alternative hippopotamus

I wasn’t planning to post anything today. It’s one of those letter perfect days here in the nation’s capital, and the thought of doing anything as ambitious as typing out a coherent sentence or two seems all but impossible. However, I happened to run into a couple of things that you, my dear reader(s) might find amusing.

The first concerns one of hobbies: my lefty crusade to undermine the Bush administration by using their words against them. This priceless exchange is between Arbustito and someone attending his social security pep rally: (from The Truth by Al Franken, p. 210):

Bush: Mary is with us. Mary Mornin. How are you Mary?
Mornin: I’m fine.
Bush: Good. Okay, Mary, tell us about yourself.
Mornin: Okay, I’m a divorced, single mother with three grown, adult children. I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I have two daughters.
Bush: Fantastic.

Now, if someone told me they were a divorced single mother with a family to support (which she does on three jobs) and a mentally challenged son the one word I wouldn’t use is “fantastic.” The words that form in my conscious mind are something like: Holy crap, have you been dealt a full hand.

If anything, Mary Mornin’s story is the perfect example of life being full of things we can’t predict, and why a civilized society needs safety nets like Social Security. In the context of Bush trying to eliminate that safety net, his “fantastic” really becomes eerie.

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So, I’ve been shopping for a mattress for about a year. I’ve been browsing at Anne’s Futons regularly, and finally made the plunge today. Usually I don’t like shopping in DC as I’ve found that most shops lack what I call the “Boston Hustle.” No, that’s not the name of a dance, it’s the dedication to customer service that includes things like making an effort, being knowledgeable about the product you sell, and good ole fashioned kicking butt.

My experience at Anne’s Futons went something like this:

Guy: Our futons are arranged by price and labelled for firmness. Here try a #3.
Me: That’s too firm. (I try another one) The #6 is too soft.
Guy: Try the #5.
Me: This one’s just right.

Right then, three bears walked in very upset about someone who had been eating their porridge. But, I digress. As the Guy was ringing up my new #5, he said:

Guy: Would you like it delivered this afternoon?
Me: I didn’t know that was possible (in DC).
Guy: How about between noon and 2?

Now, that was the Boston Hustle. To top it off he demonstrated his superior knowledge of his products:

Guy: Will you be sleeping with someone, or by yourself?

That sounded kind of personal to me. I just didn’t feel like I knew him well enough to answer that question. So, I said jokingly:

Me: Depends on whether I get lucky or not.
Guy: Hah, hah. The reason I ask is, if you’re sleeping with someone else then you should turn the mattress over every couple of months. Depending on if there’s a weight difference between you and the other guy.

Between me and the other what? I decided to let this slide. I was getting my mattress delivered on the same day, after all.

When most people think of the Washington Post-It Note, they think about the coverage of national politics. The Dana Priests, the Carl Bernsteins, the Steno Sues. And Bob Woodward, though, to put it like Woody Allen did in Stardust Memories, I prefer Woodward’s older, less sycophantic journalism.

The side of the Post-it Note people don’t think about is local life, culture, entertainment, and what have you. Now there’s folks I’ve known from back in my Boston days who were convinced that DC consisted of a small section of pristine museum space surrounded by a much larger section of homeless crack addicts ducking the shells from the latest drive-by shooting.

Not so. To paraphrase Thornton Wilder: “Nice town. Know what I mean?”

So, it was with some interest that I read this on-line chat about quality of life in DC. Here’s a few choice excerpts:

• The District: Can we close more streets to cars and turn them into parks or walking malls? And cut the bus stops in half, run smaller buses, and add more routes.

  Jay Fisette: I think the era of the car, as we know it, is ending.

