x Wisconsin State Journal]
School's anti-war assignment canceled
by Sandy Cullen

A letter-writing campaign by third-graders at Allis Elementary School encouraging an end to the war in Iraq was canceled because it violates School Board policy, district officials said Tuesday.

Julie Fitzpatrick, a member of the 10-teacher team that developed the project for the school's 90 third-grade students in five classes, said the assignment was intended to demonstrate citizen action, one of the district's standards in social studies.

"We saw peace as a common good," Fitzpatrick said. "We were just advocating that people keep working toward peace."

But Robin Reynolds, an Army veteran whose 8-year-old grandson is in Fitzpatrick's class, said she regards the assignment as a form of "anti-war protesting" that "is not suitable for elementary students."

"They're supposed to teach the facts and not opinions," she said. "That's brainwashing."

"It was certainly an unfortunate thing to have happen," Superintendent Art Rainwater said. "It's a direct violation of our board policy.

Madison School Board policy prohibits teachers "from exploiting the institutional privileges of their professional positions to promote candidates or parties and activities."

"We don't want our staff ever using our students in a political activity, which this obviously was," Rainwater said. "I think the district would apologize to anyone who was offended. It should not have happened."

Allis Principal Chris Hodge said a letter was sent to parents Tuesday apologizing to anyone who was offended and informing them that the project was rescinded.

Reynolds, who served as a personnel assistant at Fort McClellan in Alabama during the Vietnam War and has three family members serving in Iraq, said she "blew up" last Friday when her grandson brought home a letter informing parents about the campaign, in which students were to write a letter every day for 12 days.

Letters were to go to other students, the state's U.S. senators and representatives, President Bush, and the secretary of the United Nations urging them to "join our press for peace." If the war were not over in 12 days, the sequence would be repeated.

Reynolds said her grandson was upset by the assignment. "He knows he's got an uncle and cousins over there."

Fitzpatrick and Hodge, said a misunderstanding resulted in the initial letter going out to parents.

"I left with the impression we could go with it," Fitzpatrick said.

But Hodge said she had wanted to find out what the School Board's policy was before the letter was sent home.

"I thought it was an inappropriate assignment," Hodge said, adding she felt the topic of war was "too vast" for third-graders to understand. "I just think it was too much to ask of a third- grader."

Hodge said she had only heard from one parent who also was concerned that the project was beyond a third- grader's level of understanding.

School Board President Carol Carstensen said board policy and the district's teachers contract also require teachers to withhold the expression of personal opinion unless asked a direct question when dealing with controversial issues.

While it would be appropriate for students to decide to write letters expressing their own views, Cartsensen said, "It isn't appropriate to mandate it."

U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R- Green Bay, who is seeking Republican nomination for governor in 2006, on Tuesday faxed Hodge a letter calling for the assignment to be rescinded.

Hodge said she had received Green's fax but had not had time to read it.

"We're really stunned by the reception," Fitzpatrick said. "In hindsight, I guess we should have anticipated it. It's kind of sad when peace causes a furor."

Fitzpatrick said many parents had sent envelopes and stamps as requested in the initial letter they received.

Sharon Johnson, co- president of the Allis's Parent Teacher Organization, and Toni Kress-Russick, both of whom have children in Fitzpatrick's class, said they were supportive of the project.

Kress-Russick, a special education teacher at Memorial High School, said it taught social responsibility and demonstrated to students that "people can make a difference" and that "just one little third-grader can matter."

"I thought it was a great assignment," Johnson said. "People just tend to blow things out of proportion all the time. I think this is one of them."

Susan Abplanalp, assistant superintendent for elementary and secondary schools, said she does not believe the teachers involved viewed the assignment as a political activity.

"They really looked at this as a peace project," Abplanalp said. "I don't think that the intent was to make this a political statement."

The assignment The letter sent home to parents last Friday said third-graders at Allis Elementary School would be "writing letters to encourage an end to the war in Iraq. The letter writing will teach civic responsibility, a social studies standard, while providing an authentic opportunity to improve composition skills and handwriting."

Students were to write a letter a day for 12 days to other students, the state's U.S. senators and representatives, the president of the United States, and the secretary of the United Nations "urging them to press for peace," as well as to the media.

If the war did not end in 12 days, the sequence would be repeated.

Parents were asked to provide 10 postage stamps and 12 envelopes.

An alternative assignment was to be provided for students whose parents did not want them to participate.

