Tony's Doing a Heckuva Job

In a way, Tony Blair's enduring, horizonless devotion to George W. Bush is touching. Via the Independent:

Tony Blair has admitted that he is changing his views on combating global warming to mirror those of President Bush - and oppose negotiating international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol.

His admission, which has outraged environmentalists on both sides of the Atlantic, flies in the face of his promises made in the past two years and undermines the agreement he masterminded at this summer's Gleneagles Summit. And it endangers talks that opened in Ottawa this weekend on a new treaty to combat climate change. . . .

Sharing a platform with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in New York this month, Mr Blair confessed: "Probably I'm changing my thinking about this", adding that he hoped the world's nations would "not negotiate international treaties".

This contradicts his assertion in a speech a year ago - which drew a private rebuke from the Bush administration - that "a problem that is global in cause and scope can only be fully addressed through international agreement".

It also denies what his ministers claimed to be his main achievement on global warming at Gleneagles. He had succeeded in getting all the leaders except Mr Bush to sign up to negotiating a successor to the Kyoto treaty, and in arranging a meeting between the G8 and leading developing countries to discuss it.

But instead of endorsing agreed limits on the pollution that causes climate change, Mr Blair told this month's meeting at the Clinton Global Initiative that he was putting his faith in "developing science and technology" - precisely Mr Bush's position.

Someday, we'll learn precisely what Blair has received from this one-sided relationship. Until then, we can only follow the principle of Occam's Razor and assume that W. gives a stellar rim job.

This Is Fucked Up

I haven't done a picture-free post in several months, but this one offers an appropriate window from which to leap from tradition. Via Eric Muller at Is That Legal?, we learn of an execrable website that solicits photos taken by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the website explains, the hosts are specifically seeking "the gory ones so that people who do not wish to see that kind of stuff can just not go in here. I also do not want already published pictures that were taken by news people. This is supposed to be an area where we can see pictures posted by the soldiers themselves." Ordinarily, the website appears to serve as a dumping ground for amateur pornography -- I really can't emphasize this enough, but I wouldn't recommend surrendering to curiosity there, unless you're looking to swear off solid foods for a few days -- but now they're trawling through a different genre of obscenity, promoting a jingoistic necrophilia masquerading as an edgier version of the yellow-ribbon car magnets:

This site will not let pics of our dead or wounded be posted here. That is watched very close, and if someone did sneak one in, just PM a mod and they will get it taken off right away.

Big time rules here, as they push the envelope, but you will not find a better site admin. They do it right. This site lets everyone know that they will not be called names or spit on when they come home. It also lets people dealing with the shit know that there are a whole lot of people back home that realize it is less than perfect over there.

Good fucking grief. So let me get this straight. Photos of Iraqis disaggregated by cluster bombs and machine-gun fire, taken by American soldiers and posted to an amateur porn site will -- okay, I'm struggling here, but let me see if this works -- this will somehow honor the troops and and provide a much-needed source of commiseration and moral support? Is this the best the pro-war crowd can do these days? Right about now, I'm actually nostalgic for all the bullshit about WMDs and the ceaseless global campaign for democracy.

Just Asking

Am I wrong to argue that anyone associated with "America's Next Top Model" should be killed?

As Barry Goldwater might have said: In your heart, you know I'm right.

On this Date in 1986 (Part VI); Or, If I Could Go Backin Time and Kick My Own Ass, I Would Do It Today

As always, background info for this series is located here. Previous entries here, here, here, and here.

On this date, according to my 1986 Roanoke (Va.) Catholic High School Calendar, the following significant, completely unrelated events took place:

Got my fuckin' drivers' license. Got wasted off gas from 6th period chemistry. Slept all afternoon. Worked [at Kroger] 7-11 p.m.

For quite obvious reasons, I can only barely recall the lifestyle described in this entry. Nonetheless, when I try to visualize the combination of nihilism and optimism that defines the human condition, this pretty much does the trick.

WWPD?

The New York Times reports that some prominent conservatives have gone bonkers for "March of the Penguins," for reasons that probably escape the discerning attention of ordinary film viewers. DJW at Lawyers, Guns and Money happily swings a sack of doorknobs at the wingnuttery of Michael Medved and Rich Lowry, so I won't duplicate his fine efforts here. My favorite moment in the Times article, however, comes when Rich Lowry of the National Review urges a gathering of young Republicans to reap the powerful lessons of penguinhood:

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told the young conservatives' gathering last month: "You have to check out 'March of the Penguins.' It is an amazing movie. And I have to say, penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy. These things - the dedication of these birds is just amazing."

