While I don't disagree that he's the worst President ever, he wasn't the first to serve without ever being elected to national office. That would be Gerald Ford.

Also, Dubya was elected by the Electoral College, wasn't he? It's Us, The People who didn't elect him.

I'm probably stating the obvious here, but it seems unlikely that Bush would fire Rumsfeld when Kerry has been circulating a petition calling for him to do just that. Can't appear to give in to pressure from the enemy, you know.

Well, it took the Supreme Court to determine whether or not Florida's electoral votes counted for W or Gore, and lots of people weren't happy about the decision, not mention all those votes counted for Buchanon, and of course, Jeb was Georgie's brother, so....

I think there's a decent chance W will be considered by history to have only kinda sorta been elected by the Electoral College.

My personal guess is that Rumsfeld can't/won't go, just because Bush doesn't want to have to try to nominate someone to be Sec. of Def. at this point in the campaign.

Can you just imagine some poor so-and-so, trying to get Senate approval? "What's your exit plan for Iraq?" would just be the start of it.

Add to that that Rumsfeld's been loyal to W, and that's all he considers to be important. It'll take a lot more than we've had so far before Rumsfeld decides that he needs to spend more time with his family.

Rumsfeld, as a card carrying member of the Eddorian Innermost Circle, knows far too much to be cast out. If he's fired he'll turn on his erstwhile All-Highest. It's obvious.

So, beyond the installation of torturers at Abu Ghraib, including civilian contractors, we can now lay this at Rumsfeld's feet We're putting Sadr's forces in charge of Najaf and Falujah, and an Iranian backed group of insurgents is probably joining his militia in "protecting" these areas.

That's right. The Medhi Army is being given authority in Falujah and Najaf. We're also letting the Iranians in. That's how bad things are going there.

Our "exit strategy" seems to be to leave things in the hands of thugs, theocrats and terrorists.

Any bets if the Iraqi people end up thanking us for yanking out one brutal thug, replacing him with several others, and then leaving them with a flattened country?

I may be mistaken, but wasn't another President elected by the Electoral College without a majority of the popular vote? Wouldn't he be the first not elected through popular vote?

I agree that Ford is the first not elected at all.

Dave - yes. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison was elected by the Electoral College despite a larger share of the popular vote going to the incumbent, Grover Cleveland. There were also two cases decided by the House: one, in 1876, when the House decided which set of disputed election returns (and therefore which slate of electors) to sit, and once in 1824, when the Electoral College was unable to select a President.

Aw, c'mon, surely we all remember the victory of Rutherford (known as "Rutherfraud") B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden! If I remember right, Hayes was down by 14 electoral votes with 15 disputed votes; the committee put together to judge the validity of the two sets of disputed votes was tilted by 1 to Hayes's party, and lo, every one of the 15 votes fell his way.

The Hayes Presidential Library is not far from where I went to college, and apparently it's quite clear and detailed about the degree to which Hayes stole the election. I wonder if, in 2120 or so, the Bush Library in Crawford will be as open.

By an amazing coincidence, in 2001, an editor not a million miles from nielsenhayden.com went and reissued this 1968 book about the 1876 election by a pseudonymous writer not a million miles from the author of The Book of Skulls and Dying Inside. The editor still regards his back-cover copy (reproduced on Amazon, with added typos, under the heading "Book Description") as one of the finest works of his career.

Josh,

I think that the people who currently hold Fallujah are former Republican Guards/Baatists rather than al-Sadr's people. The Mehdi Army is in the south.

Otherwise, looks like you're right.

When the freepers tell this story, it will be of the triumphant USA stabbed in the back by the disloyal liberals who weren't ready to Go The Distance or Do What It Takes.

Did Lincoln win the popular vote or just the Electoral vote?

There was also the 1800 election, in which the Republican (now Democratic) Party vice-presidential candidate tried to outmanoever his running mate, one Thomas Jefferson, and become top banana. This was because the original wording of the Constitution did not presume a party system, and said the person with the most EC votes would be Pres. and the person with the second-most Veep. Once the idea of "running mates" came along, the tie became inevitable and Aaron Burr's lust for power overtook his party loyalty.

It came down to the House of Representatives, in which the opposition (Federalist) party's leader, Alexander Hamilton, basically made the choice by deciding which of the two he detested less, and putting his weight behind that person. TJ narrowly won that choice, and the election.

Given what happened between Hamilton and Burr a few years later, and what Burr did after that, I'd say Alec H. made a wise choice, and deserves his place on the $10 bill. But then I've always been a Jefferson fan.

The Constitutional Amendment that followed soon after, and prevented any later Veep-to-be from aping Burr's connivance, was also a Good Thing.

The best theory I've seen on Rumsfeld (I think it was in the comments section of the Daily Kos) was that Bush won't fire Rumsfeld until the whole scope of the tortures is made public. If he fires Rumsfeld now and more revelations of abuse come out, then he's got to fire someone else.

(This potential chain of events makes me think of that Ren and Stimpy cartoon. "There's no one else to hang... hey, why don't we hang ourselves?)

Alex

Lisa, Lincoln won the popular vote, but only a plurality of it, largely because there were four-count 'em-4 major party candidates, especially because the Democrats split into Northern (pro-Union) and Southern ("States Rights", aka pro-slavery) factions, and the Whig party in its death throes also put up a candidate, though they were in such bad shape that they called themselves the Constitutional Union Party.

Still, Abe -- having won the heavily-populated North -- got 180 electoral votes vs. 123 for all three of his opponents combined.

See the Wikipedia article on this election, which is handy. (If you were in my library I'd pull out a print source like the almanac or the Historical Statistics of the United States.)

Lincoln was the candidate of the spanking-new Republican Party -- only its second Presidential candidate ever -- which had formed in 1856 from the anti-slavery wing of the Whigs.

Lincoln's old rival Stephen Douglas led the Northern Democrats, and got the second-most votes -- popular votes that is. In the Electoral College, he finished fourth. (In the 1820s, the days of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and the "Era of Good Feelings", the Federalists had collapsed, the Republican Party of that day became the only major U.S. party, and then split again, becoming the Democratic Party -- Jackson's faction -- and the Whigs.)

John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the southern Dem. candidate, who swept much of what would soon (but temporarily) become the Confederacy, came in third in the popular vote, but second in the EC, and John Bell of Tennessee, the Constitutional Union/Whig guy, fourth and third.

