You First, Assholes

 

“People are so sick of being preached at about politics from rock bands”

“Stick to what you’re good at. You’re not a political analyst. You’re probably not really well read on the issues that Americans really care about” pic.twitter.com/vnGna7jkzo

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 2, 2024

Maybe Fox News pretend analysts need to shut up--at least long enough to hear what others are saying.

Actually, successful rock bands are political analysts or at least, seize the zeitgeist and appeal to people because they enunciate feelings other people can vibe with.  Are people really sick of being preached at about politics from rock bands--or is it that something they say resonates and that's why they have a following? I mean, songs like "For What It's Worth", or "Ohio" or "Southern Man" or "Leaving on a Jet Plane" or "Eve of Destruction"--the "freedom rock " Woodstock era stuff I heard as my early lullabies, weren't any more neutral than the "Ballad of the Green Berets" was. 

Now, whether I listened to the Dead Kennedys or INXS or The Clash, I heard politics, even as a kid. I don't understand people who ever listened to the lyrics of Rage Against the Machine and never understood what the machine was. Was it a soda machine? Were they just mad they couldn't get their Barq's root beer jones on?  Of course, they were political. 

Look, one of my ear-influences is Billy Bragg. Punk as fuck. Not punk as fuck--slipping in your old age and deciding Trump is punk. Trump is The Man that fighting the power has been about since, whatever. 

And Green Day's "American Idiot" was explicitly a political album. Just like Neil Young's "Living with War."  Bob Dylan--political. Bruce Springsteen--political. Patti Smith, Bikini Kill, Hole, Pussy Riot. 

Fox News talking heads are not political analysts.  They are propagandists. Who knows what ass they pull what they say from? They aren't musical, they aren't artful, they aren't well-informed, and they say whatever the network wants. Conservatism isn't edgy when they go against the mainstream--mostly they are just counterfactual and fronting for some paymaster--the dead opposite of the punk ethos.

Or to put it in rank Gen X terms--they are sell outs. They want you to dismiss what you are hearing because "you can't handle the reality of it". But you totally could get "woke" if you listened to the lyrics around you.  Fox News "analysts" are fake and don't represent anything going on in the real world. If they want someone to stop talking about politics--instead of shutting up artists who care about the world, they could shut the hell up because they just care about payday. 

Maybe the Boomers who listen to Fox should go ahead and re-listen to that "freedom rock" I teethed on as a kid. It was politics. And a lot of it was dead-on. 

Failure Has Many Fathers

 

Taliban Commander Who Led Attack on Afghan City Was Released From Prison Last Year, Officials Say - WSJ https://t.co/4qDJdyTyYc

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 16, 2021

The co-founder of the Taliban was captured under Obama and was released under Trump, and is now going to be the new leader of Afghanistan. Somehow, this is Biden's fault, because he inherited a withdrawal plan from Trump that was supported by the former guy until it looked bad, because that's how Trump rolls. 

But the problem was not just settling Al-Qaeda business and departing in Bush's first term, which always seemed like it should have been possible, but I think strategically, they fucked up Afghanistan in Bushworld because they really wanted to take a poke at Iraq. And if Afghanistan was wrapped up, the Iraq WMD crisis wouldn't have seemed as immediate.

 Leaving Obama to try and wind down Iraq according to the Bush-signed SOFA. Which wasn't leaving him with a great bunch of choices. Obama, to his credit, never tried to leave a mess in Syria--except of course, ISIS happened. 

And you know what Trump did with regards to our attempts to unfuck that. I'm not trying to place a partisan frame on what had happened, of course, just trying to smash the stupid lies Republicans want to tell about what they've been doing the last two decades. 

 (Just like the economy, re: unemployment and the debt, GOP does the damage, Democrats clean up.)

Mike (Klepto) Pompeo doesn't walk away from it. (Even if he'd rather be obnoxious about CRT and other stuff right now.)  The Bush Administration certainly shouldn't. They initiated the lie that kept us there--that we could fix it. That women and children depended on us. 