Allow me to be the first to endorse Rich Lowry's suggestion that young Republicans model their existence on the lives of penguins -- living on icebergs, swimming in near-frozen water, plodding brutal distances to procreate in a blizzard, and having their offspring dismembered by hungry seagulls.

Or maybe if Lowry admires the penguins so much, he sould just get one for himself.

Update: Not so fast, Lowry. Some penguins are gay. Hat tip to anonymous...uh...commenting...person.

Blackwater

I suppose we probably saw this coming:

NEW ORLEANS -- Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. . . .

. . . "When they told me New Orleans, I said, 'What country is that in?,'" said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase "Operation Iraqi Freedom" printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a "State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW," he said he was "just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is." Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq. Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they've been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. "This is a trend," he told us. "You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

Fair and Balanced

Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times, speaking yesterday on KCRW's "Left, Right and Center":

"I just want to make a clarification. I heard here in town today that someone said that [Michael] Brown was being called a "scapegoat." That's entirely wrong. A scapegoat is an innocent animal who is placed with the blame and the sins of his people -- it comes out of Leviticus, and out of Roshashanna, the Jewish holiday -- and then the goat is driven out of town and over a cliff and killed. Two things are absent in this case. The goat has to be innocent; in this case Brown is guilty. And the high priest who places the guilt of the people -- or in this case President Bush and his own responsibilities -- has not announced his guilt and responsibilities. So on neither account is he a scapegoat. He is in fact simply a malfunctioning official."

And so we acknowledge voices on the Right who aren't completely unhinged.

I Shit You Not

That's "Freedom Rolls" to you, Islamo-Fascist!


Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and Powerline are among those losing their godforsaken minds over the new Flight 93 memorial design, to be constructed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Right Blogistan is incensed, evidently, that part of the memorial has been designed in the shape of a crescent. As the Pittsbugh Post-Gazette describes it, the

"Crescent of Embrace" will feature a Tower of Voices, containing 40 wind chimes -- one for each passenger and crew member who died -- and two stands of red maple trees that will line a walkway caressing the natural bowl shape of the land. Forty separate groves of red and sugar maples will be planted behind the crescent, and a black slate wall will mark the edge of the crash site, where the remains of those who died now rest.

Images of the memorial may be found at the website of the architect Paul Murdoch, whose sinister intent Malkin and friends have alone discerned. On their view, the memorial demonstrates nothing less than the capitulation of all Christendom to the Saracen hordes -- a "sick joke" that (in the words of Powerline's Scott Johnson), illustrates "profound self-loathing that results in homage to our enemies."

The interpretive techniques at work here were last seen transcribing Satanic messages backwardly masked into Judas Priest albums. (Then again, what else might we expect from someone who looks at the World War II internment camps and finds a "how-to" manual buried within?) The proprietor of this site, for instance, takes a map of the entire memorial grounds (which, examined with a different conspiratorial eye, might be seen to resemble the territory of Israel), excises the "crescent of embrace," inverts it 180 degrees and matches it against the red crescent of the Tunisian flag. And this image, created by someone named "Etaoin Shrdlu," has "generated an azimuthal equidistant world map centered on the location of the Flight 93 Memorial which seems to indicate that the crescent is oriented toward Mecca."

What the fuck is wrong with these people? Are we supposed to assume that visitors to the site, embraced by a semicircle of maple trees, will somehow experience an unusual sense of affiliation with Islam? That by unwittingly orienting themselves toward Mecca, they will invite Jesus' purging wrath? Will this bring us more hurricanes, tornadoes, smog and anal sex? There's no need to spend much time demolishing the arguments against the memorial. It should be pointed out, however, that it becomes possible to "see" the site as an homage to Islam only by doing what bloggers do best -- by observing a three-dimensional world from an archimedian, flattened perspective that can be cut apart, pasted upside down, and scaled to fit whatever opiate dreams pass for political agency these days. Unable to imagine the experience of actually visiting the memorial site -- as the panel of artists, citizens and Flight 93 families who selected the design most certainly have done -- Malkin and friends satisfy themselves with the kind of fly-over analysis that George W. Bush inexplicably found sufficient in surveying another, more recent catastrophe.

"That will be $98.50, kid -- the cool hand of the market demands it."

Shorter John Stossel: Hurricane Katrina has allowed us to taste the sweet juice of free market economics, from which all human blessings and sustenance flow. Price gougers are merely performing their assigned role as the rational actors who ensure the continuance of civilization and order. All hail the profiteers, the forgotten humanitarians!

Friday Cat Blogging

Eleven-year-old Henry, establishing new claims to the title of Dirty Old Man, humps a blanket for 35 minutes of inexplicable pleasure.

