Those Quaint, Old-Fashioned British.

Saw a letter to the editor in today's Strib that I couldn't let pass without comment:

The news about Scotland Yard's arrest of suspected terrorists who were planning to blow up at least six and perhaps as many as 20 commercial airplanes during midflight makes me think about how angry the editors of the New York Times must be. Nobody leaked to them the counterintelligence methods Great Britain used to get the terrorists. Hence, the Times couldn't ruin the whole operation by exposing Scotland Yard's intelligence operation.

So what, you ask, were the methods our British friends used to uncover this terrorist plot? Did they illegally tap citizens' telephones? Did they snoop on electronic communications and employ the use of sophisticated social networking algorithms? Perhaps they researched books that might help one concoct a liquid explosive, then illegally gathered library records of citizens (like our 'PATRIOT' act allows the FBI to do), and caught the bad guys that way? Surely this case must be an illustration of how curtailing civil liberties can be a big win in counterterrorism efforts, right?

Answers: no, no, no, no, and WRONG!

The whole plot was discovered because soon after the London bombings in July of last year, a concerned British Muslim called law enforcement to express an uneasiness he felt about an acquiantence. From there, law enforcement did some good old-fashioned pavement-pounding in a long investigation that involved hundreds of law enforcement personnel spanning three continents. As far as we know, it was never necessary to abridge civil liberties by doing any of the things that the Bush Administration claims they need to do in order to catch terrorists.

Those crafty, clever Brits. Just HOW do they DO it?

The Ongoing Violence in Lebanon

To anyone who's been trying to follow the conflict in Lebanon, I recommend this article. It's from a perspective that's not well represented in the media, and succinctly captures a lot of nuance.

It ends like this:

But even if Lebanon survives intact, the hatred of its battered and bloodied population for those on the other side of the border will have intensified, and a whole new generation of Lebanese will have grown up knowing nothing of Israel but its pitiless aerial bombardment and indiscriminate destruction. Far from being a war for its survival, Israel has by its actions over the past month only increased the long-term threat to its own security.

And ours, here in the US, I feel compelled to add. That's the main thing that bothers me about hearing people framing this conflict as though it were a question of Israel's right to exist. What Americans should be most concerned about when it comes to the crisis in Lebanon is that this bloodshed and damage to civilian infrastructure is nearly as effective as Bush at recruiting angry, angry people to commit even more horrid acts of violence. The bitterness and resentment can too easily be channelled by a persuasive leader, like Osama bin Laden or Moktada al-Sadr or Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. And for many good reasons and a few very bad ones, a lot of angry Arabs see the US as Israel's co-conspirator, if not simply the other head on a two-headed monster. It is, after all, American bombs expoding these people and the livelihoods of their survivors, American jets firing these precision payloads into apartment buildings and hospitals and gas stations, and American apache helicoptors shooting up the ambulances who arrive to collect the dead and wounded. With a little imagination, it's not that hard to see why what's going on over there makes us less secure here. Moderates become radicals; radicals strap on bomb vests. And this is all because the Bush Administration's foreign policy amounts to shaking a Magic 8-Ball and hoping it comes up "signs point to yes."

Hm? What's that Magic 8-Ball? "Don't count on it"?

Words Mean Things

Words Mean Things
Words MEAN things!
Words: Mean Things
...words, mean things,
Words mean things
words (mean things).
Words mean things,
and so do punctuations.

Why Does Your Blindfold Say 'Israel'?

Come to think of it, that's a great idea: make up a bunch of blindfolds with the word 'Israel' emblazoned across the front, right over the eyes, then mail them to high-profile members of the blogosphere. I'm thinking specifically of Kos here, and his cohorts who let us know at every discreet opportunity that they're tight with Kos.

Maybe ball gags would be more appropriate, because it seems like there's something about Israel that makes sworn enemies of authoritarianism, champions of free speech, just tuck their tails under their legs and hide in a corner, mute.

Over at the Daily Kos, you could read so much about the Lieberman/Lamont face-off in the CT primary that you'd feel like you lived in Connecticut and gave two shits. But scan the blog for news or commentary, or even passing references, to the non-Iraqi Middle East conflict underway, and you'll likely have to hit 'next 12' a few times.

It's not just Kos. Seems like a lot of lefties are afraid to discuss it. Perhaps it's because sites like Kos' have become so connected to political campaigns that they don't want to damage any candidates they support by saying anything even mildly negative about Israel. I don't know that's the case, I'm just guessing here. What else could it be? They've got no problem pointing out what a massive mess Iraq is (on days when they're not too busy publishing a long list of obscure poll numbers, as if some random poll of 200 adults showing a 6-point margin between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dummer 4 months before an actual election is supposed to make
me twitter with excitement).

