The Stupidity Trifecta

How can the Dumbos read (or hear) Bushisms — the idiot blather from the Idiot in Chief — and live with themselves and their votes in 2000 and 2004? The Dubster's gubernatorial wins in Texas in 1994 and 1998 can be chalked up to the Texas preference for having idiots in the Governor's Mansion. However, some other Texas idiot recently torched the Governor's Mansion (vacated for renovation — including, duh, a fire-activated sprinkler system) and the current idiot, Governor Goodhair — although residing in a $1M+ loaner/rental just outside Austin — was in Stockholm winning Swedish hearts and minds (and meatballs). Governor Goodhair is fortunate, too, that he is an Aggie and has been spared having a classmate who constantly skewers Aggies like Trudeau gigs other Yalies. (Perhaps Aggies are so dumb that one might as well attack dirt.) Garry B. Trudeau (Yale '70) is brutally disdainful of both Bush 43 (Yale '68) and Bush 41 (Yale '48). His take on Poppy Bush, though, is far milder than his savaging of The Dubster. The irony in Trudeau's work is that The Dubster's own foolish babbling serves as the cartoonist's weapon of choice. If this is (fair & balanced) comic stripping down into the emptiness of The Dubster's brain, so be it.

[x Doonesbury]
By Garry B. Trudeau

Click on image to enlarge.

[Few aging agitators are as unreconstructed as Walden Commune Alumnus Mark Slackmeyer, and fewer still are as proud of it. Known as "Megaphone Mark" during his campus activist years, he was on the national organizing committee for the Vietnam Moritorium, and was interviewed after the massive anti-war demonstration by Dick Cavett. Adopting the on-air moniker "Marvelous Mark," Slackmeyer created a distinctive campus radio program that was influential during the Watergate period, though he was widely censured at the time for some of his editorial comments. After stints as a bricklayer, a computer operator, and a part-time bartender, Slackmeyer returned to broadcasting with a post at WBBY. Sensing there was nothing wrong in Nixon's America that wouldn't become even more deplorable in Reagan's, he chose to stay permanently and professionally mad, and went to work for National Public Radio. Activist folklore is the richer for it. Still making waves on air, he combines probing interviews with "Lite 'n' Easy Rock," for the generation that still gets down but can't catch up. Mark is the only major FM disc jockey known to have outed himself on the air. He and his life partner -- conservative commentator Chase Talbott III -- appear together on NPR's "All Things Being Equal" (not "Considered"). Update: Mark Slackmeyer's pursuit of a divorce from Chase Talbott III is complicated by the fact that their marriage was performed by an airline flight attendant in mid-flight over the Pacific. Stay tuned to "Doonesbury" for further developments.]

Copyright © 2008 Garry B. Trudeau

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

Google Me, Stupid Me?

I was so blissful until I began to think about the impact of Goggle (and the Internet). Check out David McCullough's jeremiad about our dumbed-down Internet Generation:

[x Parade] History In Danger

According to a recent survey, fewer than half of American high school students know when the Civil War occurred. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough weighs in about why this ignorance is a problem.

How important is history in the United States?
For at least 25 years, we’ve been raising young Americans who are, by and large, historically illiterate. The founding of our nation, the Civil War, World War II—they all should be common knowledge, but they are not. History has not just been pushed to the back burner, it’s been pushed off the stove.

Why does history matter?
Amnesia is as detrimental to society as to an individual. The historian Daniel Boorstin put it very well: “Trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.”

What can we learn from the past?
That there is no such thing as “a self-made man or woman”—we all are influenced by people around us. That every action has consequences, and we have to be very careful about leaping to conclusions from first impressions. And that integrity and character do count in the long run. The idea that no one has ever lived in more difficult or dangerous times is untrue. Others have weathered more horrendous storms; we can take heart from them.

[The HBO miniseries of McCullough’s "John Adams" is now on DVD. Among McCullough's most well-known books are The Path Between the Seas, Truman, John Adams, and his most recent volume, 1776.]