Copyright © 2005, Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved.

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The Dickster Is Dishonest, Reprehensible, and Illegitimate

The last sobriquet is the truest description of The Dickster. He is a bastard. The Dickster is a war criminal. Dub is both a war criminal and an idiot. The Dickster is not an idiot, but he is evil. If this is (fair & balanced) calumny, so be it.

[x Slate]
The Misleaders: Who is Dick Cheney kidding?
By Jacob Weisberg

Dick Cheney calls it "dishonest," "reprehensible" and "not legitimate" to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that "any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not "fabricated," which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of "lying," is a straw man of Cheney's. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein's WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq.

So, who's right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn't they?

Because the Republicans who control Congress have prevented any investigation into the administration's use of prewar intelligence (as opposed to the gathering and formulation of that intelligence), there's a lot we still don't know. Officials haven't yet had to answer questions about what they knew or did not know when they advanced various spurious claims. And even the kind of investigation that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding could prove frustratingly inconclusive, because proof of deception requires knowing someone else's state of mind. In the president's case, it may be possible to show that he should have known enough to avoid some inaccurate assertions, including the notorious "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam seeking to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa. But as with Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush's combination of self-delusion, disengagement, and sheer mush-headedness nearly precludes the possibility of willful deception.

Here's what we do know already, without a congressional inquiry: Members of the Bush Administration were dishonest with the public and with Congress about prewar intelligence. We've known this for some time—see, for example, the comprehensive and damning story Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post in August 2003 ("Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence"). Over the past two years, several incidents of executive-branch dishonesty in the run-up to the war have turned into subscandals of their own: the aluminum tubes that Iraq used for missiles and not gas centrifuges, the yellowcake uranium that Saddam didn't try to buy from Niger, the mobile biological warfare laboratories that turned out to be hydrogen generators for balloons, the al-Qaida chemical warfare training that was based on a false confession, the meeting with Mohamed Atta that didn't happen in Prague.

If you examine these and other pillars of the administration's case for invading Iraq, a clear pattern emerges. Bush officials first put clear pressure on the intelligence community to support their assumptions that Saddam was developing WMD and cooperating with al-Qaida. Nonetheless, significant contrary evidence emerged. Bush hawks then overlooked, suppressed, or willfully ignored whatever cut against their views. In public, they depicted unsettled questions as dead certainties. Then, when they were caught out and proven wrong, they resisted the obvious and refused to correct the record. Finally, when their positions became utterly untenable, they claimed that they were misinformed or not told. Call this behavior what you will, but you can't describe it as either "honest" or "truthful."

Many of the White House's most serious misrepresentations involve the case that Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons, which he had in fact stopped trying to do in 1991. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said in August 2002, in one of his conclusive comments on the subject. This position was echoed by Bush and Rice, who both conjured the specter of a mushroom cloud, as well as by Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, who went into more detail about aluminum tubes and uranium. If you were on the inside and read even the now notorious National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, you at least knew that such statements were at the very least overdrawn. Analysts at the departments of Energy and State weren't buying the aluminum tubes and yellowcake theory that formed the basis of the nuclear case.

Or consider another component of that case that has gotten less attention, the description of fresh "activity" at Saddam's known nuclear sites. A draft paper produced by Andrew Card's White House working group on Iraq, and cited in the 2003 Post article, was characteristically distorted. The document inaccurately attributed to U.N. arms inspectors the claim that satellite photographs showed signs of reconstruction and acceleration of Iraq's nuclear program. It went on to quote something chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix told Time: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." But the White House paper left out the second half of Blix's quote: "[B]ut you don't know what's under them." In February 2003, American inspectors visited those sites as part of U.N. teams and saw that nuclear bombs weren't being made at them. But Bush officials acted as if such counterevidence didn't exist.

In retrospect, Cheney casts himself and his colleagues as uncritical consumers of what the CIA and DIA spoon-fed them. Bad intel, he gives us to understand, is like lousy weather—a shame, but nothing policymakers can do anything about. In fact, the Bush hawks were anything but victims of the intelligence community. They challenged any evidence that cut against their assumptions about Saddam, going so far as to set up their own unit within the Pentagon to reanalyze raw data and draw harsher conclusions. And remember that the trigger for the Valerie Plame scandal was the vice president's mistrust of the CIA.