I’m amazed that Teresa can talk about Bush “not having been legitimately elected”, and people here immediately leap to the conclusion (erroneous, I’d bet) that she’s talking about the popular/electoral vote split, and not the outright fraud and chicanery that handed Florida over to him.

What Avram said. I guess historical memory now extends back about two or three weeks.

Genesis: *cough*steeltariffs!*cough* ;)

Lois Fundis: As I've always been a Hamilton fan, I support your view of history entirely. (Why is it that Hamilton never ran for President?)

Madeline - As I understand it, Hamilton was born in the West Indies and was not eligible to become President. (Which always seemed odd to me - none of the first six or seven Presidents were BORN in the United States. They were born in colonies that BECAME the United States.)

I guess Bush is sitting tight because firing Rumsfeld now, after backing him through the Iraq war and so on, will make him look like an idiot for having him on in the first place (I don't think Bush has yet realised that he looks like an idiot *anyway* :)) and besides, Rumsfeld has managed to build a lot of support for himself in the administration.

There's a clause in the Constitution which may have allowed for Hamilton to become President. One sentence in Section 1 of Article II says, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;" (italics mine) Since Hamilton had lived in what would becoem the U.S. since 1772, before the Revolution, and indeed had been one of Washington's aides during the war, he would have been covered by this provision.

Why he didn't? Well, for one thing, he died in 1804, in the infamous duel with Aaron Burr. (Sometimes it seems that almost everything bad that happened in American history in the first decade of the 1800s can be blamed on Aaron Burr.) Also, he was up against some stiff competition: Adams, Jefferson . . . And he was much younger than them; born in 1755, or possibly 1757, he was twelve or fourteen years younger than TJ. In fact he was less than 50 when he died, 200 years ago this coming July.

I've sometimes wondered if, had he lived, he might have run against Madison in 1808. (Madison was born in 1751, and so was much closer in age to Hamilton.)

There's an alternate history to play around with: what would have happened when the Napoleonic Wars/War of 1812 came along if the Anglophilic Hamilton had been President?

"...which means the blame flows straight up through Rumsfeld and attaches to Bush."

Sheee-it, Teresa. I doubt that Bush (let alone anyone in his circle of enablers) honestly believes that there is blame to be assigned, other than the blame for whoever leaked the Taguba report, and whoever "put our troops in danger" by making the Abu Ghraib photos public.

The administration's response to this godawful mess is shaping up to no different than the standard-issue shit we see whenever some pocket-edition Himmler of a televangelist gets caught banging a prostitute: "God forgives me. Why can't you? Cash, check, or credit card gratefully accepted."

To these faux-moral pin-dicks, civilization is some sort of bowling trophy we won a long time ago and don't even have to polish anymore, rather than a living concept that needs to be defended against deliberate acts of vile hypocrisy.

Also, I deeply resent the way this administration makes me want to hyphenate insults all night long.

Good copy, Patrick.

Avram's right. I meant the chicanery, force, and fraud that went down in Florida, plus the later connivance of the Supreme Court.

Scott, I liked "faux-moral pin-dicks".

By the way, I'm wondering whether anyone will spot the provenance of the title.

Bush has absolutely no problem with blame etc. for high crimes, as long as this blame does not cause him to lose the election. If he had a worry about the judgement of history he would probably do more to save his reputation, but i doubt he thinks that far ahead.

Actually the thing that has been bugging me for the last year is that most Presidents when they leave office make their money by high-paying speaking engagements and similar PR fluff. Can anyone see Bush being asked to do anything after this is all over?

Teresa -

I know it's not what you meant, but your title keeps making me think of the old WB Abominable Snowman: "I'm going to love him and hug him and call him George."

Duuuuuuh-huh!

Having looked at a few of the Iraqi prison photos, I am struck by some oddities. One, the one or two US individuals shown in those do not appear to have the strength to subdue more than one person let alone lift and place multiple prisoners into positions that they want. That leads me to believe those were staged. Two, the US personnel were not always smiling as if some of the stagings repulsed them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual culprits were initially blackmailing them to remain quiet about what was going on by using them in the photos.

I do not claim my interpretation to be correct. I only state that is an impression the photos give me.

Dave --

You can safely assume that there's someone off camera with a machine gun, that the prisoners were required to put themselves into those positions, and that no one smiles all the time, especially when their mental state is cycling between real disgust at their victims and intense joy in their ability to compell their victims to be disgusting.

You can also safely assume that the prisoners were in a bad state -- hungry, exhausted, and suffering the kind of personality disassociation problems that break the ability to form decision/action loops -- by the time those photographs were taken.

Congratulations; you have almost no personal understanding of the mechanics of torture.

Congratulations, Graydon, you have almost no personal understanding of the mechanics of reading. Try reading what I stated. It was an impression that came to me. Nothing more.

Besides which, those photos were clearly staged, regardless of the reason. As such, those would not have much value outside that prison other than to embarrass and humiliate the US.

Inside, yes, those could torment the prisoners... IF they were shown the photos. However, with most wearing hoods, just how would that matter? It wouldn't take them long to realize that without identifying marks, one hooded body looks much like another. About the only thing working against them would be personal knowledge of whether they were in those situations that were recorded or the few photos that showed them unhooded.

If you want to express an opinion, Graydon, please do so, but leave out the personal attacks. Otherwise, I'll turn those back on you.

Regarding where "the buck" stops, the San Francisco Chronicle's Don Asmussen has a brilliant cartoon on that subject today: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/asmussen/

As I understand it, and I could easily be wrong, Hamilton was illegitimate, which was a big deal back then. I don't know that he could have been elected.

My perception of the last few years suggests that Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld have been so deeply in each other's pockets that if any were to go the whole administration would collapse in flames. Lovely as that would be, I doubt that any one of them will take action to ignite the Guy Fawke's Day bonfire under their own feet.

My perception of the last few years suggests that Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld have been so deeply in each other's pockets that if any were to go the whole administration would collapse in flames. Lovely as that would be, I doubt that any one of them will take action to ignite the Guy Fawke's Day bonfire under their own feet.

Faren -- thanks for that link. Very funny!

Other reasons that Hamilton was never president:

He drove his political opponents completely wild, utterly around the bend. Burr is an extreme example of this, resulting in the famous duel, but by no means unique. (Burr also had this effect on his opponents, resulting in the famous duel...)

