Month: October 2003

Earlier this week, it was announced that President Bush had raised $49.5 million in just the last three months alone for next year’s campaign. At this rate, he is expected to surpass $200 million with which he can soundly trounce whichever mediocre candidate the Democratic Party nominates to run for president next fall.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish the President much success with his “fuzzy math” endeavors as he gleefully counts the 54 electoral votes handed to him by Governor Schwarzenegger (as well as some very shortsighted voters) in California, as well as the 25 “bonus brethren” points afforded him by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
Incidentally, regarding his Iraqi victory of yesteryear, one of the choice quotes uttered by the President at his appearance in San Bernardino this afternoon included the liberal-angst-inducing line: “I acted because I am not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman.”

In other circumstances, the following legal case might have sent shivers of terror down the spines of American military leaders and their elected superiors. Alas, we live in an era where the nation with the world’s largest economy has forced its hand and more or less exempted itself from war-crimes prosecution. Through economic bribery, of course.
Yesterday, a court in Germany began arguments in a case seeking damages against the German government by Serbs whose relatives were killed in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, when a handful of jets dropped bombs upon a bridge in a small village “far removed from the breakaway province of Kosovo where Slobodon Milosevic’s Serbian army was brutally suppressing ethnic Albanians and fighting off NATO air raids.”
The result of this particular bombing run? 10 civilians were killed on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
The families of the victims are seeking $4.1 million from the German government, though neither the pilots nor the jets themselves were German.
“They claim that Germany, although not directly involved in the attack, knew of and approved the bombing despite the bridge’s obvious civilian usage. Germany is in this case representative for all of NATO, explained the Hamburg lawyer Gul Pinar, who also criticized the government for sanctioning an attack without warning on a civilian target on a church holiday.
The lawyer for the relatives, Ulrich Dost, says the 35 Serbs are suing on the basis of a 1977 protocol added to the Geneva Convention which calls on signatories, including Germany, to distinguish between civilians and the military and “direct their operations only against military objectives.” The bridge in Varvarin, he added, had no military significance.”
10 people on a Sunday afternoon in a remote Serbian village? Why, that’s nothing! I mean, it’s not like the war crime that ensued when American bombers killed almost 30 Afghans, and wounded many more, at a wedding party in July 2002.
I’m sorry. Did I just say war crime? I meant “tactical error.” Good luck suing the U.S. for that, chumps! We’re immune from the impact of cases like your supposedly precedent-setting German lawsuit.

From the Washington Post‘s Battle Over Iraq Budget Begins by Jonathan Weisman and Dan Balz:
Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who said he probably would have voted for the war resolution and later said he would have opposed it, has joined other Democrats in criticizing the administration’s current course in Iraq. But spokeswoman Kym Spell said Clark had no position on the $87 billion request. “He’s not in Congress,” she said. “He’s running for president.”

The LA Weekly‘s Harold Meyerson, writing in today’s Washington Post, details a recent series of findings on the public’s perception of news, released by the “Program on International Policy Attitudes”, a presumably uber-wonkish collective of academic research centers and polling firms from Maryland and California.
Here’s the (sadly predictable) one-two punch, a veritable qualification of American egocentrism in statistical form, with relevant facts in bold:
In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.
The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get their news. The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were “the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions.” Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all three.
In other words, odds are that if you get your info from the television, you’re not quite getting reality. While the numbers make painfully obvious the extent to which Fox News viewers are a deluded mess of pre-packaged assumptions, what really stands out is the fact CBS News viewers (with Dan Rather et al hardly considered a mouthpiece of conservative propagation) were still 100 percent more likely than the average American, who may or may not get his or her news from television, newspapers, or water coolers, to be just as deluded about a realistic understanding of events.
True, the PBS viewers seemed to have a better grasp of things than “the average American,” but, well, you knew that already, didn’t you.
What pre-packaged assumptions does Sarah Vowell’s fan base bring to the table?