Triptych Cryptic  

Thursday, May 01, 2008


How Loathsome
The headline, "White House Admits Fault on 'Mission Accomplished' Banner," struck me as faulty right away. Admits fault? The Bush White House? It can't be.

It wasn't. Read the article.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."


Don't you love how the White House pretends Bush is the victim here? Me too. Of course, the reason they weren't more specific and said mission accomplished for these sailors is that they didn't invent that excuse until months after the fact.

What a crummy article. The only fault I can see is that we all misinterpreted a perfectly clear banner and beat up a poor defenseless president. It also continues the myth that Bush flew the plane. I wonder what percentage of Americans believe that Bush was the pilot. I bet above 90.

If you'll forgive me for patting myself on the back, but that day five years ago I told anyone who would listen - not many - that Democrats were going to wind up using that image in political ads.

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11:26 bone daddy

Friday, December 28, 2007

Top Four Non-Fiction Books of 2007

Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.

4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.

3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.

2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"

1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.

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08:56 bone daddy

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ask a simple question Chris Dodd submits a YouTube question for the citizen's questions GOP debate. This is actually quite funny and a clever idea, whether or not the question itself helps terrorists.

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22:56 bone daddy

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Ah, Turkey ready to invade Iraq, Pakistan breaking out the whoop-ass on secular powers and the Get out of Jail free cards on the Taliban types ... how's that "stability to the region" coming? My favorite bit in this article about Musharraf's ham-fisted repression comes in here ...

The general's suspension of the constitution has given Pakistani authorities sweeping powers to detain without charge. Opposition groups reported at least 3,500 arrests over the preceding three days, many of them attorneys.

Pakistan's top human rights defender, Asma Jehangir, was watching Musharraf on television Saturday night explain his declaration of emergency rule as a necessary step in combating extremism. As he spoke, police knocked at her door and announced she was under house arrest.


Notice anything? When Musharraf gave himself the power to detain without charge, he at least announced it.

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22:50 bone daddy

Monday, October 08, 2007

Worst. Bumper Sticker. Combo. Ever. I saw a beater of a car sporting the fading "W 04" sticker you still see here and there. You know the one with the flag sticking off the top of the W? That most owners have since snuck out of their houses in the night and scrapped off their cars? Looking over their shoulders to make sure no one's looking? Yeah, that one.

On the other side, a bumper sticker said, "I read your e-mail." Now, this guy probably wasn't one of the Bush goons who probably does read our e-mail. Those guys drive nice cars. Still, isn't it fitting that a W supporter would make a joke (or pass on someone else's joke) about invading your privacy? It's almost like a W supporter was also a Metallica fan and put Kill 'Em All next to the W 04 sticker. Except more subtle.

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23:17 bone daddy

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

You Are Not What You Own If Tony Snow lived in the "Ownership Society" he's been selling as White House spokesperson, he'd really be screwed. (via Ghost in the Machine.)

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22:18 bone daddy

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I'm getting my family-values, anti-gay Republicans caught seeking gay sex confused. It's reached a tipping point. When I first heard the Larry Craig story - this was before GOP'ers started calling for his resignation and before his "Really, I'm still not gay" press conference - I thought it was a late reference to the McCain Florida campaign chair caught soliciting in a park.

I knew it wasn't Vitter, because he was totally straight with his prostitutes, and I knew it wasn't Ted Haggard, because that guy's a Reverend, not to mention he's totally cured of his gayness. I also remember the name Foley (because of the catheter) so I knew it wasn't him. I also remember Jeff Gannon, the gay prostitute who posed as a White House reporter on behalf of the totally straight Karl Rove, because it's one of the most mind-bending examples in the game "How would this scandal have played out for a Democrat?"

See how easy it is to get confused? Anyway, which excuse is worse:

1) "I have horrible luck. There's always been these rumors that I cruise for guys, even though I'm totally straight. Then I wind up in a bathroom where this kind of thing goes on and I happen to have a medical condition that causes me to give the signal for 'I want some sex,' even though I really don't AND I'm cursed with an easy-going nature that made me plead guilty to the thing I didn't do." - Larry Craig

2) "I offered to give him $20 and a blowjob because he was black and I figured that's what he wanted." - Bob Allen

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22:14 bone daddy

Thursday, August 23, 2007

No Sense of Decency ... Bush scratches at the wounds of Vietnam in an attempt to smear his critics and prop up faltering support for his Iraq folly. I've long maintained that the pro-war right will get loonier and more violent as the debacle that is Iraq becomes less and less deniable. No reason Bush would be exempt from this I guess. There's two ways of looking at this - either a man with little ability to grasp the present is showing his trouble with the past as well, or Bush knows perfectly well that Iraq is and will continue to be a disaster for some time and he is setting up others to take the blame.

