Cipherdom (deprecated)

Very Grrrr

I clearly was too harsh in my earlier assessment of the absolutely marvelous I (Heart) Huckabees, which will debut on October 1.

As the great Walter Monheit would say: Ooof!!

"Bush" Announces Resignation!

Unfortunately, it's not for another five years.

The Mother of All Turnarounds

Thanks to my pal Doug Morton for this link to the Naomi Klein article that I haven't given up flogging. And belated thanks to Lee D. for telling me about it in the first place.

Not Dark Yet

The country is split down the middle as usual -- or maybe, as never before. I won't mince words: Unfortunately, there seem to be more dummies out there than the other kind. While many of us see a perfectly obvious choice between one smart guy and another guy who barely aspires to mediocrity, for even more people the choice comes down to one guy whose lackluster laziness feels quite comfortable to them in comparison with the brainy guy who too often reminds them just how little they have on the ball.

The smart guy is ill at ease when pretending to be a Regular Joe; he does his best to act the part because the job demands it, but that pesky wit keeps peeking through, often to his own detriment. He has shown real leadership, not the fake, flag-waving kind. At a dark time when others shirked their responsibilities, he stepped up in the most patriotic, inspiring way. At that very moment, his nemesis -- the lame guy -- was cowering somewhere out of sight, unable to meet that occasion with the courage it demanded.

The lame guy's vapidity is made obvious by his choice of friends and by his lowest-common-denominator rhetoric, which tends toward childish ridicule rather than deft satire. The smart guy even has better taste in music, as you'd expect. The lame guy panders to smarmy performers who don't challenge his cherished, lazy assumptions about life in general.

It's America, after all, so we're probably stuck with the lame guy. The numbers say that most people just love him, incomprehensible though that is to the discerning minority. Fortunately, though, the smart guy isn't going away anytime soon. Last night he pulled a bold upset, pulling ahead of his opponent in the ratings for the first time in ages. There's still hope for this Leno Nation.

Green Zone

More from Naomi Klein:

Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban Mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.

Neo-Con Job

Naomi Klein has a must-read article in the current Harper's, refuting the common wisdom that Bush and Co. went into Iraq without a plan for reconstruction. She convincingly demonstrates that they most certainly did have a plan, and it was doomed by an odd combination of naivete and cyncism among the Neo-Cons. On one hand, they exhibited an almost touching faith in the Magic of the Marketplace; post-Saddam Iraq was to be a capitalist's paradise, with investors falling over one another to build fast food joints, Wal-Marts, and 7-Elevens. On the other hand, they believed that chaos was their ally; Iraqis would be too concerned with bare subsistence to object much to the market shock treatment. We all know how well that turned out.

The article isn't on-line, but it's well worth $8 at your newsstand. Here is Naomi Klein's website, No Logo.

Meet Your Liberal Media

Here's a startlingly credulous dispatch from the Chicago Tribune's Charlie Madigan, covering the Bush "butt kicking" campaign in Michigan. (Don't tally MI as a Red state yet, though; as Madigan points out in an apparent Freudian slip, those pesky Detroit residents have a rude tendency to vote Blue and carry the state.) His title is "senior correspondent," which used to connote journalistic intent. Now, it evidently means "sycophant." A few excerpts:

Bush looks a lot better under a blue sky than he did in the
artificial confines of Madison Square Garden.

Check out the dispassionate analysis! I wonder what color shirt Dear Leader was wearing.

Describing a pleasant encounter with his "handler" -- remember when journalists rebelled against being handled? -- good ol' Charlie wrote: It was a great conversation and a good look into that most dependable segment of Bush support. The easy label would be 'conservative Christian,' but that almost seems too superficial. What she believes, she believes in her heart."

Far be it from me to call Madigan or any other Bush backers superficial. But if believing with all one's heart is the litmus test, we're in big trouble, because proponents of radical Islam seem equally fervent about the need to kill Americans. Technically, Christ counseled against violence and retribution -- yes, He was a smart guy when you come right down to it -- though you'd never know it by all those who take His name in vain. The most dependable segment of Bush's support is intent on giving him carte blanche. Just imagine what he'll dream up if he actually wins an election.

From the Trib's bio of Madigan, we learn he is an all 'round great guy who writes and performs Celtic-style music on the side, when he isn't busy being an arschloch.

Reporting for Par-tay

Those liberal attack dogs over at, um, U.S. News and World Report have made quite a compelling case that Bush scammed his way to an honorable discharge from the National Guard. It includes this quote:

James T. Currie, a retired colonel who is a professor at the Industrial College of The Armed Forces and the author of an official history of the Army Reserve, said that while the Guard had a reputation as being a "good old boy's club" during Vietnam, that didn't mean regulations shouldn't apply. "You make a commitment, and in return for what is a fairly minor inconvenience, you avoid getting drafted and sent to Vietnam, so I think the least you could do was fulfill the letter of that commitment," he said. "Clearly if you were the average poor boy who got drafted and sent into the active force, they weren't going to let you out before you had completed your obligation."

And this:

Eugene R. Fidell, a military law expert in Washington, notes that nothing in Bush's military file shows he received prior approval to miss any of the required drills. Under Air Force regulations, Bush was non-compliant with his military service obligation the moment he missed more than one month of weekend drills and by the third month he was in serious breach of his duty. "By then," Fidell says, "you should be thrown out of the program or, if there is a draft, called up for active duty."

Also:

On May 2, 1973, his superiors in Texas apparently could not locate him or identify records showing that he had trained; they were unable to evaluate Bush's Guard performance, his superiors wrote, because "he has not been observed."