Happy Stono Rebellion Day

On 9 September, 1739, the largest slave revolt in colonial North American history took place when Jemmy, an Angolan from St. Paul's Parish, South Carolina, led twenty fellow bondsmen in a raid on an ammunition store. After killing the shopkeepers and leaving their severed heads on the front porch, the rebel militia -- raising a flag and crying "Liberty" -- marched southward across the Stono River, killing nearly two dozen white Carolinians in six households, gathering recruits along the way as they cut a path toward Spanish Florida. Spain, which by October would resume hostilities with England in the War of Jenkins' Ear, had recently offered refuge to escaped slaves who reached the fort at St. Augustine. Coupled with South Carolina's recent announcement of the Security Act -- a pre-emptive act requiring all white men to carry firearms to church on Sundays, in anticipation of a slave revolt -- Spain's overtures were sufficient to persuade the enslaved Africans of St. Paul's Parish to fulfill the law's prophecy.

The Stono Rebellion was interrupted abruptly on the afternoon of the 9th, when an irate posse of whites overtook the rebels near the Edisto River. Following a series of gun battles that killed nearly half the slave militia, the rest of the rebels scattered into the woods; over the next six months, aided by Chicakasaw and Catawba Indians, South Carolina planters captured and executed the remaining fugitives, dismembering the corpses and posting their limbs, torsos and heads on spikes near public roads as a warning to others.

Silver Foot in Mouth Award: Contestant 1

Originally uploaded by DBM.

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them."

Barbara Bush, in a radio interview from the Astrodome.

Local Bear Loots Finds Food in Garbage

From our local paper:

"We saw it Sunday afternoon," Lisa Boman said of the bear that struck again Tuesday in the 9300 block of Lee Smith Drive. "He ran through our yard and jumped over our fence."

The bear crossed streets and put on a show Tuesday afternoon, knocking over trash containers. At one point it was seen munching on a diaper.

People in the neighborhood, tucked between the airport and Egan Drive, have reported numerous bear incidents in recent weeks. Other neighborhoods are reporting them too. Early Friday, police were called to a home in the 4400 block of Kanata Street in the Mendenhall Valley for a report of a bear inside a house.

Bears were reported to police Tuesday from Douglas Island to the Lemon Creek area to the valley and Auke Bay.

Neil Barten, biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said bears are fattening up before going into hibernation, and some are more comfortable around people than they might have been a few months ago.

Barking dogs don't bother them as much as they did in May, he explained. A garage might have seemed a scary place, but after perhaps finding garbage, dog food or a freezer inside, some bears have learned garages are worth the trouble.

Two notes to self for tomorrow:
(1) Stop washing clothes in bacon grease;
(2) Stop wearing diapers.

Not That This is a Pattern or Anything

The new FEMA disaster manual

My usual absorption of right wing radio has been interrupted recently by my newfound obsession with podcasts, which have allowed me to artificially broaden my audio horizons as I drive to and from campus. Yesterday, however, I left my iPod at home and tested the resilience of my gag reflex by listening to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Reagan, who served as thick-necked bookends to a day spent narcotizing my students with lectures on the emergence of bonded labor of varying kinds in the Spanish and English colonies of North America. It was a good day to listen. In the morning, I was treated to a classic Rush Limbaugh tirade, wherein the suffering masses of the Gulf Coast were upbraided for their "entitlement mentality," as if being plucked from a rooftop and herded into the Astrodome were a slipperly slope leading to nationalized health care and top loin steaks pilfered from the backyard grills of the deserving rich. I half expected him to accuse "welfare moms" of having more babies for the sole reason of having more of "them" to evacuate. (I'd track down the transcript for this, but I'd have to buy a membership to the Rush Limbaugh Society for the Propagation of Pharmaceuticals in Foreign Parts. With my $55 membership, I'd get access to all the transcripts and podcasts I could choke down, but right now I'm selling desk copies on Amazon to pay my car insurance, so there's no way that's going to happen.) In any case, by mid-afternoon it was time to hear Michael Reagan fist-fuck his way through the English language; yesterday's bit of inspiration involved a few words of praise for Harry Connick, Jr., who -- unlike Sean Penn -- actually managed to get in there and, in Reagan's own words, "rescue some black people from their front porches."

Finally, as we descend into the nether regions of the right, there's this from John Derbyshire of the National Review, who a few days ago offered the following scientific gloss to our first refugee crisis since the Civil War:

Our own Roger Clegg noted last year that "Birth rates for unmarried women vary widely by race and Hispanic origin ... Among African Americans, 68.2 percent of births are illegitimate, versus 23.0 percent for non-Hispanic whites."