I did just learn something interesting from Atrios, though: apparently, a reporter from the Washington Post was recently on CNN, and said this:

One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.

Now, granted US military analysts have said all kinds of far-out shit, like "Saddam possesses WMD and has resumed his nuclear program," and "we'll be welcomed as liberators," and "the moon is most assuredly made of cheese," but this little nugget has a smell of authenticity to it, doesn't it? Just based on the way Israel has been 'defending' itself for the past month? I'd rather not believe it, but it's clear that the current Israeli leadership have an awful lot in common with the Bush Administration, particularly when it comes to running around thinking they're fighting terrorists while actually doing all their recruiting work for them, like some kind of nightmarish Muhammed Appleseed.

So you'd think that out there in the blogosphere there'd be a much louder condemnation of Israel's actions, at least as loud as the echo of one against Bush. But apparently they're too afraid to say anything about it, for one reason or another, and that makes them an awful lot like the establishment Democrats that they pretend to eschew.

(notable exception to all of this: billmon.org)

I'm Not Going to Bite

I'm not going to bother reading the article below. I'm starting to feel physically ill from the ceaseless violence in Lebanon, not only because of so many deaths and so much terror, but because of people like Goldberg. There's a SEVERE lack of coverage of what's happening in Lebanon, in no small part to the assholes who spend day and night figuring out justifications for killing toddlers in their beds.

Here's a case in point, from CNN's Breaking News email newsletter: "Nine people were killed when a Hezbollah rocket hit a building in Kfar Giladi in northern Israel, while Israeli officials said 9 people were critically wounded in by rockets in in Kiryat Shmona Sunday morning." Wow, that sounds pretty bad, right? And it is. But how many Lebanese were killed in the last day of airstrikes? Who knows - that's not breaking news! In nearly a month of continuous bombings in Lebanon, we get a single Breaking News headline for the Lebanese casualties: "More than 65 people dead or wounded after Israeli airstrike on Qana, Lebanon, security official says." I heard a reporter at the scene the morning after the strike in Qana, describing the bodies of babies and toddlers being withdrawn from the wreckage, all of them asleep with their families, hoping they were safe from the carnage. This is our token headline after nine hundred Lebanese have been killed in airstrikes and commando raids in identical scenes throughout the country.

What I don't get about all of this is why people don't seem to care that nearly a thousand civilians have died as an act of retribution for the abduction of two soldiers. They don't seem to care that an oil slick is suffocating every living thing along Lebanon's coast, the result of Israeli airstrikes. They don't seem to care that among the 'military' targets being hit, hospitals, sewage treatment plants, power plants, ambulances and caravans of fleeing civilians are among the them. People seem to accept that Israeli is doing what it must, in spite of the fact that in just one month the IDF has killed more civilians than Hezbollah has in its entire history - and Hezbollah is an actual terrorist organization.

I've actually browsed around, looking for some coherent argument justifying the IDF's actions. My current favorite is "Liberals don't want Israel to defend itself," a great analogue to that old favorite of ours, "Liberals don't want the USA to defend itself." You see, there are only two ways for something to go down: you send in advanced fighter/bomber jets and tanks in a massive assault on a broken-down third world country, or you sit helplessly while terrorists murder your peace-loving citizens in their beds. There is no solution in between. Just the relentless slaughter of innnocents passed off as collatoral damage or hopeless impotence.

The problem I have with Goldberg and his ilk is that they're probably smart enough to see the shades of gray, but are too bound to the nationalist line to bother with the nuances of the conflict. They'll continue to poison public opinion, joining those soothing Israeli commanders on NPR in reassuring a dumb, blind public that what they're doing is both quite necessary and quite desireable.

So, where's the outrage? How many civilians have to die, and how much damage has to be done to a country before we start giving a shit about the actions of one of our allies? Look to Iraq, I suppose for your answer. This could go on a long, long time.

Not All Jews are Created Equal

A (Jewish) friend of mine suggested I read an article by Jonah Goldberg in the local paper, saying it's "food for thought." Here is the article, and this was my reply:

Have you ever heard of Jonah Goldberg before? I had, so I looked him up. He's a contributor to the National Review. Are you familiar with the National Review? It's a weekly publication of the batshit crazy right-wing neocons. A publication that Dick Cheney is probably proud to read.

Right off the bat Goldberg pisses me off. He refers to the Qana "massacre", with actual quotes around "massacre." He's making a mockery of the fact that a good three dozen or more civilians were murdered by the Israelis, many of them children. At first, the IDF claimed that rockets had been fired from that location, but later they admitted that was incorrect, and that they 'regretted' the loss of life there. In other words, the IDF itself admitted it was a massacre. No need for the patronizing quotes.

