Category: Politics

We’re restricting Iraqi rebuilding contracts to coalition countries. That’s pretty short-sighted. Bush’s take on it:

“Coalition, friendly coalition folks risked their lives and therefore, the contracting is going to reflect that, and that’s what the U.S. taxpayers expect.”

Actually, I expect Bush to choose the course which results in high-quality reconstruction at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. I suspect that opening the bidding to more firms will lower the costs. I would prefer, thusly, not to exclude non-coalition firms.

I also find it deeply ironic that the latest Halliburton story is breaking today. Seriously. Open the bidding up to everyone. The guys we’ve chosen so far are gouging us.

Now, if I was thinking globally — and I’m told we invaded Iraq for the Iraqis — I’d also be a little bit worried about the best interests of the people who live there. It seems not entirely impossible that, among the companies best suited for this kind of reconstruction work, there might be some French or German or Canadian companies. It seems not impossible that, by imposing this restriction, we might be causing some degree of difficulty for the Iraqi people. It’s almost enough to make one think that the motives behind this war might have had something to do with US interests all along.

I’ll finish up with the always-evasive Scott McClellan’s Wednesday press conference.

Q: In the case of Canada, Canada contributed troops to Afghanistan, lost troops in Afghanistan in an accident by U.S. troops, which politically made it very difficult for them to contribute to Iraq. And they’re being punished for not being able to provide —

MR. McCLELLAN: In the war on terrorism, there are a lot of countries participating in those efforts, and we appreciate that. There is a very large coalition of countries across the world that are fighting the war on terrorism and making sacrifices. There were — there was a decision made by coalition forces on Iraq and there are a number of countries that have been helping from the beginning. There are a number of countries that have been sacrificing on the ground in defense of freedom and in an effort to build a better and safer world. And we’re talking just about the U.S. taxpayer funding here, which is a significant amount of money from the U.S. taxpayers.

Scott! It’s OK with me! Open up the bidding so Halliburton can stop charging way the hell too much for gas…

Crap. The White House isn’t listening.

Yeah, I’m feeling flamingly political this week. So: the Guardian claims that some of the Guantanamo Bay defense team was fired. If the report is accurate, and it might not be, a few of the selected defense lawyers objected to the rule that says the government can listen in on conversations between the lawyer and the defendant. They were fired immediately.

The question is obviously not whether the government can fire lawyers who aren’t willing to work under the procedures outlined. The question is whether or not the procedures are reasonable. When you pick a team of lawyers who know in advance that they’re working as part of a military tribunal, and they still object to the procedures once they see them, there is perhaps something wrong with the way you want to do things.

The BBC notes that both the Guardian and Vanity Fair are reporting this story, despite DoD denials.

Ginger pointed out that I didn’t mention the violence committed by the anti-abortion crowd. She’s right; it’s another example of extremist right-wing violence that at the very least verges on terrorism. So let’s talk about that some.

Start out at Abortion Violence, a site run by anti-abortionists. (Brant, this is one of those links. You’ve been warned.) About five seconds into reading it, I realized that the tactics were incredibly familiar. It’s the same stuff I talked about in my previous post on right-wing terrorism.

They’re quick to claim that pro-choice activists are more violent, and provide charts to make the point. However, when you drill down into their state by state numbers, it becomes clear that their stats are hopelessly biased. For example, in Massachusetts, they count the following case as a pro-choice murder:

On October 31, 1999, allergist and part-time abortionist Dirk Greineder murdered his 58-year-old wife, Mabel, during a walk at a Wellesley pond after she discovered his secret life of prostitutes and pornography.

What’s the connection? Well, he performed abortions. By that standard, you have to count every murder ever committed by an anti-abortion activist, though, and they don’t. They also count deaths during abortions; they do not count (or even mention) deaths in childbirth.

The arguments are the same. “We’re not so bad when you look at them.” The arguments are also equally false.

The links between these terrorists and right-wing extremism have been documented for nearly a decade. Eric Rudolph is a great example. So is John Burt. So is Donald Spitz.

Note also the last paragraph in this article on Stephen Jordi — Pastor Ruckman knows what’s going on in his community. Jordi had hopes of killing Clinton and Bush. And the Patriot movement is happy to embrace Jordi as a sympathetic figure. (Scroll down, and if you thought abortionviolence.org was bad, you really don’t want to read that link. But this is what’s happening in our culture and I kind of think it’s better to know.)

It’s all part of the same fabric; it’s all part of the same culture of violence.

Last week, Lawrence Haws wrote me to point out this post, which is — well, it’s what it is. As best I can untangle the logic, Lynxx Pherrett thinks that right wing talk radio isn’t creating a culture of violence because Andrew McCrae was a leftist. There’s also a lot of really flawed rhetoric about how our colleges are producing left-wing assassins by the boatload…

OK, I’m going to digress here for a moment. I experienced Harvard’s General Education program, as it happens, and not only did I not become a brainwashed leftist cop-killer, I remember what General Education courses I took. One of these, which was and is the largest course at Harvard, was Michael Sandel’s Justice. Michael Sandel teaches an unrepentantly communitarianist theory of justice; a large portion of the course is dedicated to refuting the theories of John Rawls, patron saint of modern liberalism. It is difficult, to say the least, to reconcile the popularity of a course which preaches the importance of society with claims that Harvard’s General Education curriculum is a breeding ground for dangerous loners.