During the debate over how bonds issued by the Continental Congress and the various states during the war would be treated, Hamilton, who was arguing for complete assumption at face value, was discovered to be making withdrawals from his savings, for no apparent purpose. This led to the obvious conclusion that he was buying up bonds, expecting to make a killing at public expense if his view prevailed. To refute this charge and save his plan for establishing the credit of the USA on a sound footing, Hamilton revealed the truth: he had been having an affair with a married woman. Her husband discovered the affair, and threatened to go public with it. The withdrawals were for blackmail payments. This did not enhance Hamilton's political prospects, although it did save his plan for the US treasury.

Dave Kuzminski, I believe there's someone I can ask about your speculations, so hold tight. In the meantime, please don't offer to get into a fight with Graydon. If you do it anyway, I'll wait a while before rescuing you.

Lis, I always chalked it up to Hamilton being a non-egalitarian snot who didn't bother to hide it. But he was also a man with a real sense of how money works, which is why he's remembered approvingly in New York. He did a lot to get the country's commercial finance on a firm footing -- said footing being located at the lower end of Manhattan Island.

Patrick:

I noticed that Grandmaster Silverbob's book description includes "...and set the stage fro [sic] eighty bitter years of segregation...

I either saw this book description in the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times.

Of course, one can also read:

Alternate Presidents

Resnick, Mike (ed.). Alternate Presidents.
Comments: New stories involving American elections, including Pat Cadigan's "Dispatches from the Revolution", J. Carr's "The War of '07", Jack L. Chalker's "Now Falls the Cold, Cold Night", G.E. Cox's "The More Things Change...", Barbara Delaplace's "No Other Choice", Thomas A. Easton's "Black Earth and Destiny", Bill Fawcett's "Lincoln's Charge", David Gerrold's "The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson", Alexis A. Gilliland's "Demarche to Iran", Eileen Gunn's "Fellow Americans", Janet Kagan's "Love Our Lockwood", Tappan King's "Patriot's Dream", Michael P. Kube-McDowell's "I Shall Have a Flight to Glory", Barry N. Malzberg's "Kingfish", Barry N. Malzberg's "Heavy Metal", J. Moffett's "Chickasaw Slave", J. Nimersheim's "A Fireside Chat", Jody Lyn Nye's "The Father of His Country", L. Person's "Huddled Masses", Laura Resnick's "We Are Not Amused", Mike Resnick's "The Bull Moose at Bay", R. Roberts "How the South Preserved the Union", Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Fighting Bob", Robert Sheckley's "Dukakis and the Aliens", Susan Shwartz's "Suppose They Gave a Peace", Martha Soukup's "Plowshare", Brian M. Thomsen's "Paper Trail", and Lawrence Watt-Evans's "Truth, Justice, and the American Way".

Published: Tor 1992 (0812511921) and SFBC 1992.

Say, who at Tor might have had a hand in this fine anthology, which I read with repeated delight?

There is a good column in today's Washington Post Business Section entitled, "War Management Follows the Wrong Corporate Model." The article draws parallels between W. and some other poor examples of corporate leadership in recent years. I especially liked the following two paragraphs:

"Here's a little test: You are president of the United States and revelations about abuse of Iraqi prisoners has created the biggest crisis since Sept. 11, inflaming the Arab world, undercutting support at home and undermining our moral authority in the world. How do you spend the weekend?

If you answered 'spend it at Camp David as planned, then drop in at the Pentagon on Monday to praise the defense secretary for doing a superb job,' you just flunked, along with George W. Bush."

Not looking for a fight, Teresa. Just expressing an impression that came to me for discussion and not expecting to be accused of ignorance for doing so. It's one thing to discuss the facts and whether those support the impression. It's another to be "scolded" for ignorance.

Besides, I have enough fights already with a new one brewing because an AAR listed agent doesn't want to be listed in P&E and is threatening to sue.

I was going to say, "What about David Rice Atchison?" Wikipedia, however, seems to feel that Ripley overstated the case (that Atchison was our only chief executive to sleep through his entire term of office). Still, a man with as much right to the office as anybody who's marking the place now.

Dave -- I'd have suspected that being ignorant of the mechanics of torture was a good and positive thing.

I knew what Teresa meant. "Not legitimately elected" and "not elected" are two different things; Bush was the former, Ford the latter.

Hamilton founded the New York Post. Perhaps Aaron Burr was a time traveler with good intentions, who landed just a few years too late?

Jo, you're right.

Furthermore, treatment of that sort towards others just makes me sick. I've seen wrongful behavior before and and can proudly say I stepped in to protect a civilian from another US soldier who had over 50 pounds and a height advantage over me, not forgetting to mention I had one hand bandaged at the time. I fought that jerk to a draw because it was the right thing to do.

While we're here, raise a glass to absent friends.

I read something which claimed that while the photos in the press were tightly cropped to show just the prisoners and their immediate tormentors, some of the originals show a crowd of other Americans in the background watching. I believe I saw at least one such audience-included photo, though I don't recall where.

Dave, what gives you the impression the prisoners were "lifted or placed" into position? I would assume that they were ordered into position under threat of worse punishment. Note that such orders could probably be done by gestures, pointing, and hands-on direction, without requiring much strength, nor a translator.

It sounds like the MI personnel or contractors who encouraged the torture may not have been present when the photos were taken, or at least were savvy enough to know that being photographed is never a good thing for an intelligence operative.

Dave, Graydon,

I think we have a classic case of one person's genuine, honest statement coming across the wrong way.

Now, I don't pretend to speak for Graydon, and his "congratulations" did sound kinda snarky to me at first read, but that kind of snarky isn't Graydon's usual rhetorical style, and there was no call for him to be snarky when offering his views on the subject. So I read it again, assuming a lack of snark, and in a different subvocal tone, and what I got was, as Jo says, that it's a good thing to have almost no personal knowledge of the mechanics of torture. I certainly claim no personal knowlege of same, and am quite pleased that I can.

I do concede that Graydon's "congratulations..." sounded like some of the sarcastic comments I make sotto voce after getting off the phone with some of my less helpful clients "Congratulations! You just won the chaos bomb of the week award. You, singlehanded and unabetted, have set this project back two whole weeks! Give yourself a kewpie doll!" but I would be inclined to question whether Graydon meant it that way, before actually going into attack/defense dialectic.