Sound Familiar?

Today's news out of Russia begs the question: Who won the Cold War, anyway?

The Truth

There's one obvious point I'd dispute in it, but this column by Melinda Henneberger is pretty spot-on regarding the degradation of debate.

Sometimes I wonder: Is there any truth left, or just consequences?

The Dick Cheney Guarantee

Today, VP Dick Cheney pretty much promised that a vote for him and Bush means there will be no more terrorist attacks on the U.S. I feel safer already!

Labor Lost

Here are some interesting stats on the convenient omission of Osama's name at the recent GOP convention. Thanks to Marietta's "A Day at the Races" blog, which I found via the redoubtable "Randomness Personified."

Vernam has been down w/ pneumonia all weekend, though the worst seems to have passed. Little Vernam, Jr. had it worse, as the bug settled deep in his lungs during a week-long camping trip he took w/ his scout troop. But he's doing better, too. Nice to see Amy and Olam kept up the fight in my absence! 8^O

I feel compelled to make two clarifications. First, here's what "asshat" means. Second, I do indeed exhibit an unmistakable loathing of our current president. There was a time when Vernam was tolerant of conservative views; he wouldn't have survived 13 years in the South without being able to abide wacky right wingers. Literally, some of my best friends . . .

But a line has been crossed during this Administration. The guy took office ("take" having a whole new connotation due to the botched election) under false pretenses, having campaigned as a moderate who respected opposing viewpoints. Nothing could be further from the truth, as we've seen. Instead, he has taken unilateralism to new heights both at home and abroad. With reckless tax cuts and spending, he and the Republican congress have taken us from a budget surplus to a massive deficit. With a pack of lies and exaggeration, he took us into a war that even he admits was the result of "miscalculation." The best I can say about him, frankly, is that he's a dim SOB unduly influenced by a cadre of radicals whose far-from-the-mainstream views have proven disastrous. But if someone less charitable wants to assert that Bush is the real architect of our misery, please feel free. It's giving him more credit than he deserves, in my opinion.

People far to the left of me have equated Bush with Hitler, it is true. (Moveon.org did not air ads to that effect, however.) Before that, certain elected Republican officials compared Clinton to Hitler, so that sort of overwrought polemic had a recent precedent. A longstanding rule of Netiquette called "Godwin's Law" stipulates that any person who compares someone to Hitler automatically loses the argument in question. So ol' Vernam is way too slippery for that. I don't believe Bush is fixin' to round up all us malcontents and infidels, however much simpler it might make his life.

But, as a nation, we should be very careful about imposing our will on individuals or countries who can't defend themselves. Whether or not America behaves in a fascistic way, undeniably a large portion of the world beyond our borders has come to believe that's how we act. You could say that the only thing terrorists understand is brute force, and that might be true; in the short term, no amount of diplomacy is going to dissuade them from wanting to destroy us. But over the long haul, behaving belligerently can't be in our best interests. It's what prompted this hatred to begin with, and the more we resort to force in the Middle East, the more we lend credence to the radical Islamists' argument.

The whole notion of a War on Terror plays right into the bad guys' hands; with every Pyrrhic victory we "win" in the Middle East, it becomes that much easier for Islamic radicals to portray us as aggressors and oppressors. In his acceptance speech, Bush stated unequivocally that he will attack preemptively whenever he discerns a threat to U.S. security. Post-9/11, that's a defensible policy, at least where the American public is concerned. Whether it's wise is quite another question. What is not defensible is to lead us into a war under false pretenses, with what Bush now admits was a "miscalculated" plan for managing the peace. The Iraq adventure has made us less safe on many levels. It's inflaming radicals throughout the Middle East; far from being viewed as liberators, our army is regarded as an occupying force. He needlessly tossed aside U.S. alliances that had been the basis of international security for more than 50 years, then realized too late that the restoration of Iraq couldn't be accomplished without them. He created such distrust of American motivations that we will be hard-pressed to act when a real WMD threat emerges in Iran or North Korea. Because of him, we are demonstrably less safe in the near term and the long term.

The Real Turtle Soup

It looks like someone got tired of waiting for Wes Anderson's next movie and tried to make one of their own. It has a lot going for it, on the surface. Jude Law is never less than interesting. Naomi Watts is never less than terrific. And maybe Dustin Hoffman still has a few tricks left, notwithstanding the silly hairdo he's adopted here. Also, seeing Lily Tomlin back on-screen is nice. And then there's the Jason Schwartzman factor. The trailer is not as promising, though. The real Wes doesn't do slapstick.

Besides, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is due out this fall.

Alternate Reality TV

A whole lot of people evidently like to pretend they're getting news, when they're really digesting pablum disguised as news. (Sometimes ol' Vernam wonders if he's one of 'em.) New heights of self-delusion and/or mass hypnosis were reached this week when the Faux News Channel -- or "Fox," as you may know it -- achieved the highest ratings of all news networks during the GOP convention.

Meanwhile, thank god for the Daily Show. If you didn't catch tonight's coverage of yesterday's Zell Meltdown, it gets rerun several times in the next 24 hours, so set that Tivo. Even funnier, in light of Miller's ridiculous attacks on Kerry, is this page on his very own website in which he calls the Democratic nominee a "hero" and praises him for having "worked to strengthen our military." By providing plenty of spitballs, no doubt.

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan posted a devastating dissection of Miller's "dixiecrat" dissembling.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

If only the whole clan really were just figments of our imagination. Read, if you dare, this transcript of Nikki and Paris Bush's prime-time debut.

Out, Jezebel spirit! O-u-u-u-t!!!