rssJohn Lukas, writing in the NYT today on "The Senseless Salute".
But about 20 years ago the militarization of the image of the presidency began. It started with Mr. Reagan, who had no record of military service and who spent World War II in Hollywood (something that he tried on occasion to obscure). There were his fervent, sentimental and sometimes tearful expressions when meeting or speaking to American soldiers, sailors and airmen. There was, too, his easy and self-satisfying willingness to employ the armed forces of the United States in rapid and spectacular military operations against minuscule targets and "enemies" like Grenada, Nicaragua and Libya. President Bush, too, enjoys immersing himself in the warm bath of jubilant approbation at large gatherings of soldiers.
Like the boy soldier salute, the sentimentalization of the military is juvenile. Television depictions of modern technological warfare, for example, make it seem as if a military campaign were but a superb game, an occasional Super Bowl that America is bound to win and with almost no human losses. ("We'll keep our fighting men and women out of harm's way" a senseless phrase that emerged during the Clinton years.) The exaggerated vesting of the president with his supreme role as commander in chief is a new element in our national history.
Of course, Clinton was also guilty of playing up to the military side of the presidency, and in recent times we've had the somewhat nauseating sight of J.W. Howard eagerly sending the military off to war. But there's something altogether disturbing in how often Bush is willing to surround himself with military-ish trappings -- and then use this as a weapon to attack those who oppose him.
We've been good little vassals of the US, so it's time for a nice pat on the head from the local viceroy, er ambassador.
Australia, Mr Schieffer says, "had a great deal of influence" in the run-up to the Iraq war. "I don't think Australians fully understand that."
Yep, vast amounts of influence. That'd be why Spain (troops sent: 0) got all the attention while little Johnnie got ignored.
While Schieffer's in the US, perhaps Howard could learn to fetch a stick. There might be a nice cookie in it for him if he does.
Someone probably should word Schieffer up on his talking points, though:
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction "really were the reasons for this war, and had they been eliminated then there would not have been a war."
"The reason that this became such an issue of late is because of September 11." Mr Bush was "haunted by the prospect of having to console more victims" of terrorism. "A nuclear device going off in New York harbour, anthrax being sprayed over a sporting event, these . . . were the kinds of things that were possible if terrorists acquired weapons of mass destruction. The president was very concerned at the possibility that if something were not done about the Iraqi situation it would foretell even more tragedy . . . That's been done."
Um, without wanting to be too rude, but WHAT FUCKING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION?, you lying arsewipe! And tastefully done, too, using the deaths of thousands of people to push your little war. And absolute fucking SHAME on the age journalist (Grattan) for letting him peddle that shit uncritically.
Oh, and for those of us who thought we might be allowed to elect a government that could make it's own foreign policy:
There's one bit of Australian political territory on which Mr Schieffer now treads extremely warily. Asked how a Labor government and a re-elected Bush Administration would get on, he laughs. "I don't think that's something I want to get into." But then he predicts good relations with future Labor governments "because at the heart of the Labor Party is the realisation that the alliance is important to the security (of Australia)".
Get that? No talking smack to the americans, or else. Just so long as the Labor party doesn't dare think about an independent foreign policy, they'll be allowed to form a government here.
Finally, as I predicted some time ago, once the US sets up their colonial administration in Iraq, our farmers can expect to get utterly shafted:
More immediately, Mr Schieffer says the US won't, in the transitional period, try to muscle Australia aside over wheat to Iraq. (We've sold wheat under the food-for-oil program; the US hasn't.) But once Iraq is back in the world market as a buyer, "we'll compete like we compete around the world".
"In the transitional period". This would mean the next month or two, then it's goodbye exports to Iraq for us. They'll compete like they compete everywhere else - using threats, bribes, subsidies and the like.
A while back I half-seriously suggested that you could view the Federal Governments actions through a "bash the reffos" lens. Today, just to prove the point, we get the Cadaver:
The Federal Government is considering a reintegration package to encourage Iraqi asylum seekers to return home.
The Government offered similar assistance to Afghanis, detained at offshore immigration centres, whose applications for asylum were rejected.
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock told Channel 9 the idea is still being discussed.
