Sunday, April 06, 2003
Your Two Cents - I finally added a comments section to my blog. Click on the "comments" line at the bottom of each post, and let 'er rip.
It's an experiment, of course; if it's too much of a hassle, or doesn't add anything (which I find hard to believe possible), I'll spike it. But 'til then, it should be interesting.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/6/2003 01:24:28 AM
Let's get going!
Saturday, April 05, 2003
Death Factory - Note to the American Left, especially all you anti-Bush protesters: Read this, and then tell me you have any claim to moral superiority:
Each sheaf of notes contains a picture of a man or woman. Each and every one has been shot in the head. Their wounds are mangled and gaping. Many of them barely look human any more as the anonymous photographer chronicled their dead faces. It is a horror almost beyond words.
The story, in the British Sunday Herald, discusses British soldiers' discovery of one of Hussein's death and torture marts, in As Zubayr. Hundreds of bodies. Evidence of torture. Most damning; detailed records of what happened.
It is hard not to look at the black-and-white photographs -- two for each victim -- and wince. Yet each was a brother, a father or a son; or a mother, a daughter or a sister. Each had a past and hopes for a future, yet each ended here, in this dry and dusty hall of the dead. There must be at least 200 of them in the plywood coffins, roughly hammered together by a hurried carpenter. All of them are in bags, jumbled together in sad piles of remains.
So one of the left's most persistent tropes is "we shouldn't be fighting this war; it's killing Iraqis! If we weren't invading Iraq, innocent Iraqis wouldn't be dying!"
Iraqis like this?In one sack a single photo lies. It is a simple ID card. On it a middle-aged man stares out. He has black hair, a long face and a drooping moustache. In life he would perhaps have looked pensive. But lying, half-covered by his own dusty remains, the man pictured within looks sad and forlorn. He looks regretful for the life stolen from him. A splotch of bloodstain on the corner of the card is reminder enough of the brutality of how all his hopes died.
I'm normally pretty dispassionate about the things I write about in this blog. Not so, now. I can barely contain the rage I feel at the idiocy of some on the American left, even some of my own neighbors.
Speculation: About 500 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have died in this war so far.
Fact: Hussein's regime has killed over a million Iraqis in the past thirty years. That's 30-odd thousand a year, on average, an average of 250 a week for the entire time. That's a rate actually a tad higher than the estimate of casualties so far for the war.
And it ends now.
Lefties: explain this to me. Anyone.
I doubt any of you has the balls to try.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2003 09:46:34 PM
Where Will It End - So listening to Arthur Kent's bleating (as indistinct from so much other bleating this past few months), I tried to catalog the little rhetorical steeplechase has characterized the spin over this war so far:
Any others?
and now,
The backed-up fountains of ridicule are ready to break loose in a torrent. Get ready, American Left.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2003 09:33:43 PM
SCUD Dud - As I was writing the piece below, who should pop on the TV but none other than Arthur "Scud Stud" Kent himself. He's writing for McCall's magazine and hosting a puff show on the History Channel today. He was on the Larry King show, talking about the announcement today about the post-war provisional government of Iraq. He was in a panel discussion with King, Winston Churchill (grandson of the great British prime minister) and a reporter for Nile TV.
Kent commented on the notion of a government led by CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks and proposed civilian administrator, retired General Jay Garner: "This means quagmire. Game over".
The Q word, again. You'd think they'd learn.
Churchill responded, with some of his granddad's aplomb: The idea that the UN, with its threat of Russian, Chinese or French vetos, would produce a better thing thatn a UK/Us administration, is absurd. I think the moment will come when the regime cracks, and people across the world, including the Muslim world, will see scenes of rejoicing after liberation fro 30 years of tortunre and murder...and that'll have an amazing effect on the Arab Street. We have to make sure we follow through and not just move on and forget about Iraq.
Kent dismissed Churchill:SUre, there'll be a period of rejoicing. But the fact of matter [this seems to have become Kent's favorite modifier to any sentence, by the way; "the fact of the matter is, we're taking a break" is only a slight exaggeration] is, the Russians and French are more popular in Iraq than the US is. I think the reporting needs to consider the deep animosity among the Iraqis against US and UK for the twelve y ears of crushing sanctions and the twelve-year bombing campaign. When the time comes to estabilsh a supposedly free iraq, and there's no UN - where's the logic in that? The Iraqi people and the Iraqi government aren't buying it.
Arthur Kent; from "Scud Stud" to "Clairvoyant UN Flack".
Listen; you can hear the sound of a career falling faster than a SCUD that's been hit by a Patriot.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2003 08:56:51 PM
SCUD Studs - There's been no Arthur Kent, so far in this war.
Maybe you remember the first Gulf War; NBC correcpondent Arthur Kent was widely christened the "SCUD Stud" for his performance while reporting from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. As the missiles fell about him, Kent's reports were distributed worldwide via satellite.
We've not heard much about the heroism of the reporters this time. I think that's because the embedded reporters have shown us the real heroes. They're the men and women on the ships, at the airbases and aloft, and most of all in the tanks and Bradleys and trucks rolling through Iraq, or blazing away in green light at unseen enemies, or going door-to-door through the cities and villages of Iraq.
In 1991, Arthur Kent and Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf were the best we could do. Today, we can see a quarter-million potential heroes in action.
So who will the American people remember in ten years?
Time will tell, of course.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2003 08:19:43 PM
Separated At Birth? - Christiane Amanpour and the late Joey Ramone.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2003 07:32:08 PM
RIP Michael Kelly - Michael Kelly, WaPo columnist who left the newsroom to travel with the 3rd ID in Iraq, was killed yesterday in a Hummvee accident.
He was a literate, commonsensical, tough-as-nails conservative commentator. He is sorely missed already.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/5/2003 07:02:04 PM
Friday, April 04, 2003
Out - I've got some stuff to take care of today, that'll probably eat up my whole day and evening.
Look for a blogalanche this weekend, per usual.
Have a great weekend!
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2003 09:44:37 AM
Crushing British Defeat - AFP is carrying this report of British Marines being thrashed in action in southern Iraq:
Leading Airman Dave Husbands said the marines were beaten from the start. "We turned up to play and there was no-one around, just a few kids messing about," he said.
We're talking soccer, of course: "Then suddenly, out of nowhere, came this kitted-up football team together with a referee and two linesmen.
Y'know, it was GIs who made baseball - "Besoboro" - the Japanese national sport. I think we need to get cracking here.
"The boys thought they must be the Iraqi international side or something"
(Via Andrew Sullivan)
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2003 08:43:52 AM
Garry Owen - While the particulars of the PFC Lynch story have changed in the past day or two, it seems clear so far that she's a hero.
But lest we forget, we have a group of about 1,000 heroes to talk about.
While PFC Lynch's story (and that of the snake-eaters that rescued her, and the Iraqi that tipped us off to her whereabouts) is a wonderful story, it'll be great, one day, to hear the story of the 3rd Squadron of the Seventh Cavalry.
This battalion-sized group, the armored recon element of the Third Infantry Division, spent nearly two weeks way out ahead of the rest of its division - its mission (I don't know this, but a look at the map would seem to confirm it) to drive as much as 50-60 miles in front of the main advance - finding the enemy, fixing his location for the rest of the Division to either destroy or bypass, and pressing further onward toward the capital.
Worth a thought, anyway.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2003 07:25:08 AM
Why We Fight? - Jim Dwyer, an embedded reporter for the NYTimes, may have found the keys to Iraqi democracy.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
Now, I've got the usual visual indicators of my sympathies. My house has a large "Liberate Iraq" sign. My car is festooned with a "Deserve Victory" sticker. My website...oy vey, look at my right margin.
"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"
But I have to add this - courtesy of today's Lileks bleat - without which neither my blog nor life will be complete. 
Sorta sums it all up, I think.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2003 06:53:33 AM
They Really Hate Us, You Know - The Iraqi man who tipped us off about PFC Lynch didn't seem to resent Americans too deeply for conquering most of his country...:
Mohammed watched as the man slapped the American woman with his open palm, then again with the back of his hand. In that instant, Mohammed recalled today, he resolved to do something. The next day, when the man in black was not around, Mohammed sneaked in to see the young woman.
It'll be interesting to see how many of these things happen as we close in on Baghdad.
"Don't worry, don't worry," he told her. He was going to help.
As he recounted the events today, that decision set in motion one of the most dramatic moments in the first two weeks of the war in Iraq. Five days after Mohammed located U.S. Marines and told them what he knew, Black Hawk helicopters swooped in under cover of darkness, touching down next to the six-story hospital, and a team of heavily-armed commandos stormed the building. With hand-scrawled maps from Mohammed and his wife, the commandos quickly found the injured Pfc. Jessica Lynch and spirited her away to safety.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/4/2003 06:24:06 AM
Thursday, April 03, 2003
Sad, Sad World - As much as I biff on Steve Perry, he's at least worth mixing it up with. The guy is rational. I think he's wrong about a lot of things, but he's rational.