So, Rat has his work cut out for him with his "No Stupidity Zone" sign. Leonard Pitts showed another way in last week's Op-Ed column. If this is a (fair & balanced) cognitive process, so be it.

[x Miami Fishwrap]
Reader Finds Satisfaction In A Good Read
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

I had thought it was just me.

In reading the cover story in the new issue of The Atlantic, however, I have learned that I am not alone. There are at least two of us who have forgotten how to read.

I do not mean that I have lost the ability to decode letters into words. I mean, rather, that I am finding it increasingly difficult to read deeply, to muster the focus and concentration necessary to wrestle any text longer than a paragraph or more intellectually demanding than a TV listing.

You're talking to a fellow whose idea of fun has always been to retire to a quiet corner with a thick newspaper or a thicker book and disappear inside. But that has become progressively harder to do in recent years. More and more, I have to do my reading in short bursts; anything longer and I start drowsing over the page even though I'm not sleepy, or fidgeting about checking e-mail, visiting that favorite website, even though I checked the one and visited the other just minutes ago.

I've tried to figure out why my concentration was shot, but no explanation satisfied: I watch less television than most folks and am no more busy than I was 10 years ago.

Now, author Nicholas Carr posits a new theory. In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he notes that he and many of his literary friends report the same experience, leading him to wonder if the Internet is not rewiring our very brains, not altering the hard drive of the human computer. The culture of hyperlinks, blogs and search engines that return more results than you could read in a lifetime is, he argues, changing the way we read and, indeed, think.

You hardly need me to sell you on the benefits of the Internet. Sitting at her desk, the average human being now has instant access to a vast universe of information a previous generation could not have begun to dream.

But what if the very vastness of that universe, the very fact of so much out there to know and so little time to know it in, requires a tradeoff in concentration and focus? I mean, we may have more options than ever before, but we're still dealing with the same 24 hour days we've always had. And the Internet does little to filter or prioritize the information it retrieves -- it simply dumps it on your head and leaves it to you to figure out. So perhaps it is to be expected that we learn to skim and scan information, but lose the ability to truly absorb and analyze it.

Granted, this is all theory. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet subjected it to scientific rigor. But it is compelling, nevertheless.

A couple of weeks ago, I read Scott McClellan's book, What Happened, for this column. Deadlines being what they are, I had to wolf down the last 200 pages in a single day. I chose an uncomfortable chair to minimize the danger of dozing off, allowed myself only one Internet break.

I would read this book. Nothing else. Just read.

It was difficult. I felt like I was getting away with something, like when you slip out of the office to catch a matinee. Indeed, I'd have felt less guilty sitting in a matinee. I had to keep reminding myself that this was OK, that, indeed, this was work.

It wasn't until somewhere around the third hour that I began to unclench, to stop feeling guilty for spending so much time focused on this one bit of matter plucked from a surging sea of knowledge. It felt . . . liberating.

In an era in which everyone has a truth and the means to fling it around the world, an era in which knowledge is increasingly broad but seldom deep, maybe that's the ultimate act of sedition: to pick up a single book and read it.

The hours I spent reading McClellan's book felt like an escape, like I had stepped off a treadmill for the first time in years. The pages fell away and the hours got lost.

I don't know about you, but I could use more days like that.

[Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004. A former writer for Casey Kasem's radio program "American Top 40," Leonard Pitts, Jr. was hired by the Herald as a pop music critic in 1991. By 1994 he was writing about race and current affairs in his own column. His column was syndicated nationally, and his 1999 book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood was a bestseller. After the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, Pitts wrote an impassioned column headlined "We'll Go Forward From This Moment" that was widely circulated on the Internet and frequently quoted in the press. In the column, Pitt bluntly expressed his anger, defiance and resolve to an unnamed evil terrorist: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard."]

Copyright © 2008 Miami Herald Media Company

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

More NY Fishwrap Snark: The Richster Sticks It To The Geezer

No wonder, in a previous life, The Richster (as the NY Fishwrap's theater critic) was known as "The Butcher of Broadway." Today, he has drawn and quartered The Geezer. If this is (fair & balanced) gibbeting, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Now That We’ve "Won," Let’s Come Home
By Frank Rich

The Iraq war’s defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore. When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.

