Lie Mania
If it were not for the fact that the world series is on, I would put my television in a box and refuse to take it out until November 3rd.
Both Campaigns are lying at such a rate that I swear Factcheck.org will soon burst into flames. They have got to be the largest growth industry in the country right now. Soon Bush can say "Of course I'm good for the economy, every time I give a speech five people are hired!"
But the lies may take a back seat to the patently stupid statements made by candidates. The other day John Kerry was talking about stem cell research and he basically said that it was unethical to stop scientific progress because of your moral beliefs.
What kind of crap is that?
John Kerry is trying to Al Gore himself and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by his own verbal gaffes. Why? And how? Why would you bother to say stupid crap like that? It's so obviously wrong that it's just inviting valid criticism.
Let Bush have the monopoly on stupid, simplistic statements!
Nixon vs Bush - A Review of No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon
Read Between: 18 and 22 Oct 2004
Location: Seattle
I used to also have a copy of Nixon's book Real Peace. I'm not sure what happened to it.
When Richard Nixon left the White House after resigning, a new era of politics was ushered in. It was an era of checks and balances, but the checks were more like those found in Hockey and less like those in healthy oversight. The ugly partisan bickering that brought about the end of the Vietnam war, the Watergate Break-ins and CREEP led to The Contract with America, Ken Starr and today's bitterly divided America.
A few months back, Pat Buchanan (one)(two)(three) confirmed his political impotence by coming out publicly against the war in Iraq and having very few people take notice. If there was someone who should have the tools necessary to manipulate the media, it should be Buchanan. But he was unable to muster anything other than casual mentions.
Beyond this, most people so quickly forget who Pat Buchanan is because he's allowed himself to become a poster child of screaming irrational heads on television pundit shows. But I remember. I saw that and know that a lot of the words that came out of Nixon's mouth were put there by Pat Buchanan. As sure as if Nixon were a CD player and Pat was the disc.
So Pat coming out against Iraq was a wake up call. He had nothing to gain by complaining.
I read what Pat had to say, but since I think of him as interchangable with Nixon, I thought I'd go back and refresh myself on what Nixon said. What were the lessons that Nixon took from Vietnam? What did he feel our failings and strengths were in the war that everyone never wants to see again?
In the back of my mind, I recalled the lessons Nixon outlines in the book and thought they didn't fit very well with how I saw Mr. Bush handling his war.
Much like in the movie The Fog of War by / about Robert McNamara, Nixon does not appologize directly for the VietNam war, nor does try to necessarily excuse it. What Nixon does is spell out the rationale for our involvement and discuss how our internal politics allowed defeat after victory was practically sealed.
I'm not going to go over VietNam and why we were there, how the fighting played out, and who did what. Suffice it to say that No More Vietnams is extremely informative, extremely biased and vital to read if you ever want to fully understand why it happened.
What I do want to talk about is what situations led to our ultimate failure in VietNam and how they have been re-created in Iraq.
These are divided into three areas: Communication | Purpose | World Opinion. All three are intertwined. All three must be discussed in light of each other.
Communication
In VietNam, the White House was never able to fully explain to the electorate why the war was going on. The dissent that VietNam produced at home was partially caused by this. People saw death and horror on television, but we didn't hear firm rationale for this from the White House. VietNam's confounding influence was Communism or the perception of Communism.
It is certain that no one has ever scored more of a coup than the founders of the U.S.S.R. in taking an ethic based on mutual cooperation and turning it into totalitarianism. For years after, people would be fighting "Communism" as an evil and confusing the issue.
If in VietNam, the five administrations would have approached this human rights based war from a human rights perspective, international outcry would have been largely curbed. And this is one of Nixon's main points. While wars need to be fought militarily, they need to be sold politically. National US politics, International Coalitions, Liberal and Conservative.
Given that people are predisposed not to trust each other, especially people in power, if those in power employ extreme measures they are likely to be criticized for it unless they provide ample justification. There is a relation as well between the amount of justification you need to provide before an action and an amount after an action to satisfy critics.
The Bush Administration when launching the Iraq War could not muster internal or external support for the war. They did not heed Nixon's words and redouble their effort to make their case for the war. Then, as the war was waged, the Bush Administration actively insulted countries and Americans who did not support the war and changed their rationale for having the war in the first place several times. The Administration then proceded to have the fewest press conferences of any Administration in 100 years.