Meanwhile, so far as males are concerned, the Bureau of Justice reports that "At midyear 2004 there were 4,919 black male prison and jail inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,717 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 717 white male inmates per 100,000 white males."

Under the circumstances, to say, as Steve Sailer does, that African Americans "tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups," and "need stricter moral guidance from society" does not seem to me very outrageous.

This Derbyshire turd was pinched out in reply to a post in which John Podhoretz, momentarily believing it was 1966, courageously denounced the xenophobes at VDARE.com for suggesting that black Americans "need stricter moral guidance from society."

UPDATE: For more of the same, see this excellent compilation of racist bile.

Mississippi on His Mind

George W. Bush really wants to sit on Trent Lott's porch:

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." (Laughter)
--George W. Bush, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005

***

I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs. That's what I think is going to happen.

I just want you to know that when I'm thinking about how we can help this part of the world, Mississippi is on my mind. Mississippi is a part of the future of this country, and part of that future is to help you get back up on your feet. And I'm confident that your United States senator Trent Lott, if I don't say it loud enough, he will. (Laughter.) He'll remind us. But I appreciate you taking time out of your day.
-- George W. Bush, Poplarville, Miss., September 5, 2005

Government Falls to the Armies of Compassion

Don't worry, guys -- the bloggers are coming!


With his own special brew of libertarian flakery and blogger triumphalism, Hugh Hewitt consoles the destitute victims of God's mighty wrath. Conceding a point that should now be obvious -- that Hurricane Katrina was worse than the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- Hewitt offers the following bit of solace:

Yesterday [September 1] America's emergency relief effort went into high gear and is likely to stay there for weeks, as all across the country citizens open their wallets to help out their fellow countrymen.

Before long, however, the extreme needs will be met and the long-term rebuilding will get underway. At that point it will become much less obvious how ordinary Americans can help. When terrorists struck on September 11, the carnage was huge and the loss of life staggering, but an entire community was not wiped out. With this disaster, America confronts for the first time the daunting reconstruction of complex social and political organizations.

It is a task which may be beyond the ability of the local, state, and federal governments to manage. How, for example, does a government--at any level--presume to assist a shattered church in the reconstruction of its walls and its Sunday School programs, an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in the care of its members, a community theater in the reconstruction of its playhouse, or scores and scores of high school athletes in the completion of their senior year schedules so that colleges and universities can offer talented kids a chance at a free education?

The only way such a multitude of specialized needs can be met is for the vast, vast numbers of their counterparts across the United States to act--independently of government--to come to their aid in a reconstruction effort.

In other words, smash the state; we live in such a specialized world that only the internet and its innumerable microcommunities can meet our true needs, like reorganizing the New Orleans chess club (which Hewitt actually invokes as example of the complex, a la carte social wounds that can only be met by private citizens with similar interests). More broadly, Hewitt advises that the reconstruction of the social fabric be handed over to blogs like N. Z. Bear, Mark D. Roberts, and others who are more adept than government at directing resources and knowledge where they are needed most.

All this is well and good, but the subtext of Hewitt's argument is rather bizarre. As he musters the privatized armies of compassion, Hewitt introduces the claim that "government" presumes to do all of these things in the first place -- rebuilding community theaters, directing talented but displaced young athletes into collegiate athletic programs, setting up chess boards and brewing coffee for twelve-step programs -- rather than providing the basic protections and services that were so evidently absent during the first five days after the storms. Hewitt doubtless believes, as all conservatives do, that we enlist government to perform tasks that are beyond the reach of individual citizens. But what kind of a society can we envision -- what kind of chess club can we hope reconstruct -- when the state fails to provide the fundamental securities that make civic life, including democracy itself, possible? This was the important question raised by social progressives throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, questions that were to varying degrees addressed from the 1930s through the 1960s, when an activist federal government, prodded by wars of varying kinds (e.g., wars against the depression, against fascism, against communism, against poverty and disease), redistributed wealth, political power, and "security" in ways that (however insufficient they were at the time) seem positively revolutionary in the age of Karl Rove and Bill Frist.

Hewitt and others want to push past this basic confrontation and start speaking the only activist language they can truly understand, offering warm homilies of folksy, can-do Americans who can't be bothered to wait around for government to solve their problems. Sitting on the comfortable side of the digital divide, Hewitt and his readers don't have to wonder any longer if it's government's job to shore up levees, preserve wetlands, evacuate the poor, or prevent people from drowning in their own feculence. Instead, they can count on the blogosphere to soothe the wounded while they themselves trawl the ruins of New Orleans for disconnected, affirmative anecdotes -- weepy applause lines for State of the Union speeches yet to be written -- while nudging away the dead bodies with a broomstick.