We were guilted into forever war. Biden is doing the honest thing. The buck is stopping with him. So for many lazy pundits, that means he gets the onus of failure? Pshh. I am not a goldfish. and can remember years of effort. Media pundits can and should do the same. 

Barbara Bush Was Unique, Wasn't She?

I guess the thing that sticks in the memory for me regarding Barbara Bush was how she had spoken about the Hurricane Katrina survivors who had been displaced by circumstance; they were "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."  It was, if not racist (who knows to what extent she was looking at this through the lens of race?) at least deeply classist. She was privileged, and she could only see silver linings because she did not understand how desperate it was for people to lose literally everything they had. One thing you could say about the former First Lady--she was blunt, and she did not go out of her way to camoflage her meanings. If anything, she was highly articulate and sharp-tongued. It was hard to say she "mispoke" when she held forth.

This isn't the sort of thing one normally thinks about when considering a political wife--the spouse of a president and mother of another. The stereotype of the political "helpmeet" is inoffensiveness, but that was not really Mrs. Bush's style. But, she made her sarcasm and directness work for her, even if she could not always help the fortunes of her spouse or her first-born son with them. 

Without gilding over her flaws, Barbara Bush was a serious and intellegent person. She was not an orthodox conservative, and one of the things she did best was simply be, quite publically, an imperfect figure. She stood in her prematurely white hair and solid frame, and just was herself. 

She isn't alone by a long shot at being a first lady who I liked better than I liked her spouse, or, for that matter, her son. And while I do wonder how GWB's values reflect how he was raised, I can't help but wonder about her speech to Wellsley in 1990:

For over 50 years, it was said that the winner of Wellesley's annual hoop race would be the first to get married. Now they say the winner will be the first to become a C.E.O. Both of those stereotypes show too little tolerance for those who want to know where the mermaids stand. So I want to offer you today a new legend: The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream ... not society's dreams ... her own personal dream. And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse.

I wish him well!

Her understanding of what it meant to be a mermaid--to do one's own thing and do it with one's heart, to be connected and live so as to have no regrets, resonates with me. Her thing was marriage and children, but she wasn't judging anyone else's thing. That was saying a lot.

And as for her son, who I like far more as a late-blooming painter than I ever did as a president, he summed something up about her so aptly:

Laura, Barbara, Jenna, and I are are sad, but our souls are settled because we know hers was,” George W. Bush said. “Barbara Bush was a fabulous First Lady and a woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions. To us she was so much more.”

"Our souls are settled because we know hers was."  It was her time, and she went with no regrets and laid her down with a will.

We could anyone of us do worse, couldn't we?

I could wish some of her family anything at all as a political happenstance, but about seeing her life through and the business of burial, I wish them well. She had a great if awkward spirit. She knew educational inequality and illiteracy were such great barriers to success that she strove to see people acheive parity. She was kind of like America's occasionally not enlightened Mee-Maw, whose pronouncements were not right, but she thought you should hear them anyway.

She was unique.

Dancing Around the May Poll

I know there is some hay being made out of this spring grass already,  but I just don't know how to relate to May polls when I know that Barack Obama wasn't supposed to win in 2008 according to a poll done as late as September.  After McCain picked Palin. I don't even know what all was going on at the time because I was unplugged in Reggio Calabria on a personal vacation, but as far as I know--my individual data from people I knew didn't match the poll numbers. I thought Obama would win, and he did.

A poll in May of 1988 showed Dukakis comfortably kicking Shrub Senior's ass. Belief in polling strength was nothing but stupid for Romney. And we all have anecdata of where polls were especially wrong.

I like quantifiable data, but polls are kind of a snapshot suggesting a direction, but aren't actually a "story" outside of horserace politics. Take the poll numbers suggesting that Sanders has better "unfavorable" numbers than Trump and would be better able to beat him than Clinton.