"I've raised with the Prime Minister the question of whether we should put together a package at this stage, which would be in this form, that we provide a reintegration package to pay fares, some financial support for people who elect to go and don't use our protection system, that is, they don't impose significant costs on us in having to determine their claims," he said.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ. Has Ruddock actually looked at media
reports from Iraq? Complete breakdown of public order, widespread looting
and violence, most public services are either destroyed, looted or
abandoned. But hey, the bad man Saddam and his weapons of
mass destruction and his terrorist allies
is gone, so whack em back on the fucking boat and send them home.
Gosh, we sent a whole planeload of humanitarian supplies, really, what else could be expected? Sure, a single planeload won't stretch far in a city of millions of people, but hey, they can learn to share.
Yes, they're probably going to be sending more relief supplies, but you think that they could maybe worry about preventing starvation, disease and mayhem there before they start salivating at the prospect of kicking some more poor bastards out of the country. I know, I know, they're the Liberal party, aside from wedge politics and the fine art of demonising anyone that "looks funny" they don't actually stand for anything, but you think that they could maybe pretend for a bit.
Can't talk about Iraq. Must focus on shiny new war: Syria.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Syria on Wednesday of giving haven to some members of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government and assisting others to additional safe locations.
Citing "scraps of intelligence," Rumsfeld also renewed his accusation that Syria provided Iraq with night-vision goggles and other military technology.
(yes, I know I've not been updating that much this week - busybusy. Better next week).
A piece in Salon on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (via Digby) (and note that the Daily Show's website has a bunch of clips online).
Test how consistent your beliefs are with Battleground God (via Calpundit).
Also from Salon, a "Christian" charity called, and I wish I was making this up, CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) that pays drug addicts to be sterilised (via Boing Boing). This is wrong on so, so many levels. They have a website at http://cashforbirthcontrol.com/.
Finally, Slate's David Edelstein revisits "Three Kings" in the NYT.
Kristof, in the NYT today, is puzzled "why does the world hate America". After noting that the US is now investing a whole lot of effort into spin and public relations...
So why does everybody still hate us? Even in Britain, one of the rare countries where a traveling American isn't tempted to seek camouflage by donning an "O Canada" T-shirt, a poll last week found that fewer than one person in seven trusts President Bush to tell the truth.
A couple of simple points. As Kristof notes, the world looks beyond the fluffy PR campaign and sees the current administration's actions for what they are. It's not a matter of spinning, which Kristof seems to think is part of the solution. If you act like imperious bullies, expect to be treated as such.
And secondly, when did hating the behaviour of the US president and his team suddenly become equivalent to hating America? Just because the British public (correctly) sees Bush as a right-wing whacko doesn't mean the Brits are going to be lining up to join Al-Qaeda any time soon.
Again, we can turn to the behaviour of the Republicans during Clinton's time in office. They hated Clinton and his team with a scary passion, yet I don't recall opinion writers describing this as "hating America".
Turns out that "tort reform" or "insurance reform" isn't just a US screwup (Dwight Meredith at PLA has pieces on the US efforts here and here).
The federal legislation took an "interesting" approach to fixing the non-problem. It merely capped the amounts that insurance companies were liable to pay, any amount above the cap will be the personal liability of the individual doctors. It gets better. The doctors will remain potentially liable for over 20 years after they retire!
From yesterday's Hun:
UP to 80 per cent of Victorian obstetricians and gynaecologists could quit private practice unless the State Government addressed the medical indemnity crisis, doctors warned yesterday.
AMA state president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal said other specialists could also leave medicine because of federal reforms to be phased in from July 1.
The move will increase insurance premiums and make doctors personally liable for damages that exceeded a cap, he said.
From July 1, doctors will be forced to continue to take out insurance even if they have retired in order to protect themselves, Dr Haikerwal said.
They could also be sued up to 24 years after a child was born. The AMA wants this reduced to six years and to restrict the number of people who claim for damages.
(There's a similar piece in yesterday's SMH.)
In case you've not been following the bogus "insurance crisis", it's pretty simple. Insurance companies collect premiums and invest them. They use this invested money to pay out claims. The primary investment vehicle is the share market. The share market has been, well, "toxic" isn't too strong a word. Insurance companies lose money on their investments. This is made worse with the collapse of HIH and the general appalling lack of regulation by APRA, the government regulator of the insurance industry, and because during the late 90s when the investment market was good, the insurance industry cut premiums to unsustainable levels.