But I worry about the City Pages' Brad Zellar.
I'm not sure what to chalk this piece from his blog up to (you'll have to scroll down - his archive links don't work); solipsism, the eternal self-absorption of the eternally single. The word that jumps to mind: embarassing.
At least he starts with the key admission:I don't have any kids myself,
It goes downhill from here. but that's precisely because I know how dangerous they are.
"I'm not a neurosurgeon, but that's precisely why I know everything about operating on the brain..."Dangerous and erratic. Dangerous and erratic and cold blooded. Every dark impulse known to man can be found in the heart of the average five-year-old.
No more so than in the heart fo the average solipsistic thirtysomething alternative writer. Five year olds have fewer inhibitions and even less artfulness about expressing the dark - or the light sides, for that matter - of their personalities. Children are instinctively militaristic, and people spend years trying to civilize it out of the little bastards, but it's hopeless.
"Little bastards". Charming.
Children are inherently fascinated with the dark side of everything; it's how they learn to deal with the dark sides that seem, more and more, to surround them as they become more aware. To try to make this into some sort of all-encompassing social commentary is absurd. Kids have a sophisticated understanding of vengeance and the consequences of messing with the man. They know what happens when they don't do what daddy tells them to do, or they for damn sure should. That conflict of fearing the man and wanting to be the man is at the heart of the military instinct.
This is claptrap.
Kids are taught the "consequences of messing with the man", usually inheriting from parents who learned them in turn from their own parents. Look around and see if I'm not right on this point: the adults who most enthusiastically embrace war as a spectator sport are those who are most in touch with their inner child.
Read: Mr. Zellar has a friend that reflects this notion. Mr. Zellar is extrapolating. serving up the extrapolation with a healthy dollop of his own preconceptions of the world - and of the children he's never had to raise..But enough dicking around. I'll get right to my point: as always, honesty is the best policy with your kids. And if this war isn't a coachable moment for the entire family, I don't know what is. Your children need to understand that there are no longer any non-combatants in this world, and the sooner they learn the rules of engagement the better off we'll all be.
Spoken like a person who's never had to care for a person outside of his own turtleneck in his life. Because America's youngsters are born gun crazy and trigger happy, but they have the battle ethics of the Fedayeen. Hand a kid a gun and I guarantee you they'll know what to do with it. Guns are to humans as litter boxes are to cats --all right, that's a terrible analogy, but what I'm trying to say is that weapons are part of our wiring. Put a pistol in a kid's hand and see how long it takes for them to point it at their mother's forehead and pull the trigger.
It's called "curiosity", and "testing boundaries", and modelling behavior. It's quite normal - a Masai kid will do the same with a pretend bow and arrow.Show me a kid who doesn't like to blow stuff up and slay God's creatures and I'll show you a panty-waist with a long, tortured life ahead of them.
Show me a writer who makes such gross and (let's call a spade a spade), bitter generalizations about children, things he has no clue about, and I'll show you someone with a hidden axe to grind.So, look, parents: relax. Let your kids watch this war to their heart's content. Trust me: they'll get a big kick out of it. There is, of course, always the chance that some particularly fragile children will be freaked out by what they see, and perhaps even permanently affected. I can assure you, however, that in such instances the problem is with the child and not with the war. Neurosis is inescapable in this day and age, and like pretty much everything short of sexual gratification it should be first acquired in the home. So: don't sweat it. War or no war, you're gonna have some stiff therapy bills down the road. That's your problem.
I'm pondering two possible responses here:
We continue:As your kids watch the televised war, of course, they'll likely have questions about what they're seeing, and you must be willing to answer these queries truthfully. There's not a damn thing in the world wrong with telling your kids that we're killing a bunch of belligerent foreigners and that America's going to be a much better place without them. Believe me, your children will understand.
Or, better yet, tell them the real truth.They'll understand even better than you do. Kids get this stuff, they really do. "The bigger the gun, the bigger the fun" is one of life's earliest and most useful lessons.
While it no doubt made a great-sounding theory down at (I'll guess) the First Avenue one night, it has no bearing on how real children react. But what would I know - I'm just one of those benighted slob that's raised/is raising three of themYour kids are also sure to encounter protesters, but, again, simply tell them the truth about these odious characters: these people are hippies and vegetarians who've never done a damn thing but run America down, and you can boil all their babble down to one word: hogwash.
I'm saving that lesson for their first encounter with Brad Zellar's writing.
Brad! Time to up the Zoloft. And since you would seem to live in Uptown or Dinkytown or Loring or some other child-free haven, you might think of meeting some actual children, rather than dreaming up kids who resemble manifestations of Eric Budd or Edvard Munch paintings.
Y'know. Most of them.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 10:18:10 PM
Sightseeing - I've done a bit of driving around lately. I've noticed a few things:
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 08:13:41 PM
At The Gates - In the movie Enemy at the Gates, itself rather loosely adapted from one chapter of an excellent book by the same name, one of the most striking scenes is at the beginning of the movie.
The Soviets - Stalin - were desperate to stop the Germans - every bit as desperate as the stalinist Hussein or his minions are to stop us today.
A trainload of Soviet conscripts, unarmed except for their Communist Party overseers, rolls across the steppe to Stalingrad. On the east bank of the Volga, they detrain, and are herded to boats through thick artillery fire (which kills a number of them). The boats sail through artillery fire and an attack by Stuka dive-bombers that kills some of the boats, and kills more of the men packed on the decks. Some men jump and try to swim for it, and are shot by the Komissars.
The boats arrive on the west bank of the Volga, still under fire (shrapnel mows down more of them), and they climb a stairway and run down a street to stand behind a US-supplied truck. There, an officer hands out rifles - one rifle and five rounds to every two men. "Those without rifles, pick up the rifle when the man with the rifle is killed", the officers bellow. The conscripts are herded to a jumpoff position, realizing that this is not a good situation.
The whistle blows, and the men - armed or not - jump off and charge down a street toward a German position. Waiting rifles and machine guns mow them down like ripe wheat.
The survivors turn and try to run back to Russian lines. A machine gun manned by a KGB crew also mows them down. The few survivors, having no choice, continue the attack, stepping over bodies from their own group and several previous attacks. Almost all die - except the movie's protagonists.
But there we leave the movie to join the present day. In Iraq today, a similiar scene seemed to occur:There was fierce fighting in Kut, to the south, where desperate Iraqis armed with rifles charged tanks in a suicide raid. "We mowed down" the attackers, said Lt. Col. B.P. McCoy.
The stories have been circulating for weeks: Ba'ath machine gunners driving Iraqi conscripts forward to the charge; Fedayeen press gangs rounding up civilians, Soviet-style, and in effect holding the families hostage to make the men and boys attack; stuff straight out of World War II.
Again - we really have to win this one.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 08:10:54 PM
Grow: Protesters and the Free Ride - Last week, we talked about Governor Pawlenty's proposal to charge court costs and arrest-related expenses to protesters who break the law in the name of civil disobedience.
In the Twin Cities, we've raised a generation of protesters who've grown used to being able to conduct their "civil disobedience" - complete with scores of "vanity arrests" for trespassing and other offenses - completely at city/county cost.
Doug Grow wrote about this last week. There are only a couple of problems, beyond those pesky civil-rights issues, that I can see with Gov. Tim Pawlenty's desire to place a "restitution" charge on people arrested for civil disobedience.
Mr. Grow - leave aside the simple fact that one does one not have a "civil right" to break the law. Doesn't the whole notion of a whiffle-ball justice system undermine the whole idea of "civil disobedience"? If the "protesters" approach an act of civil disobedience knowing that there will be absolutely no meaningful consequences, is it really disobedience at all?
Back to Grow:1. He's not planning to charge enough per bust.
Forget for a moment the snarky little class-warfare sneer (which is completely misguided; most "anti-war" protesters I've met are either perfectly well-to-do Highland Park matrons who drive to the "protests" in Volvo 740s, or college kids with no real bills or responsibilities.
2. Many of the people I know who get arrested don't have that kind of money. Though many protesters work and raise families, many are students and many others frequently don't have the all-American gumption to get the sort of jobs needed to move to places such as Eagan.
To say "they can't afford it" infantilizes both the protesters and the notion of civil disobedience.
And it's irrelevant; the law is the law. Someone arrested for trespassing outside the context of a (politically correct) demonstration can not expect the kid-gloved tokenized treatment that "anti-war" protesters, rich or poor, can expect.
Either, for that matter, can a demonstrator for a less PC cause. Pro-life protesters rarely if ever get quite as sympathetic or consequence-free forum from the legal system.Before examining its possible shortcomings, here's a quick review of the governor's outside-the-box -- and likely outside-the-Constitution -- proposal:
And this is unconstitutional precisely how?