Then Goldberg writes, "They understand that images are more important than armies. Heck, that's why they're terrorists in the first place." Really? You must agree, that's got to be one of the dumbest pair of sentences ever put together. I'll bet that Isaac Mizrahi thinks that images are more important than armies -- why didn't he become a terrorist? Perhaps it's a battle he continues to fight.

Goldberg then blabbers on for a couple of paragraphs with incendiary language that hawkishly advances banal, pig-headed generalities that have no logical bearing on the topic at hand. For example, he writes "Another tactic is to make the Israelis the bad guys for resisting terrorism." Is that what the IDF was doing when they started bombing Lebanese civilians after two of their soldiers were kidnapped IN Lebanon? Resisting terrorism? From where I sit (and, I gather, the vast majority of civilized westerners), when a military kidnaps soldiers of another military, that is hardly a terrorist act -- it's a military act. And responding by bombing the shit out of civilians IS, in fact, a terrorist act.

And here's the most telling paragraph of Goldberg's article so far:

This strategy depends on the willing support of what Lenin called "useful idiots." These are the accommodating Westerners all too eager to believe that the champions of democracy are in the wrong. Some call these people "French," but there are plenty of them in America, too.

In other words, liberals are preventing us from winning the War on Terror. When you read that, did you not recognize the familiar language of the right-wing nuts who run our government? The clear implication by his use of the word 'accomodating' is that Goldberg's political opponents aid and abet terrorists. "You're with us or you're against us." Facile, stupid, authoritarian language crafted to stifle the democratic principles the virtues of which Goldberg purports to extol. You're the "useful idiot" here, Jonah, but you're too fucking stupid to know it.

Another Goldberg quote: "But here's the thing. Even if Israel did accidentally bomb the beach, those deaths would still be tragic, but they wouldn't be Israel's fault." You're fucking kidding me, right? You read this article and thought is passed as a reasonable argument? Yeah, hey -- accident, people. Sure, we shelled the beach, but it was an accident and not our fault. This, again, is exactly the sort of reasoning employed by the right-wing nutjobs running the White House. "We're fighting a new kind of enemy, therefore we have to tap your phones and gather your library records and monitor all your electronic communications and piss all over your civil liberties. It's not OUR fault -- blame the terrorists." How do you refer to Israel as a 'champion of democracy' in one paragraph, and a few sentences later declare that this 'champion' is not responsible for its own actions because of the external threat of terrorism? Which is it, Goldberg, you fucking douchebag?

Speaking of which, it's really damned handy to toss around the word "terrorist" because for the sort of simple, stupid people who support Bush and/or read the National Review, it fits in with their childish, black-and-white view of the world. Good vs. Evil. Life vs. Death. If ever we had an honest, well-reasoned discussion about what the word 'terrorist' means, we'd arrive at the conclusion that the only difference between Hezbollah and Hamas and Israel, or the US and the Iraqi insurgency, is matching uniforms and far superior firepower.

I can barely finish this horrible, hateful, bullshit article. Jonah Goldberg is a fascist fuckhead, an ideological brother of Dick Cheney's, and his writings are a waste of my time and yours.

Just because the son of a bitch is a Jew doesn't mean he's on your side. Did you reckon that Goldberg's words were worthy of contemplation by virtue of his Jewishness alone? Surely it wasn't because of his actual words. You're aware, aren't you, that most of the architects of the miserable failure in Iraq are Jews too, right? Not only is a Jew not automatically on your side because he's Jewish, but he's not automatically on Israel's side, either, any more than white American men are my fellow travelers. No matter how this nonsense in Lebanon ends, Israel is going to be worse off than before, just as the US is far worse off for having invaded Iraq. Both wars are waged by fundamentalist crazies who have no clue how to solve a problem if the solution doesn't involve blowing shit up.

"Food for thought" my ass. It's poison designed to prevent thought.

What kind of a response from me did you expect? And frankly I'm amazed that you read this article and didn't immediately disregard it as fascist bullshit before you got halfway through.

Aren't you supposed to be some kind of a Democrat?

________________

The only thing I would add to that is that it seems to me that an article like this is intended to support the Bush agenda and bolster it's lunatic ideology more than it's intended to defend Israel. Goldberg's ranting in no way attempts to contradict reports of Israeli's terrorist behavior; he simply accuses those who might regard that behavior as terrorist of being terrorists themselves, so fluent is he in Bush's mother tongue of oppositespeak.