Rather than address the complex problems, the insurance industry's been looking to the government to bail them out by limiting their liability. As people such as Dwight Meredith have pointed out, this is actually not going to help matters. Plenty of people have pointed out that in the US, there is in fact no massive explosion of payouts, just the public perception of payouts (driven largely by insurance industry PR). The enormous rises in public liability premiums that have been seen in the last year or two could be seen in light of this as a pretty straight-forward bludgeoning of the public and the politicians - by driving premiums for various festivals and the like through the roof, they were guaranteed to get the government's attention.
There's a group of consumer bodies who've set up a website Insurance Reform Campaign with a lot more details on the issue. It's not entirely clear who's behind this site, so take what's there with a grain of salt.
It's probably also worth noting that the doctor's association, the AMA, is probably indulging in beating this up into a scare campaign to get the situation resolved, but nonetheless it is a very real issue.
(thanks to Richard for bringing this to my attention, after he heard about it from his local GP)
The American Physical Society (Physical as in Physics, rather than bad-hair-Olivia-Newton-John aerobics) publishes a weekly newsletter by Bob Park called What's New. From this week's issue:
PRAYER HEALING: WELL WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM "PARADE"? WN got a lot of mail from people who read "Why Prayer Could Be Good Medicine." As near as WN could tell, no one on Earth doubts that sick people who pray may derive some sort of emotional benefit, perhaps even improving their prognosis. The only question with any religious implications is whether intercessory prayer, prayer offered by others without the knowledge of the patient, helps. The answer will not be found by reading Parade. Elsewhere, In Touch Ministries distributed a pamphlet to troops: "A Christians Duty in a Time of War." It included a helpful scripture from Romans 13:1 "Every person is to be in subjugation to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God..." This was the basis of the Divine Right of Kings.
... you know, just in case you were worrying that George "believes self called by God" Bush might not be getting enough ego boosting.
(Which brings to mind a question. If Bush was called by God, could he not be recalled by God? Or are deities immune from defective-product legislation requiring them to replace something that's completely broken?)
My current theory is that Peggy Noonan's flipped out, killed Bill Safire, and occasionally turns up at the NYT wearing his skin to churn out his columns. How else to explain yet another column that could generously be called "fiction" and less kindly known as "making shit up".
Really. Has anyone seen them in the same room any time recently?
On the other hand, it solves that tedious problem of hoping Your Side of politics actually say something that's not hideously awful. Just make up what you'd like them to say.
(update: TBogg notes that Peggy's "taking time off" to work on her book. I think we know that this is just a cover. Obviously the work of pretending to be a pedantic old blowhard is just taking too much of her time. (TBogg's got broken permalinks - yay blogger. scroll down to 11.36pm on 6th April, "My loss is journalism's gain"))
From this piece on the US assault on Baghdad:
A man with explosives strapped to his chest drove toward the column before being stopped by hundreds of rounds of tank fire, returning troops said.
It took hundreds of rounds of tank fire to stop him? What sort of Iraqis are they dealing with here?
The other possibility, suggests Cam, is that the US are lousy lousy shots. Under the rules of movie cliche, I think that makes the US the bad guys...
Happy Birthday, Astroboy! April 7th, 2003 is the date Astroboy was/is created. There's a new series and a movie in the works (the page referenced has a preview - it looks rather spiffy) (Note that the preview's a windows media mms: thing - recent versions of mplayer play it fine.)
King of Denial Tom Friedman, warning Bush to watch out for those who'll try to "hijack" the peace in Iraq. After warning against "old-guard Arab intellectuals and Nasserites", he turns to:
The other hijackers are the ideologues within the Bush team who have been dealing with the Iraqi exile leaders and will try to install one of them, like Ahmad Chalabi, to run Iraq. I don't know any of these exiles, and I have nothing against them. But anyone who thinks they can simply be installed by America and take root in Iraqi soil is out of his mind.
Jesus. What does it fucking take to get some people to pay attention? What possible wierd little substances is Tom Friedman smoking that he thinks that Bush isn't one of these idealogues? He's as bad as the rest of them, if not worse - Cheney and Rumsfeld are obviously intelligent, while Bush has shown little or no sign or intellectual activity.
The "idealogues within the Bush team" are the Bush team.
Mmmm. Not only is dissent unpatriotic, merely providing alternate points of view is also evidently not allowed. Akamai drops Al Jazeera. How long before someone in the US Homeland Security Department "asks" a major backbone provider to null-route the Al Jazeera website?
Akamai are either: a) gutless in the face of any political pressure, or b) willing to impose their own standards of "acceptable content" on their customers. Either way, it's a pretty poor effort.