Pawlenty, apparently agitated that police arrested about 90 antiwar demonstrators last week in the Twin Cities area, said the protesters should pay for the costs of their arrests. He believes $200 would be a nice, round number to work with.
"We're not saying people don't have a right to free speech," Pawlenty said Friday on his weekly radio program. "We're just saying people don't have a right to free arrest." Very glib, but civil libertarians, of course, already are voicing objections to the governor's plan. (What don't they object to?)
So many ways to respond to this.
"A surcharge on free speech," is what Senate Majority Leader John Hottinger, DFL-St. Peter, calls the Pawlenty plan.
Breaking the law may be speech, but it's not specifically protected by the Constitution; nothing in the Constitution says that either protected or disobedient speech need be cost-free. I enjoy freedom of the press - but I have to pay for the bandwidth and server space. If I intended to break the law to make my "speech"'s point, why would I not expect to pay for it?My concerns are less academic than Hottinger's.
Grow fails to mention that this was a rather extraordinary operation; not in the least bit like the usual protest. Grow uses it to emotionally manipulate the argument.
For starters, $200 often isn't going to be nearly enough to cover the cost of an arrest.
The state record for cost-per-protest-bust, for instance, came on Dec. 28, 1998, when more than 600 law enforcement officers -- police, sheriff's deputies and highway patrol officers -- moved as a mighty army against a bunch of Hwy. 55 protesters in south Minneapolis.
In the end, 36 scrawny tree-huggers were arrested at a cost of $332,488 in overtime billing alone. In addition, law enforcement officers consumed $7,309.90 worth of box lunches, doughnuts, muffins and coffee. Under a pay-for-your-own arrest plan, each tree-hugger would have had to write a check for more than $9,000. We saw an exercise in efficiency just this past Tuesday when 68 protesters were arrested outside the U.S. Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis by a modest force of 50 Minneapolis cops. No overtime was involved in the two-hour operation, and the protesters were hauled to Metro Transit buses, which were lent to the police at no charge.
Note the clever rhetorical device: for the extreme case, Grow has taken the trouble to get the actual numbers. For the "typical" case that applies to the vast majority of arrests, he takes a wild guess.
Assuming the average Minneapolis cop is paid about $25 an hour, the bust-per-protester charge should be only about $40, not counting booking and any upcoming court costs.
Grow fails to account for the non-police-time-related costs; worse, he fails to mention or account for the costs incurred while the fifty cops involved in hauling off the 68 protesters weren't doing their real jobs, patrolling the streets of Minneapolis. The costs of longer response times to robberies and domestic assaults in South Minneapolis, while fifty cops were busy nursemaiding 68 corn-fed Highland Park matrons and college students to their meaningless court dates.
Doug? Get back to us when you've done your homework.
Now, here's the part that really gets me:The second big flaw in the Pawlenty plan is the fact that some of these peace-and-justice people haven't invested much time in moneymaking careers.
So professional protester Marv Davidov's right to a symbolic arrest and meaningless charge trumps the right of the taxpayer - especially the Minneapolis taxpayer who has every right to expect that her tax money will give her relatively timely police protection, and that the police's time will not be wasted on trivialities like indulging Mr. Davidov's self-righteousness?
Take career protester Marv Davidov, for example. Davidov figures he's been arrested 51 times going back to the 1960s. He'd be out $10,000 under the Pawlenty rule. Except . . .
Davidov's done a lot of things in his life but has always looked askance at having your standard American job. This means he frequently can't get his hands on $200. That Davidov never has aspired to a steady paying job surely agitates Republicans such as Pawlenty. Why, it even frustrated Marv's own mother, Gerty, who died at age 100 a little more than a year ago.
Touching.
As we discussed the Pawlenty pay-per-arrest plan on Friday, Marv recalled a phone conversation he once had with Gerty:
Gerty: "What did you do this weekend, Marv?"
Marv: "I went to hear the Minnesota Orchestra. It was wonderful."
Gerty: "You love the orchestra. Why don't you get a job with them?"
Marv: "I can't get a job with the orchestra. You never taught me to play a [very strong expletive] instrument."
Gerty: "Don't use a word like that when you're talking to me."
Marv: "What word? 'Job?' "
I'd suspect that Mr. Grow considers it admirable, that someone can reach late middle-age and never have held a job, having devoted his/her entire existence to...what? "Activism?"
Tell you what, Marv (and Doug): Spend your energy learning a [very strong expletive] instrument, and quit talking to your [very strong expletive] mother like that.
And pay for your own [very strong expletive] symbolic arrests. Assuage your self-righteous ego on your own [very strong expletive] dime.Sometimes, our governor doesn't seem to see the complexities.
Normally that's not such a good thing.
In this case? Stomp on the "complexities", Governor. Charge them for every [very strong expletive] dime they cost the rest of us.
By the way - I know I have some readers in the Strib newsroom. I'd welcome Mr. Grow's response to this.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 01:19:23 PM
Progress - Reiterating my analogy from yesterday; if Fargo is Kuwait and St. Paul is Baghdad, a Coalition probe just pulled into Robbinsdale, maybe even North Minneapolis.
According to the radio news, it then pulled back - it may have just been a reconaissance in force.
But after two weeks, that's pretty amazing.
Interesting watching the way the media's mood has changed in the past week, isn't it? From gloom and doom to euphoria. Both, of course, are inappropriate.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 11:55:23 AM
The McGovern Gambit - I'm not saying Bush couldn't be vulnerable in the next election. Who knows - we have a double-dip recession, or the battle for Baghdad goes badly, anything can happen. We i>could have a Dem president in '04.
But I'm suspecting that using terms that tacitly to Saddam Hussein or some other tinpot dictator isn't the way to do it.''What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States,'' Kerry said in a speech at the Peterborough Town Library.
Oh, please please please please PLEASE, Democrat party - please please do in '04 what McGovern did in '72. Please line up behind someone who's so far to the left even the trade unions turn up their noses at him. Please nominate someone who's aligned himself with the wackjobs blocking traffic in San Francisco.
Despite pledging two weeks ago to cool his criticism of the administration once war began, Kerry unleashed a barrage of criticism as US troops fought within 25 miles of Baghdad.
By echoing the ''regime change'' line popular with hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters who have demonstrated across the nation in recent weeks, the Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential contender seemed to be reaching out to a newly invigorated constituency as rival Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, closes in on Kerry in opinion polls.
Tell you what - you nominate Kerry, I'll pitch a couple bucks in to the Sierra Fund. Deal?
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 09:38:58 AM
Three Articles - I hope that's enough until later today. I have to get to a school conference, then get to a project (and hopefully find some coffee - I've run out).
By the way - thanks for those of you who've contributed to the site via my Amazon link on the right. You have not only made the site self-supporting for these past six or so months - you've funded what could be a fairly significant (if not important) development which should be rolling out in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 07:56:18 AM
The Revolution and the Arab Street(s) - Thomas Friedman had a fascinating piece yesterday on how the war is playing in the "Arab Street".
For starters - there is no "Arab Streets" - according to Friedman, there are three streets - Arab liberals, the chattering classes, and officials in the various governments. Each is having different reactions to what Friedman calls "the revolutionary side of US power", which Friedman describes:for Arabs, American culture has always been revolutionary — from blue jeans to "Baywatch" — but American power, since the cold war, has only been used to preserve the status quo here, keeping in place friendly Arab kings and autocrats.
. Friedman goes on to quote an Arab professor:I spent this afternoon with the American studies class at Cairo University. The professor, Mohamed Kamel, summed up the mood: "In 1975, Richard Nixon came to Egypt and the government turned out huge crowds. Some Americans made fun of Nixon for this, and Nixon defended himself by saying, `You can force people to go out and welcome a foreign leader, but you can't force them to smile.' Maybe the Iraqis will eventually stop resisting you. But that will not make this war legitimate. What the U.S. needs to do is make the Iraqis smile. If you do that, people will consider this a success."
So in other words, we can't screw up the post-war period.
There is a lot riding on that smile, Mr. Kamel added, because this is the first "Arab-American war." This is not about Arabs and Israelis. This is about America getting inside the Arab world — not just with its power or culture, but with its ideals. It is a war for what America stands for. "If it backfires," Mr. Kamel concluded, "if you don't deliver, it will really have a big impact. People will not just say your policies are bad, but that your ideas are a fake, you don't really believe them or you don't know how to implement them."
And I don't think we will. George W Bush is not George HW Bush. He's not motivated primarily by a desire to stabilize the region - he is truly, as Friedman says, applying a revolution to Iraq.