Hey, don't knock James Buchanan--he's the only President we Pennsylvanians have ever had.

While I consider the Shrub administration to be a disaster, I tend to get a bit annoyed when the idea that he didn't win the election is played up. Yes, there were significant problems with the Florida vote, but they only came to light because 1) Florida ended up being the deciding state due both to the closeness of the race and it being the last to be decided and 2) the race in Florida was so close. I'm sure if you'd looked at every state with the same intensity as Florida, you would've found minor chicanery on *both* sides going on. And if we're going to hit the Shrub for not being "elected" in that sense, well, seems to me he'd be preceded in that regard by JFK and those Illinois votes.

What happened was, basically, the election was a tie; statistically, it was closer than the various noise in the data (which include the bits by both sides to sway action at the polls around the country). Ideally, there should be a clause in the Constitution allowing for such a possibility and describing how to handle it, but I don't think Congress is math-savvy enough to do so, and it's complicated by there being no true national election, but rather elections at the state level in each state that determine the results when combined.

So, while I'm not thrilled with the fairly obvious partisanship of the Supreme Court, I don't feel this came anywhere near the 1876 election in that regard. Frankly, I would've found a coin flip between Gore and Bush to have been reasonable since for all intents and purposes, it was a tie election.

Me, I'm much more concerned about the liklihood of electronic voting systems being used to steal elections. Fortunately, there've been enough problems that it's becoming a major issue.

And you STILL have a better record than Texas.

Oh, were they allowed to take their hoods off so they could see gestures and pointing?

As far as the ones without hoods in individual photos, my guess is they fall into one of two categories. Either they were non-cooperative individuals that the MI feared would lead the other prisoners so they warranted extra humiliation by having their faces seen or they were snitches who were treated that way to make it appear that they weren't giving information. You can't prove you were tortured if your buddies can't see your face.

However, this is all speculation so far. We may not know anything until everything becomes declassified as much of it is certain to be stamped and kept secret.

Lis, I always chalked it up to Hamilton being a non-egalitarian snot who didn't bother to hide it.

That too, for sure, Teresa, but what's most interesting about Burr and Hamilton is that, with their very different personalities and politics, they had exactly the same effect on otherwise-sensible opponents, of driving them completely, utterly, around the bend. And it killed Hamilton, and destroyed Burr's political career. What would those two have done if they could have remained sane in each other's presence?

Please note that the NYPost was not always a rag, and its current horribleness is due to current ownership, not inherent character.

BSD, change 'current' to 'recent' and I agree with you (while it's certainly gotten lots worse under the evil Murdock-demon, it's been a rag for at least 20 years that I know of personally). I was kidding, honest.

The Burr/Hamilton duel took place just up the road from me, in Weehawken. Also I have a friend who's Burr's nephew (or something) n times removed, for large n. So I've heard a bit about it, not counting the recent NPR interview with the author of a new book on Hamilton, who claims that Hamilton basically invented the US economy, or what little I remember from school ("Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, so they put Hamilton on our money" would about cover it).

Is it possible for a newspaper to have inherent character? Now that the wall between "church" and "state" (editorial and corporate respectively) that was kept up in American journalism until recently has been torn down, what paper is safe?

Tom, there's a difference between ordinary election chicanery and refusing to count the votes. I looked up what I wrote at the time:

In 1986 I spent a semester studying mathematics in Hungary. I was surprised at how apathetic Hungarians were about their government. "We can't do anything about it," one explained, "So why should we talk about it?" I came home with a new appreciation for America, a true understanding of what was implied by the words "government of the people, by the people, for the people".

I have not always been happy with the results of the democratic process. They have been elected leaders in my lifetime who I disliked, or despised, or even considered evil. That did not shake my faith in the American ideal.

In many ways, this election shows how close we have come to attaining the ideal. Not one vote seems to have been deliberately stolen in this election. The process of counting the votes, where it has been allowed to proceed, has been honest, open, and fair.

Unfortunately one candidate and his supporters have chosen to attack the legitimacy of our electoral system. They have attacked the fairness of manual recounts, until now universally accepted as slower but more accurate than machine tallies. They have portrayed judges and election supervisors as partisan and biased, without evidence. The result is that in a very close election, the level of error has not been reduced to a minimum. Legal procedures have not been followed.

There are certain errors for which our system has no remedy. When some voters are misled into casting spoiled ballots, or others are improperly purged from the registry of voters, there may be no way to cure the defect in the election. If this election had been tainted only by error of that sort, I would grumble about the result, but I would accept the winner as legitimate. But where the accepted procedure for tallying the ballots has not been followed, where mechanical defects in the election equipment are known and material and at least partly correctable, then the winner has no claim to legitimacy. For the first time, it appears I will live my life under a President not democratically appointed.

I type this because I cannot sleep. There is an emptiness where once there was faith. Faith in a dream, a conviction that the dream was reality. I still believe in the dream, but now it has become a thing to be attained, a goal in this darkest hour seems impossibly distant. In the morning I may see hope. I may find the strength to pursue this dream, to speak in favor of democracy, to encourage all those I encounter to see the dream and fight with me to attain it. I know I will find others who share this dream. But for now I can only mourn for that which was, and now is not.

I've gotten somewhat more radical since then--I now believe that the purging of voters was deliberate and egregious enough to call the legitimacy of the entire election into question--but I still think that a candidate and a Supreme Court refusing to accept the principle that whoever got the most votes should win is appalling beyond all measure. JFK never tried to stop a recount (and would have won even without Illinois's electoral votes). There's just no comparison.

suggestion for immediate replacement for Secretary of Defense: Eric Shinseki. He's free, isn't he?

By the way, I'm wondering whether anyone will spot the provenance of the title.

Well, I can't. A simple Googling for it gave me only

When Hanuman returned home Ram was so pleased that he hugged him like a brother. He had found Sita.

Dave --

That wasn't sarcasm; it was right, too, because you're looking at those pictures and seeing something relatively benign.

The hoods are sort of poor man's sensory deprivation; if they're actually sandbags, as reported, you can almost see through them -- coarse burlap -- in a way that makes you dizzy with eyestrain. You can hear things, but the weak directionality of human hearing gets messed up, so you are going to mistake where sounds are coming from, and everything you hear will be distorted. No whispers; you can't communicate with the fellow next to you without talking loud enough for the guard to hear. (Is there are a guard there? You can never be sure.)

