Ted

I keep getting emails asking for more posts with a long string of unconnected links, about which I have nothing intelligent to say. I live to serve:

BusinessWeek on government waste.

Kos on the Bush campaign’s crazy money burn rate

Katherine at Obsidian Wings has three reactions to the stories that Chalabi has been working for Iran: the initial reaction, the responsible reaction, and the snarky reaction.

Respectful of Otters asks why a crime prevention program with a remarkable history of success has to bow and scrap for funding.

TalkLeft reminds us, “Every few months, it’s worth remembering that your tax dollars are being spent to incarcerate Tommy Chong so that the Justice Department could send a message about pot pipes and bongs.”

The Poor Man goes all kung-fu on the idiotic claim that one (1) chemical weapons shell is “an arsenal”. He also writes a mean Dem Panic Watch.

Gary Farber on how to resurrect old New York Times stories.

Ogged at Unfogged refutes an untrue smear on Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.

Jeanne D’Arc makes the new images from Abu Ghraib sting in a thoughtful post.

Finally. Something funny.

Check out Sgt. Stryker on the bubble that some right-wingers are making for themselves regarding bad news from Iraq (via Gary Farber). He sees this as a mirror image of a left-wing bubble that has existed since September 11th.

Stryker is a likable, moderate right-winger, whom I greatly respect. I have no doubt that he’s calling it like he sees it. Here’s my attempt to call it like I see it:

I don’t think that it’s the same thing. Left-wingers spend a lot of time just talking to each other. That’s one kind of bubble. And, there’s no doubt that movement left-wingers and movement right-wingers have a tendency to trumpet news that’s congruent with their political attitudes, and a tendency to scrutinize contrary news more carefully. And, I have no doubt that, for all of us, the other side’s tendency is much, much more frustrating than our own. This leads to the totally, totally awesome posts wherein someone discovers that those treacherous Elses haven’t made enough noise about X, proving that their alleged belief in equality/liberty/ lies in tattered rags.* But it’s inevitable.

What isn’t

Finally, if you haven’t heard the Sgt. Stryker’s piece about the bubble that some right-wingers are making for themselves regarding bad news from Iraq (via Gary Farber). He sees this as a mirror image of a bubble that the left has been in.

Stryker is a likable, pro-war moderate right-winger, and I have no doubt that he’s calling it like he sees it. Here’s me calling it like I see it, in brief:

I don’t think that it’s the same thing. There’s no doubt that movement left-wingers and movement right-wingers have a tendency to embrace news that’scongruent with their political attitudes, and a tendency to scrutinize contrary evidence more carefully. This opens us all up for totally, totally awesome posts wherein someone discovers that those treacherous Elses haven’t paid enough attention to our favorite story, proving that they hate America/freedom/minorities/whatever. But, it’s probably inevitable.

However. Left-wingers haven’t put the loathing and rejection of the mainstream media close to the center of their intellectual movement.

I can have an intelligent discussion with someone who argues that (say) the biases of reporters lead them to unconsciously slant the news toward liberal points of view. I generally don’t, because I’m sick of it, but sometimes they’ve got some reasonable points.

What I’ve seen recently is different. I’m seeing a number of conservatives who seem to think that the media is deliberately doing what it can to lose the war in Iraq in order to discredit Bush. Matthew Yglesias puts it well:

Flip over to, say, Instapundit and you’ll see that Baudrillard simply spoke of the wrong Gulf War when he said it didn’t really happen. Over there, it appears, the second Gulf War is just a social construction of the virulently anti-Bush US news media. Nevermind that the foreign news media paints a distinctly bleaker picture. Nevermind that some of the voices of bleakness (Bill Kristol, George Will, etc.) can hardly be said to be virulently anti-Bush or liberal. Just nevermind. Bad news can be dismissed because the media is biased, and you can tell the media is biased because they keep reporting so much bad news!

Here’s Roger Simon: “In a world where people’s heads are being lopped off and others are being castrated live these sleazy careerists (the media) are hellbent on winning an election over all.” He simply refuses to believe any negative story from Seymour Hersh. Instapundit sees pictures of vandalized New York Times newboxes and asks for more. One of his readers emails “I’ve tuned out the MSM (mainstream media) and rely on the ‘Net — bloggers, Lucianne.com, etc. — to keep me informed, which it does quite well. That way I get all the info but don’t have to endure Dan, Tom and Peter, Wolf, etc. I miss nothing that’s happening but I gain all the stories that the mainstream media simply ignore.” Lucianne.com, for Christ’s sake. Ralph Peters writes about “journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers” and says that in Falujah, “The media weren’t reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.” (The pen is that much mightier that the sword, apparently.) The President himself “to see his news reading largely, if not entirely, as an exercise in detecting liberal media bias,” in Josh Marshall’s words, and prides himself on avoiding opposing viewpoints. Mort Kondracke writes that “The American establishment, led by the media and politicians, is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq.” (It’s funny; Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, have a loud, loyal media megaphone, and control a political machine that would make Lyndon Johnson weep with envy. And yet, many still see themselves as being under the boot of “the establishment”, and think that they can pawn off responsibility for their failures on a handful of critics. It reminds me of one of my favorite Digby posts. Anyway…)