• Alexandria, Va.:We need to place more emphasis in funding for public transit and making it easy to access in all of the DC metropolitan area. By doing this, we remove a majority of the vehicles that clog the roads and we reduce our pollution levels in the air.
• Haymarket, Va.: I think it is imperative to extend Metro to the western suburbs and I think it should be a priority. The population growth of the area has far outstripped the current road system.
• Alexandria, Va.: I think Washington DC should be a model city for the country and mass transit. Lets get rid of the cars and put in place an extensive trolley system. This certainly would clean up the air and make this an even nicer city.

There’s an urban tree-hugger vibe to the thread that you gotta love. I guess it’s interesting to me since it suggests that people, at least here in the nation’s capital, are way beyond Bush’s shallow “addicted to oil” rhetoric. They see the future, and they’d prefer it didn’t have a Ford in it.

* 1 1/4 fluid ounces coconut rum
* 3/4 fluid ounce butterscotch schnapps
* 1/2 fluid ounce hazelnut liqueur
* 1 fluid ounce pina colada mix
* 2 fluid ounces pineapple juice

• Fill a large tropical or Collins glass with ice cubes.
• In a shaker, combine the coconut rum, butterscotch schnapps, hazelnut liqueur, pina colada mix and pineapple juice.
• Shake vigorously, and pour over ice in the glass.

Speaking of Tony the Snow Monkey, I see that he’s been getting some advice vis-a-vis truth telling: (from TPM)

“By favoring the center-right media, the president will enhance their prestige while the anti-Bush establishment media play catch-up.”

Either that, or as soon as the president’s particular method of catapulting the propaganda gets associated with the right-wing media, people will start to recognize them for the hack shops that they are.

I already posted this to the Drinking Liberally mailing list, but in case you’re looking for new Martini recipes to try:

Frog March Martini
aka, Frog in a Blender

2 shots Vodka
2 shots blue Maui
8 oz Orange juice

2 splashes Grenadine

• Shake the first three ingredients in a shaker with ice.
• Pour into chilled martini glass and then splash the grenadine on top, do not stir the grenadine in.

Rinse, repeat.

While I’m on the subject, perhaps someone can clue me in to why being a secondary source that the CIA operates prisons overseas is a firable offense, while being a primary leak of the identity of a covert CIA agent isn’t. I can certainly understand the absolutist standpoint: anyone who leaks classified information should be fired, but I don’t see any way of justifying firing Mary McCarthy, but not Karl Rove.

I notice that Porky Pig was asked why the McCarthy case was resolved so quickly, while 3 years later we still haven’t got to the bottom of the Plame matter. Porky stuttered:

We are engaged in a difficult and long war against a bunch of ideological extremists who want to do everything they can to stop the advance of freedom in this world and want to harm innocent Americans and innocent people in the civilized world. And that’s why it’s important that we not show them our playbook.

Okay, the terrorists now know they might be sent to prisons where they’ll be tortured. Film at 11.

Meanwhile, they also get this other page out of our “playbook” where we leak classified information to take revenge against political opponents.

I’m just trying to understand why it’s okay for them to get the disclosing the identity of covert ops page, and not the torture facilities overseas page.

One of the narratives that’s developed over the last few years, starting with Woodward’s Plan of Attack, echoed by a variety of books and mainstream news articles, not to mention scads of blogposts on the Downing Street Memos, was that the decision to invade Iraq had been made well in advance, and that all the strutting and frutting we saw from Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, and Condi was a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury.

As Froomkin reminds us in today’s White House Briefing:

Said Drumheller: “The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested. . . . And we said, ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said, ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.’ ”

Drumheller’s view is reminiscent of last month’s Foreign Affairs article by a fellow former CIA official, Paul R. Pillar . He wrote: “It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized.”

Well, just how was the decision to invade Iraq made? What was the basis?

This quote from the Post online (the story and quotes will evolve, I’m sure) gives us some insight to these questions:

“I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there’s an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.”