This is precisely what Nixon warned against. In this book he specifically points out where the US changed positions on why we were in Vietnam or refused to talk to those with dissenting opinions. And, in the end, our will to fight and our focus to win were compromised.
Purpose
This leads to Purpose. As mentioned in Communication, if your purpose isn't clearly and regularly stated, you will become suspect. Nixon inherited the VietNam war from Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Of course, he was the Vice President with Eisenhower that started the ball rolling. But the point is that VietNam enjoyed bipartisan support throughout its history as has Iraq.
It devolved into partisanship, as has Iraq, because of no clear sense of purpose. The Bush Administration was good at repeating talking points into oblivion, but when those talking points were challenged, they switched to new talking points.
Today some Americans believe that Iraq attacked the World Trade Center. Today some Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was the primary cause of world terrorism, while the US and the world had the country under a no-fly zone and nearly constant supervision for over a decade.
Meanwhile, slowly but surely, we have satisifed our objectives in Iraq - but we are losing ground on our goals. Our objectives: Find weapons of mass destruction, Find Saddam Hussein - we've done pretty good at. Our goals: To create a free and liberated Iraq - we're sucking horribly at.
And this isn't a Vietnam situation. There isn't a massive uprising of the US people to pull our troops out. There aren't clashes between students and the few national guardsmen left over here.
But people are noticing the similarities. To their credit, the people of the US understand that we've made a commitment to history. But we don't trust the Bush Administration because they haven't been able to clearly spell out our purpose for being there or our vision for getting out.
In No More VietNams, Nixon says "Our critical error was to ignore one of the iron laws of war: Never go in without knowing how you are going to get out." There are two reasons the Bush Administration has given to invade Iraq.
1. We would go in and give them freedom which they would accept gladly and be peaceful.
2. We would go in and find massive stockpiles of weaponry.
Neither of these provides a clear vision of entrance, execution or exit. Bush's now infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech showed that he did not understand the difference between winning a battle and winning a war. Or of winning a war and winning a peace.
We marched into Iraq, which is a country created from pre-existing soverign terroritories by previous oppressors. Anyone who has studied Middle-Eastern history would know that Saddam wasn't gassing Kurds because it was his own private fetish. It was cultural. Saddam wasn't killing members of various families, religious sects and reasons because he was uniquely evil. It was cultural.
The only thing that "liberating" Iraq without safeguards would do is let loose a lot of angry repressed people. Historically peaceful Vietnam was a cakewalk compared to Iraq.
We know there was no exit strategy, because anyone investigating this with a critical eye would point out that, short of carving Iraq up into four or five new countries, there wasn't one.
World Opinion
The Court of World Opinion is an important one. It is ad-hoc. It reacts both to the best information available and to pure raw emotion. It is made up of people. People's opinions are based on what excites them and what scares them. That is life.
What scares women in Lawrence, Kansas, is sometimes similar to what scares women in Ghent, Belgium. Sometimes it is not. As someone selling a product as unpopular as a war, it is incumbent upon you to do the legwork to show why your war will eliminate things that scare people and make the world safer for things that excite them.
The Bush Administration made it clear that the war would eliminate things that scared the Bush Administration. Nixon would say that's not good enough. He said, now fully 20 years ago, "Terrorism today is an international challenge to International Order and it requires an international response." He goes on to say this ominous pre-indictment of Bush isolationism "Terrorism breeds fear; fear breeds insularity and suspiciousness; and these inevitably will serve to drive nations apart. When that happens, the whole world will suffer the consequences."
The American decision to spurn the objections of the Europeans wasn't dangerous for the reasons John Kerry likes to bring up: money and American casualties. Ultimately, these are self-serving reasons to criticize Bush's actions. By being self-serving, they are also self-defeating.
It gives Bush the ability to say "This was an important investment and no one was willing to step up and pay for it." In short, by saying that it's too expensive gives Bush moral superiority in this argument.
What the real point is, the one that is obfuscated by repeating that we are paying 90% of the bill is that the bill is higher, the war is longer, the death toll is higher, the world is less safe, terrorism is more common, and the world is more divided because of these actions. All of this is by Nixon's metrics. Applying the rules of engagement laid out by Nixon in No More Vietnams, waging a war unilaterally, with little public discourse, in a region where you are already considered alien, with no clear exit strategy, and with shifting rationales, is precisely the way to build your own unwinnable, long-term, self-defeating conflict.