Unlike most revolutions, the American Revolution had an upside for those who survived it. We need to make sure the American Revolution in Iraq bears more resemblance to ours than to, say, the French or Russian or Nicaraguan versions.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 07:52:54 AM
The Diversity Tapdance - John Fund, on how badly the "diversity" movement has failed to convince even liberal college professors of its value - and the lengths they're going to in covering their tracks:
That negative attitude may be wholly the result of the methods used to produce diversity. Those methods have silent majorities opposing them. A majority of faculty members oppose relaxing academic standards in order to promote diversity. Even administrators, who oversee diversity policies, are sharply divided, with a full 48% opposing racial preferences. While two-thirds of administrators don't believe that admitting minority students with lower academic qualifications affects academic standards, those who believe they have a negative effect outnumber those who think they have positive effects by a margin of 15 to 1. "Those who argue that diversity will improve the education of everybody haven't made their case," concludes Mr. Rothman. "The data do not support them."
I'll be writing - maybe later today - a piece on how this movement has reflected itself in the St. Paul Public School system.
Maybe that's why an obviously frantic University of Michigan felt compelled to collect a record-breaking 78 friend-of-the-court briefs supporting its position...
...The briefs backing Mr. Bollinger came from dozens of leading companies, labor unions, three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and members of Congress. All of them cite diversity's benefits, but they offer scant evidence and little data.
Indeed, some engage in outright deception. Peter Wood, a professor of anthropology and author of "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept," was appalled at what some of the material in the briefs--and he looked at only a few of them. Indiana University's law school, for example, claimed that it gave great weight to law school board scores and undergraduate grades in determining admissions. The school claimed that race was at the end of a long list of "other factors" it looked at. In reality, half of the students are admitted on the basis of their test scores and half of those go into a pool where race is a prime factor in the decision. The Hoosier Review, a student publication, quoted a former admissions committee member as saying that "to meet de facto quotas, we leapfrog less qualified minority applicants over approximately 330 more qualified nonminority applicants." An internal law school memo mentioned the "concern that a minimum of five blacks per section of the first years class is needed." But in practice the quota is a ceiling as well as a floor. Indiana University has seen the number of black applicants to its law school nearly double in the past three years, but the number of blacks admitted is a rigid number (52, 52 and 53).
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 07:11:13 AM
Attention, Islamacist Terrorists! - This sort of things has just got to piss off the likes of Al Quaeda:
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.
OK - let's allow for the possibility that this is creative spin by the military, manipulating the press a la Wag the Dog - hey, it could be a big trick. I doubt it - from a PR perspective, this story didn't need a more sympathetic protagonist. But even if it is a made-up or exaggerated story, so what? This is the kind of thing that has to make Al Quaeda grind its teeth with rage. "Woman takes out a couple of Fedayeen thugs and fires off all her ammo before being captured, probably unconscious. Fedayeen guys violates a slug of Koranic rules by stabbing her after she was incapacitated. And the infidels get her back anyway". See how this is going to play in Karachi?
Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.
"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."
posted by Mitch Berg 4/3/2003 07:00:06 AM
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
A Debka Flash - Debkafile is reporting that there may just be nobody at the wheel in Iraq today:
In a move that smacked of panic, Iraqi intelligence agents went round the capital impounding cell phones to cut off contact with the outside world as wild rumors swirled around the fate of Saddam Hussein, his sons and his regime.
Now, this next part is an intrigueing twist - yesterday, there were rumors, which the Administration and Pentagon quashed immediately, that the US and Iraq were involved in secret peace negotiations via some kind of intermediary.
The little hard information reaching DEBKAfile’s most reliable intelligence sources is that Saddam and his sons departed Baghdad some days ago. They do not know where he went, or in what state of health, whether he traveled abroad for medical treatment or the family headed for a safe berth prepared in advance, or even if they arrived safely at their destination.
But it is safe to say that Saddam and the senior members of his family are no longer at the helm of government. Iraq is undoubtedly in the process of regime change, the main objective of the Iraq War. Anything beyond that is hazy. Other members of the Saddam regime may have seized power after the ruler himself departed.
If the Debka story is true, it could give a motivation to the "negotiation" angle. The new ruling caste may be divided between a faction negotiating terms of surrender with the Americans and a second, which is determined to fight on. The whole truth of the day’s events on April 2 may never be fully discovered. The war may come to an abrupt end, but not the Iraq crisis which promises more upheaval ahead.
As the guys from Powerline say, Debka is usually pretty reliable, often reporting news that seems farcical because it's so far ahead of the pack (like their report around Christmas that indicated US, UK, Australian, Jordanian, Turkish and Iranian Special Forces were already in action in Kurdistan and the Marshes; except for the Iranians, this story was largely confirmed by the major US media not too long ago.
So take what you need and leave the rest. But in this case, pray they're right. This could end the war very quickly.
This story via Powerline, which has been absolutely on fire these last few days.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 03:43:28 PM
Sniffing - Jesse Jackson is now trying to serve as an intermediary to contact our POWs.
This quote almost made me yakk up my soup:To be humane, you must have a commitment to reconciliation".
Since the only people he'll be dealing with are the Iraqi leadership, and/or the leadership of the Fedayeen, whoever they are, I have to wonder what he's talking about.
I don't suspect we want to "reconcile" with them.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 01:25:36 PM
Diminuitive - I'm still waiting to see the first reaction in the "alternative,", anti-Bush media to the rescue of PFC Lynch. I'm especially waiting for the urbane, hip left-wing media to start in on the soldier's family; on TV, they come across as Appalachian blue-collar working stiffs, with the accent, the tumbledown house, the three kids in the Army. If you see any such references, send them to me.
But I have a bunch of bones to pick with the major media - and I wonder if any so-called "feminists" will echo this. Too many in the media have referred to PFC Lynch in diminuitive terms; "the nineteen-year-old was brought...", "the Girl from West Virginia..." and so on.
She's a soldier! She's grownup! Yes, her relative photogeneity certainly doesn't hurt "sell" the story, but let's not ignore the fact that PFC Lynch is a member of the Army, no different than the crustiest Staff Sergeant in the dustiest tank unit.
More on this as it develops.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 01:22:25 PM
Finding the Dark Cloud - Not to use up a whole day talking about Steve Perry, but I had to touch on this bit from his blog that involves some of the most creative digging for encouragement I've ever seen:
A Gallup poll released over the weekend shows that black America continues to oppose this war, and by a striking margin: 68-29. Maybe you've already heard as much. But here's another detail from the same poll that few have mentioned: The $30,000 a year income threshold is a major breaking point, too. Above that level, 78 percent of all Americans now say they support Bush's war; below, only 58 percent. Still a majority for Bush, but a tenuous one,
Whoah!
Leave aside, for now, the fact that Americans who earn over $30K support the war by a 4-1 margin, by Perry's own data.
According to Perry, Americans who earn less than $30K, the ones to whom Perry and his paper constantly depict as a seething cauldron of anti-establishment frustration, support the administration by a 3-2 margin.
When a political campaign ends with a 3-2 margin for a candidate, it's regarded as a drubbing. A landslide. A politcal and statistical degüello.
Suddenly, according to Steve Perry, the fact that Bush has a 20 point lead among low-income Americans is "tenuous"?
Leaving aside the fact that all all polling numbers are transitory (vide George 41); if one is to believe the spin that Perry et al put on class relations in America, this number is utterly inconceivable!
How could this be? and it's not likely to get better as the economy keeps on stagnating or sinks lower.
Well, Mr. Perry will have to just hope, won't he?
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 01:15:09 PM
Contrarian Blues - Steve Perry is the editor of Minneapolis' City Pages. In previous mentions, I'd said the Pages were Minneaoplis' version of the Village Voice. In fact, they are the Twin Cities' subsidiary of the company that owns both papers.
Steve Perry is a gadfly to both sides - he rather famously shredded the DFL after last November's defeat at the polls.
But make no mistake, he's anti-war. Soooo anti-war.
He (along with most of the CP's writers) has a blog, one of the few "out" anti-war blogs in the Twin Cities.
But it was his editorial from last week's CP that caught my attention: If your viewing habits are anything like mine, you probably did not tune in to Oprah last Tuesday...Oprah taping antiwar show! Developing! Right, I thought. What might Oprah Winfrey--Goddess of All Media, a figure nearly as shining and raceless and apolitical as Tiger Woods--have to say about invading Iraq? ...So I watched, and I am here to tell you: For anyone concerned to know where the fabled silent majority is these days, it was a revelation.
Perry seems to have a problem with accepting numbers; in various articles, he's noted, and even tried to rationalize, the fact that Americans seem to support the war by a 3-1 margin, digging hard for any nugget or bon mot that shows that the 3-1 majority is really a minority.
In Oprah, he thinks he's found it:From the start the air was heavy and melancholy; Winfrey and her guests (the ubiquitous Tom Friedman of the Times and a Middle East specialist from Sarah Lawrence, Fawas Gerges) all seemed shaken by the quickening of events. Friedman looked especially cowed. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner spoke as though he had just wandered in dazed from a particularly brutal Dr. Phil taping. The thing is, he kept saying, America has to come to grips with the way it has hurt the world's feelings. "We've been exporting our fears, not our hopes," he scolded.
Fear is one of nature's means of assuring self-preservation.