Also exceedingly popular: Roderick MacFarquhar’s course on the Cultural Revolution. It was an unstinting look at the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I find it very hard to convince myself that MacFarquhar’s stinging condemnations of Mao cause fond affection for Communism.

Digression over. That wasn’t actually the point of the post; I just couldn’t help but point out that the Harvard curriculum of the late 1950s may not actually accurately model today’s Harvard curriculum.

What I did take out of Pherrett’s post is that there are, in this country, left-wing terrorists. But I already knew that. There are fanatics on both sides of the political spectrum, and some percentage of them are inclined to kill. I wrote back to Lawrence with some extended musings on this topic, and let the topic kind of percolate for a bit.

Then, on Monday, I read the latest post on Orcinus. It exposes his personal reasons for his crusade; I found it remarkably open, exposed reading. Worth reading just for the integrity. It also got my thoughts back on this longwinded post I’m constructing here.

One of the things he talks about, after acknowleding that there are fanatics on the left, is the preponderance of violent right wing rhetoric. He knows, as do I, that there are repellent people on the left — “In my view, Stalinist Communism is the epitome of the blinkered, anti-personal ideology of the left, and I’ve always been a fairly severe anti-Communist.” I suspect he would acknowledge that the rhetoric of groups like ANSWER influenced Andrew McCrae. But McCrae is only one person.

A single loner doesn’t mean the left is as dangerous as the right. I’ll see your McCrae and raise you a Carl Drega. Have an Eric Rudolph. Remember the murder of Alan Berg. Look up Buford Furrow. Read about these forty men.

The right doesn’t have a monopoly on hatred in this country. Thirty years ago, our domestic terrorists were the left-wing Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Thirty years from now, radical environmentalists may embrace terrorist tactics wholeheartedly.

But that’s then. This is now. I am a minarchist, and I have great sympathy for those who feel the government has too many tendrils in private life. This does not stop me from thinking that violence is the wrong solution for the problem as it exists in America today. And when I look around to see where the violence comes from — today, now — I see the terrorist right.

I kept the cynical from my door for about, oh, 24 hours. Going to a warzone and cheering up the troops is a pretty good thing to do, even if the motives are impure. So, sure, I gave him points for that.

But then I stopped and asked myself why he brought the press corps along.

I gotta say. If I’m the President, and I’m worried about my security, and the purpose of my visit is to rally the troops — why do I need Fox News on that plane? Why am I taking the risk of letting reporters in on the story a few days early? I could just, you know, get on the plane and go and come back without bringing along a bunch of cameramen and reporters. If I gotta have pictures, I’m sure there are a couple of Army guys whose job it is to take pictures of things.

Wouldn’t it be safer for both me and the soldiers I’m meeting if I skipped the press coverage and kept the people who knew to the absolute bare minimum?

Cynical’s back. But I’m not the one who decided to heighten the security risk for the sake of positive media coverage.

Tom Kratman responded to my recent discussion of his Posleen book over on my LiveJournal. Since that post is about a month old, I figured I’d be fair and provide a pointer to the discussion. If I’ve given people a negative impression of him, which I imagine I have, he deserves to have his defense seen.

Australia and the US have agreed that Australian detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be tried by US military tribunals. There are a number of points in the agreement, including a promise that the US will not seek the death penalty for any Australians. Also, the media will be allowed to observe the tribunal and the accused may have a cleared attorney as an advisor to his defense team.

The press release makes it really clear that these are case specific assurances which do not apply to Guantanamo Bay detainees in general. Pity.

The North Korean crisis has been pretty quiet lately, at least until KEDO decided to halt the North Korean reactor project.

This is pressure on North Korea to come back to the negotiating table. We’re betting that North Korea won’t escalate as a result. The only levers we have are power, food, and military action. We’re not going to starve people, and even if we were so inclined, the UN is working on food aid. We’re not going to invade a nuclear power. That leaves cutting the nuclear power plant construction, which has the advantage of not making the North Korean situation any worse. It just blocks one method of making things better, so it’s about the most palatable pressure possible.

No telling how North Korea will react. That reaction will determine if applying pressure was in fact the best thing to do.

Glenn Reynolds wants to know if Hollywood is swinging conservative. He quotes one of his readers:

“At the moment it is almost impossible to imagine Hollywood producing a MASH or Catch 22 or Doctor Strangelove (Although I hasten to add Strangelove will always be in my top five movies.) It wouldn’t dare. They may still smile knowingly over their designer water at home but not in their films.”

The terrifying “they.”

In any case, someone’s suffering a severe failure of imagination, I fear. As a corrective measure, I’d recommend that Glenn and his correspondant spend a day with their DVD players. Start out with Three Kings, which is topically applicable and which came out four years ago. Move on to Hulk, for a more current movie with no fondness for the military. And just to make the situation crystal clear, pop in The Quiet American. (Which nearly didn’t get released, admittedly — but which, in the end, did.)

The Massachusetts Supreme Court just ruled that bans on same-sex marriages are unconstitutional. That’s the Massachusetts Constitution, not the US Constitution. There’s some pro-same-sex marriage background about the case here, and some fairly frothing anti-same-sex marriage background here. Or just get the fairly unbiased coverage from Howard Bashman, who knows his stuff.

The actual ruling has been mirrored here.