Drowned in a Bathtub

Rob Farley speaks:

It seems readily apparent that Republican ineptitude and obstructionism at FEMA, combined with the general problems associated with tight funding, have played a significant role in slowing down relief efforts. Whether more government competence could have prevented the breaching of the levees, we'll never know. Watch for the discourse the subtly change, however. Dubya has already admitted that the relief efforts thus far have been inadequate. The trick that the Republicans (and their conservatarian allies in the blogosphere) will be trying to play over the next few weeks is to convince the world that the problem is not an inept Republican government, but is instead the abstract concept of an activist government.

And Michael Ledeen unwittingly demonstrates why Rob Farley has a Ph.D.:

Why has nobody blamed the lawyers (I mean, it seems so obvious)?

New Orleans shows how hidebound and slow-moving the bureaucracy is, at all levels, from local through Federal. But the lawyers are always waving their codes, prattling on about the orderly practices we have designed to deal with daily life in this highly civilized society.

But when something like this happens, political leaders should recognize that those rules no longer apply, and that the only way to deal effectively with it is to switch to military codes of conduct.

Ergo, martial law should have been declared, a curfew should have been proclaimed, and armed men and women should have patrolled the streets. With military authority established, it might (only might, human beings screw up all the time) have been possible to have rounded up some of those buses and evacuated more people. It would certainly have been possible to protect the sick, the hospitals, the hospices, the nursing homes.

If you follow my drift…it’s the damn lawyers, as usual…

Yep, now we know the real reason bodies are floating in the streets, elderly people are still pissing themselves on rooftops, diabetics are lapsing into comas, and corpses are deteriorating in wheelchairs. It's all because a pile of nervous bureaucrats are afraid of being sued by southern trial lawyers when all this is over.

Holy fuck.

The Buck Stops Somewhere Else

It continues to floor me that people like Assrocket at Powerline are capable of taking seriously the notion that somehow, the Bush administration bears no immediate responsibility for the unfathomable disaster along the Gulf Coast. Apropos of the Iraqi constitutional struggle, there's no sense debating the question of whether the president's policies represent "a" source of colossal underachievement and negligence or "the" source of colossal underachievement and negligence. It is, however, worth wondering how the Presidential Reacharound Committee at Powerline -- and I have not even begun to plumb the sinkhole of Fox News commentary, so I'm sure this is only the beginning -- can announce the following:

The blame game continues, with most attention being focused not on the local and state officials who have responsibility for disaster preparedness, but on the federal government. Even at the federal level, I've not seen any informed criticism of FEMA or any other relevant federal agency, or any detailed analysis of the formidable logistical problems that make the relief effort painfully difficult. No, the critics aren't interested in such targets or such details. What they want is to bash President Bush, and we'll hear more and more of it as the days go by.

To paraphrase something Jonathan Schwartz once wrote at A Tiny Revolution, Assrocket would have made as much sense if he had typed ;sdOAIGHF;AoirEhG; LFkCHJX;GL kASDFhJGO&%^&*(IUVH OIJF. It evidently makes no difference to him that the directorship of FEMA -- once a cabinet level position -- was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security, where it has clearly lost ground in terms of funding and access to the president himself. Any scolding of "local and state officials" must concede this basic intitutional fact; Assrocket seems, however, to believe that disaster relief still functions according to the logic of a decentralized nineteenth century republic. Sitting in his pajamas near the headwaters of the Mississippi, Assrocket can only observe the obvious, which is that relief efforts are "painfully difficult," a defense that should carry as much weight as Shrub's own "hard work" bleats from the first campaign debate nearly a year ago. Sitting in my pajamas, untold thousands of miles from the hundreds of people trapped without food or water in public hospitals (ones that sit across the street from now-evacuated private facilities) I'm at least unaddled enough to observe that what we're witnessing in New Orleans are not the "painfully difficult" consequences of nature's insensate rage, but a multi-storied cluster fuck decades in the making — one that was forseeable (and forseen) and for which all public officials who failed to prepare adequately deserve to wade for days in their own feces. That being said, the meme that George W. Bush bears no meaningful responsibility for any of this is absurd on the face of it. If the American right can credit Bush directly for such "logistically difficult" matters as Libya's abandonment of WMD programs, or the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, or the "Orange Revolution" in the Ukraine, surely he can assume some kind of direct responsibility for the devolution of "homeland security" in his own fucking country.