Messrs. Perry and Friedman: In 1942, we exported our fear of Japanese invasion, and Nazi dominion over Europe. Seen in this context, Omaha Beach was a firesale of US fears.
Israel was, in this context, the result of gathering together a lot of fears; one wants to ask Messrs Perry and Friedman if fear of mass extinction and genocide is a valid reason to fight?
Yes, we export our fears; it's called "Self-preservation", or "Defense". I see a bunch of drunk bikers throwing beer cans in front of a bar? I step carefully - or, as Messrs. Perry and Friedman would have it, "export my fears". Yet even the always-dependable Friedman could not exactly endorse Bush's war.
Because he's not, nor has he ever been, a Bush supporter. For a NYTimes columnist, he is as close to balanced as anyone this side of William Safire, but he's never been mistaken for a Republican....the mood of the broadcast was quietly and vehemently antiwar. The most amazing segment came midway through, when Oprah lent her seal of approval to a lengthy and fairly devastating bit of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine--the scene in which shot after shot and caption after caption recount bloody U.S.-sponsored coups and dictators while Louis Armstrong croons "What a Wonderful World." Now first, you rarely see this sort of thing on American television, and when you do it is always followed by a litany of credentialed hacks telling you what hogwash it is.
Piffle. "Columbine" was one of the most lionized movies of the year. It won the friggin' Oscar, for the love of pete. But after the clip, and Moore's own pointed comments about our bloody empire, no one tried to deny the veracity of the claims. Well, Friedman said wearily, you could make a similar clip about Saddam. Right, said Gerges, and you could make a dozen more about the U.S.! Friedman fell silent.
And this - an exchange between a mild Anti-Bush pundit and a rabid Anti-Bush pundit - proves what? Which Anti-Bush pundit gets more cred with Steve Perry, apparently.
Perry drives toward the crux:What's so remarkable about this? So Oprah did an antiwar show, you might say. She's not God.
Wrong, Mr. Perry.
But you're wrong about that. Oprah is the author of the most successful syndicated show in television history. She presides over one of the largest-circulation magazines in the country, launched a scant few years ago. She sells millions of books magically, simply by causing their names to pass her lips. She spins the likes of Dr. Phil into gold. She knows the pulse of workaday America better than you will ever know your spouse, your children, yourself. Where the public taste is concerned, she is God.
For that part of the public that watches daytime TV, and lets their opinion be driven by the likes of a pop-psych diva, she's a large female Michael Jackson. For volvo-driving soccer moms that are trying to find personalities of their own, Oprah fills a vaccuum, perhaps.
She is the daytime TV-watching, supermarket-tabloid-reading public what Michael Jackson was to music in the eighties.
And that is all. Her demographic is big - but no bigger than her savvy in marketing to them, in squeezing every last viewer and dollar out of that cachet. But it's not a synonym for "America", or even "Silent Majority".
Ask yourself; do you think Oprah's audience is bigger than Rush Limbaugh's? She attained this status not just by telling her audience things they already knew, as some of her critics have charged; Oprah's great gift is that she never tells them things they will not want to hear.
Perhaps - if you follow the desired story line far enough. I have my doubts that that'll happen.
So you see what it means for her to step out this way. It says that, at the start of a war that will not end in the present theater of battle and may conceivably not end at all in this generation, the president of the United States is already losing the hearts and minds of the American people.
Mr. Perry proceeds: A majority--or near majority, depending on the day and the poll--have opposed waging war on the present terms. (Polls since early last week have shown a large and predictable spike in support of the war, but that is an emotional reaction and probably a fleeting one.)
In this, Mr. Perry reminds one of the Adolph Hitler of 1945; not ideologically, of course (I'm not comparing Perry with a Nazi), but psychologically. As the Red Army advanced on Berlin, Hitler stood before his map table, moving division that existed on paper, planning offensives jumping off from places he no longer held.
Perry's numbers in this argument are like Hitler's phantom divisions in 1945 - comforting to those who want to believe in the cause; just not real.
The polls before the war were pro-liberation. Today, the difference is nearly 3-1. That's more than a "spike".Not only that: A shockingly large and heretofore unseen minority have begun to realize that their country is an iron-fisted world empire that is despised on nearly every corner of the globe.
Note the choice of words; "Shockingly Large" to whom? And how "Shockingly large" is this minority? Who interviewed them? From where did they start on the way to this realization - from the far left? Do you see legions of truck-stop waitresses and ex-Marines switching sides?
If that "shockingly large" minority constitutes Mr. Perry's social circle, it would make sense. Beyond that - let's say I need convincing. And now the most revered producer in American media thinks that message is ready to go mainstream.
No. It means that America's most successful pop-psych lifestyle huckster feels safe telling her large, but captive, audience what it most likely believes anyway.
And it'll be interesting to see if a "Shockingly large" minority of Oprah's viewers desert the show in coming weeks, in light of her stance.
We shall see. I'm not betting against it.
That would be something new under the sun, indeed.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 12:39:53 PM
Maple Grove - Following my analogy from earlier this week, depicting the US advance in Minnesota terms (picture Fargo as Kuwait and St. Paul as Baghdad), US troops are in Maple Grove and Chanhassen:
The 3rd Infantry Division ( Mechanised) pushed beyond the Iraqi's "red line" defensive positions on the approaches to Baghdad - the point at which it was feared Saddam would unleash chemical weapons.
I'm going to try to find a map I can post. This is getting interesting.
Asked if they would reach Baghdad today, a senior US source said: "Keep watching the television." Ahead of them Apache helicopters blasted missiles at anything in their path, clearing the way for the advance. In the first of a series of dramat ic move s , troops completely encircled the city of Karbala, 68 miles south-west of the capital this morning. They then swept past along both sides of the Euphrates. US units later crossed the Euphrates at a bridge north of Karbala.
In the south-east, US marines fighting the Republican Guard near the city of Kut took and secured a vital bridge over the Tigris. Thousands of US troops crossed the bridge today. Brig Gen Brooks said their advance was "a dagger pointed to the heart" of Baghdad. At Kut the US forces dropped two huge "daisy cutter" bombs, sending giant mushroomshaped clouds billowing into the sky. Troops were this afternoon punching forward on three fronts. The first was north-east from Karbala. Another advanced north-west from Kut where they seized Highway 6 to Baghdad. The third front was moving directly north from the town of Hillah on the eastern side of the Euphrates.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 11:07:40 AM
Business As Usual - I hope I get a job soon, so I can settle down to a halfways sane pace. Between calling, interviews, and little freelance gigs, I'm a lot busier now than when I'm working.
Some work to do today - I'll post more later on this afternoon or evening. I'm hoping - hoping, mind you - to write something about Steve Perry, at the City Pages, and his approach to the whole war thing.
Be sure to check back!
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 08:27:06 AM
Sullivan Quote of the Day - Sullivan sends a challenge to the anti-war left.
Here's the payoff:The rhetoric of the "anti-war" movement has consistently argued that this is indeed a criminal war: that it is being conducted by an illegal president for nefarious ends - oil contracts, the Jews, world domination, etc etc. When you have used rhetoric of that sort, when you have described your own country as indistinguishable in legitimacy from a Stalinist dictatorship, when you have described the president as the equivalent of the Nazi SS, when you have carried posters with the words Bush = Terrorist and "We Support Our Troops When they Shoot Their Officers," then why shouldn't you support the enemy?
An excellent article. Always worth a read.
Before the war, such hyperbole could perhaps be dismissed as rhetorical excess. During a war, when American and allied soldiers are risking their lives, it is something far worse. Before the war, it was inexcusable but not that damning for the mainstream left merely to ignore the rabid, immoral anti-American rhetoric of some of their allies. But during a war, ignoring it is no longer an option. In fact, the mainstream left has a current obligation to declare its renunciation of what amounts to a grotesque moral inversion, to disavow the sentiments that were cheered at Columbia University.
You can see why they might be reluctant. De Genova's rhetoric - and that of the rest of the far left - describes president Bush as an unelected, maniacal tyrant, a caricature that is useful to Bush's political enemies. But indeed, if the president is what de Genova says he is, if he is, as the posters have it, the same as Hitler, then why indeed isn't Saddam indistinguishable? Why should we back one unelected dictator against another? Those are questions the rest of the anti-war left never answered categorically before the war, because they didn't have to. Now they do.
Note to the Media - I'm getting tired of seeing stories about "US Troops" read over footage of British troops.
Handy recognition guide for US-based producers:
Don't make me repeat this.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 08:11:55 AM
The Sane French - While I've had my "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey" moments with the French, and I and many Americans have rightly pointed out the fact that French foreign policy is at odds with ours because, though they're a weak, sclerotic nation, they still feel powerful.
Still, more French are with us than against us, according to a Le Monde poll. 34% of the French back us in Iraq, while 25% support Iraq, with 31% neutral.
A stunning victory? Hardly, but a plurality (and not much different than our last gubernatorial election, actually).