Another giveaway is the administration's lack of outrage over the bad intelligence they now claim to have been victimized by. Only Colin Powell, before his U.N. speech, seems to have pushed back with any skepticism about charges he was being asked to retail. And only Powell has expressed any outrage after it became evident that his U.N. speech had been a case of garbage in, garbage out.

Powell's old colleagues now defend themselves by saying they didn't know their claims about Iraq weren't true. But the truth is most of them didn't care whether their assertions were true or not, and they still don't.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World. Weisberg also collects Bushisms — the wit and wisdom(?) of George W. Bush.

Copyright © 2005 Slate

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It Wouldn't Be A Thanksgiving Holiday If We Omitted The Biggest Turkey Of Them All

Dub would be funny if young people weren't dying or suffering unspeakable wounds because we have an idiot for a president. If this is (fair & balanced) hope for an end to this madness, so be it.

[x Newsweek]
Let’s Be Thankful: President Bush has much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.
By Andy Borowitz

Nov. 22, 2005 - In a special pre-Thanksgiving radio address broadcast from the White House, President George W. Bush asked his fellow Americans to join him in giving thanks for the following things:

"My fellow Americans, let's be thankful for global warming, because as these winter months approach, it makes the world such a nice, toasty place.

"Let's be thankful to Brownie for doing such a good job, even if he doesn't have it anymore.

"Let's be thankful that we live in a place like America and not in a place like China where the doors are really tricky to open.

"Let's be thankful that even though my approval numbers are falling, they're still higher than my grades at Yale.

"Let's be thankful for the Sony PlayStation Portable, which really helps you get through those long cabinet meetings when they're going on and on about the economy.

"Let's be thankful that the year is almost over and I've managed to avoid talking to Cindy Sheehan.

"Let's be thankful that John Kerry waited until a year after the election to start saying smart things about Iraq.

"Let's be thankful to Rep. ‘Mean Jean’ Schmidt (R-Ohio) for saying, 'Cowards cut and run, but the brave serve in the Alabama National Guard.'

"Let's be thankful that in nine months it will be August and then I can go on summer vacation again.

"Let's be thankful that we have such courageous men and women working at the CIA, and that we all know their names.

"And finally, my fellow Americans, let's be thankful that, even though we still haven't brought Osama bin Laden to justice, we did finally get Robert Blake."

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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The Dickster Takes The 6th

Here is a little more holiday satire at the expense of The Dickster. If only Prosecutor Fitzgerald will indict the sumbitch. If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.

[x Borowitz Report]
CHENEY SEEKS SIXTH DEFERMENT: Veep Hopes to Secure Place in History
by Andy Borowitz

Vice President Dick Cheney announced plans today to seek an historic sixth draft deferment, realizing a longstanding personal dream of his.

Clutching his deferment application in his hand as he addressed reporters at the White House, a beaming Mr. Cheney said, “I am so close to getting this sixth deferment I can taste it.”

Washington insiders were surprised that the vice president chose this moment to seek a sixth deferment, with the debate over the war in Iraq at full throttle and Mr. Cheney’s lack of military service increasingly a target of his critics.

Furthermore, even without a deferment, Mr. Cheney would be unlikely to pass the routine physical necessary to serve in the military, since simple tasks like stepping out of a limousine or shaking hands with dignitaries leave him easily winded.

But according to vice presidential scholar Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, the vice president may be trying to secure his place in history by obtaining his latest deferment.

“FDR will go down in history as the only president elected to four terms,” Mr. Logsdon said. “Dick Cheney wants to be known as the only vice president with six deferments.”

At his White House press conference, the vice president snapped at a reporter who questioned why he was seeking a draft deferment at all when there was no draft at the present time.

“Better safe than sorry,” the vice president said.

Elsewhere, in order to keep details of her wedding from leaking to the press, pop star Christina Aguilera made all of her guests sign a confidentiality agreement and disinvited Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Andy Borowitz is a former editor of The Harvard Lampoon. Borowitz has contributed more than twenty humor pieces to The New Yorker to date.