Because no one has given you food or water for a couple of days, you're wobbly and weak and your brain doesn't work quite right; the ability to connect decision to action is gone or going. You don't know where you are, who or what is near you, who might be a witness to your nakedness, who that naked person you're lying on top of is.

Given the way the American forces are collecting prisoners, that could be your brother, father, or uncle; your next door neighbour, childhood friend, you don't know. After awhile, it'll prey on your mind -- who else is here? Who is a witness to my shame?

Much of that, in a brain functioning obsessively and badly due to dehydration and starvation, starts to gnaw on the edges of sanity.

Remember the guy on the box? With the wires? He thinks, has been told, that if he falls over, he's going to die. He's not been fed adequately in some time; he's dehydrated, he's cold. He's going to fall over; he's going to know that he's going to fall over long before he actually will. Basic message? You're helpless; all the will and strength you possess cannot protect you in this place. Your desire to live can be made to make you know you are weak.

That's the passive form; the active form involves variations on demands for voluntary helplessness. Some guy with loud boots will walk by, and stop in front of you, and kick you in the balls. (Retching in your sandbag is highly disrecommended, but I'll bet they left prisoners like that.) You don't know its coming; you can't see. Anything could be about to happen to you at any moment; there is no safety, no security, no place to hide. Anything can happen to you at any time, and you won't know what until the pain starts.

You won't actually know what after the pain starts; you'll just know it hurts. Your existence comes to be defined by a taxonomy of pain from doubtful, nameless causes.

The next time Loud Boots comes by, if you cower or try to turn sideways or tense up, something worse happens. If you don't, if you just stand there, maybe Loud Boots keeps moving on, or maybe he boots you in the balls again. Maybe Loud Boots keeps going, and thirty seconds later Quiet Boots does something to you, when you were starting to think you were safe, that nothing bad was going to happen this time.

After a while, something breaks; you stop thinking you can defend yourself, and then you stop thinking there is anything there to defend. Which is what the part of this that isn't simple gloating sadism is about; it's intended to compell people to break their own brains, so that their ability to not tell you whatever you want to know is destroyed -- no self, no willpower, basically.

The ones not in hoods are the ones where they want the prisoner to see what's coming; the guys with the electrodes, the dog, the firing squad of the mock execution. Or maybe they want the father to know he's in the horrible naked pile with his son.

Depends on whether you want them to be afraid of where they are, or to be afraid of you.

Probably, you want both at different times.

But this wasn't something genteel, to which the concept of 'snitch' might apply, or any question of who had or hadn't been tortured.

If there is one thing the survivors will be sure of, in the broken world to which they have been so forcibly transported, it is the answer to the question of who has been tortured.

Xopher -- at least you managed to get something out of Google. I couldn't get a hit on the phrase at all.

Well, thank you for the refresher course. However, I offered only some impressions because it was what struck me in the way some of those pictures were staged. Now if you'll excuse me, I have better things to do.

The only hit that I have been able to find, Teresa, on a variation on the title is lyrics from the band Sixpence None the Richer:

Sister, Mother

My life is plagued
By mistakes, broken love, slaps in the face.
But I'm trying to care, to dare to embrace your face.

Hug him like a brother.
Kiss her like a sister.
Let it be my mother for now.

I want to find where the maid in the street
Is pouring her wine.
I heard she takes you in and gives you the words
You need said.

If you'll be her brother,
She'll kiss you like a sister.
She'll even be your mother for now.

Hug him like a brother.
Kiss her like a sister.
Let it be my mother.
Let it be my father.
I will be her brother.
Kiss her like a sister.
Come and be my mother forever.

I can't say I can see the connection yet. Could your title be one of the lyrics from Nine Naked Men that you can't make out right at the beginning? [grin]

T, I'm guessing Joel Chandler Harris and the Tar Baby on the provenance issue.... The cadence is dead right, and I haven't google or nothin to find out.

The Wonderful Tar Baby Story

Hmmm . . . I dunno, Tom.

Graydon, thanks for taking the time to get down to specifics. I hadn't a clue why burlap would be advantageous to a torturer, for instance.

When people try to excuse what was done just in the pictures (never mind what went on and on and on in the days and hours and minutes before and after, and that hunger and thirst are more than just feeling a bit peckish and dry) as no worse than a frat initiation, what they're not saying is that plebes consent, or think they do, to what's done to them, and expect to gain status when it's over. And that there is a time limit, known to all. And also that frat initiations aren't exactly known for their attention to safety, even though the initiates are considered, not just as humans, but as friends, when one might expect the trials to be (to a degree) tempered by mutual regard.

In short, there is no equivalency at all between the two situations.

I saw on the news tonight that Rumsfeld says more stories and evidence of torture will be coming to light, not because the press are good at their jobs, but because US Army Intelligence will reveal it. This is the new absolution: because we are coming clean, and reporting our culpabilities, we are exonerated. As if 'covering up' were the greater evil, instead of the alleged policy of brutality.

'Hugged him like a brother' - is it meant in the same sense as 'thick as thieves'? with reference to Georgie and Jebbie? GWB hugging Rumsfeld 'like a brother' if so, i found it a little obscure.

Graydon, it sounds as if you have had experience with this kind of imprisonment? Or have you studied it?

Hunting the title:

An Australian review of a Pearl Jam concert:

Bono himself would have turned green during the pandemonic encore of Do The Evolution, in which Vedder rescued an intrepid stage-crasher from security, planted a George Bush mask on his head, danced him to his knees, clambered on his shoulders, wrestled him to the ground and then hugged him like a brother, all without missing a breath.

Although amusing, no.

How about embrace, not hug...

A translation of a poem about a mattress.

No again.

The Orson Scott Card short story Atlantis

Then he bumped against a log that was also floating on the current, and took hold of it, and rolled up onto the top of it like a dragonboat. Now he could use all his strength for paddling, and soon he was across the current. He drew the log from the water and embraced it like a brother, lying beside it, holding it in the wet grass until the rising water began to lick at his feet again. Then he dragged the log with him to higher ground and placed it up in the notch of a tree where no flood would dislodge it. One does not abandon a brother to the flood.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Could it be this?

