Author: Bryant

Charlie Stross draws comparisons between the museum losses in Baghdad and hypothetical losses of equal scale in London.

Imagine London bombed. The V&A trashed, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels looted, the British Library complex on Euston Road burned (along with all those annoying old bits of paper like the original draft of Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, and so on), the Natural History Museum used as a defensive fortification and shelled. (Goodbye, Apollo 10.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden also has an excellent summary of where we are right now, generously supplemented by commentary on the Free Republic crowd and Andrew Sullivan.

Campaign season has apparently officially started. Ari Fleischer spent more time answering questions about Bush’s campaign yesterday than he spent on anything else, including this little gem:

Q Secondly, on fundraising. Governor Dean has said that it’s a threat to democracy for any one presidential candidate to have two or three times more money to get his or her message out than any other candidate. Regardless of how much money the President plans to raise, does he see any merit whatsoever in that argument?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well again, I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country. So the President is proud to have the support of the American people, and the American people will ultimately be the ones who decide how much funding goes to any Democrat or any Republican.

I love typing that. I’m gonna type it again: “I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country.”

The more money you raise, the more support you have. If you’re supported by a lot of poor people, but not many rich people — well, support from poor people just doesn’t count as much.

You don’t get to know who we arrested.

The Justice Department might be correct; revealing the names of those detained post-9/11 could be helpful to Al-Qaeda. Assuming, that is, that Al-Qaeda is incapable of figuring out whether or not cell members were arrested on its own. Which is actually less snarky an assumption than it appears; the answer depends on the nature of the cell structure. On the other hand, with a properly defined cell structure, Al-Qaeda leadership wouldn’t necessarily know that a given detainee was an Al-Qaeda member either.

But I digress. Let’s assume that there is some degree of risk associated with releasing those names.

That’s not a sufficient argument to keep ‘em secret.

The problem is this. If you don’t reveal the names, then you remove one of the checks and balances from the judicial system. You don’t need to assume that the Justice Department is acting in bad faith for that to be a bad idea. It’s possible for humans to make mistakes. There were US citizens in detention in Guantanamo Bay for a little while, for example. If we hadn’t known about that, we couldn’t have objected and they wouldn’t have been moved as quickly if at all.

These matters need to be public for the safety of the accused. Keeping them secret is a risk too. In order to make a strong case for secrecy, you need to show that the risk created by revealing the names is greater than the risk created by keeping them secret. Considering the recent report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General, it’s more than reasonable to expect the case to be made strongly.

Bush is now claiming that questions about his justification for the invasion of Iraq are coming from “revisionist historians.” Saddam was a threat, and that’s that. Apparently he was the kind of threat who can be ousted in about two weeks flat — but maybe pointing that out is revisionist history. It’s probably also revisionist history to point out that Iraqis are killing more Americans per week now than they were in 2002.

Perhaps this would be a good time to refer once more to Robin Cook’s resignation speech. Again: “We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.”

Not surprisingly, Bush is getting called on it. But you know, I think there’s a little more to Bush’s speech than just the desire to strike out at the smart people who’re picking on him. (That’s irony. I don’t actually think Bush was pouting at all; I think his choice of words was carefully made. Onward.)

I just searched for “revisionist historians” on Google. Top result: Revisionists.com, a site dedicated to explaining why the Holocaust wasn’t so bad after all. Not all of the top ten results are about Holocaust revisionism, but it’s sure a constant theme. I kinda don’t think that’s an accident.

Bush is deliberately implying that those who claim the Holocaust never happened and those who claim Bush misrepresented the reasons for attacking Iraq are in some way similar. This implication goes nicely with the argument that we invaded Iraq in order to restore civil rights. It’s a good thing that Saddam’s out of power, but we didn’t invade Iraq because of the mass graves; we invaded because they were a threat.

However, linking the mass graves of Iraq to the mass graves of Germany is great spin. And linking anti-war activists to Holocaust revisionists? That’s icing on the cake.

Everyone’s linking to this one, but what the heck — let’s dogpile. Rand Beers resigned from his position as a counterterrorism advisor in the White House just before the war on Iraq began. Not because he didn’t support the war; he did. Rather, he couldn’t take working for Bush.

Beers had been working in the NSC since the 80s; he replaced Oliver North as director for counterterrorism and counternarcotics. He worked for Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes. He’s a registered Democrat but it would be hard to argue that he dislikes Republicans.

He’s now working for Kerry, because he feels that strongly about the mess Bush is making of our counterterrorism policy. Read the article.

Looks like the Killer D T-shirts are finally available. Paypal 20 bucks (includes shipping) to dkz@swbell.net, subject line “T-Shirt Order”, tell him what size you want. Or use this link, which I just whipped up and used myself.

This really shouldn’t be a surprise, but I was a bit surprised. The official British investigation into those trailers decided they weren’t WMD labs. They were, apparently, hydrogen gas producing units, which is exactly what the Iraqis claimed they were. The Brits may have had an easier time figuring this out, since Iraq’s original artillery balloon systems were sold to Iraq by a British company.

So let’s go back to the surprise. Why was I surprised? Because I can’t help believing, on some level, that there are WMD in Iraq. Despite the fact that no Iraqi official has decided to let us know where they are, and despite the fact that we can’t find the tens of thousands of tons of WMD that Bush claimed, and despite the fact that Iraq didn’t use ‘em even at the 11th hour — some of me says “Well, they must be there.”

Thus, you can point at me and say “Look! There’s someone who was against the war, yet he believed in WMD!” However, it might be instructive to think about why I sorta believe in WMD. (On a gut level, let me emphasize. My brain strongly suspects we won’t find any, and it’s right.)

I thought there were WMD in Iraq because I didn’t think the President of the United States of America would mislead us about that kind of thing.

Truly. If Bush had gotten up and said “We’re pretty sure there aren’t any of those in Iraq,” I would have said “Oh… OK.” I mean, why wouldn’t I buy that? Doesn’t the President have access to better intelligence than I do? He absolutely does. So when he beat the drums so passionately and warned us in such uncertain terms that Iraq had WMD — I bought into it. I believed it because he said so, and I still have a little part of me that believes it because it’s so hard to wrap my mind around such a grievous lack of accuracy.

I don’t feel too bad about this. The technique known as the Big Lie works, and whether or not Bush consciously lied he used that technique. I’d use a better name for it if I had one. It comes down to someone in a position of authority saying something with absolutely no doubt in his or her tone; people believe that, because the consequences of thinking that the authority figure is lying loom large in our hindbrain.

Bush may well not have meant to mislead us. (Josh Marshall has a great piece on this, by the by.) But the effect was certainly misleading.

Unsurprisingly, Bush’s faith-based programs have taken that fateful next step. This one involves the Head Start preschool program. In eight states, it’s now possible for religious organizations running Head Start programs to discriminate in hiring based on religion.

This is ludicrous. The rationale is that religious organizations might not participate without being able to discriminate. I am forced to say “So?” Religious groups that feel the need to discriminate based on religion are not appropriate teachers for our children.