Copyright © 2005 Andy Borowitz

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Another View Of Academic Blogs

Until recently, it had never occurred to a graduate student that her blog and her professional fate might be connected. That thought occurred to me when I launched this blog on June 24, 2003. I had made the momentous decision (for me, in terms of time spent on development) to close down the Web site I maintained for my students at the Collegium Excellens and move to WebCT. WebCT is a suite of course management applications that was licensed by the Collegium. I saw that WebCT provided more for students than my Web site. However, there was a void in my life when WebCT replaced my Web site. At that time, I saw an announcement about Blogger and I signed up. I kept the existence of this blog private because I knew that some of my ranting & raving (even though fair & balanced) might offend the High Poo Bahs of the Collegium, or worse: some local citizen who would complain to one of the Regents about something they read in my blog. So, I kept the blog private and it went unlisted in the Blogger directory. A month or so ago, I reviewed my Blogger settings and changed this blog from private to public. I am beyond the grasp of the forces of evil at the Collegium; I severed the last link to that place within the past fortnight. I am beyond their wretched grasp. If this is a (fair & balanced) braggadocio, so be it.

[x CHE]
Do Not Fear the Blog
By Rebecca Anne Goetz

My blog, "(a)musings of a grad student," was born one day in July of 2002 when my then-boyfriend suggested I start one. I suspect he was slightly sick of listening to my running political commentary, and a blog seemed an ideal channel for my complaints. So with little effort and a crash course in basic HTML, I had my own Web-based publication, subtitled (appropriately, as it turns out), "reflections on an academic life, plus politics and more."

In the beginning I had five loyal readers: the boyfriend, my father, my mother, and my grandfather, who periodically printed out posts and brought them dutifully for my grandmother to read.

My blog inhabited a quiet, slightly dusty corner of the blogosphere. My posts were occasional meditations on the politics of the day, interesting primary sources, fun news articles, rants about graduate-student life, quick research notes, together with some thoughts about the plot arcs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I lurked on the edges of an increasingly vibrant scholarly community overflowing with posts on what it meant to be an academic, current research, teaching dilemmas and successes, and other day-to-day experiences of people in my profession. For me blogging was a professionally pleasant hobby. I could ruminate at will on what was going on in my academic and political lives.

Initially I was semi-pseudonymous. I blogged under my own name but hid my affiliation until a blogger at another university referred to Harvard as a bastion of grade inflation. I defended my university enthusiastically and thus blew my cover. The sky did not fall. I don't think my small but growing audience even noticed. I did enjoy my status as a graduate-student pundit in history: It was a happy day when "(a)musings of a grad student" became the first thing that popped up when I Googled myself.

Installing a site meter was even more fun. At first visitors just dribbled by to the tune of 5 or 10 a day; now I get an average of 50 visitors a day. I was even invited to begin blogging at "Cliopatria," a group blog for historians. I felt slightly overwhelmed — two places to blog instead of one! What could I do with such riches?

It never occurred to me that there might be a connection between my blog and my professional fate. I considered myself simply a historian in training who commented sporadically online about her experiences.

But over the summer, as I began contemplating the job market, I started to wonder what role my blog would play in the process, if any. Should I list it on my CV or on my department's job-placement Web site? It isn't a publication, really, more of a scholarly activity that isn't always scholarly. In the end, I decided that since I don't list my swim team on my CV, then my other extracurricular activities, the blog included, didn't belong there either.

That settled the question, until the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble's two anti-blogging columns were published in the summer (The Chronicle, July 8) and early fall (The Chronicle, September 2). The effect of those columns, both of which strongly cautioned graduate students and junior faculty members against blogging, trickled into other parts of my job search in alarming ways.

Shortly after Professor Tribble's second column, a campus career counselor advised several of my fellow job-hunters and me to limit our online presences, because, she said, The Chronicle had published articles saying it was a bad idea. (I assume she meant Tribble's columns.)

She advised Googling ourselves to see what was out there and further suggested removing questionable items about ourselves from the Web. (She was less specific about how one goes about removing things from the Web.) Any online content, she said, should be completely professional. If you have a Web site, make sure you don't put up pictures of your pets. (Oops.)

Like many bloggers disturbed by Tribble's columns, I was seized by a fit of metablogging. Why do I blog? What benefit do I derive from it? Does anything in my blog somehow make me a less desirable job candidate? Have I blogged myself out of academe without even realizing it?

In answering those questions to my own satisfaction, if not Ivan Tribble's, I came to understand the nature and the value of the academic blogging community.

I blog first and foremost because it is downright fun to participate in an emerging media form. Blogs and the blogosphere are new concepts, and the possibilities for scholarly communication are endless and exciting. Because I blog I now have contacts, online and offline, with a variety of scholars inside and outside my field. They don't particularly care that my dissertation is not yet done; the typical hierarchies of the ivory tower break down in the blogosphere so that even graduate students can be public intellectuals of a kind.