In a small sense, Vietnam War protesters have helped set up Bush's blame-those-who-were-right strategy by taking too much credit for ending Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because of the Vietnamese and, to a lesser degree, because we shouldn't have been there. Not because of the hippies.

Less than a year ago, Bush floated this analogy, prompting Robert Scheer to write ...

The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, "free fire zones," South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors ... none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three US Presidents--two of them Democrats--lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.


Lastly, I'd like to ask, if Bush knows so much about winning in Vietnam, why didn't he go ahead and fight there?

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14:21 bone daddy

Monday, August 13, 2007

Karl Rove to Leave White House, Spend More Time with Coven

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16:50 bone daddy

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Great video on Generation Chickenhawk.

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10:33 bone daddy

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

We're already hearing - for those who couldn't figure it out - that we will fall far short of the goals Bush laid out for the surge/escalation, meeting "not a single goal." First Bush rejects anyone else's (already low) standards or expectations and, in fact, sneers at them. Then he proposes his own (corrupt and artificial and lower) goals as superior. Then he fails to meet them and will probably retroactively creat a third set of goals that he will have to lie to pretend to have met better than expected. I couldn't come up with a better motif of the W years.

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16:07 bone daddy

Monday, July 02, 2007

Who wipes away Libby's prison time? The accountability president. The "restore integrity to the White House" president. The Fitzgerald prosecution, already sort of empty in my book because it did not charge as criminals Rove and Cheney, just got a little emptier.

W and Libby partisans will moan about how he still has the guilty verdict and the fine and lost his job, etc. Still, it occurs to me that Valerie Plame lost her job through the actions of Libby, Cheney and Rove and her job - helping to keep the country safe from WMDs - was a hell of a lot more important than Libby's job of propping up the worst administration ever.

Anyway, only complete scandal fatigue and the absolute fanatical devotion of the right-wing base can keep W above 25% now.

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22:14 bone daddy

Friday, June 01, 2007

Bush's Amazing Achievement [NYRB]

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

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10:15 c-dog

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A Modest Proposal This whole timetable issue has a clear and easy solution. Well, at least the financial end of it does. Let's simply fund the Iraq disaster by taxing the people who supported it. You want it, you pay for it. This would also be quite easy to figure out. By 2004, the war was clearly a disaster. If you voted for Bush, you need to sacrifice for this fiasco you supported. Note how I'm exempting those who originally supported the war but came to their senses later. I'm generous that way. Now if you didn't support the war, but voted for Bush for some other reason, sorry, but you get taxed for having your priorities out of whack. Who could possibly complain about this? What, you want other people to fight and pay for your war? Now some might point out that punishing people for the way they vote is unconstitutional. However, this just brings up another beautiful aspect of my plan. By 2004, W. had already demonstrated his disregard for the Constitution. A vote for him was a vote for unconstitutional rule. Except for the fact that it will never happen, I don't see a flaw here.

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22:36 bone daddy

Monday, May 07, 2007

I've finally gotten around to reading H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, partially because I loved the show and partially because I was kind of sick of reading on the back of every book that follows something for a year "It's the Friday Night Lights of chess/scrabble/day trading/porn." Just like they always say about the show, it's so much more than football. The portrait of the boom and bust town of Odessa, Texas which has no constant except a love of Mojo Panther football is mesmerizing. It's also very much about race. Bissinger does not flinch or cover up for this town that finally integrated its schools in 1982. And when they had to, they grabbed as many blacks as they could (sending the Hispanics elsewhere) because, you know, who do you want as a running back, a black or a Hispanic? The chapter on the use of the word "nigger" in Odessa is pretty much essential reading on race in America. (It's like household cleaner, you can use it anywhere.)