Snow to Talk to G7 on Sharing Iraq Costs:
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Thursday he wants other Group of Seven allies to help bear the cost of an Iraqi reconstruction effort once the U.S.-led war ends.
Speaking to the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, Snow noted that he will meet other G7 finance ministers in Washington next week on the fringes of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank spring meetings and that reconstruction would be on the agenda.
"We want to make sure other countries help us," Snow said in response to questions after a luncheon address.
Hey, it's your fucking war. You pay for your own damn mistakes. The piece finishes with:
[Snow] said Iraq has extraordinary oil wealth and noted that President Bush has said he wants the revenues to be used to help make Iraq into a modern state once Saddam Hussein is toppled from power.
Repeat after me: it's not about oil. It's not about oil. It's not about oil. (Well, no - to be completely accurate, it's about paying back campaign contributors, and getting Bush re-elected.)
From slime-meister Andrew Sullivan:
Let's see, from the ICBL website, Italy signed the land-mine ban 3 Dec 1997 and ratified it 23 Apr 1999. The US still refuses to sign the treaty, and has stated that they will be using more land mines in Iraq. In refusing to sign the treaty they have some fine company - pretty much every nasty piece of work country in the world.
Back to Sullivan's slur, Italy had completely stopped producing landmines by 1994. As far as I can see, the Italian arming of Iraq dates back to 1984, and at the time was done with the complete approval and assistance of the United States.
Of course, this doesn't excuse their selling them in the past, but then, I don't see the US apologising for helping arm Saddam (including his chemical and biological weapons) during the 1980s, either.
Sullivan: for those times when Instapundit just doesn't provide your essential daily slime quotient.
It would be a wonderful wonderful thing if the state liberal party were to follow the advice of Alan Moran, writing in The Age. Before we begin, let's jump to the bottom of the page:
For those who don't keep up with this stuff, the Institute of Public Affairs are an extremist economic rationalist/corporatist/all-government-is-bad kinda group. They claim to be small 'l' liberals, but a scan of their website shows that they're liberals only in the capital-L sense of the word.
A typical IPA topic: "climate change is a myth" (a look at their recent "climate change" conference shows one earth science speaker, and a pile of economist types, but a strange lack of folks who actually work in the field). They're also dead-set against the regulation of business by things such as the ACCC, except where the ACCC can be used as a stick to beat unions to death (see, for instance, this press release)
In short, they're whack-jobs of the Ayn Rand school.
Now, back to the age opinion piece. Moran's recipe for electoral irrelevance includes the following wonderful points:
- where the environment has gone backwards "it is usually because of land being socialised and locked away from productive activities in national parks that are infested with pests, feral cats and other introduced species." The proposed solution? Increased property rights. Uh huh. This is one of the two basic solutions for everything that the IPA proposes. It's either "decreased regulation of private enterprise" or "increased property rights". Back to the point, it's hard to see how, for instance, the Ross Ice Shelf melting into the sea is caused by feral cats. I mean, I know they're a nuisance, but sheesh.
- On education, "Doyle showed no sign of absorbing the lessons of Britain and some American states, where carrots and sticks, parental choice and school evaluation have led to improved standards." Ah, yes, the wonderful US system, where the "No Child Left Behind Act" signed last year has led to absolutely no improvement in quality, inflexible federal controls over state schools, and the very real risk that a large minority of schools, already suffering severe budgetary constraints, will be marked as "failing" and have funding cut further, rather than attempting to provide funds to improve them. Please, please follow the US approach, which is aiming towards ending the role of the state in education as it is known.
- Overall, Moran says that Doyle's speech "showed a lamentable failure to understand how recent elections had been won and lost and a total dismissal of the strengths of previous Liberal policies, the fruits of which the Bracks Labor Government is enjoying." Ah, these would be the very same Liberal policies that got the Liberals first tossed out of power, then drop-kicked deep into the electoral wilderness? Or is Moran of the "1999 was an electoral aberration?" school of thought? Because, y'know, that's kinda the position the Liberals took into the last state election, and they saw their primary vote fall from 42% to 34%, the ALP go from 46% to 49%, and the Greens go from 1% to just shy of 10%. I think that's known amongst folks that follow elections as "a fucking solid boot to the testicles" from the electorate.
It would make my little heart fill with joy if the state Liberals took the advice of the IPA loons as a basis for their future policies. Electoral oblivion awaits them.
