This, no doubt, is why the reaction from some quarters to these revelations is "What's the big deal?" It's standard operating procedure to them.
"It would have been the first time they ever overtly admitted being behind an attack"
Al-Qaeda never admitted being behind 9/11? I must have missed something somewhere. I thought one of Osama's video/audio tapes claimed credit.
"escalated domestic dispute"
And they bombed the building? Some escalation. Still, if you want to kill people at your enemy's embassy, you'll take whoever you can get.
Stefan, did you notice, further down in the article, that there was a retaliation? On the Macedonian consulate in Pakistan: three people tied up and killed, and the building bombed, in that order.
I'm hardly surprised that Rove and Bush are Babylon-5 fans. Way back before 9/11, when Bush attempted to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by essentially telling both parties to cut it out, the resemblance was strong to the way Bruce Boxleitner ends the equally implacable Shadow War by telling both parties to cut it out.
The only difference is, in science fiction this works.
By the way, if we're to discuss the Vingean Singularity, I found this a provocative article arguing that no such thing is going to happen, because humans aren't smart enough to do it.
Comparable situation:
It was said at the time of Watergate that Richard Nixon betrayed the trust of the American people.
What betrayal? The American people put their trust in a crook, and he fulfilled that trust.
I was neither surprised nor dismayed at the revelations of Watergate. I was merely astonished and delighted that they were revealed.
TomB, I'm not condemning these people, I'm simply incredulous at their lack of awareness and discernment.
If the "you" in my previous post doesn't apply to you personally, it does apply to those to whom it does apply. Or something.
What Julia and Michael, among others, said.
TomB, I think there's a difference between trusting the president and supporting the president. When Bush announced his sudden intention to invade Iraq - about a year after 9/11, a year filled with screwing up in Afghanistan - my thought was, "He's lost the script. What does this have to do with 9/11?"
That Bush wasn't to be trusted had been more than re-proved by then already. If you supported the invasion of Iraq because of a lingering feeling that you should support the president, then I'm sorry, but you were still out to lunch when everybody went home from the office for the day.
I kept asking, in the comments section of this very weblog, why invading Iraq was all of a sudden so urgent when it hadn't been on the agenda before. And the Bush defenders here told me that the idea of invading Iraq had been advocated by administration policy-makers even before 9/11. The Bush defenders told me that. (I might be able to find this in the archives if you really want.) Later on this idea became exclusively the province of left-wing tin-hatters.
Matt McIrvin, I for one do not claim to be right all the time. But about this, it was easy.
TomB wrote, I have a great deal of respect for those who saw the situation more clearly than I did and were on the right side from the beginning. How did they do that?
And my bafflement is over the question, how could others not see it?
The same question comes up in relation to Vietnam. Fact: the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons went to Daniel Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post Dispatch for a cartoon showing Uncle Sam, holding a bayoneted rifle, walking into a swamp labeled "French Military Mistakes in Indochina." And the caption read "How Would Another Mistake Help?" Let me repeat: Nineteen Fifty-Five.
How could they not tell?
TomB also wrote, His mistake was trusting the President, an all too common and easy mistake to make.
Trust this President?
Anybody who supported invading Iraq at all is in a sufficiently different head space from me that I can't quite put myself in their place.
But it seems to me that a lot of the problems we're having in Iraq are a consequent of having a military invasion at all, and not just from Bush pursuing it badly, although he surely is. I can't imagine any strategy for invading Iraq that wouldn't have the ethnic groups uniting against us, or other Muslim countries resenting it. But I haven't read Pollack, so maybe he had some bright ideas on these subjects.
But if invading Iraq is a bad idea tout court, and if there are those who mistakenly consider it fundamentally a good idea, then the phenomenon that Yglesias is describing - that of people who supported a different strategy of invading Iraq, but were willing to go along with Bush's half-assed way of doing it - can be explained as a case of - in THEIR eyes - "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good."
The problem was their fundamental assumption - invade Iraq, yes, good - not so much their willingness to let Bush do it. Yglesias's greater fastidiousness only saved him because he was willing to reconsider his basic position.
All right, here's my comment on a sidebar item:
"The last thing I want people to believe is that I don't care about the shareholder," says Jim Sinegal, Costco's president and chief executive ... "But I happen to believe that in order to reward the shareholder in the long term, you have to please your customers and workers."
Holy mackerel, a public CEO who gets it!
(acoustic, bagel, Chaucer, trackball. No opinion on the others)
Jim, I've read some discussion of this matter. First, most of the hijackers were already on watch lists. It's been remarked by many people that the additional security instituted since 9/11 would have been superfluous in this case: we wouldn't have needed additional security to catch the hijackers, we needed to use the security we already had. This was not a failure on the national security level (though there might also have been failures on that level), this was a failure at the lower intelligence gathering-and-analysis level.