Before Nixon died, he had frequent talks with Bill Clinton and counseled him in our successful interactions in the Balkans. Both Nixon and Clinton discussed this in public. Nixon support the actions, they were successful. Now we have Nixon's Shadow, Pat Buchanan, levying charges against the Bush Administration's actions.
Through No More Vietnams, we can see that Nixon, too, would be dismayed at the decisions that have led us to this point. Who knows, he may have been at the Democratic National Convention to counter Zell Miller.
Buy No More Vietnams
New J. LeRoy Track
I have just released, for your listening, The Ineffectiveness of the Electoral College. This is the latest of my Ineffectiveness Series, which I've been working on for a few years. It's been a slow project to evolve. Most of the songs are pretty short and crazed. This is no different. This one has the electorate trying to sing their votes over an uncaring electoral college guitar riff.
Checking out Bush's Bulge
In the debate last week, George Bush suddenly lashed out at an invisible enemy, shouting LET ME FINISH. No one had interrupted him. This blog entry gives some possibilities for this outburst and a nice picture of Bush's strange growth half way up his Spine(tm)*.
My personal theory is that it is Zontar**.
* Spine is a registered trademark of George Bush for President, Inc. Used here without permission.
** Zontar The Thing From Venus was a 1966 Remake of a 50's horror sci-fi film by Roger Corman. The only thing worse than a remake of a Roger Corman film is two presidencies by a guy named George Bush.
Observations about our Top Down Culture of Fear
Ann wrote this morning about the recent government warning about terrorists attacking schools. Again this was met with the caveat "we have no immediate threat against schools." In other words, they do not wish to panic anyone, just put mild fear and distrust in them whenever they look at something that is guaranteed to provide an emotional response.
Schools in the US are already under heavy supervision. Why? Because of our own domestic terrorists. The ones we generally forget.
Schools today have armed guards, metal detectors, lock their doors and other things unheard of just a few years ago. There are laws against loitering near schools, selling drugs near schools, having a weapon near schools, soliciting a minor near schools ... at this point, schools should be pretty much the safest places in the US.
So here was my response to Ann.
Are there terrorists in your bathroom?
1. The US was hit on US soil by foreign terrorists twice in the last 20 years. Not a very high percentage of days overall.
2. The US was hit on US soil by domestic terrorists about 100 times. Some small, some larger. Unibombers don't come from Saudi. Oddly enough, Tim McVey did - but in an entirely different way.
3. Theoretically, Terrorists can do anything scary. So a warning from the government saying that Terrorists might sodomize three year old girls or that terrorists were going to poison shipments of McDonalds' Filet-o-Fish would be justifiable, but as spurious as anything else.
4. Airport security remains laughable, it merely preys on our fears of enclosed spaces and flying. Terrorists would be more likely to take out a section of elevated highway at rush hour. Making Americans afraid to drive would be the ultimate blow.
5. For purveyors of fear, this is the ultimate gambit. People of a different color, a different religion, different cultures, who make funny noises and wear things on their heads who could do almost anything to anyone at any time. If you could by stock in Scary Paranoia Inc, this would be the time to buy.
6. In this climate and with the randomness in internet communications, seemingly credible urban legends and other myths can be manufactured by the government or others faster than they can be debunked.
Clap for the Bogeyman, he's gonna raise your terror high.
Clap clap clapclapclapclapclap
Technology Disappoints Cheney
This could be the highpoint of the 2004 elections for me.
In the Veep Deb Cheney mistakenly referred to Factcheck.org as Factcheck.com.
Kevin was nice enough to provide the details that cybersquatters in the Cayman's owned Factcheck.com and re-routed it to George Soros' website.
What I Saw in the Veep Debs
Last night I saw:
Dick Cheney angrily stick to talking points.
John Edwards happily stick to talking points.
Dick Cheney stared at the table like he was forced to endure a contemptible public.
John Edwards couldn't answer a direct question if his life depended on it. Q:"Do you have any pre-existing heart issues, Mr. Edwards?" A:"The American public has lost millions of jobs under Bush and Cheney."
The Vice Presidential debates were a mind numbing masturbatory exercise that ultimately will sway few voters and have only disappoint people who expected better from both men.
I shoulda watched the Boston game instead.
Done Moving
We are done moving to the new house. Now we just have to go through the long process of unpacking. As soon as that is done ... I'm recording.