I've never seen the movie and I have to believe it - like the show - kind of whitewashes some of Bissinger's book. I root for the Panthers on the show. The kids and the town in this book is frequently so ugly, conservative, racist and vain I often felt that losing would be good for them. Then you realize that the other team is often just as ugly and maybe nobody should win or maybe nobody should pour too much into this game.

The chapter on the Midland-Odessa rivalry becomes fascinating in light of the failed W administration. W grew up in Midland and wrecked his first businesses there. Friday Night Lights was published in 1990 and doesn't mention W at all - Bush the Greater gets a few pages - but the descriptions of Midland business culture are appalling when you consider this was W's environment.

"Greed, delusional visions of grandeur, the mercenary mercilessness that made every relationship expendable - Midland perfected all these long before they became the standard of the eighties around the rest of the country."

"Over at the country club, or in enormous corner offices with picture windows that seemed to deserve something more than wide-angle views of scrub brush and mesquite, [Midland oil executives] confused luck with business acumen. Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe they were the creators of it."

This is so much more than football. It's the Friday Night Lights of football.

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23:33 bone daddy

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I missed Heroes over the long break. When the promos started up again a few weeks ago, I had some genuine anticipation. They could still kill off about half the characters and I wouldn't really mind. And you do have to overlook somethings here and there. For example, if you're Mohinder the scientist guy and you've just knocked out the superpowerful, crazy evil guy who killed your father do you (a) kill him or (b) pick up Peter's corpse and take it to an address you found in his wallet, leaving the crazy evil guy to wake up. Also, if you're Peter, why do you carry your mother's address in your wallet? Don't you have it memorized?

But mostly, it is a well-plotted show and it has some seriously enjoyable characters. How many people watch the telepathic cop trying to figure out if he's more like a Gutenberg or more like that doofus from Road Rules? I like the villian and in Hiro they have someone who perfectly embodies the silly/serious, dorky/cool vibe of the show. I like the show enough that I avoided all those spoiler-ific rumors about ripping off The Watchmen. After last night's episode, I can see that as a valid complaint. A massive disaster in NYC makes Americans put their faith in an unworthy leader. Seems to me like they're riffing on 9/11 as well.

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23:37 bone daddy

Thursday, March 22, 2007

I must confess I have so far taken a pass on the U.S. attorney scandal. I know many details about the outing of Valerie Plame and I'm exceptionally well-informed about the spinning of pre-war intelligence. I know more than a little about the incompetence of Bush's response to Katrina, but I can only do so much. I'm begining to think this administration is deliberately doing nasty and/or illegal things just to fuck with me.

I'll start to pay more attention if this scandal veers from recent scandal history - possibility of something vile/illegal suggested in media. Media attacked as evil Bush-haters. The vile/illegal thing is proved to have happened but probably not a big deal, right? Okay it's a slightly vile or maybe illegal thing, but Clinton did it too. Well, an underling is responsible for this thing and he's a great person doing a great job in Iraq/New Orleans/the White House. Hey, now that the underling has been disposed of there's really no need to investigate any further, right? Who would ever suggest that the guy who called himself "the Decider" every decided anything? Wow, look! Another scandal!

I'm also not particularly surprised that a guy who rolled his eyes at treaties barring torture would even blink at politically motivated firings. Rove and Bush probably could have gotten Gonzales to approve beatings, water-boarding and then dismissals.

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23:06 bone daddy

Saturday, February 17, 2007

In my quest to read the book about the political build-up to the Iraq war, I finished Michael Isikoff and David Corn's Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. It's very good, but not definitive. The outing of Valerie Plame gets a lot of attention and Judy Miller of the New York Times has probably never looked worse. The authors document the backstory of three accusations propping up the Iraq menace: uranium in Niger, aluminum tubes, and mobile labs. How easily these could have been kicked out from under the blustery, lying, incompetent Bush adminstration shocks even a cynic like me. Of course, that would have taken an aggressive media, a bold opposition party and maybe somebody inside Bush's bubble willing to say no.

Anneheart's on a quest to read 100 books in '07. I'm not going to make it - without counting kids books anyway - if I keep hitting books like Fiasco and Hubris. I did tear through the second, but neither were particularly lively and both were, obviously, depressing.

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22:40 bone daddy