The blacks could be made a wedge to drive between the two parties, but to do this it required a party so obnoxious to the Whig or Federal party that they would not unite. So the South starts up a party of fire-eaters, claiming that slavery, according to the Constitution, might spread all over the land. Another party in the South did not want to carry slavery into politics but leave it just as the state had made it and Congress must have nothing to do with it. This hypocrisy of the South inflamed the North and a set of men sprang up actuated by pure revenge for the wrongs heaped upon the honesty of the North. They appealed to the Whigs or Federal party for help, but as the Federal party never had anything to do with slavery, as a party they got no sympathy. This fretted them and the democracy saw this and hugged it like a twin brother. So the Democratic party made a wedge of the abolitionists to split up the Federal party. This gave them the power and they have nourished a viper which has destroyed the democratic party and it will before long establish the old party of North and South, which always held that slavery was a state institution and the government never had any authority over it, outside the states where it existed.

The Wonderful Tar Baby was my first thought, too.

Increasingly desperate googling produced this (From "Rhoda Fleming" by George Meredith):

I call him a working soldier in opposition to the parading soldier, the, coxcomb in uniform, the hero by accident, and the martial boys of wealth and station, who are of the army of England. He studied war when the trumpet slumbered, and had no place but in the field when it sounded. To him the honour of England was as a babe in his arms: he hugged it like a mother. He knew the military history of every regiment in the service. Disasters even of old date brought groans from him.

Karen --

I haven't been imprisoned, but I have had some similar experiences.

I have also studied these things, though mostly from an abnormal psych perspective rather than a human rights perspective.

Claude, the Sixpence lyrics were also what I came up with, but the Card and Quimby quotes seem like better possibilities to me.

Tom Galloway - If you want to talk about "election chicanery" on both sides, consider that one of the reasons Nixon didn't try to challenge any Kennedy-Daley chicanery in Chicago in 1960 was that his advisors quietly informed him that there were Republican activities downstate that wouldn't bear much scrutiny.

But what Steven desJardins said: This isn't about election chicany, any more than it's about Bush not winning the popular vote. It's about not counting the votes.

More historical trivia: Lois Fundis writes that the Republican Party "formed in 1856 from the anti-slavery wing of the Whigs." Not exactly. The northern Whigs did pretty much all become Republicans, though not all immediately (many supported Fillmore in 1856), whether they had been specifically identified as anti-slavery or not. But there were also a large number of disgruntled anti-Lecompton Democrats, as well as the entire Free Soil Party, who were mostly extreme anti-slavery ex-Whigs. The balance between ex-Democrats and ex-Whigs was carefully observed. Every Republican national ticket through at least 1872 contained one candidate who'd started out as a Whig and one who'd started out as a Democrat.

Teresa says, "worst President ever." Most incompetent ever, except perhaps Buchanan or Harding, yeah. But worst, I'm not so sure. I hope this won't come across as an excuse, but is Abu Ghraib, horrible as it is, actually worse than My Lai? Presidential response to that one wasn't exactly a model of responsibility either.

I don't believe Teresa based that assessment just on Abu Ghraib. The Johnson administration had a number of actual positive accomplishments, some very significant, to go along with its very real failures. This administration, not so much.

The title struck me as a rhyme of something that I can't place. As if I should replace initial sounds or reverse letters to get the right words, but what it is is just on the edge of my consciousness, taunting me with familarity.

Worst president ever? Why we know he Stacks Up Well!

Calimac --

Lyndon Johnson could talk to the press without pre-scripted answers to the pre-approved questions.

Yes, Mai Lai was an atrocity; yes, Mai Lai was substantially covered up.

Mai Lai does not being to compare to creating an extra-legal gulag, waging an offencive war on the basis of a deliberate campaign of public disinformation, destroying the economic stability of the nation, or attempting to enact a permanent freedom from the common burdens of society for the very rich.

Did this make the U.S. news? Donald Rumsfeld a indiqué qu'il souhaitait publier l'ensemble des photos et vidéos de prisonniers irakiens, mais il a ajouté que les avocats gouvernementaux s'y opposent car cela violerait la Convention de Genève, qui interdit la présentation d'images dégradantes de prisonniers.
(Source Radio-canada)

(I haven't checked the English news yet. Translation: Donald Rumsfeld [on a surprise visit to Abu Ghraib] said that he wished to make the entire collection of photos and videos of Iraqi prisoners public but that he was opposed by lawyers for the government because to do so would contravene the Geneva convention, which forbids the presentation [which I think in this case means publication] of degrading images of prisoners.)

Lemme get this straight: The lawyers for the government are worried that publishing the images contravenes the Geneva convention. What about the subject matter? Isn't that an enormous b**dy contravention of the Geneva convention? All of the sudden, he's worried about violating the Geneva convention?

From what planet was this individual recruited? Can we send him back? On which planet does he currently believe he resides?

Yes, it made the U.S. news. Reminded me to lookup something from Rex Stout/Nero Wolfe on the topic of letting lawyers rule your life make decisions.

On the Florida election front, I'd like to see more acknowledgement of the rebuff to Gore in the footnote to the opinion by the Florida Supreme Court reminding the world that Gore (Boies?) did not ask for a full and fair recount, even in the alternative, but rather asked that more votes for Gore be allowed.

Yes, publishing the images does contravene the Geneva Conventions.

Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.

Perhaps Bush and Rumsfeld are late to the table when it comes to observing the Geneva Conventions, but I think they should be rewarded for their new-found faith. It might serve as a mitigating factor when it comes time for sentencing them after their war crimes trials.

Oh, I understood that publishing the images was against the conventions. I was just rather flabbergasted that Rumsfeld was expressing concern for the Geneva conventions in this instance, when he wasn't sufficiently concerned to actually prevent the abuses from happening.

jennie, Rummy's attitude toward the GC is "use it when it's to your advantage, ignore it otherwise." Time to turn flabbergast into rage.

And it is true - and unfortunately something the Bushies can hide behind - that the public display of these photos will add to the humiliation of the victims and their families. Being stripped naked is a profound humiliation to a Moslem, in a way that we (especially for someone like me, who never wear one more scrap of clothing than is absolutely necessary for health, safety, and social appropriateness) find hard to completely understand.