This is all by way of saying; our stereotype of the French "America-hating coward" is no more accurate than the sneering Frog intelligentisa's slurs about cowboys and ugly Americans. Stereotypes exist for a reason - but as in all questions, there's more to it than surface indicators and satisfying one-liners.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 07:09:33 AM
Left Tackles Peaceniks - The LA Weekly - the La La Land version of the City Pages - has been astoundingly balanced for this type of publication (especially when compared with the comically dogmatic City Pages (or, to be fair, the comically-intense dogmatism of editor Steve Perry and the vast majority of his staff).
In this article, Marc Cooper tackles some of the hypocrisy and self-absorption of the "anti-war" movement: Maybe someone in the peace movement should figure out that not only Bush could stop this war. So could Saddam — by resigning his unelected post and saving his people any further sacrifice. Yet I’ve yet to see one anti-war placard allude to Saddam’s responsibilities in securing the peace.
The article also notes, rightly, that the whole notion of "bringing the troops home" is specious - if we were to turn around and drive back to Kuwait, it'd open the Iraqis up to horrendous consequences.
But talk about quagmires. The peace movement, which promises so much in its scope and energy, itself remains bogged down in a minimalist program of simply and only opposing U.S. military action. That’s hardly enough. The movement suffers a malady similar to that of the Bushies, but in reverse: smart principles but dumb — no, make that stupid — operational politics. Pure rejectionism, since the outbreak of war makes the peace movement as blind and indiscriminate as a WWII-vintage iron-cast bomb, though considerably less dangerous and infinitely less powerful.
Blocking traffic when 74 percent of the American people support the war, or endlessly whining about CNN’s coverage, or grandstanding as Michael Moore did at the Oscars (news - web sites) telling America that a president who currently enjoys (for all the sordid reasons we know) stratospheric popularity ratings is “fictitious,” has much more to do with personal therapy than with effective politics. Continue on that tack and you can pretty much count on another four years of Bush, no matter how ugly the war turns.Protecting the Iraqi people, as the peace movement rightfully desires, is one helluva lot more complicated than merely shielding them from the collateral damage caused by U.S. bombs. (That is, unless you really believe that America is the “greatest terrorist state in the world,” as is so often repeated on KPFK’s drive-time shows. If your world-view is that facile, then indeed we have little more to discuss.)
It's all worth a read - high praise from something from the LA Weekly.
Those who chant “U.S. out of Iraq” ought to be prepared, then, to offer themselves as human shields to protect the Kurds against threatening Turkish troops (a task currently in the hands of U.S. special forces). Or as shields to protect the southern marsh Arabs against occupation by the theocratic armed forces of Iran. Perhaps all those human shields, idle now after fleeing Baghdad when Saddam’s government ordered them anchored to strategic military targets, could assume these new responsibilities.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 06:57:30 AM
The Other Rescue - While the rescue of Army Pfc. Lynch was a moral coup and a tactical showpiece (although the 11 bodies found with her are most probably not good news), there was another rescue in the news yesterday that, in its details, showed every bit as well the evil we're fighting.
Troops of the 1st Battalion, The Black Watch (the senior Scottish regiment, and one of two Scots regiments in the Gulf) rescued a pair of Kenyans who had been kidnapped and badly mistreated by the Iraqis. The two men were apparently held in a school for ten days, used as de-facto human shields.
The good news? According to the story quoted by Powerline, the Scots were tipped off to the Kenyans' presence by locals.
Side note: So if the worst fears are true, it's possible that most of the people captured in the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company are dead. I'm waiting for the first feminist to make a jape at the fact that the only one spared was a cute 19 year old blond. It's inevitable, you know.
Side Side Note: Yes, I was drawn to the story about the Black Watch due to my current interest in Great Highland Bagpipes. Why?
posted by Mitch Berg 4/2/2003 06:30:04 AM
Tuesday, April 01, 2003
Twice Shy - So many on the left are convinced that Iraqis are, completely at odds with prewar hopes, irredeemably hostile to the US; that their sense of Arab nationalism will trump any relief that obtains from being liberated from Hussein.
I just saw CNN's Ryan Chillcothe (sp?) reporting from An Najaf, with the 101st Airborne. He indicated that in this city - where the US intends to come to stay - they were welcomed quite warmly. With the mass of US troops present, the Fedayeen death squads seem unlikely to recrudesce.
In other towns - the ones we've bypassed - the death squads are still able to travel, undercover, terrorizing, murdering those who express any joy at the Coalition arrival.
Something had to give in an offensive like this; with four divisions and change attacking a nation the size of California, you can not both garrison every town and drive for the objective.
But, like in any counterinsurgency operation, we will need eventually to put troops on the job garrisoning the Iraqi hinterlands, and especially hunting down any zealot guerrillas. Reports that Iraqi citizens have helped by pointing out sniper positions and headquarters are a promising thing.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 11:55:58 PM
Restraint - For those who don't follow these things, the British have more successful experience at counterinsurgency warfare than anyone; in brushfire wars in Malaysia, Yemen, Northern Ireland and Oman, they literally wrote the book on the sort of "hearts and minds" operations that we'll need to master to make the liberation of Iraq work out.
And there are problems:Monday’s checkpoint shootings were seen as a disaster for the coalition’s efforts to win Iraqi hearts and minds. Asked if they undermined attempts to court the local population, Colonel Chris Vernon, a British army spokesman, replied: “It does indeed, and if you were a civilian watching that you would interpret it in that way.”
We may be the best in the world at putting firepower on target - nobody else comes close. But the psychology of transitioning from war to peace is something at which the Brits are still the experts.
The difference in approach was epitomised yesterday when the Royal Marines in four southern Iraqi towns swapped their helmets for berets as a sign of goodwill. American troops wear helmets at all times and checkpoint troops cover their faces with goggles and scarves.
US commanders are also said to have instructed their troops to adopt tougher tactics to weed out militiamen. “Everyone is now seen as a combatant until proven otherwise,” one Pentagon official is reported as saying before Monday’s checkpoint shooting.
British military sources spoke at length about the hard-won experience of UK troops from manning checkpoints and policing in Northern Ireland. “There is no doubt that with that experience, as well as in peace support operations in countries such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, the British have learnt the art of restraint,” one source said.
It's a little disturbing that this gulf exists.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 11:19:54 PM
Support the Troops, Oppose the War? - Is it possible to oppose the war and yet support the troops?
Of course it is. It's even possible to oppose war in general, yet support the liberation of Iraq and also support the troops.
But there is a dividing line. And plenty on the left cross it. The most egregious example, of course, is Professor Nicholas De Genova, who famously called for "a Million Mogadishus" at an anti-Bush rally over the weekend.
But that example is just too easy. Let's look at an article whose author is obviously This slobbering at the thought of a US defeat.. The defeat, of course, would help the author's desired political outcome, a Bush defeat in 2004.
Military defeat is inevitably accompanied by death and misery on the part of the loser. If you wish for a political victory couched in a military defeat, the deaths to ones servicepeople inevitably follow; logically, these people wish for the worst for our troops.
You can't have it both ways.
So yes - a person can oppose the war and support the troops simultaneously. But it's not an automatic thing; when people claim they can do that, there's a burden of proof they need to meet.
By the way, Mr. Parry unleashes this hooter:The botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, but President Bill Clinton then cut U.S. losses by recognizing the hopelessness of the leadership-decapitation strategy and withdrawing American troops from Somalia.
Hm. Doesn't really square with Mark Bowden's non-partisan take on the situation; Clinton cut and ran like a scared girlscout after Mogadishu, even though Mogadishu was a tactical victory on the ground. Clinton caved in on every count. To spin that as a clever loss-cutting strategy is incredibly disingenuous, and more or less shows the author's agenda.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 11:10:26 PM
Beneath Contempt, Part II - Several emailers wrote to tell me the picture I cited yesterday, from Democrat-affiliated hate site Democrats.com had disappeared. It seems the site changes its pages around midnight every day.
I wish I'd saved it - it was probably the yellowest piece of hack I've seen on the web - and I've seen lots. It showed a US soldier - an Afro-American - sitting in an airport, in tears, obviously bidding his family (wife and little girl) goodbye.
Fair enough - but the caption they added was absolutely diabolical. I'll paraphrase (I wish I'd saved it): "Sergeant XXXXX ponders the fate that awaits him in Iraq, fighting a war for an unelected president bla bla bla...". Oh, yeah - the heading was "COM-EDY". Ha ha.
Today? A new hooter, a petition demanding the President be indicted for "war crimes".
Yeah, I know - these people crank out petitions faster than my kids do their homework. And internet petitions aren't worth the paper they're not printed on.
So the temptation's there to just ignore their little hate site. But there's satisfaction in calling a spade a spade.
Or calling a vile, opportunistic little hate site by its true name.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 04:59:37 PM
Leave Nobody Behind - Nine Marines died last week in an effort to rescue the POWs from the 507th Maintenance Company.
