Month: October 2004
Golly gee. Who’d have ever thought that a few hundred tons of weapons gone missing in some Middle Eastern nation-state would have such an effect on the waning days of the race for the White House? Certainly not the American military unit that apparently wasn’t told to search the weapons-storage facility from which these munitions were presumably taken. Realistically, if their bosses had known there were weapons floating around Iraq, they’d have been on high alert over this sort of thing, right?
From “Spokesman: Unit Didn’t Search Al-Qaqaa”, Associated Press, October 27, 2004:
The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a “tragic series of blunders” by the Bush administration in Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site, and he complained that Kerry does not mention the “400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that our troops have captured.”
OK, there you go. This is how war works, and politics, too. It’s that classic Cheney tactic: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. To wit, regarding the administration’s now-very-clearly-fucked-up invasion of Iraq, the Vice President said in June:
“After decades of rule by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq,” Cheney said in a speech in New Orleans, which made the case that Bush had reversed a terrorist threat that grew unchecked before he came to office. “America is safer, and the world is more secure, because Iraq and Afghanistan are now partners in the struggle against terror, instead of sanctuaries for terrorist networks.”
You see how that works? He plays up the good things that have come from the invasion and overthrow of Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn’t act like a certain senator from a certain state in the Northeast might, by focusing on, say, the fact that 3,000 Americans died three years ago, or that well more than a thousand American soldiers have died in military action since then, or that much more than ten thousand Iraqis and Afghans have perished at the hands of American weaponry in that interim…see, that’s meaningless, folks.
Because at the end of the day, those hundreds of millions of Americans who don’t fall into those “irrelevant” categories of deaths detailed above are, of course, safer. It’s about positivity. Optimism. And that’s the Cheney way.
At least I think that’s how it works. Though I’m probably overlooking something. I can just feel it…
Oh, shit, I’ve got it! This, right here!
“The biggest threat we face now as a nation,” he said, “is the possibility of terrorists’ ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us – biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind – to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
“You have to get your mind around that concept,” he added.
You go, Dick! For a few fleeting moments up there I’d somehow managed to convince myself that you’d gone all Disney, all “hakuna matata” and “circle of life” and shit, but thanks for grounding us in the bare necessities: Vote or die.
Notes Towards an Election Week Mix Tape
“The Final Countdown,” Europe
“Political World,” Bob Dylan
“Power to the People,” John Lennon
“It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” REM
“Welcome to the Terrordome,” Public Enemy
“Help!,” The Beatles
“The Power,” Snap
“I Started a Joke,” The Bee Gees
“Whistle When You’re Low,” Cancer Boy
“Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind,” Lovin’ Spoonful
“Manic Depression,” Jimi Hendrix
“Heroes,” David Bowie
“A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke
“Authority Song,” John Mellencamp
“You’re a Big Girl Now,” The Stylistics (for Dubya)
Question: What’s on yours?
Despite This, You Should Still Vote
Green Party: Punks Dead and Your Next [sic.]
Earlier: Another counterculture icon for participatory democracy
Hitch Your Wagon
Slate, in its noble but hopeless effort “to emphasize the distinction between opinion and bias,” allows contributors to reveal their picks for President. And while the legion Mia-philes will be fascinated to learn that arts writer Mia Fineman is voting Kerry, it’s Christopher Hitchens’ endorsement that is likely to raise eyebrows – Hitch, per Slate, is voting Kerry.
Nevermind his recent endorsement of Bush in The Nation (titled “Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush”), nevermind his defenses of the Bush administration that occasionally border on the absurd, let Hitchens explain his choice, with the clarity and concision for which he is known. From Slate:
The ironic votes are the endorsements for Kerry that appear in Buchanan’s anti-war sheet The American Conservative, and the support for Kerry’s pro-war candidacy manifested by those simple folks at MoveOn.org. I can’t compete with this sort of thing, but I do think that Bush deserves praise for his implacability, and that Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.
So his Slate endorsement is ironic, but his Nation endorsement is sincere? Or he’s not interested in voting for Kerry for ironic reasons, but for obvious reasons? Or what the fuck? I’ll bet that piece from the Nation will clear things up, where this Merlot-fueled master of the mot juste really gets to lay out his case. To wit:
Sometimes it’s objectively not so bad that the “other” party actually wins. Thus I ought to begin by stating my reasons to hope for a Kerry/Edwards victory.
…
I can’t wait to see President Kerry discover which corporation, aside from Halliburton, should after all have got the contract to reconstruct Iraq’s oil industry. I look forward to seeing him eat his Jesse Helms-like words, about the false antithesis between spending money abroad and “at home” (as if this war, sponsored from abroad, hadn’t broken out “at home”). I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi’s existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America’s part.
OK, so that was totally ironic. Totally. But then what to make of what follows?
Should the electors decide for the President, as I would slightly prefer, the excruciating personality of George Bush strikes me in the light of a second- or third-order consideration.
That’s totally sincere (aka un-ironic), right? So then what’s with the thing in Slate? Did he change his mind in the four days between the publication of his Nation piece and his Salon rumblings? Maybe Hitchens has run out of things to be a contrarian about and he now has only himself to debate. Or maybe someone should just lay off the sauce this close to the big day. God knows I’m confused.
It’s Been A Long Campaign Season
July 29, 2004… October 21, 2004
We’re all sagging a bit, but we can pull through, people!
Chomsky Shrugged
Bipartisancurious Andrew Sullivan seems to strain credulity a bit with this passage in his
endorsement of John Kerry:
Does Kerry believe in this war? Skeptics say he doesn’t. They don’t believe he has understood the significance of September 11. They rightly point to the antiwar and anti-Western attitudes of some in his base–the Michael Moores and Noam Chomskys who will celebrate a Kerry victory.
Frankly, we find it somewhat difficult to imagine the dour MIT linguist celebrating anything, especially the election of John Kerry, whom Chomsky endorsed, if anything, more reservedly and reluctantly than Sullivan did.
So, like, yesterday the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency announced that a whole lot of explosives were missing or gone or something from an Iraqi weapons facility. This, like, looks so so bad for President Bush, who’s been campaigning non-stop on the perceived strength of his, like, handling of this war on terror thing. We’re, like, fighting terrorists, and if they have weapons that they shouldn’t have, it’s so totally bad for our troops.
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan fielded questions on the munitions – which are, like, missing – from reporters aboard Air Force One.
Q: Are U.S. troops under any kind of higher alert because there’s enough munitions for like 50 car bombs? Is there, like, any kind of alert going on for them? Are they on any kind of higher standard?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think you need to look at what we have done in terms of destroying munitions. As I point out, we’ve destroyed more than 243,000 munitions, we’ve secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed.
OMG those numbers totally shot you down, anonymous White House pool reporter! Or should I say…Ms. Lohan!