I’m coming to believe that the incredible popularity of the “blame the liberal media first” mindset is going to be pretty bad for the country.

(ALSO: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_21.shtml#1085433164)

I heard a rumor that if you’re the 1000th donor, he’ll tell you his name.*

*Rumor is not true.

Does law professor Glenn Reynolds need me to explain why this is a bad idea?

UPDATE: He’s responded to my email in a responsible way. Good show.

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog is correct- this really is astounding:

It’s McCain vs. Hastert on meaning of sacrifice

A 2-month-old House-Senate standoff over the 2005 budget burst into public acrimony Wednesday, when House Speaker Dennis Hastert questioned Sen. John McCain’s credentials as a Republican and suggested that the decorated Vietnam War veteran didn’t understand the meaning of sacrifice. …

On Tuesday, McCain gave a speech excoriating both political parties for refusing to sacrifice their tax cutting and spending agendas in a time of war. At the Capitol on Wednesday, Hastert shot back: “If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) and Bethesda (Naval Hospital). There’s the sacrifice in this country.” …

First: Hastert isn’t making sense. McCain is not asking for cuts in the military budget. He’s asking for legislators to put their other legislative wishes, specifically tax cuts and new spending, on hold in response to the deficit. Hastert seems to think that the federal government has no obligation to balance revenues and expenditures, as long as he can point to the existence of wounded soldiers.

If Hastert believes what he’s saying, he should quit his post and go write for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He certainly has no business in my government.

Second: I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to read this and say, “McCain spent five and a half years in a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp. Where the hell does Hastert get off lecturing him on sacrifice?”

Third: Why are the grown-ups in the Republican party the ones who get spanked?

UPDATE: Digby has a little more on the man being lectured on “sacrifice”.

Christopher Hitchens has just put up a piece in Slate. It’s a response to Sy Hersh’s most recent New Yorker story about the connection between Abu Gharib and Rumsfeld’s policies. Here’s Simpler Christopher Hitchens:

What Went Wrong: The flaw in Seymour Hersh’s theory.

I, Christopher Hitchens, present Sy Hersh’s story as such: Rumsfeld was frustrated at the legal obstacles that (for example) prevented combat forces from firing at a convoy that they believed contained the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar. Rumsfeld loosened the rules. The loosening of the rules led to the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

I, CH, believe that this is an incoherent story. There is no necessary link between overruling the combat restrictions that I have highlighted and prison abuse. Furthermore, regardless of the decisions of Rumsfeld, there would still have been bad apples in the military.

Shouldn’t opponents of the war have some explaining to do? Now they say that the Bush Administration should have killed the leaders of al-Qaeda. I believe that, had the Bush administration taken the steps necessary to take out the leaders of al-Qaeda during major combat operations in Afghanistan, they would have opposed them. Therefore, they are hypocrites.

The struggle against terrorism will be long and difficult. Rumsfeld should treat the soldiers who abused the Iraqi prisoners as traitors and enemies.

P.S. I’d like everyone to look at the bomb with sarin in it, and the uncovery of a mustard gas weapon in Iraq.

If anyone thinks I’ve misrepresented Hitch, please pitch in in the comments. Because if I understand him correctly, this is a truly shameless piece of misdirection.

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[Removed. Upon reflection, I couldn’t back this up. I apologize.]

Terry Welch, who is serving as an Army public affairs specialist in Afghanistan, has a very reasonable request. He says that what Afghan children want, more than anything, are pens. Pens are cheap. Below the fold is his letter, including a link to OfficeMax and his address.

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(I’m going to start with the punchline, in case you don’t click through: please consider signing the DCCC petition asking for Rumsfeld’s dismissal).

I recently saw a post on a conservative blog asking whether liberal bloggers were going to accept Rumsfeld’s apology. I know the answer to this one: It Doesn’t Matter. The Administration doesn’t have to worry about us. They need to worry about what they’re doing to minimize the firestorm raging among Iraqis and Muslims. The pictures could hardly have been scripted better to alientate and inflame the people that we’d like to have on our side. Dealing with this terrible stain is of incalculable importance right now.