The phrase “regardless of what you look like or where you live” is a head scratcher. Is this a pre-emptive defense of ugly people? Also, Bush may want to rethink that “where you live” bit. As far as I can tell, the whole immigration bruhaha is about people who live in Mexico, and who want to come to the US. Exactly what notion of freedom that applies to Iraqi’s, but not to Mexicans, but still has nothing to do with “where you live” is beyond the grasp of this hippopotamus.

Does Bush really believe that the Iraqi invasion was to appease his (theologically very incorrect) view of doing God’s will by invading other countries? Or is this just another tale told by an idiot?

Christopher Hitchens on Hugh Hewitt’s show discussing Joe Wilson’s adventure in Niger: (emphasis mine)

CH: Let’s bring it on. He lied about whether his wife, who works for the CIA, nominated him for the trip, which he did, on the grounds that he was, of all things, friendly with the Niger minister of mines, who had been in the 80’s the supplier of Saddam Hussein’s uranium. So they send a friend who has no curiosity, who doesn’t discover that Saddam’s point man on nukes has come calling a few months before, in fact. So I mean, it’s astonishing, and I don’t think, even though he’s been so far hugely overpraised in the media, I don’t think that his reputation can last very much longer. I think he’s through.

Former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller on 60 Minutes, via TPM, discussing the same Niger adventure: (emphasis mine)

Drumheller was the CIA’s top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn’t:

“The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other,” says Drumheller.

Drumheller says he doesn’t think it mattered very much to the administration what the intelligence community had to say. “I think it mattered it if verified. This basic belief that had taken hold in the U.S. government that now is the time, we had the means, all we needed was the will,” he says.

The road to war in Iraq took some strange turns — none stranger than a detour to the West African country of Niger. In late 2001, a month after 9/11, the United States got a report from the Italian intelligence service that Saddam Hussein had bought 500 tons of so-called yellowcake uranium in order to build a nuclear bomb.

But Drumheller says many CIA analysts were skeptical. “Most people came to the opinion that there was something questionable about it,” he says.

Jonah Goldberg is representative of the right-wing hacks that take up space on the pages of otherwise distinguished publications: He’s a self-made man. That is, If by “self-made” you mean he got his job through his mother’s infamous role in the Lewinsky scandal, and by “man” you mean effeminate boob.

I took a look at his recent vomit, I mean column, Seeing Red Over ‘Green Scare’, and had to wonder if they paid him not by the word, but by the hack.

For instance, this bit:

But Gore & Co. aren’t troubled by such details because the smears are all for a good cause. That’s why Gore saw nothing wrong in bullying dissident climate change scientists when he was a senator or waging a mean-spirited campaign to discredit the work of his old mentor, Harvard oceanographer Roger Revelle, because Revelle thought alarmism was unwarranted.

If you don’t recognize the name Roger Revelle, he’s the guy who coined the term “Global Warming.” If you do a Google search, you can come up with numerous examples of Gore dissing him, like this 2000 NYT article:

His appreciation of science really exploded in his senior year, when Mr. Gore also got to know Roger Revelle, the oceanographer who did much of the pioneering work on the greenhouse effect and global warming — a major focus of Mr. Gore’s 1992 environmental tome, “Earth in the Balance.” When Mr. Revelle shared his research with the students, Mr. Gore was hooked.

“It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates,” Mr. Gore said. “Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!”

Wow, Gore really tore Mr. “Global Warming” a new ozone hole!

(For the record Jonah seems to have been flogging the “Al Gore turned on his mentor” canard since at least 1999.)

I know it must be tough to find scientists coming out against taking action on Global Warming, but Jonah found some guy named Richard Lindzen. Funny story about Mr. Lindzen:

The November 10, 2004 online version of Reason magazine reported that Lindzen is “willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now.” Climatologist James Annan, who has offered multiple bets that global temperatures will increase, contacted Lindzen to arrange a bet. Annan offered to pay 2:1 odds in Lindzen’s favor if temperatures declined, but said that Lindzen would only accept a bet if the payout was 50:1 or better in his favor. No bet occurred.