But you're not naked if no one sees you; conversely, the more people who do, the more naked you are. Think of them as rape victims. For them to come forward and speak out, describing what was done to them requires great courage, and will make the narrowminded view them with disgust. Yet NOT to speak out keeps the injustice from being addressed, and protects the perpetrators. Rapists (and abusers of all kinds) often use their victims' shame against them.

I guess that's it, for me. The people who caused (proximately, ultimately, or in the middle) those abuses to occur are rapists. I think they should be treated accordingly.

A tiny ray of hope:

I can't find the story on the web (and can't remember the relevent names, unfortunately), but in the paper and on the TV news yesterday in NZ there was a story of a 10 year old NZ boy who read newspapers with stories about the Iraqi prison abuses. Of his own volition, he went to school yesterday in his pyjamas. He wanted to see what it felt like to be humiliated, and he wanted to make a public statement about it, since he firmly believed that "bullying is wrong."

People laughed at him as he walked down the street. His classmates made fun of him. Thankfully, his teacher took the time to talk to the whole class about the Iraqi issues, about humiliation, about bullying, about war, about sovereign rights, about honour.... The 10 year old boy is now a local hero, and his classmates plan to join him in wearing pyjamas to school every Wednesday until the atrocities stop.

I damn near cried when I read this story. One little boy =does= make a difference.

I think Johnson will have to split My Lai with Nixon. The latter was president when the story came out, and it was Nixon whose administration oversaw the court-martial, and tried to "manage" the political effect of the investigation, and Nixon who set aside the court's ruling, commuting Calley's sentence from life to, effectively, time served.

FranW: Here's the story about the New Zealand boy (Shane Ellis), found via Google News.

Dave Kuzminski - I'm not sure why your last reaction to Graydon continued to be snappish. I thought the clarification given was clear and informative (And may help as much as everything around this situation to keep me awake at night).

However, as one of the prisoners, since released, has talked to reporters directly, and been able to point out his own body in the pictures, hooded and not (Based on shape and known scars combined with memory), I don't think the idea of "Not knowing / one body looks much like another" are particularly to the point.

If the photos were to be used as prisoner intimidation, it would be to those not yet tortured, who may, or may not, recognize some of their fellows, or someone pointed out to them. And that recognition would be irrelevant - the message isn't, "This was done to them." It's "This is about to be done to YOU."

Grrrr. Grrr. Grrr. I want to be a citizen of the United States just long enough to vote AGAINST Bush. And our new PM is cozying up.

This frustrates the hell out of me, because I want Canada to fix some of our broken relations with the US government... but NOT until Bush is out of office. This is one of the tough things about dealing with a democracy; with a true dictator-for-life, there's actually MORE you can do to express disapproval.

Lenora --

Paul Martin more or less has to try to do something about the really bad trade situation; I don't think I'd describe it as 'cozying up', since it hasn't worked and there's absolutely no sign of anything silly like sending troops or making approving noises about the Iraqi Debacle.

Re: Hamilton owning up to the affair-- what balls!

As for the thread title, all I can say is that every time I come here and see it I get Paul Simon's "Loves Me Like A Rock" stuck in my head...

I get Warren Zevon’s “Accidentally Like a Martyr”. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Clark, under Florida law, Gore didn't have the power to ask for a "full and fair recount"; he could only ask for a recount in specific counties where he had specific evidence of a significant number of uncounted votes. I think it's the height of hypocrisy to blame him for not attempting an unprecedented legal challenge, instead of blaming the opponent who tried to block it. Gore's legal strategy may have been conservative, but with the Supreme Court signalling their willingness to strike down any recount decision that was in the least bit questionable, I can't fault him. (As I'm sure you will recall, Gore asked Bush to join him in dropping all legal challenges and seeking a full statewide recount. Bush refused. I tend to think that trying to get a full statewide recount ought to exonerate him from blame for not trying to get a full statewide recount, but perhaps you come from a planet where such logic is not considered compelling.)

Since nobody's had an Open Thread around here recently and this one is at least vaguely connected, I'll hijack it to point to
Giblets on Fafblog (the best blog):

It's good to see that a graphic video of a man being decapitated is being taken off the internet because of the Slashdot effect. We are making great progress as a civilization here, people.

Could this be it? Quote:

"Hate.

A strong term of dislike. I hug it like a long lost brother. I embrace this anger and I seeth and I writhe. It does not stay inside like a dense little mass of hate. I unleash it at the inappropriate time and like a bomb it levels cities. Like a car alarm it pierces ears. Like the hand of god, it crushes souls.

Hate.

It is not a word that is strong enough for the contempt I feel for the human race. For the people that live outside this box of mine. A word for a hatred so pure as mine does not exist.

Misanthrope.

The hatred of all mankind. The definition of my disposition. The sheer lack of care for my fellow man. I reach out my hand, not to offer help, but to throttle your throat. To rip out your heart. You turn your back, I might put a knife in it.

Hypocrisy/love.

I embrace my little hypocrisies. There are those close to me that are untouched by my hatred. Yes they hold the sheer opposite. My heart has the capacity to love unconditionally, and hate the same. If I hate you, you know it. If I love you, you know it. So few loved. So much anger and hatred resides in my black heart it gives me chest pains. Fighting with the love I feel.

I am filled with sandwiches and black goo."

It sounds like it may be from Sandman.

Lenora, logically, just how is anyone else supposed to recognize that individual since they don't normally see each other naked?

To repeat, I offered an impression, not an opportunity for some folks to make comments about what I know. If Graydon hadn't meant it to be offensive, Graydon could have stated that or he could have left off that last sentence to begin with. You want to call me snappish for being offended by the rudeness of his remark? Be my guest.

Okay, I cannot help but interrupt this conversation to comment on my new favorite book title, "Night Travels of the Elven Vampire" (see Particles, "Behold the Power of Self-Publishing). I do not own this book, I cannot afford to buy this book, but man, oh, man, do I ever want that book. Just the title alone makes me want it. "Night Travels of the Elven Vampire." It's just such a fun title. Mistakes? Who cares? It's called "Night Travels of the Elven Vampire" for Christ's sake! The real question is, "Why wouldn't you buy it?"

Oh, and I profess ignorance as to most of the above conversation. I may not know U.S. history, but I have excellent knowledge as to the inner-workings of the pre-Crisis DC Universe. Does that win me any points here?

Mr. Kuzminski --

The presumption of ignorance is the charitable assumption concerning your remarks, freely offered in a pleasant spirit.