Donald Rumsfeld has said that he accepts reponsibility, and there are a lot of people arguing that Rumsfeld should resign, not all from the left. Daniel Drezner says that he should resign, in part, because of his poor record of handling postwar Iraq. (So does Dwight Merideth, among others.) The Economist says that he should go, in part, because of his arrogant refusal to allow prisoners to be held to the Geneva Convention, or any standards or oversight at all, created a culture that led to Abu Ghraib. The Army Times says that he should resign because of the appallingly poor handling of the reports of prisoner abuse by his office. Jane Galt thinks that only real accountability can help repair the damage. Jacob Levy says that getting rid of Rumsfeld would be an acknowledgement of past error that would improve the Administration’s credibility. George Will points out that there are no indispensable men, and gently points out that Rumsfeld’s greatest contribution to the War on Terror at this point may be to cease to be the official most identified with it. I very strongly agree.

(UPDATE: William F. Buckley, too.)

What if, instead, the President and Vice-President decided to tell the world that we owe Rumsfeld a “debt of gratitude”, that Rumsfeld is “the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had”, and that people should “get off his back.” What effect would that have?

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Via Edward at Obsidian Wings, I see that the state of Virginia has been busy digging a trench to the 19th century.

The Virginia General Assembly… passed with veto-proof majorities a jaw-dropping bill that bans not only civil unions but any “partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.” And it declares “void in all respects” and “unenforceable” in the commonwealth any such arrangement made in another state.

In other words, not only is any public affirmation of gay relationships banned but even private legal arrangements between two people who love each other are prohibited. The bill’s broad language would preclude contracts to share assets or provide for medical powers of attorney, and though its sponsors deny they intend to do so, it would seem to ban even certain contractual business relationships undertaken by people who happen to be of the same gender.

One of the arguments against gay marriage is that gays don’t need it. They can get the rights of married people by making their own contractual arrangements. That’s not exactly true- some rights, such as immigration rights, cannot be obtained by contract

The legislators who passed this bill are wasting their words. A protestor in

http://www.blackeyedgirl.com/nazis.jpg

It’s Dylan-goes-electric time over at AndrewSullivan.com:

The question I have asked myself in the wake of Abu Ghraib is simply the following: if I knew before the war what I know now, would I still have supported it? I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war – something that no reasonable person can now ignore – has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission. But does it make the case for war in retrospect invalid? My tentative answer – and this is a blog, written day by day and hour by hour, not a carefully collected summary of my views – is yes, I still would have supported the war. But only just. And whether the “just” turns into a “no” depends on how we deal with the huge challenge now in front of us….

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.….

By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led – and should lead – to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.

(emphasis added) He ends with a call to win, I should point out. Nonetheless, when this Administration has lost Sully, they’ve done very badly indeed. More to come.

Shorter :

I really believe that the feminists, and the media, and the gays and the lesbians, academics, the Clintons–all of them who have tried to liberalize America–I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

There’ll be more where this came from, I’m sure.

I don’t have much to say about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners that isn’t obvious; I’m just another guy who’s depressed and heartsick at the images on my screen. Just one point:

I don’t know what the Administration was thinking when they appointed John Negroponte, infamous for his role in Honduras in the 80s, as the ambassador to the new Iraq. I don’t know what they thought he could accomplish. I have my suspicions, but they might be unfairly colored by my general impression of the Administration.

At this point, hopes are irrelevant. Negroponte will be a massive detriment to the mission in Iraq. His story will be told again and again in the Arab press, and he will be a crystallizing symbol for anti-American forces who don’t believe in American goodwill. If the Administration wants to demonstrate its concern for the hearts and minds of Iraq, it will be necessary to find a replacement for Negroponte. (Among others.)

UPDATE: Tim Dunlop beat me to this point. The more, the merrier.

UPDATE: As is usually the case, Dwight Merideth has some thoughts that are well worth reading.

UPDATE: More from Jacob Levy on Rumsfeld:

Whatever credibility Rumsfeld had left has now been fatally undermined. It’s time to demand that he take responsibility and resign; he can no longer do his job anyways. The failure of the White House to understand that seems to be tied to a sense that, while Bush can judge Rumsfeld, no one else has any business doing so. Utterly obtuse.

Roger Ailes has found a particularly stunning Kaus moment.

(Don’t bother to keep reading if you’re making a noble attempt to avoid irrelevant trivia about the candidates; there’s nothing terribly important here.)

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