David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy writes:

Gotta Give Bush Lots of Credit for This One: “Any country has the right to defend itself from terror. Israel has the right to defend herself from terror. And as she does so, I hope she keeps consequences in mind as to how to make sure we stay on the path to peace,” Bush said in his first public comment on Monday’s assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin. From Reuters, via Little Green Footballs.

Reuters, by the way, can’t seem to help itself, and blatantly editorializes in the midst of its news story: “Yassin’s killing was a major setback to the U.S. ‘road map’ to Middle East peace, already mired in tit-for-tat violence.” I don’t recall anything in the road map that required Israel to sit back and allow its citizens to be murdered by Hamas, as happened last week in Ashkelon. And the idea that the roadmap itself is worth anything so long as Arafat—who didn’t hesitate to praise Yassin as a martyr who is on his way to heaven—remains in control of the Palestinian security services is a joke, and a pretense that the Bush Administration itself doesn’t entertain.

Mm-hm. Okay, is it just me? Was there something in the roadmap about Israel killing its way to peace? At any point does someone get to take the high road?

I look at what Mr. Bernstein wrote and it makes me realize what’s missing in the Palestine/Israel conflict: compassion and willingness for peace. That’s it. There’s no magic solution, no redrawing of boundaries or reparations that will lead to peace until someone has the courage to simply stop hating the other side.

Simplistic? Maybe. But as far as I’m concerned, for Bush or Bernstein to wave the peace plan around without condemning the violence – no matter which side originates it – is a joke. Grow up, people. Act like adults. Fucking love each other or fuck off! Your choice.

I haven’t been posting as much for the last few days. My head has been way inside the books on my Toussaint Louverture Project. I have been following the Richard Clarke thing, and I may or may not have something to say about it. But as I’ve been listening to the 9/11 Commission hearings today, I’ve been thinking a lot about Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Trouillot’s book is about the writing of history, and about what gets written and what gets left out. He spends some time, too, on the idea that until certain things happen, those things can be inconcievable to the population at large. In his example, the idea that black people could have even the desire to revolt, much less actually organize and stage a revolution… this was an unimaginable thought to most of the white world in 1791. In the same way, the idea that someone would use airplanes as bombs was unthinkable to most of us until September 11, 2001. I find it perfectly understandable that stricter measures weren’t taken to prevent those attacks. How would you have made the argument prior to that day that we needed to bolt cockpit doors or confiscate box cutters? The momentum of opinion hadn’t been generated; the urgency was lacking. What I do find unpardonable, though, is the Administration’s obtuse insistence on destroying Iraq, and their subsequent pattern of lies and distortions to cover up what they must know to be indefensible acts.

‘We ugly! But we here!’ – JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM

The so-called new prime minister of Haiti is one monsieur Latortue, who has a lot of chat for someone without a mandate from anyone except the US ambassador and his bosses. He is, he says, going to unite Haiti, so he has begun by boldly leaving out of his ‘government’ any representative of the people of Haiti. I give him three weeks.

John Maxwell continues to be the most outspoken commentator and the most trenchant observer of the ongoing situation in Haiti. What has happened to that country in the last 10 years is a farce of epic proportions. It would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.

The world should know that the United States and France bear the major responsibility for the predicaments in which Haiti now finds itself. It is a savage irony, that two of the three nations founded at the end of the 18th century on the ideals of the Brotherhood of Man should continue to hypocritically dismiss the third on no other visible basis but that Haiti is black.

Racism is Racism is Racism. To describe Haiti as a ‘failed state”, to say that Aristide misgoverned his country, to allege that the mulatto elite in Haiti are capable of operating a democracy are sick jokes. The mulatto elite and the military have been the junior partners in the franchised predation of Haiti for most of its history.

Aristide was not perfect. Nobody ever claimed that he was. But is George W Bush perfect? or Jacques Chirac? The money misappropriated when Chirac was mayor of Paris could feed a great many Haitians. Does that make Chirac unfit to lead France?
Does the fact that Ken Lay of Enron was the largest contributor to President George Bush, or the fact that Vice-President Cheney’s company is accused of overcharging the US army for food make either Mr Bush or Cheney unfit to govern the United States and the world??

Well, if it doesn’t make them unfit, per se, it sure weakens their authority. Or, it would in a rational world.

The behaviour of Kofi Annan and the UN Security Council was barbaric. They refused to help a UN member in good standing when his country was threatened by the most disreputable, bloodthirsty assassins. Yet, two days later, when Aristide had been overthrown, kidnapped or whatever, the same group felt impelled to send a ‘peace-keeping’ force to Haiti. And a few days ago, the World Bank held a donors meeting to consider aid for Haiti. The hypocrisy runs like blood in an abattoir.

I think the abattoir is an appropriate metaphor. We’ve turned Haiti into as effective a place of misery as a slaughterhouse, one we can turn our backs on and ignore as long as the meat keeps showing up on our plate.

Just watched the interview with Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes. It’s pretty damning. Most of the salient points have already been covered here, here, and here.

There’s just one thing, something that my roommate pointed out to me. CBS is owned by Viacom. So is Free Press (a division of Simon & Schuster), which is publishing Richard Clarke’s book. I wish I didn’t feel creeped out about that. I’m sure Clarke has some good points to make. I want to believe him, but there’s that hanging question of motivation and timing. Worse, didn’t anyone at 60 Minutes consider the appearance issue?