Climate Sunday: Don Blankenship Edition

Greetings and Happy Sunday to you all, and thanks for tuning in to my semi-regular environmental musings. This week's round-up is brought to us by Don Blankenship, who was recently told by a judge to shut his flapping yap up about how politically persecuted he was. It might very well be true that under the Obama Administration, investigators spent more time inspecting his mines and pointing out the very tragically wrong things that led to the deaths of miners at his mines. But this might have been for a lot of reasons, such as, the pattern emerging that Blankenship was awful, the Obama Administration being less likely to ignore these kinds of abuses, and, I don't know--the deaths of 29 miners in a preventable accident due to Blankenship's pathological management? (Not a big fan of Blankenship, this blogger right here.)

But this individual's beef with the government over what he considers to have been job-killing regulations versus what appear to have been employee-killing violations, sets the tone for this week's rumination on--what about the fossil fuel industries, anyway? For example, it looks like Exxon, who apparently knew enough about global warming science in the 1970s and 1980s to have considerable private information on it, basically "gamed" the Bush Administration to sow doubt and confusion. (Although don't let the big bad oil company take the total blame for that--the Bush Administration was very willing to be had. I mean, leave it to these pricks to have a "Safe Water Drinking Act" that lets frackers screw up drinking water however they want.)

But this conflict in knowing full well climate change was real, and also working to sow doubt, is pretty unnerving. They could only act like that if profits entirely outweighed any sense that they should be responsible corporate and global citizens, and exposes a real weakness of the capitalist system.

Jeb!: I, Clod-I-is

I just want to direct my readers' attention right here.

Jeb Bush said out loud, where people could hear, that he was offering "hope" to African Americans, instead of "free stuff".  Having paid attention to what Bushes do to the economy, you don't mind if I think white people should also think "free stuff" would be a better deal than what these idiots think "hope" means?

That's just clod-ish. This is supposed to be the "smarter brother". And he still isn't showing any signs of it. For one thing, you can't pretend you're not divisive, but then talk about a group of people as "the other" so naturally. And then, wow, welfare queen stereotype much? That's just kicking it Reagan-era. Is this a thing he thinks is okay in the 21st century?

Yeah. Well--maybe he thinks he will survive the primary from hell if he plays it dumber? You know, like Claudius from the popular PBS series I, Claudius, based on the novels from Graves, downplays whether he understands what's going on? Is it possible that he is pretending to be an actually super-thick nonsense shake because if the straw fits-?

I am going to both posit this theory, and then completely reject it. He's not playing dumb. I think the mistake with GWB was thinking he was playing dumb. I am doing to come out and say, this dude is actually kind of dumb. When the guy with the Mexican wife says "multiculturalism is bad"--dumb. When he says he's his own man and then embraces everything his father and brother did, including relying on their aides and advisors, dumb. When he calls rejecting the XL Pipeline "environmental extremism"--he's just being a clod. What are we really getting out of it? What is our pay-off? How is this beneficial to us and not an ideological fetish?

He doesn't know. He doesn't think he's supposed to know. He's a clod.  He's really as dumb as we might suspect he is.

CPAC Straw Poll Winner Rand Paul:Same as the Old Boss

I don't know how much store I should put by the results of the CPAC straw poll, because for one thing, I don't believe it necessarily is a valid cross-section of the conservative vote because it skews a bit younger, male and "wired" for political action anyway. Also, former Rep. Ron Paul won a couple straw polls, and the son may well be the beneficiary of the same mechanism that delivers a straw poll, but can't quite deliver a presidential primary win.

Nonetheless, I am going to take him seriously, because I began to respect a part of his political acumen for message delivery during his 2010 senate campaign. But I do want to point out that if what he is saying here is correct, I'm a little concerned. See, there is a criticism from the right that the Pauls, father and son, are effectively isolationists. But if Rand Paul considers his foreign policy to be similar to Bush 41, we're talking about the first Bush presidency that invaded Iraq.  And that is interesting, because as I recall, GHWB fought against  being labelled a "wimp" by the right wing of his own party. I don't think I'm mistaken in saying he didn't overcome that label by invading Iraq.  He was a one-term president.

Now, this is some old news, but I'm old enough to have been pissed when Bush 41 left the Kurds hanging. So what are we talking about when we say he would be like the elder Bush? I remember the oil fields burning that time. At least his son kept his eye on the ball as far as US corporate interests were concerned, right? I have no idea what positive thing Rand Paul means by comparing himself to 41.