The Cafferty File

Is it possible that there are CNN producers who are actually clever enough to a) deceive most people into thinking is a hard news outlet, committed to the highest journalistic standards and ideals, and simultaneously b) openly mock those of us who regard this mass delusion as bullshit?

At least, that's the question that came to me after I viewed this video clip of Jack Cafferty delivering a 'The Cafferty File' segment, its branding wrapped inside the branding of CNN's all-branding-no-bite 'The Situation Room'.

The problem with 'The Situation Room', just to whack one off the top ten (of oh so many) list, is that it gives the appearance of bandwidth while actually throttling it. For those of you who don't speak a lick of geek, what I mean to say is that the numerous large displays on the show might lead one to believe that she has multiplied her access to information, but the true effect of the tools used by the show is to diminish one's capacity to consume any information properly. It is a show that aims to look like it informs while engineered to provoke anxiety. Just because there are a dozen huge screens doesn't mean you've multiplied your information. More like divided it by the number of screens, especially when each of those screens is showing pictures from a place where you could easily, quickly, be killed.

Fear is what keeps televisions tuned into CNN. Fear is what is going to scare up the ratings, explode ad revenue, and deliver the results that the shareholders expect. Fear can kick Reason's ass in a street fight any day of the week. ( In fact, fear got so sick of waiting around for reason to show up for the fight that he decided to go hunt him down a few years back, and he's been delivering stalwart beatings regularly ever since. )

A true thirst for knowledge demands that CNN remain off at all times (with the possible exception of Lou Dobbs' show, whom I take to be an ally in the war on bullshit, even though he is occasionally full of it himself, though aren't we all?). If you wanted actual knowledge about a subject, you would never watch two or three minutes of complete gibberish, brush your hands briskly together three times and say, "mission accomplished!" If you wanted to understand anything about what's happening in Lebanon, for example, you wouldn't feel like you'd scratched that itch after sitting in front of CNN for about a half hour, would you? No, obviously not you personally, because you personally have a brain. Or you wouldn't be here reading this. I can say this confidently because I know who you are.

Anyway, back to Cafferty. Grumpy ol' Jack was asking viewers to write to him and explain why, in 2006, 50% of those surveyed believe that Iraq possessed WMDs when the US invaded in 2003, while just a year ago only 36% of respondents believed the same? And that brings me back to the question I asked at the outset: are these people fucking with me? Who produced that segment, and was Jack's tone what the producer(s) had in mind? Jack seemed baffled. Why in the world would he be genuinely baffled? He's in on the joke, right? You guys are fucking with me, right?

I don't have to say it, do I? You know the answer to Jack's question, right? Of course you do -- we've already established that you have a brain. I won't even do it because it's just to obvious. The very idea of going through the motions of typing the words is so boring that I'm in danger of becoming too sleepy to finish the post. But then I think "What if Jack sees this? Shouldn't he receive an honest reply to his cheeky question from somewhere? What if somebody I know knows somebody who knows somebody, and this post, in some form or other, winds up in a CNN producer's mailbox?"

Ok -- just in case, I'll indulge my fantasy of a nonexistent reach:

Dear Jack Cafferty:
The reason that more people now than a year ago believe that Iraq possessed WMDs before the US invasion and occupation began is because so many of them get their information from 'news' outlets like CNN. Is that answer too simple to believe? Did you think Karl Rove might have a magic wand or something? Or perhaps Tony Snow has mastered a dark art of mass hypnosis? It's because they watch CNN, you fucking idiot! What did CNN ever televise that would openly challenge this fallacy? When, and how many times? Those 36% who were believers a year ago will never, ever change their opinion on this matter, or probably any other, because that is about the same percentage of Americans who generally approve of Bush's job performance when most everyone else secretly wishes that he and Cheney and Rumsfeld would have a crazy-drunk sleepover together and get so out-of-their-minds drunk on liquor and power that they decide to play russian roulette with a full cylinder. These 36%ers are the same people who voted for this sociopath twice. If you read my previous post about the nature of belief, you'll know that if these 36%ers saw this segment on tv, they'd say to themselves, "we're up to 50%! See that? I knew we were right!" I'm going to make a crazy, shot-in-the-dark guess here and say that 36% is probably the same ratio of Americans who believe, and I mean really, truly believe, that the Bible is the literal word of God. Shit, somewhere around 78% of Americans believe in angels. Seriously -- angels.

So you see, it's not just you and your bosses, Jack. It's also got a lot to do with the fact that a whole lot of people are pretty damned dumb and don't much care for facts, but a lot of those damned dumb folks get their news from CNN.

Chicken or the egg, Jack?