Via TBogg, Arundhati Roy in the Guardian. Excerpting it does it no justice, really, but I will include the conclusion here:
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.
Bring on the spanners.
Really, I can't urge you strongly enough. Read the whole thing.
Noted spirit medium Bill Safire's latest piece is "On Rewarding Friends". The opening para:
He then uses the rest of the column to call for what might be best called "spiteful-teenager-politik" (as opposed to "real-politik"). Rather than deal with the world as it is, Safire would have everyone demand that the world is exactly how we would like it to be, and then punish anyone that fails to live up to these expectations. For instance, right now Latvia is considered a member of the "coalition of the willing" (although they're not actually providing anything but words of support). But should the Latvians dare to toss out the current pro-US leadership in the upcoming elections:
Ironically, he begins his whining about those perfidious Turks with:
So, Turkey was supposed to "lead the world to secular democracy". But when Turkey's secular democracy declined that opportunity (backed by an overwhelming majority of the Turkish people), well, then:
So, remember kids, Democracy means never saying 'no' to the US. Something worth bearing in mind in a post-invasion reconstruction of Iraq. Safire's something of a language buff, which makes his inability to understand the 'D' word a puzzle.
(There's also, of course, Safire's endless, tiresome French-bashing, which, to be honest, my brain just skipped over. It's about as notable as the petulant whining of somebody else's child on public transport, although possibly slightly more annoying.)
A couple of pieces from the Guardian. The first, from Jonathan Freedland, is a riff on the Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi", in particular the line "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" -- in this case, the multilateral institutions that the Bushies have gone out of their way to thoroughly trash. It also includes, almost as a postscript, the following possible explanation for Rumsfeld's deliberate under-gunning of the invasion force:
Or take one more striking, practical illustration. In the months before war a debate raged in the Pentagon between, crudely put, the uniforms and the suits. The soldiers wanted more time, so they could build up to the 250,000 troops that would constitute the "overwhelming force" believed since the first Gulf war to be the best way to deploy US power. They wanted another month. But the Pentagon civilians, led by Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, insisted on going earlier, with many fewer men.
Why would a hawk like Rumsfeld prefer less to more? My Washington source offers an astonishing explanation: "So they can do it again." The logic is simple. Rumsfeld and co know that amassing an army of quarter of a million is a once-a-decade affair: 1991 and 2003. But if they can prove that victory is possible with a lighter, more nimble force, assembled rapidly - then why not repeat the trick? "This is just the beginning," an administration official told the New York Times this week. "I would not rule out the same sequence of events for Iran and North Korea as for Iraq."
This follows on from Josh Marshall's "Practice to Deceive" piece quite eerily. JM's piece suggested that Iraq is actually the first of many wars planned by the neo-cons (at what point do they lose the 'conservative' label? perhaps neo-hawk, neo-imperialist, neo-loon, or just scary right-wing radical fruitloops)
The second piece, by Paul Foot this time, is on "FDR" -- "Friends of Donald Rumsfeld". When this stuff happens in Eastern Europe or Asia, it's called simply "crony capitalism", or "corruption". Why is this not the case for the US? And, as Foot notes:
Second, how on earth did we British become involved in this whole ghastly business? How did nice, sanctimonious Mr Blair with his psalms and his cliches become so dedicated to the war of the US corporations that he throws British troops into the charnel house?
Again, we see something that couldn't even vaguely be described as "conservative". Would a "conservative" government slash money for veterans affairs at the same time as they've got hundreds of thousands of these soon-to-be-veterans in the field, just so they can give their mates and supporters kickbacks?
The final piece is another by Freedland. He points out the obvious, that this current war goes against everything the US has ever stood for -- there's many traditional schools of thought of foreign affairs in the US, but this new war is something new, and something awful. He notes that this "un-american" war will result in the Iraqis living under an oppressive military rule that would result in the american militias heading for the hills were it to occur to them.
I'm not quite convinced by this. The right-wing media echo chamber in the US has lulled citizens of the US into accepting quite unbelievable offensive assaults on their freedom, and more are on the way. (Of course, we're seeing something similar here) (update: the aph webserver is misconfigured - if you get the 'your browser is unsupported' page, click the 'continue anyway, click here' link, then return back to here and click on the link again. Yes, this is retarded).
Returning to the theme of the first piece "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone", this could really be applied to a lot of things. Peace, prosperity, and basic human rights, for instance.