I’m not sure what’s worse – our current administartion or the major media.

The Poor Man: The Gathering Storm

Brilliant.

[Note: I think I’ve discovered a new type of blogging. When I read something I like from now on, instead of doing my own clever analysis, I’ll just give you a word or two to show my approval, and then provide you with a link. I call it “What are you looking here for? Go read somebody else’s blog” blogging. It’s really a hell of a lot easier, and it relieves me of all that strenuous thinking. Now I think I know what all that Limbaugh “Dittohead” stuff was all about.]

Who says computers are a waste of time?

(Thanks to Rhoda for the tip.)

Nice.

Boing Boing: Send-up of ‘Respect Copyright’ PSAs

I read Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo regularly now. Today he’s on a roll.

First, there’s this post about the curious reasoning some in the press use when talking about the African-American vote.

This vaguely reminds me of the line one often hears in TV commentary about Democrats and their ‘dependence’ on the African-American vote. It’s only the African-American vote, the argument goes, that keeps the Democratic party from becoming a permanent minority party.

[...] I don’t want to overstate the point. But nestled down deep in this argument is some sort of perhaps unconscious notion that the Dems are just hopelessly sucking wind among real voters and thus have to resort to padding their totals with blacks.

Secondly, Marshall hits upon the perfect analogy for why the administration’s “Don’t dwell in the past” dodge leaks like a cheap paper towel.

[It’s] like I come back to my office to find my new employee has taken a crap right on my desk.

Puzzledly and not happy, I say, “What, umm … what happened here?”

To which he replies, “There you go again, always focusing on the past, how this or that could have been done differently, when what’s really important is the future, how we deal with this and other challenges we’re going to face.”

To which I would reply, “No. The future is exactly what I’m thinking about. And that’s why you’re fired. Because in the future I can’t afford to have anyone working here who craps on my desk, and then when I confront them about it all they can do is dodge responsibility with moronic excuses and try to put the blame on me for asking what the hell is going on.”

Third, he points us to Moveon.org new ad featuring Donald Rumsfeld’s apprearance on Face the Nation.

Finally, Marshall echoes my sentiments exactly that the Bush administration seems to think they can get away with absolutely anything they want.

‘Disrespect’ doesn’t quite convey the intended message. But it comes close. It may be closer to ‘contempt’ though I think the attitude is somehow breezier than that. They don’t think any rules apply to them.

They want to say up is down. And they’re sure they can get away with it because they think the people who are listening are either chumps or that their trust can be exploited endlessly.

Thanks, Josh. You’re okay in my book.

If you’re ever interested in exploring the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other of our nation’s important historical documents, head over to NARA | The National Archives Experience. There you’ll find high-resolution images of our national charters, along with plain-text transcriptions and essays on their development and meaning.

David Corn, author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception, laments in Capital Games that he keeps coming across more Bush lies that would have been perfect for his book. Fortunately, someone else has been capturing and cataloging the Administration’s mendacity…

[Representative Henry Waxman] just released a report that identifies 237 specific misleading statements made by Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 125 separate public appearances. There’s even an on-line database.

Sure enough, Iraq on the Record is hosted on the house.gov website, and contains a slick interface that lets any average Joe look up Administration misstatements on Iraq by speaker, subject, date, and keyword. The page also links to the Iraq on the Record Report (pdf), a 36 page document that includes a graph entitled “Number of Misleading Statements Made Each Month, March 2002 – January 2004.” There’s a curious spike on the graph around September 2002. One can only assume that the first anniversary of 9/11 was a solemn event for the Administration. They must have been really trying to reach out to America, to promote healing and stuff like that.

The report is packed with footnotes and lists the categories of misleading statements – Claims about the Aluminum Tubes, Claims about Uranium from Africa, and so on – as well as misleading statements by individual officials.

The report is a rib tickler from beginning to end, but the biggest guffaw I got out of it was when I read the Methodology section. The report, which was peer reviewed by two independent experts, was compiled, as mentioned above, “from 125 public statements or appearances in which the five officials discussed the threat posed by Iraq.” Out of those 125 events, 237 misleading statements made it into the report. However, the authors tell us that…

To be conservative, the Special Investigations Division excluded hundreds of statements by the five officials that many observers would consider misleading. For example, the five officials made numerous claims that Iraq “had” stockpiles of chemical weapons. Many of these statements were misleading in that they implied that Iraq possessed these stockpiles currently and did not acknowledge the doubts of intelligence experts. Nevertheless, these statements were not included in the database when they were expressed in the past tense because Iraq did possess chemical weapons at least as late as the early 1990s and used them during the 1980s.

Investigators also excluded scores of statements of certainty that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” prior to the war. To many observers, these statements would be misleading because they implied that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons without acknowledging the divisions among intelligence officials about whether this was the case. The Special Investigations Division excluded these general “weapons of mass destruction” assertions, however, because of the ambiguity inherent in the phrase. [My emphasis.]

What else do you have to do to prove to people that the Administration lied its way into war? I mean, really, what do you have to do to wake people up? Doesn’t anybody care? Is there no shame? Is there no one to ask the question of George Bush, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”