Sunday is the first time U.S. military officials revealed that Marines conducted a search-and-rescue operation to recover the wounded Army soldiers. All but one of the missing Marines was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, from Camp Lejeune, N.C.
The part that gets me - for the first time, I can really, truly identify with all the fathers who are wondering about their sons and daughters. It hit me with a bang a few weeks ago - my son is eight years away from being able to join the military. My stepson is well within military age.
And of course, we're all on the front lines anyway, whether we're in uniform or not.
We really need to win this one.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 04:39:16 PM
Another Tricky Day - Much more work to do.
And Blogger is acting up...again.
But I'll be posting this evening.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 12:04:20 PM
Terrorists - Powerline has an excellent piece on the Ansar-e-Islam compound our forces raided, and what it means to the war on terror:
The Associated Press reports that American and Kurdish forces have searched the compound formerly occupied by Ansar al-Islam Islamofascists in northern Iraq, and have found "what may be the strongest evidence yet linking the group to al-Qaida." The search also yielded documents and computer data identifying Ansar members or sympathizers around the world. General Richard Myers says that the Ansar compound is believed to be the source of the ricin that was found in London a couple of months ago.
And as the guys say - it's not just about Al-Quaeda. Even if there's no link between Al-Quaeda and any Iraq; the terrorist world is both decentralized and cross-pollinating.
We have no idea what a big win this is going to turn out to be.
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 07:46:50 AM
Attention, Garage Logicians - Great story in the Strib this morning about a Marine tank crew that ended up stranded in the desert for about three days, and was declared Missing In Action for 11.
Read the article, of course. But the part you GLers have to love was right here:The next morning, the crew went to work with rope, communications wire and duct tape.
It really is universal, isn't it?
posted by Mitch Berg 4/1/2003 06:46:00 AM
Monday, March 31, 2003
Beneath Contempt - Democrat-affiliated hate site Democrats.com sinks to a new low.
Look at the picture. Tell us what you think the odds are that Specialist Tanner either approves of the site's caption, or is thinking precisely what these people ascribe to him.
Despicable.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 07:24:30 PM
It's All About Me - Looking at the hit logs recently, I see that there are a lot more of you out there these days - I'm averaging about 30% more visitors now than I was last month.
Welcome! Feel free to drop me a line - I'd love know who it is that's reading me out there.
More job stuff going on; besides the big (BIG, as in almost eight hour long) interview on Friday, I had another last week, for a total of three serious job leads in the hopper now, and maybe one more developing as we speak - it's hard to say. So - if you're a hiring manager, by all means get on it!
If you're new, I'll direct your attention tactfully but directly to the "Amazon Honor System Click to Give" box on the right side of the page; I've been blessed with readers who've enabled this site to be self-supporting for the last six months, and I appreciate it a lot. If you like what you read, please consider an anonymous donation.
Again - thanks for your interest!
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 03:29:20 PM
Embed This - Glenn Reynolds (AKA Instapundit) has this excellent article about the performance of the media in the war so far in his TechCentral column today.
The "embedding" program has been a stroke of genius for the Pentagon... The embedded journalists have come to identify with their units, and have formed a bond with American soldiers and Marines that will likely last a lifetime and fundamentally alter the character of the press in terms of its relations with the military.
So as a conservative who's both been in the belly of the media beast (OK, in its duodenum anyway) and on the side that the media usually opposes, I'm thinking - stroke of genius! All we have to do is repeat this tactic a few more times, and the war for society will be won!
We just need to embed some reporters:
It could only improve things.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 02:58:28 PM
Best Laid Plans - There's been much heat, but little light, over Peter Arnett's claims to Iraqi TV that the US "plan" is off in the weeds - a failure - and needs to be re-drawn.
Blogger and veteran Sergeant Stryker comments on "The Plan", from - here's a rarity - an informed perspective:There's also been much speculation concerning the failure of "The PLAN." Yes, that mysterious piece of paper we depend upon for Victory. The General's Plan has failed! The Plan failed to acount for Iraqi irregulars! The Plan relied too much on blitzkrieg warfare! Supplies are running out! The Plan has failed! Defeat is upon us! Run away! Run away!
Very true. Military plans - at least, good ones - are not like film shooting schedules. They're almost like very robust computer programs - allowing for all sorts of friction and SNAFUage, including, yes, unexpected resistance. The difference, of course - they don't push 1s and 0s around, they affect people, battles and, today, nations.
I'm here to tell you: There is no "Plan," at least not in the way most people think of it. There is no paper sitting in the center of Gen. Franks' desk with objectives and the dates they should be accomplished, with certain sentences lined-out as they are accomplished. There's nothing anywhere that says, "Take Baghdad by end of week or all is lost." What exist are thousands of matrices, cross-indexed and used by commanders and planners as decision-making aids in conducting operations. Each matrix lists, in tabular format, conditions and recommendations for action. For example:
If Condition X exists, and conditions A, C, and F are present, then proceed with R.
These matrices have been formatted and indexed in the months leading up to Iraqi Freedom and they list just about every conceivable condition that one would find in addition to the courses of action one should take in response. I'm sure that most of you who work in the business world are familiar with matrices and how they function. They allow commanders to be flexible and highly adaptable to the fluid nature of warfare by presenting options figured out months in advance, rather than having to think of solutions on the spot. And matrices aren't a novel concept unique to Iraqi Freedom. We use them in our everyday operations. So when you hear Rumsfeld or Franks saying, "We're on Plan and we've factored-in all that's happened," they're telling the truth. The Plan does not feature time-specific objectives and it isn't a checklist. It's a combination of thousands of decision matrices used to conduct operations in support of achieving the expressed goal: The removal of Hussein's regime and nullification of his ability to resist. It's also important to note that this war does not feature an "exit strategy" common to our limited operations in the past, which allowed our foes to exploit the half-measures we employed. In this war, the only exit is through Baghdad and there is no end save Victory.
Everyone take a deep breath. In one week our troops advanced nearly 350 miles - which is 40% faster than armored troops are supposed to advance in ideal conditions - to the suburbs of Baghdad. Think about it - if St. Paul were Baghdad and North Dakota were Kuwait, the lead US troops would be just west of Monticello. There'd be some stiff skirmishing in St. Cloud and Alexandria, but the guys near Montecello would be threatening to move into Albertville any moment, and the bad guys moving up through Maple Grove to reinforce the defenses would be learning firsthand what it feels like to be in an oil drum being pelted with bowling balls.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 10:41:21 AM
And the Latest Nominees Are... - A correspondent writes:
I hope [my Blogosphere Blacklist] is still up and running, because it's damn near genius. And my nominations are:
Feel perfectly free - the Blacklist never sleeps! Nominations are always welcome.
Gosh, there are just too many to name in one sitting! I'll have to get back to you with more...
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 10:04:42 AM
Coulda Been an Actor, but I Wound Up Here - Controversy about the Embedded Reporter program - among the media:
As Slate's Jack Shafer puts it: "Embed reports from the front are mostly variations on the themes 'Hey, I'm still alive!' and 'Hey, those Iraqis are extremely dead! ' which must warm the hearts of the chain of command." Magazine columnist Roger Simon says the TV reports are all about star power, "celebrities like David Bloom riding in that M-88 tank recovery vehicle."
There lies the rub; a good reporter draws flak from both sides. But it's not just the reporter in the field that's supposed to be doing the job - the staff back at the Network or Newspaper or Wire Service need to do their job as well.
[Ironically, some military leaders are critical of the embedded journalist program because reports from the field don't always square with official assessments.]
Back in World War II, war correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Walter Cronkite lived among the troops - Cronkite parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne on D-Day. Pyle died among the soldiers he covered, shot by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima. Some of the best reporters - Andy Rooney and cartoonist Bill Mauldin - actually were soldiers, working for GI publications. Did their "objectiity" or detachment suffer in the process?
The article addresses this:No one denies that journalists who eat and sleep with the people they cover tend to form bonds, not unlike those forged in the traveling bubble of a presidential campaign. The feelings are even more intense when unarmed journalists must depend on heavily armed soldiers to protect them from enemy fire. But they fervently maintain that they are there to do a job.
Glenn Reynolds led his piece on this story with with this quote - challenging the reader to guess who the speaker is:
"I did not and still do not buy into the notion that proximity necessarily influences coverage," says ABC correspondent Ron Claiborne, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. "In all honesty, I do not believe I would in any sense 'let up' on a story on this ship because I may happen to like the admiral or the captain or anyone else.
"I do not deny that reporters sometimes go easy on someone they like -- or go hard on someone they don't. That's human nature. But I do not think that living among the people we are covering undermines our putative objectivity.""Let them try not showering for a week, sleeping out in the desert, living through sandstorms, being under fire -- I don't see these people out there. All they do is criticize."