Professor Tribble lamented that blogs are not peer-reviewed and wrote that that was one reason why their content was illegitimate. While it is true that the author of a blog decides what she publishes on her blog, she does not blog in a vacuum. Other bloggers can — and do! — react to faulty logic or misinformation.

Bloggers write about the rewards and pitfalls of teaching, the difficulties of putting together syllabi, and the solutions for odd classroom situations. They write about research dilemmas, forthcoming conference papers, and publishing problems and successes.

I bring my own research issues to my blog on occasion; I wrote a few months ago about a dilemma I was having about counting godparents in early Virginia wills. I received e-mail messages from several people recounting their own counting experiences and offering helpful suggestions. I have come to believe that those online exchanges build better, more involved scholars who have a wide circle of blog-colleagues.

Moreover, my post on Virginia wills was recognized on the History Carnival (see http://historycarnival.blogsome.com). Carnivals are the periodicals of the blogosphere. History carnivals, the brand I have the most experience with, are open to blog posts about all periods, places, and methodologies. The result is a fortnightly collection of links to the best posts in history blogging, assembled by volunteers on a rotating basis. While bloggers can nominate their posts for inclusion, the dedicated hosts also strike out on their own to find appropriate posts. (I did not nominate my post about wills.)

There are other carnivals — on topics like philosophy or teaching, for example, and a recently inaugurated Carnival of the Feminists. In short, academic bloggers who write about research and teaching are thinking very seriously about their vocation, and they are engaging with their colleagues about how to do it right.

Academics who blog and assemble carnivals can perform thought experiments and try out ideas quickly without going through the conventional publications or conference process. They can also comment on areas outside of their expertise or current research. If they like — and I've been known to do this myself — they can be a bit silly on their blogs, too, letting off steam at the end of a long week.

In short, I find that blogging makes my work better. What isn't to like about that?

Having come to an understanding of why I blog, I wanted to hear from other blogging academics about their experiences. I posted a set of questions on my blog asking to hear from blogging graduate students and junior faculty members. I received 65 responses to my query — not a scientific poll, I know, but the answers to the question "why do you blog?" were the most thoughtful.

Graduate students, in particular, found blogging to be a way of communicating the joys and frustrations of working on a dissertation. Almost all of the respondents mentioned the usefulness and stimulation of cyber-scholarly life. Several mentioned that they had had Web presences since the mid-1990s; for those students, blogging is just an extension of previous Web-based activities.

I also received a few disheartening e-mail messages from grad students who had been told not to even think of blogging because it would destroy their chances of getting a tenure-track job.

But of the blogging junior professors, those whose colleagues knew about their blogs indicated that it did not seem to have harmed them in any way. A few even told me they had included their blogs in performance reviews — perhaps a sign of things to come?

The overall response led me to believe that the anti-blogging hysteria evident in Professor Tribble's columns is not as widespread as I originally thought.

The meaning and purpose behind a blog is, of course, in the eye of a blogger. For every blogger who posts only serious scholarly material, there will be many more bloggers like me who mix the personal and the professional in fun and quirky ways.

My advice to job committees: If you have a blogger in your pool, give the candidacy serious consideration. Job seekers who blog are thoughtful, interesting people who are fascinated by the possibilities that this new medium has for enhancing their personal and professional lives. Do not fear the blog; embrace it. You'll be glad you did.

Rebecca Anne Goetz is a doctoral candidate in early American history at Harvard University. She writes a blog called "(a)musings of a grad student," which is at blogspot.com, and contributes to one called "Cliopatria," which is at http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html.

Copyright © 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Annual Autumn Rite Of Passage

Within the past few weeks, high school students more accomplished than I was in 1959 have completed and mailed college admission materials to the college(s) of their choice. Within those large envelopes, the students enclosed an admission essay. While I never wrote an admission essay anywhere because I attended mediocre schools that accepted anyone (open-door institutions), I remember the admission essay for Rice University because I was acquainted with some students at the Collegium Excellens who asked me to write a letter of reference for them. The Rice letter of application was prompted by an empty box at the head of the form. The applicant was instructed to place anything in the box that was of great significance to the applicant. The letter was to explain the choice and how it related to the applicant's desire to attend Rice University. One successful applicant, a gifted celloist, place a photo of his cello in the box and wrote about the role of music in his life. Another semi-successful applicant placed an album cover from a Beach Boys album in the box and was wait-listed. Chrisopher Buckley has written a modest entrance submission of his own to a college admissions office. It is laugh-out-loud humor. If this is (fair & balanced) satire, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
COLLEGE ESSAY

. . . your entrance essay must not only demonstrate your grasp of grammar and ability to write lucid, structured prose, but also paint a vivid picture of your personality and character, one that compels a busy admissions officer to accept you.