Here's another disquieting thing: he considers drilling in "every conceivable place" the proper response to the Ukranian crisis. Not totally unlike Rep. Paul Ryan's idea that the Keystone Pipeline is part of the solution. Both opinions seems to rely on a bizarre "Jed shooting at some food" notion of how the bubbling crude actually comes up in this world.

I give his political gifts props, but I think his basic understanding of  "how to go about things" is all too familiar, and all too insufficient to the challenges we're going to face. There is no drilling our way to anything--it's at best a bandage on an arterial wound of vital energy need. We need to shift from chasing and battling over commodities, to investing in technologies that make regional sense and lead to energy independence. His approach would be no leadership on that front at all.

Mother Knows Best

I don't think it's any secret that I'm not the Bush Family's biggest fan, but Barbara Bush made an interesting comment regarding the political future of Son Number Two:

“There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes,” she told NBC’s Matt Lauer. Jeb Bush has not said if he will seek the presidency. 

“He’ll get half of our friends and all of our enemies,” she added, referring to the possibility of family baggage getting in the way of a successful 2016 presidential candidacy.

I really don't believe that the problem with Jeb Bush running for president could be better stated. And it might not sound like the sort of thing that a mother says regarding her child (although she did point out that she believed him to be the most qualified) or her family name, but then again, she's not ever been a person who had trouble saying what was on her mind. And also, it's true not just politically, but it made me wonder what it is like to be the mother of a president--especially one like 43. I don't know that being First Lady could even prepare one for it. And given the eight years of her first son's presidency, and the saddening crash of the first waves of the judgement of history regarding him, I could easily understand not wanting to see another son take office.  Perhaps she has seen enough Bush men in that office, and worries on a very personal level what running, win or lose, would mean to her son.

I'm not sure she meant it in the latter sense, and possibly she was just referring to the idea of "Bush fatigue". But momentarily, I did feel a little sympathy.

What was that whole thing even about?

I wonder to this day what it it was all about--in the lead-up to the war, I'll tell you one thing I didn't really think: I didn't think there were any WMD's in Iraq, and when the invasion started ten years ago, I was morally certain of it. Because it felt sudden. Like, the clock was ticking, and if the UN inspectors (because yes, and I have had this conversation with people, Saddam Hussein did so let inspectors in) kept finding nothing, well, then, the rationale for the whole enterprise would start to melt away, wouldn't it? Which is why, when that smirking jackass joked about not finding WMD's a year later, it simply wasn't that funny.

It isn't any surprise to hear people being matter-of-fact about it having to do with oil, now. Of course it did. I don't think the contracts to rebuild the oilfields and all that (a high priority business) were too far away from the war-planning concerns, either. Maybe they supposed the rationale for the war would take care of itself, once the mission was accomplished.  Whatever that meant.

Looking at the Iraq war, it's hard not to get bogged down in facts, mostly in statistics. How many casualties. How much it cost. How many people protested it. You can look at certain pieces of the puzzle that made things fall apart for you--the debunking of the yellowcake story. The discovery of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.  Or just the obvious horror of it. (And of course, there are people for whom this war made and likely still makes sense. I do not and probably will not understand these people. I might be saner for not understanding them.)

But when I get down to why it unfolded the way it did, I still find myself looking at GWB with a weird curiosity. Saddam Hussein was, after all the guy who tried to kill his dad. Huh. How do you like that?

Jeb, This is Awkward

You know, I really don't want to be back talking about 2016, but Jeb was all over the Sunday shows, and it was hard not to look at it as being possibly just as much about 2016 as about peddling his book. And yes, maybe it's a little bit like being a "crack addict" to speculate about this--but really? Are we going to shrug off the legacy of big bro' as "not baggage"?

Heavy sigh. The last quarter-century is all about Bushes. There is no escape here. How to explain?

That outsider artist reinventing himself as a premier puppy painter?  Is forever linked with an Administration that oversaw a war in Iraq that will always be associated with gross abuse. (I wonder if there isn't something in W that makes him uniquely suited to capturing the soul of puppies. They, too, are scolded for making messes they don't entirely understand and aren't sure what they should do to fix.)