This bit of sludge towards the end of his piece is too dense for me to unpack entirely:

This is just a small taste of the millenarian battiness running through the green scare. Sure, a one- or two-degree-per-century rise in average global temperatures may have unpleasant consequences — with some pleasant ones as well — but in what study did the New Yorker’s fact-checkers verify that Earth will become uninhabitable? Moreover, the greens’ proposed solutions to global warming are even more otherworldly. Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions to 60% of 1990 levels before 2050, while China, India and (hopefully) Africa modernize, is inconceivable, ill-conceived and also immoral because it would consign generations to poverty.

Besides using the word millenarian incorrectly (it means a positive transformation, not a cataclysmic one as the context implies) he manages to condemn the New Yorker for not justifying their prediction of an “uninhabitable” earth, but provides no justification for his statement that action against Global Warming will “consign generations to poverty.”

Remember though. It’s Al Gore who’s the fear mongerer. Goldberg would never use tactics like that.

Priceless. Though, perhaps “without value” captures it better.

Update: ThinkProgress picks up on the part about Global Warming having some pleasant consequences.

I missed the significance of this being the day before Earth Day, which seems kind of rude of Jonah. It’d be like writing an essay on the evils of presidential arrogance the eve of Bush’s birthday.

Henny Youngman famously said that when he read about the evils of drinking he gave up reading.

That would explain Christopher Hitchens. You’d pretty much have to be both drunk and ignorant to support Bushie the way Hitchens does. He stretches his jaw-dropping cluelessness to the point of incredibility, however, in this interview with Hugh “Hack” Hewitt: (emphasis mine)

HH: Yeah. What is going here? Is it an attempt to write the end of the story before the story’s even remotely close to being over?

CH: Sean Wilentz is a guy…actually, he is a good historian, and some of his work on the founding, and on the revolution, especially a book called Chance Democratic, is very good. But I remember him appearing before the House Committee on Impeachment. They were taking advice on what the law and history of impeachment were, and giving testimony that so misled and annoyed them, that actually, many people think that they made them decide to vote for impeachment. By the way, I can’t say that I think that Mr. Bush at his worst is as bad as President Clinton was. That’s eight years down the American drain right there. The first eight, those post-Cold War years, thrown away by a narcissist and a crook. For the nomination of worst ever president, I can’t, I really, though I have many, many quarrels with President Bush, I cannot believe that people would say he was worse than Mr. Nixon or Mr. Carter, just to stay in modern times…or Kennedy.

HH: A line, though he writes, he writes, “History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution.” That’s just ignorant of Constitutional law, but I do believe that’s part of the writ that is running against Bush at this point by Joe Klein and Sean Wilentz.

CH: I think Bush, as a matter of fact, did flirt with that with the NSA stuff, because he’s asking for an extraordinary power that you’d have to give to all other presidents, too, which is why I don’t like it. But you and I would probably have to differ about that.

HH: Yes.

Hitchens actually believes that people think that Clinton, much less Kennedy was a worse president than Bush? He feels okay about Bush spying on citizens, but wouldn’t support that for presidents in general? WTF?

I’ll just add that Steven Wright once observed: “24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?”

What Steven Wright might call a coincidence, Hitchens would call a lifestyle choice.

I really have no idea why the Washington Post-It-Note employs Anne Applebaum. Wait a minute, I kinda do. Perhaps it’s because she’s a supporter of Ollie North, and a critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Anne, and Fred Hiatt, Dr. Rathacker and the rest of the Postal editorial page probably get along.

I might even argue that Applebaum is a movement conservative in the guise of a columnist. For instance take this tidbit from Media Matters: (emphasis mine)

On December 13, 1994, The Washington Post reported that Applebaum and her husband, Radek Sikorski — who is a resident fellow and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and who has written for National Review and The American Spectator — are “solidly plugged into a transatlantic power grid of conservative editors, writers and politicians, and have a reputation for politically incorrect social mischief.”