A cranky GI? No - CBS' John Roberts, with the First Marine Division.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 08:00:33 AM
Buying Time - As the fog of war descends over our view of the situation in Iraq, a conversation last night with a friend brought out this idea:
In 1945 - hopelessly late in World War II in Europe - the US and British militaries were rolling forward across a broad front. The end of the Battle of the Bulge had cut the heart out of much of the German army in the west. But the front was punctuated by short, sharp, fierce firefights and occasionally intense pockets of ferocious resistance.
It was demoralizing to GIs, and to some extent on the home front as well; everyone knew that the war was drawing to a close, that the Russians were closing in on Berlin, that someone would have the distinction of being the last GI to die in Europe.
So these small but intense pockets of resistance were troublesome. And eventually, we figured out that many of them happened for a reason. Sometimes the reason was simple; the rolling advance caught up with a hard-core SS or Hitler Youth unit.
Sometimes, though, the resistance stiffened because they were protecting something; a concentration camp where the guards hadn't finished off the inmates or burned the records; a V2 rocket plant whose staff hadn't evacuated yet; in the East, pockets of German refugees trying to escape from the Russians.
So if what we've heard is anywhere close to correct (my standard disclaimer to all things, these days), the situation looks like this:
Read about the types of things the Iraqis are doing: A crimson sunset painted the street red and visibility fell to less than 15 feet as a swirling sand and dust storm kicked up when the guerrilla units attacked.
So you had what we coudl call "spirited resistance" - but in the end:
U.S. officers said fighters in minivans, pick-up trucks and cars drove straight at the oncoming tanks. Others took to canoes, rowing down the river and trying to fix explosives to the main bridge.
But the guerrilla-style forces were vastly outgunned by the tanks of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, and hundreds of Iraqis have died in this town over the last four days.
The officers said the tank unit fired two 120 mm high velocity depleted uranium rounds straight down the main road, creating a powerful vacuum that literally sucked guerrillas out from their hideaways into the street, where they were shot down by small arms fire or run over by the tanks.
"It was mad chaos like you cannot imagine," said the tank unit's commander, who identified himself as "Cobra 6" as he did not want friends and neighbors back home to know what he had been through.
"We took a lot of fire, and we gave a lot of fire," he said. Some U.S. soldiers estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqis were killed here since the fighting began at dusk on Wednesday, and everyone puts the number in the hundreds.
So we have fierce, nearly suicidal resistance - reminiscent of the SS or Hitler Youth's fanatical zeal - accompanied by horrendous, crippling casualties.
Officers say just one U.S. soldier has died...
Wave after wave of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitaries had set up mortar positions at an old brick factory on the edge of town, getting dropped off from civilian vehicles at a large tree that U.S. forces here now call the "Gateway to Hell."
U.S. officers said they had destroyed up to 50 vehicles making drop-offs there, adding the brick factory, like much of Kifl, was now virtually abandoned.
Is there a parallel between the desperate spasms of the final days of the Third Reich - or for that matter, Stalin's desperate thrashing at Stalingrad, where cadres of party fanatics "strengthened" the regular troops' resistance by firing machine guns at those trying to withdraw from attacks? It's too early to say.
But some parts of the pattern seem to be there.
What are they defending? WMD installations that they don't want Unblixed? Or buying time for Hussein to reinforce the defenses of Baghdad?
Time will tell, of course. But totalitarians historically display a limited range of tools, and I wonder if this isn't one to think about?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/31/2003 07:14:52 AM
Sunday, March 30, 2003
The Littlest Mujahedin - Peter Arnett is working for the other side:
Journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV in an interview aired Sunday that the American-led coalition's first war plan had failed because of Iraq's resistance and said strategists are "trying to write another war plan."
If you remember this vile little man from 1991, you're not surprised.
Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting in Vietnam for The Associated Press, garnered much of his prominence from covering the 1991 Gulf War for CNN. He is reporting from the Iraqi capital now for NBC and its cable stations.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2003 11:16:08 PM
Moore's Logic - Michael Moore on geopolitics:
I'd like to learn more about this concept of removing dictators "non-violently".
“Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator,” he added, “and I hope he’s removed as soon as possible. But nonviolently.”
I can think of the following:
I'd suspect Mr. Moore doesn't know, either.
UPDATE: An email correspondent suggests Slobodan Milosevich for the "Dictators Removed Without Reference to Violence" category. But I'd say the NATO bombing campaign had a lot to do with that - as sloppily-done as it was, it went a long way toward showing the dictator that the west had had enough.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2003 08:38:56 PM
Happy to Bend Over for a Bigger Budget - The lawn sign wars are slipping the bounds of rationality and flittering off into zoopdieland.
A group called A Better Minnesota is distributing "Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota" lawn signs. They're something like this:
I think it's high time we started distributing our own signs:
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2003 05:18:23 PM
Footsteps of Giants - One of my favorite recent discoveries in the blogosphere is David Warren, who's been on my blogroll for quite a while, and on my "at least weekly" reading list since then.
Here,he talks about Canada's most yawning generation gap: If any American, or Briton, or Australian, or free man or woman, should happen to be reading this, I want you to know that I am not speaking only for myself. I am speaking on behalf, quite literally, of millions of Canadians, who are every bit as disgusted as you are with our country. You have the same kind of people -- you will know perfectly well -- within your own countries. The difference is, in Canada they are in charge.
The whole thing is fascinating. Read it.
In this particular moment of truth, and for all time, America had a Bush, Britain had a Blair, Australia had a Howard -- each one of them willing to stand, and face the music; each one a politician, but also a man. In this same moment of truth, and in the histories forever, Canada had the scuttling Chrétien.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2003 05:17:22 PM
In My Name - I've long detested the preening self-righteousness of Not In Our Name, the group for whom Susan Sarandon is currently flacking.
Their cause isn't so much anti-war...er, anti-Bush as it is salving the righteous egoes of its adherents. I've long wanted to figure out exactly what to write about these people.
But Julie Burchill, at the Guardian (far from a right-wing tool), did it first and best. I've always thought that the last place you'd see the vanity of depression in action would be on a protest march, especially one against war in a foreign country, but I do believe that many of the anti-war antics currently taking place are totally egotistical. Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less. But does the most hardened peacenik really believe that Iraqis currently enjoy more liberty and delight than they would if Saddam were brought down? If so, fair enough; if not, then they are marching about one thing - themselves. That's why so many luvvies are involved; this is simply showing off on a grand scale.
But for these people, it's not about anyone else's freedom - as, indeed, "Freedom" in Hollywood is usually about the half of the First Amendment that's about speech and press rights. I'd have to wonder how many Hollywood liberals know anything about the other half of the amendment?
I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?
Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? See how they write them so solemnly in a list on the bottom of the letters they send to the papers. And the ones that add their brats' names are the worst - a grotesque spin on Baby On Board, except they think that this gives them extra humanity points not just on the motorway, but in the whole wide weeping, striving, yearning world. We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside.
Burchill also does the magnificent service of comparing the relative contributions of the principals on both sides of this conflict:Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here? And is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously "difficult"and vain - Streisand, Albarn, Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn? And Robin Cook! [Don't forget Michael Moore!] Why might anyone believe world peace can be secured by this motley bunch?
Read, of course, the whole thing.
Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too...Similarly, there are the human shields - now limping homewards after being shocked to discover, bless 'em, that Saddam wanted to stick them in front of military installations as opposed to the hospitals and petting zoos that they'd fondly imagined they were going to defend.
What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people...
How embarrassing it will be for the peaceniks to have to explain to the celebrants how much better it would have been for them never to have been troubled by such joy!
We know what the likes of Madonna, Sarandon and Penn want "in their names" or not. But the actions of those whose names we'll never know are usually more interesting. And telling.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2003 09:21:29 AM
Three More Years! - Twin Cities bloggers Fraters Libertas discuss the latest manifestation of our "senior" senator Mark Dayton's attempts to slalom about both sides of an issue - and crash in the attempt:
Dayton declined to speak at the anti-war event because he said he wouldn’t be in town that day. Then he agreed to speak at a support the troops rally that same day. Then he later agreed to also speak at the anti-war rally (and was turned down). Then he didn’t show up at either of them.
Here's the part I think is so utterly ironic: the left savaged the man Dayton replaced, Rod Grams for reasons that had little to nothing to do with his legislative accomplishments; his marital problems, his son's hijinx (never mentioning that Grams' ex-wife had had full custody of Morgan Grams for quite some time) - never actually bothering to assail his legislative record, except over high-level stances like abortion and gun control.
Now that’s what I call getting out in front of an issue! (And then falling under it and getting flattened.)
Now, we have a "senator" whose personal life is a bigger disaster than Grams', whose legislative record is negligible, and who unlike Grams hasn't even bothered to stake out an actual position on much of anything.
As the Fraters say, we may be approaching a rare moment of agreement in Minnesota politics - left and right agreeing on needing to dump Dayton.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2003 08:03:24 AM
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