Second, the recently-released tapes of phone calls from the planes reveal that the callers gave some of the seat numbers of the hijackers. That enabled them to be identified pdq.
Dan Blum, bomb threats that turn out to be fake are hardly unknown, and the fact that we aren't getting more of them from terrorists suggests either that you're right; or that the terrorist organizers have strategic reasons of their own to not do this. Or, maybe, the Bushies are right and they really do have the terrorists on the run. But that wouldn't make much sense, because you don't need much infrastructure to phone in a fake bomb threat.
James D. Macdonald's post reads like a news report from the Buffyverse, which probably says more about the Buffyverse than it does about the news.
Rice has a choice of being throught regrettably unprescient (she knew about the threat but didn't learn a plan was actually in motion), for which like Clarke she could apologize; or being thought completely and rampantly incompetent (she'd never thought of a threat that was common knowledge to even the fiction-reading public). Consistently, from the first reactions to 9/11 on, she's chosen the latter course.
Why? Perhaps she can't apologize: she's always gotten her way, she's always been the smartest and toughest person in the room, and the thought that she finally has a job that's bigger than her is simply inconceivable. And, being new to this kind of situation, she doesn't realize how damaging the admission of ignorance is.
Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell are probably the same way. As for Bush, he's always relied on a combination of personal charm and daddy's fixers to get him out of holes, but though charm works on Tony Blair it won't work on terrorists, and this hole is too big for daddy's fixers.
Clarke, by all accounts, is natively more arrogant than any of the above, but the difference is, he was capable of learning humility when he needed it.
Michael Weholt, I made what I guess was the mistake of re-reading your 9/11 posts. It was a mistake to do so because it made me feel even more distressed than I normally am at how Bush has wasted and squandered the righteous anger and clear imperatives that event generated.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, FDR by agreement with Churchill put the bulk of US resources into the war with Hitler as our first priority, and I wonder if anybody thought "Hey, he's attacking the wrong enemy," as many of us thought about the attack on Iraq. Yet, if they did, there are differences: most notably that we did not abandon or ignore or shove aside the war against Japan, that Hitler had not been internationally quiescent for ten years, and most obviously that there were clear links between Hitler and the Japanese government, and we didn't have to invent meetings in Prague to prove it. (Yes, I know Hitler actually declared war on the US. But I didn't want even to have to bring that up.)
Stephanie Dray wrote,
Even if the next President did nothing but sit around in the oval office all day calling 1-800-SEX-LIVE and eating doritoes, it would be an improvement on what we have today.
I think that's pretty much what our last president did. You're right, it wasn't as bad as what followed.
But I recall musical performers from dicey countries being denied visas under his administration, too. In those days the usual excuse was "There must be Americans who can do this job, why hire a foreigner?" Uh-huh.
Jonathan Vos Post wrote,
The real tragedy of the Grammy Award Ceremony was that they had Yoko One live, Ringo Starr by video, and Sir Paul McCartney by video, without including George Harrison's son or one of John Lennon's sons.
Lois pointed out the video presence of Olivia Harrison. I didn't watch the ceremony, but my newspaper showed a photo of Sean Lennon on-stage in a white tux.
I've read in a number of places that Bush got an honorable discharge. If that's not the proper term for what he got, what exactly did he get? (And yes, I suppose I could leaf through all those PDFs of documentation on my slow dial-up line for myself, but perhaps somebody else already has.)
Since we're all agreed, it seems - except for Ricky - on the import of all this, and since Charles Pierce in the original quote pointed out that "They apparently can’t even find one barracks braggart to come out and lie about it," allow me to wonder, just in passing, whether Nixon's reputation as a cardshark was exaggerated somewhere along the line. I would have thought that some physical deftness, along with the more obvious mental deftness, would be a requisite for this role. Yet stories of Nixon's extraordinary physical clumsiness with his hands, at least in later years, are legion. Indeed, a principal argument that Nixon didn't erase the 18-minute gap personally is that he couldn't possibly have displayed the coordination needed to operate the machine.
But maybe it is possible that a man who couldn't coordinate the punching of tape recorder buttons could adequately shuffle and deal cards. I'm the opposite: I can operate sound equipment, and type pretty fast, but I can't deal cards adequately, and can't shuffle a deck at all. Any thoughts on all this?
I found Ms. Russ's and Mr. Nielsen Hayden's wisdom as gnomic as Kris Hasson-Jones did, and appreciate the elaboration.
What reading the article mostly brought to my mind was a wise saying by a person I cannot recall: "Being poor is a full-time job."
Erik V. Olson, you should send that story to Scott Adams.
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| 2004 | 23 |
| 2003 | 157 |
| 2002 | 90 |
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