Ms. Applebaum takes joy in her work. And, as far as I can see, her work is bashing various sects of liberalism. In this weeks rhetorical fallacy she hacks away at environmentalists in defense of her recently aquired fondness for windmills:

To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.

But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is “an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a few truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of lies.” Far from being clean and green, “corporate wind is yet another extraction industry relying on false promises,” a “poster child for irresponsible development.”

Such attacks — those come from http://www.stopillwind.org/ , the Web site of Maryland anti-wind activist Jon Boone — are not atypical.

Not atypical? Not atypical of what? Not atypical of the red herrings she uses in her columns? I hope she doesn’t mean not atypical of the mainstream environmental movement. Though that seems to be where she’s going:

The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant.

Those environmental whackos! They’re just anti-progress. If I didn’t already know that Applebaum thinks liberals hate America, I’d guess she thinks liberals hate America.

For the record: here’s the Sierra Club on windpower. Here’s the Mass. Adubon Society. Both are supportive. They are not atypical of the mainstream environmental movement.

Note also what Applebaum leaves out of her pablum, I mean column: the unbending struggle of the Bushies to prevent conservation: tax deductions for guzzling SUV’s, refusing to raise car efficiency standards, or just having his boss, Dick Cheney, say that conservation is a personal choice but not part of his energy policy.

Update: No sooner did I post the above when I got this from GreenPeace about Mitt Romney’s opposition to the Cape Wind project.

There’s one school of thought that says we need to needle and cajole the rank and file journalist into acting as if the 4th estate still describes the infotainment form known as “newspaper.” That’s what Glenn Greenwald is getting at here:

There are no critical faculties exercised, no investigation, no skepticism of any kind. In short, there is nothing adversarial between the government and the media — which was supposed to characterize how this watchdog relationship was supposed to work. The founders didn’t guarantee a free press in order to ensure that it could publish government claims without interference. The idea was that the press would be adversarial to the Government, serve as a Fourth Estate when other checks on government power failed. The press has, of course, become the opposite — it now exists only to amplify and lend credence to even the most suspect and manipulative government claims.

There is another school of thought (mine) which says that a corporate-owned media by it’s nature can’t be an effective watchdog of a corporate-owned administration. It might be possible under a 2006 version of Media Fairness, where Congress mandates an independent press. Unfortunately, in our version of 2006, a corporate-owned congress is more interested in mandating that boys be boys and companies be companies. (See net neutrality for more details.)

That school of thought leads us to look for the voice of accountability in alternative media. Which brings me to an excerpt on “Challenging Empire” that I’ve been meaning to plug (pp. 54-55)

While some slighted the alternative press for “preaching to the converted,” the stark reality was that the converted desperately needed the serious analysis necessary to back up their instinctive or spontaneous or emotional or spiritual or habitual position against the war, especially in their efforts to win new converts to an anti-war position. What is the real history of teh relationship between the Taliban and US oil companies? What are teh real US interests in Iraqi oil? How do we talk about Saddam Hussein’s massive human rights violations? The depth of analysis was available almost exclusively within the independent media.

But the alternative media reached a limited- though growing- percentage of the American people. So it was particularly important when mainstream outlets opened up to voices against which they had long been closed. From early spring until late summer, then, the US press appeared to be quite a different phenomenon, coming close to (if never quite matching) the kind of “free press” people in many democratic countries take for granted, but which has rarely been a feature of US media. Instead of having access mostly to the alternative press, I was suddenly discussing Iraq policy with White House advisors on National Public Radio, being quoted in the Washington Post, and debating the neo-conservatives’ own “Dark Prince,” Richard Perle, on the prestigious Lehrer News Hour television show.

But that opening was not to last. By late summer, much of the elite debate was muffled. Administration critics were silenced, congressional opponents were suddenly subdued. A decision had been made. The press mostly retreated to its usual Washington talking heads, with critical voices largely locked out.