The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news — it’s no news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara Logan appeared as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest. “Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,” she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”

Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis, is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.

In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.

Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war’s inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold. The center does.

The good news for Democrats — and the big opportunity for Barack Obama — is that John McCain and the war’s last cheerleaders don’t recognize that immutable reality. They’re so barricaded in their own Vietnam bunker that they think the country is too. It’s their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the “liberal media” acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq — as indeed it is, substantially — voters will want to press on to “victory” and not “surrender.” And therefore go for Mr. McCain.

One neocon pundit, Charles Krauthammer, summed up this alternative-reality mind-set in a recent column piously commanding Mr. McCain to “make the election about Iraq” because “everything is changed,” and “we are winning on every front.” The war, he wrote, can be “the central winning plank of his campaign.” (Italics his.)

This hyperventilating wasn’t necessary, because this is what Mr. McCain is already trying to do. His first general election ad, boosted by a large media buy in swing states this month, was all about war. It invoked his Vietnam heroism and tried to have it both ways on Iraq by at once presenting Mr. McCain as a stay-the-course warrior and taking a (timid) swipe at President Bush. “Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war,” Mr. McCain said in his voice-over. That unnamed fool would be our cowboy president, who in March told American troops how he envied their “in some ways romantic” task of “confronting danger.”

But reminding voters of his identification with Iraq, no matter how he spins it, pays no political dividends to Mr. McCain. People just don’t want to hear about it. Last week, the first polls conducted in Pennsylvania and Ohio since the ad began running there found him well behind in both states.

The G.O.P.’s badgering of Mr. Obama about the war is also backfiring. In sync with Mr. McCain, the Republican National Committee unveiled an online clock — “Track How Long Since Obama Was in Iraq!” — only to have Mr. Obama call the bluff by announcing that he will go to both Afghanistan and Iraq before the election. Unless he takes along his own Lieberman-like Jiminy Cricket to whisper factual corrections into his ear, this trip is likely to enhance his stature as a potential commander in chief.

The other whiny line of G.O.P.-McCain attack is to demand incessantly that Mr. Obama stop refusing to recognize the decline in violence in Iraq, stop calling for a hasty troop withdrawal and stop ignoring commanders on the ground in assessing his exit strategy. Here, too, Mr. Obama is calling their bluff, though not nearly as loudly as he will, I suspect, in the debates.

The fact is that Mr. Obama frequently recognizes “the reduction of violence in Iraq” (his words) and has said he is “encouraged” by it. He has never said that he would refuse to consult with commanders on the ground, and he has never called for a precipitous withdrawal. His mantra on Iraq, to the point of tedium, has always been that “we must be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” His roughly 16-month timetable isn’t hasty and isn’t “retreat.” As The Economist, a supporter of the war, recently put it, a safer Iraq does not necessarily validate Mr. McCain’s “insistence on America staying indefinitely” and might make Mr. Obama’s 16-month framework “more feasible.”

After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in January remains inoperative. Mr. Obama’s timetable is at least an effort to use any remaining American leverage to concentrate the Iraqi leaders’ thinking. Mr. McCain offers only the status quo: a blank check holding America hostage to fate and ceding the president’s civilian authority over war policy to Gen. David Petraeus and his successors.

Should voters tune in, they’ll also discover that the McCain policy is nonsensical on its face. If “we are winning” and the surge is a “success,” then what is the rationale for keeping American forces bogged down there while the Taliban regroups ominously in Afghanistan? Why, if this is victory, does Mr. McCain keep threatening that “chaos and genocide” will follow our departure? And why should we take the word of a prophet who failed to anticipate the chaos and ethnic cleansing that would greet our occupation?

