Category: Politics

PETA offered the town of Hamburg, New York a cool $15,000 to change its name. To Veggieburg. Well, no; on rereading the article they actually offered the town $15,000 worth of non-meat patties. For the schools.

“Ham” is old Saxon for “banks,” you know. Or anyhow, you know now. Hamburgers are named after the town. Clearly PETA should be campaigning to change the name of the meat product, as naming the vile meat after a town is a slur on the noble history of the place. Town yes! Meat no!

Well! We’re holding children under sixteen at Gitmo. That kind of stings. These kids, like other prisoners at Gitmo, are being held without benefit of either US law or the Geneva Convention. Let’s assume that the case for the legality of this has been made. I still can’t help but wonder why the US government is willing to put aside those two bodies of law. The real test of morality is not what you do when you have no choice — it’s what you do when you do have a choice. Apparently, when we have a choice, we sometimes decide not to grant civil rights. Even to kids.

“I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting,” he said. “The likelihood of it seems to me to be so low that it does not surprise me that it’s never been discussed in my presence to my knowledge.”

“He” is Donald Rumsfeld. Dude. Not even considered? Not even thought about it? Everyone else in the world has mentioned it, and you didn’t even talk about how to answer the question when it came up? I mean, senior military officials have thought about it.

Yeesh.

Another quick note on the matter of the practicalities of speech-oriented boycotts:

It’s the Internet era. We’re moving inexorably closer to the day when you can’t shut anyone up. Ask Christopher Allbritton — not that anyone was trying to shut him up, but he’s a great demonstration of how much the reach of the independent commentator/journalist has grown. People who want to get their message across need big media less and less.

Right now, you can pull together a sizable interest group without media help. That’s a distinct change in social possibilities. You probably can’t put together an interest group big enough to matter in a national election, but the day is coming. Put differently: South Park got on the air because a little Christmas card video was distributed all over the Internet.

Those who want to influence the opinions of the future ought to be thinking about establishing the core mechanisms for person-to-person communication right now.

So I was reading this entry from Mike and it made me think — which reminds me, cause I’ve been meaning to talk about Cold Fury for a while, so I’m going to digress. Back to the main point in a minute.

I read Mike because he’s honest and a man of integrity. He’s also pissed off, but so am I. Thing is, he does not have a secret agenda to take over the world, and he isn’t plotting to send hordes of jackbooted Young Republicans marching down the streets, and he doesn’t hate all Muslims, and he’s not living in some weird little world of his own. He’s a good guy who has different politics than I do. If I couldn’t read Mike’s stuff and think about it rationally, rather than just writing him off as a right-wing thug, I’d be pretty worried about myself. When I express an opinion, he listens to it; I owe him the same courtesy. Also, he plays a mean guitar.

OK, on with the thoughtfulness.

The above-referenced entry is a shot at Tim Robbins. I pretty much disagree with Mike on the whole Baseball Hall of Fame controversy, on a number of levels; mostly, I think it’s morally right to encourage expression of multiple points of view. I happen to agree with Robbins some of the time, but I’d be just as cheesed off if the Baseball Hall of Fame uninvited Randy Johnson to a festivity on the grounds that Johnson might say something praising Bush. Once you start telling people to shut up based on what they might say, you’re stifling free speech — it’s what they call a chilling effect in the legal world.

A bunch of people in the comments section said that they could boycott anything they wanted. Well, it’s not a boycott if someone else is making the decisions for you — in this case, it’s the Baseball Hall of Fame exerting control over what we hear, and man does that ever piss me off. I’m an adult; I can make my decisions for myself.

But — and this is where I got thoughtful — what about boycotts? What about the Dixie Chicks? What about… oh god… what about the Michael Savage boycott?

You know, I can’t honestly say I think anyone should be trying to shut Savage up by applying that kind of economic pressure. Truth is, if Savage is succeeding it only means there are a lot of people willing to listen to him. That problem isn’t going to go away by gagging the man. You don’t win the battle for hearts and minds by creating martyrs.

And that’s just the practical standpoint. From a moral standpoint, I can’t see any way to praise a Michael Savage boycott without also accepting the reasonableness of the Dixie Chicks boycott. Even if it’s ClearChannel pulling the strings in the latter case, aren’t we asking Savage’s advertisers to pull the strings in the former case?