One uncharitable assumption is that you wish to begin by calling into question the authenticity of the photographs -- to assert, on no basis other than personal incredulity, that they are staged, and thereby in some sense not real.

That beginning, some of these photographs aren't real -- though all Gods know the people in them are -- progresses through the photographs are fake to it didn't happen; the United States Command Authority did not order systematic torture of prisoners in defiance of its own public policy statements, sworn word, and obligations under solemn treaties.

Certainly, that would be the more comfortable thing to believe; administrative detention without trial is quite scary enough without sure knowledge of systematic torture, rashly and broadly applied.

Except, of course, that it did happen; there are multiple lines of evidence, including the admission of the Secretary of Defence, that this is precisely what occurred.

Another uncharitable reading, strongly supported by your last statement, is that you expect your personal incredulity to have the same standing as material evidence.

If you, like Thomas Jefferson, are personally incredulous that stones might fall from the sky, it is appropriate to tell you about the presence of asteroids in this solar system, and the various ways by which natural forces might indeed cause stones to fall from the sky, as has been observed in many times and places.

If you are personally incredulous that depictions of torture are real torture, presumably on the basis of a lack of pulled out fingernails, bloody whip welts, and visible burns, why, then it is appropriate to tell you something about the actual practise of torture since the widespread adoption of the camera as a tool for reporting the news.

You can hardly expect to substitute assertion for discourse by your own mere demand, no matter how annoying you find it to have your assertions called into question.

If no one is free to comment upon your remarks, or to call them into question, though those comments irritate you ever so much, when such discourse is the most basic of all the underpinnings of democracy and freedom, perhaps you have departed in your desires from your intent?

Dan Blum, Johnson’s positive accomplishments didn’t make his failures one whit less bad, just as Nixon’s positive accomplishments were no amelioration to Watergate. What you’re saying is that Johnson was more competent than Bush, not that he was less bad of a President.

Graydon, same thing. Sure Johnson could actually talk with the press: that makes him competent, not less bad a president. (Hitler could talk; he was very competent at being evil. That's not to compare any President to Hitler, just to observe that no amount of badness need go with inarticularity.)

Some of the things you say My Lai does not compare to – “waging an offensive war on the basis of a deliberate campaign of public disinformation” and “destroying the economic stability of the nation” – these are things the Johnson administration actually did too.

Probably Bush is a worse President than Johnson, but none of these arguments seem to me to validate that conclusion at all.

Clark Myers: Gore did not ask only that more of his votes be allowed; he asked for second recounts in the counties where he thought he’d gain the most votes. This is perfectly ordinary procedure when requesting recounts. Bush was free to ask for recounts in his best counties if he’d wanted them. This was a mistake by Gore, as it turned out, but it was neither a moral nor a legal crime. Meanwhile, the Bush forces were actually preventing, by means of physical violence, the first, state-mandated recount in several counties. It was never completed. I’d like to see more acknowledgment of that. The election was stolen, by physical violence. Even if Bush would have won anyway, that only makes it ironic, not less stolen.

Calimac --

I think being incompetent to talk to the press, that basic requirement of political life, is part of what makes someone a bad politician, and thus a bad President.

Johnson's Bay of Tonkin strikes me as a qualitatively different thing from Bush's Iraq; there's a difference between faking a causus beli -- that tacit agreement that one really does need one -- and declaring that none is needed.

Both are the practice of deceit; the former is at least the acknowledgement that there is a rule of law to fear, if not respect. The later dismisses the possibility of the rule of law entirely.

Dan Blum, Johnson’s positive accomplishments didn’t make his failures one whit less bad, just as Nixon’s positive accomplishments were no amelioration to Watergate. What you’re saying is that Johnson was more competent than Bush, not that he was less bad of a President.

Well, yeah. I'm not judging moral character here, but rather the good or ill done for (or to) the country.

Maybe you are not referring to moral character, I'm not sure. If you explain the criteria you are using to determine bad Presidents, then it would be easier to have this discussion.

Graydon, you obviously do not read the words of others very clearly, let alone give pause or thought to those you bandy about so freely concerning what you consider someone else's intelligence to be. To someone who analyzes my first comments on those photos, it would be obvious that I merely stated an impression that occurred to me. Nothing more, nothing less. I did not assert that those were facts. I did not assert that it was correct. Your last comment in your first posting regarding what I knew about torture and imprisonment was uncalled for. Your subsequent remarks presuming ignorance on my part and then further assuming that I was trying to justify those actions in defending your previous statement is reprehensible, though not nearly so much as what was done to those people. Yours is more on the level of that displayed by Mr. Rumsfeld. It's okay for you to say certain things because you know you're right even though you didn't read what was actually stated just as you assumed that certain actions had to precede those photos. I prefer to wait on some of the evidence to come in as it already is. That is why I pointedly stated that it was merely an impression that those particular photos imparted to me. Your first response regarding torture was excellent until the last paragraph where you turned it into a personal attack. That is what I object to as any reasonable person would.

As to whether those photos are staged, some of those are because some of the individuals in those clearly know the photos are being taken by virtue of the face that they're posing. What remains to be learned is for what purpose those photos were really staged. Unless you work for the people who perpetrated those acts, I doubt that you or I can answer that until the evidence is heard. Not knowing that is not an admission of ignorance on either of our parts.

Mr. Kuzminiski,

Not knowing that is not an admission of ignorance on either of our parts.

I think, if you were to consult a reliable dictionary, you might discover that "not knowing" is indeed the very definition of ignorance.

Oh, and I apologise for misspelling your surname, Mr. Kuzminski.

Jennie, part of what gripes me is the fact that Graydon presumed to know what I do or do not know.

As well, ignorance is also used by many to indicate stupidity. The plentitude of meanings for words within the English language is both a virtue and a burden especially when trying to make a point.

I haven't asked for an apology, but I don't have to like it when someone states something in an offending manner and justifies it by further assumptions of my motives that had no bearing upon the initial statements other than to pre-emptively discredit me by tieing me to those. If there was no intent to offend, it could have more easily been stated as "no offense intended."

Dave, call me naive, but I think those photos are what they appear to be--Americans documenting a part of their lives which they thought was worth communicating in their social circle.

It was ill-judged in this case, but it's a pretty strong compulsion in a lot of people.