—Online college-application editing service

It was a seventeenth-century English-person John Donne who wrote, “No man is an island.” An excellent statement, but it is also true that “No woman is also an island.”

The truth of this was brought home dramatically on September 11, 2001. Despite the fact that I was only twelve at the time, the images of that day will not soon ever be forgotten. Not by me, certainly. Though technically not a New Yorker (since I inhabit northwestern Wisconsin), I felt, as Donne would put it, “Part of the main,” as I watched those buildings come down. Coincidentally, this was also the day my young sibling came down with a skin ailment that the doctors have not yet been able to determine what it is. It’s not like his skin condition was a direct result of the terrorist attack, but it probably didn’t help.

I have a personal connection to the events of that day, for some years ago my uncle by marriage’s brother worked in one of the towers. He wasn’t working there on 9/11, but the fact that he had been in the building only years before brought the tragedy home to Muskelunge Township.

It is for this reason that I have resolved to devote my life to bringing about harmony among the nations of the world, especially in those nations who appear to dislike us enough to fly planes into our skyscrapers. With better understanding comes, I believe, the desire not to fly planes into each other’s skyscrapers.

Also, I would like to work toward finding a cure for mysterious skin ailments. Candidly, I do not know at this point if I would be a pre-med, which indeed would be a good way to begin finding the cure. But I also feel that I could contribute vitally to society even if I were a liberal-arts major, for instance majoring in writing for television.

Many people in the world community, indeed probably most, watch television. Therefore I feel that by writing for TV I could reach them through that powerful medium, and bring to them a higher awareness of such problems as Global Warming, Avian Flu, earthquakes in places like Pakistan, and the tsumani. Also the situation in the White House with respect to Mr. Scooter Liddy. To be precise, I believe that television could play a key role in warning people living on shorelines that they are about to be hit by one humongous wave. While it is true that in northwest Wisconsin we don’t have this particular problem, it is also true that I think about it on behalf of people who do. No man is an island. To be sure.

Another element in my desire to devote my life to service to humanity was my parents’ divorce. Because I believe that this is valuable preparation for college and, beyond, life. At college, for instance, one is liable to find yourself living in a situation in which people don’t get along, especially in bathrooms. Bathrooms are in that sense a microcosm of the macrocosm. Bathrooms also can be a truly dramatic crucible, as the playright Arthur Miller has demonstrated in his dramaturgical magnum opus by that title.

I am not one to say, “Omigod, like poor me,” despite the fact that my dad would on numerable occasions drink an entire bottle of raspberry cordial and try to run Mamma over with the combine harvester. That is “Stinkin’ Thinkin’.” As the Danish composer Frederick Nietzche declared, “That which does not kill me makes me longer.” This was certainly true of Mamma, especially after being run over.

Finally, what do I bring to the college experience? As President Kennedy observed in his second inaugural, “Ask not what your country can do to you. Ask, what can you do to your country.”

I would bring two things, primarily. First, a positive attitude, despite all this crap I have had to deal with. Secondly, full tuition payment.

While Dad pretty much wiped out the money in the process of running over Mamma—she was in the house at the time—my grandparents say they can pay for my education, and even throw in a little “walking-around money” for the hardworking folks in the admissions department. Grandma says she will give up her heart and arthritis medications, and Grandpa says he will go back to work at the uranium mine in Utah despite the facts that he is eighty-two and legally blind.

In this way, the college won’t have to give me scholarship money that could go to some even more disadvantaged applicant, assuming there is one.

Christopher Buckley is a wickedly funny satirist. According to Buckley's self-description, he is a novelist and editor of Forbes FYI magazine. Buckley lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children and dog, Duck. In 1998, he was inducted into the Legion d'honneur by the president of the Republic of France for "extraordinary contributions to French culture," despite the fact that his French is barely sufficient to order a meal in a restaurant. He has been an adviser to every president since William Howard Taft, a remarkable achievement, since he was born in 1952. His next book, a refutation of the theories of the physicist Stephen Hawking, will be published this fall by Princeton University Press. The sole omission in this autobio is that he is the son of William F. Buckley, Jr.