And exactly how, as Mr. McCain keeps claiming, is an indefinite American occupation akin to our long-term military role in South Korea? The diminution of violence notwithstanding, Iraq is an active war zone. And unlike South Korea, it isn’t asking America to remain to protect it from a threatening neighbor. Iraq’s most malevolent neighbor, Iran, is arguably Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s closest ally. In the most recent survey, in February, only 27 percent of Iraqis said the American presence is improving their country’s security. Far from begging us to stay, some Iraqi politicians, including Mr. Maliki, have been pandering to their own election-year voters by threatening to throw the Yankees out.

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg.

But as Lara Logan asked, who’s paying attention to any of this Iraq stuff anyway? That Mr. McCain makes an unpopular and half-forgotten war the centerpiece of his campaign may simply be a default posture — the legacy of his Vietnam service and a recognition that any war, good or bad, is still a stronger suit for him than delving into the details of health care, education, tax policy or the mortgage crisis.

Even so, it leaves him trapped in a Catch-22. If violence continues to subside in Iraq — if, as Mr. McCain has it, we keep “winning” — it will only call more attention to the internal contradictions of a policy that says success in Iraq should be punished by forcing American troops to stay there indefinitely. And if Iraq reignites, well, so much for “winning.”

Not that the Obama policy is foolproof either. As everyone knows, there are no good options in Iraq. Our best hope for a bipartisan resolution of this disaster may be for a President Obama to appoint Mr. McCain as a special envoy to Baghdad, where he can stay for as long as he needs to administer our withdrawal or 100 years, whichever comes first.

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005. From 2003-2005, Mr. Rich had been the front page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section's redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to The Times's culture editor on the paper's overall cultural news report. Frank Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 he became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page. A native of Washington, D.C., Rich is a graduate of its public schools. He earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, an honorary Harvard College scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

The Flatster Gets Testy With The Dubster: Lead, Follow, Or Get The Hell Out Of Dodge

The Dubster is addicted to his own stupidity. Where's Rat and that "No Stupidity Zone" sign? The Dubster needs a good whack upside his addled head. If this is (fair & balanced) snark, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Mr. Bush, Lead Or Leave
By Thomas L. Friedman

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”

Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better. The president actually had the gall to set a deadline for this drug deal:

“I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past,” Mr. Bush said. “Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act.”

This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who’s done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the E.P.A. today seems to be in a witness-protection program. I bet there aren’t 12 readers of this newspaper who could tell you his name or identify him in a police lineup.

But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn’t lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America’s energy profile right now — unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow — and create good tech jobs to boot.

That bill is H.R. 6049 — “The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008,” which extends for another eight years the investment tax credit for installing solar energy and extends for one year the production tax credit for producing wind power and for three years the credits for geothermal, wave energy and other renewables.

These critical tax credits for renewables are set to expire at the end of this fiscal year and, if they do, it will mean thousands of jobs lost and billions of dollars of investments not made. “Already clean energy projects in the U.S. are being put on hold,” said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines — because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.

That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans — sorry to say, with the help of John McCain — have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.

Of course, we’re going to need oil for years to come. That being the case, I’d prefer — for geopolitical reasons — that we get as much as possible from domestic wells. But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn’t be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He’d be telling the country a much larger truth:

“Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy — particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor.”

That’s what a real president would do. He’d give us a big strategic plan to end our addiction to oil and build a bipartisan coalition to deliver it. He certainly wouldn’t be using his last days in office to threaten Congressional Democrats that if they don’t approve offshore drilling by the Fourth of July recess, they will be blamed for $4-a-gallon gas. That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

[Thomas Lauren Friedman, OBE is an op-ed contributor to The New York Times, whose column appears twice weekly and mainly addresses topics on foreign affairs. Friedman is known for supporting a compromise resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, modernization of the Arab world, environmentalism and globalization. His books discuss various aspects of international politics from a neoliberal perspective on the American political spectrum. In 1975, Friedman received a bachelor of arts in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University, where he first arrived as a transfer student in 1973. He then attended St Antony's College at the University of Oxford on a Marshall scholarship, earning a master of arts in Middle Eastern studies. Friedman's books include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002), and The World Is Flat: A Brief History Of The Twenty-first Century (2005). In 1982, Friedman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and in 2004, he was named to the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.