Yeah, I think we are. Let’s stop trying to eliminate ideas that we find unpleasant, already.

US comes out against ridding the Middle East of WMDs. Film at 11.

Yeah, I’m simplifying. But not much. Syria introduced a Security Council resolution that would require all Middle Eastern countries to rid themselves of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The US said “No, no, the time isn’t right.” That means, of course, “We don’t want to make Israel give up their nuclear weapons.”

I have to grudgingly admire the acumen of Syria. Not only did they make the US object to a positive resolution, they nudged us into admitting that the Security Council matters after all. Odd; I could have sworn Bush said that the Security Council would be irrelevant if it didn’t vote to allow us to invade Iraq. Why do we care what resolutions Syria introduces?

Answer: because even if we don’t care, most of the rest of the world — including the UK, Spain, Italy, and Australia — does. And we are not capable of defeating the rest of the world singlehandedly. From a military perspective? Quite possibly. From a financial perspective? Not a chance in hell.

Heh. I was speculating earlier today that the Iraqi National Museum looting might have been pro art thieves. Through sheer luck, it looks like I was right.

Someone should tell those Marines to redo their sign in Arabic, but I’m glad they’re awake now. The FBI is on the job, too. Right reactions, even if we got the initial actions wrong.

Robert Fisk has the most poignant things to say. I don’t know what I could add to what he wrote. An observation, perhaps, that this is a deeply apoliticial column. Frustrated? Oh yes. But not political. (Via Making Light.)

The buried mobile labs we found last week weren’t chemical weapon labs after all. It’s unclear whether or not these are the labs Powell was talking about in his UN speech — from the CNN article, it looks as though they’re cargo containers rather than actual vehicles, but those are designed to ride on flatbed trucks. I’m thinking they’re at least the same type of lab. Well, maybe Iraq had 18 mobile chemical weapons labs plus 11 mobile labs that had nothing to do with chemical weapons and it’s just a coincidence and we’ll find the chemical weapons labs later.

Or maybe we were suckered, just like we were suckered on the nuclear materials sale.

Why does Bush have to find weapons of mass destruction? Because that’s how he justified the war.

Exhibit A: the State of the Union. There is a sequence of 19 paragraphs directly discussing Iraq, beginning with the line “Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq,” and ending with “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

Of those 19 paragraphs, 18 of them refer to the threat Saddam poses and/or the weapons of mass destruction he possesses. 4 of them discuss Saddam’s brutality towards his own people.

Exhibt B: the Iraqi Threat speech, which admittedly aimed at discussing the threat Iraq poses. Still, it’s significant that he chose to discuss the threat, rather than the need to bring freedom to the citizens of Iraq. Surely if the issue of rights and freedom were his primary concern, he’d have discussed those?

In any case, out of 48 paragraphs, 4 paragraphs discuss the repression of the Iraqi people. You can probably guess what the other 44 deal with.

Exhibit C: the ultimatum, delivered on March 16th. 27 paragraphs; we’re 14 paragraphs in before we hit any comments on the oppression of the Iraqi people. Sum total of discussion of said oppression: 3 paragraphs, maybe 4 if you’re inclined towards a liberal interpretation.

Exhibit D: the Iraqi Freedom speech, which was delivered on March 19th as the bombing began. It opens with the statement, “My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Two out of three motivations relate to the weapons of mass destruction.

Later, he says “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly — yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

If you can’t take the President’s word on what the purpose of the war was, whose word can you take?

None of this should be taken to imply that I’m not happy Iraq is potentially free. I say potentially because anyone who says they know what the place will look like in a year is lying; a lot depends on us and a lot depends on whether various Iraqi groups decide to work towards democracy or not. Regardless, I’m quite happy that Saddam has been overthrown.

However, when my President tells me we’re going to war for a purpose, I expect that purpose to be fulfilled. I expect his rationale to be justified. If we do not find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq (not predicting we will, not predicting we won’t), I expect Bush to get up and say “We were wrong; there wasn’t so much of a threat after all.”

Why is it so important? Well, it speaks to trust, you know? I really want to know if our President’s claims about threats can be relied upon or not. Is that so much to ask?