Copyright © CondéNet 2005. All rights reserved

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Turn Out The Lights, Dub, The Party's Over

When if's and but's are candy and nuts, Dub'll have a helluva Christmas. The boy president has exhausted the political capital of 9/11. He's not a wartime president, he's an idiot president. The writing is on the wall. The only tragedy is the loss of life among our troops in that spot of hell known as Iraq. The historical reality is that the only popular war in the U.S. was "the good war," aka WWII. Dub tried like hell to put an act as a WWII-style "war leader," but that dog won't hunt. If this is (fair & balanced) history, so be it.

Have Americans Usually Supported Their Wars?
By HNN Staff

It has seemed to come as a bit of a shock to the Bush administration that Americans are turning against the war in Iraq. Just as administration officials weren't prepared for the fierce resistance that developed to the American occupation of Iraq, neither were they prepared for a change in public opinion at home as the war dragged on. Cindy Sheehan's galvanizing protests outside the president's vacation home caught officials by surprise.

But throughout American history there has always been significant opposition to war. New England states threatened to secede from the union during the War of 1812, which severely hampered the trade carried in New England ships. The Mexican-American War was opposed by leading Whigs including Congressman Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War President Lincoln faced the opposition of the Copperheads, many of whom he had thrown in jail. The Spanish-American War triggered a robust anti-imperialist movement led by William Jennings Bryan.

In the twentieth century, as Hazel Erskine demonstrated in her widely cited 1970 article, "Was War a Mistake?" (Public Opinion Quarterly), "the American public has never been sold on the validity of any war but World War II." She noted that as of 1969--a year after the Tet Offensive and the brief invasion of the American embassy in Saigon--"in spite of the current anti-war fervor, dissent against Vietnam has not yet reached the peaks of dissatisfaction attained by either World War I or the Korean War."

Reviewing the wars of the 20th century, she noted:


In answer to quite comparable questions, in 1937 64 per cent called World War I a mistake, in 1951 62 per cent considered Korean involvement wrong, whereas in 1969 burgeoning anti-Vietnam dissent nationwide never topped 58 per cent.

Her charts demonstrated the extent of American opposition to war:

Gallup Poll — WWI 
Click image to enlarge


Gallup Poll — WWII
Click image to enlarge 


Gallup Poll — Korean Conflict
Click image to enlarge 


Gallup Poll — Vietnam Conflict
Click image to enlarge 

Copyright © 2005 History News Network

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The Hundred Years' War Redux?

The "stay-the-course" rhetoric of the last years of the Vietnam conflict is being recycled by Dub and The Dickster. This dynamic duo is trying to keep their sinking dinghy afloat with bullshit. Senator George Aiken (R-VT) proposed an exit strategy during the late Vietnam years, "Declare victory and go home." A pox on Iraq and its miserable insurgency; their oil is not worth one more drop of blood. Prolonging this national disaster, as Dub and The Trickster rant against "cutting and running," is a war crime. Draft dodgers like Dub and The Dickster talk tough, but it's still bullshit. Representative John Murtha (D-PA) tells it like it is. If this is (fair & balanced) reality, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Time to Leave
By Paul Krugman

Not long ago wise heads offered some advice to those of us who had argued since 2003 that the Iraq war was sold on false pretenses: give it up. The 2004 election, they said, showed that we would never convince the American people. They suggested that we stop talking about how we got into Iraq and focus instead on what to do next.

It turns out that the wise heads were wrong. A solid majority of Americans now believe that we were misled into war. And it is only now, when the public has realized the truth about the past, that serious discussions about where we are and where we're going are able to get a hearing.

Representative John Murtha's speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.

Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that's why he wants us out as soon as possible.

I'd add that the war is also destroying America's moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. (In his speech, Mr. Murtha pointed out the obvious: torture at Abu Ghraib helped fuel the insurgency.) When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about the reality that much of Iraq is now ruled by theocrats and their militias.

Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.

Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out after we're gone. One is tempted to say that they should have thought about that possibility back when they were cheerleading us into this war. But the real question is this: When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq?

The fact is that we're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more.

Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices - higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft - that might have made a long-term commitment to Iraq possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty in Iraq, the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of facing a collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970's.

So the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.

Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we're better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose."

And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out in his speech, the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.

The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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