But Jeb himself isn't quite ready to articulate a vision for the future, at odds with his book, at odds with interviews of mere days ago.  He can invoke the Reagan Administration of which his own father was a part as a time of less partisanship--but it doesn't help him begin to explain how to arrive at a less-partisan future--anymore than his brother's "compassionate conservatism" did. Not when the 1988 campaign of his father against Dukakis was one of the most wedge-issue-tainted smear-jobs. Not when the first Gulf War has so much to do with a very specific vision of power and patriotism. That is what W inherited--and it's Jeb's legacy, too, like it or not. Which is why he's spinning like a tire in a damp rut over immigration. Does he, like his father, supposedly lack "the vision thing"? Or has he only seen too much?

No matter. Na'gonna happen. Not even if folks in the Beltway bubble want to make it happen.

(X-posted at Rumproast.)

So, why can't my president have nice things?

I went out of my way in 2008 to make sure I was voting for the person I thought would do the best job. I chose Barack Obama. I was a fan of his from 2004. He seemed like a very reasonable person, for an Illinois state legislator, who I learned, had interestingly enough been born in Hawai'i. He gave a very good speech at the DNC, and I expected I would see him again in higher office, someday. I thought he would became a very respected elder stateman senator, in the vein of Teddy Kennedy, then, because I just didn't think he'd so quickly (if ever) choose to run for president after becoming a senator from Illinois--but I was glad he did.

I am pissed when people tell me my president, who I have respected for this long, can't have nice things. He can't have legitimacy. He can't have citizenship. He can't have his academic acheivements.

And now, he can't have being the guy whose administration put Osama bin Laden in the history pages, to never again be current events? Because poser after poser on the right wants to give credit to George W. Bush (and so close the the 8th anniversary of "Mission Accomplished", also, too. How sweet.)

The Chronicles of Bush--I may have to Dust off my library card.

There is something really compelling in the details of the recently-released Bush memoir that almost induces me to want to read it. I generally get books from Amazon with Two-Day Free Shipping because I'm impatient and owning books means I can read them whenever I like--but I don't want to own this one, or make GWB even a ha'penny wealthier. But I am something of a fiend for books relating to the Bush family. They are different from us--but George Bush, the younger, our last, and worst, president, sometimes seems so human.

One story he recounted in his book and in an interview with the Today show's Matt Lauer, involved his mother miscarrying, and showing him the fetus, she she had put in a jar.

That strikes me as truly odd. In what way does a person confront their dead sibling? Or better still, in what way does one confront a parent who displays said sibling in a jar, like a cocktail onion, and somehow learn anything from it, other than one's family is a little odd?

And since he admits to torture and hints at having possibly wanted to endorse Obama over McCain--his book might just be an interesting read. He might not be president any longer, but I still do wonder who GWB is and how he got that way.

"Damn right" said the retired dictator.

The practice of water boarding has historically been acknowledged as torture. But in a recent interview, the former president, George W. Bush, has admitted to sanctioning it:

Bush takes responsibility for giving the go-ahead for water boarding terror suspects, which has touched off a new round of criticism of Bush and calls for his prosecution. He says that he did decide not to use two more extreme interrogation methods, but did not disclose what those were.

Here are excerpts from the book, which CNN obtained on Friday:

'The choice between security and values was real'

Bush reveals the decision points that led him to choose water boarding as an interrogation technique.

"CIA experts drew up a list of interrogation techniques. ... At my direction, Department of Justice and CIA lawyers conducted a careful legal review. The enhanced interrogation program complied with the Constitution and all applicable laws, including those that ban torture.

"There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them. Another technique was water boarding, a process of simulated drowning. No doubt the procedure was tough, but medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm."

Does a memoir count as a signed confession? Why should lasting harm be a criteria when immediate harm is being done? And how glib it seems--he just admits it. We have a culture where enhanced interrogation videotapes have been destroyed, and where the military has sought to keep certain pictures pf alleged torture out of the public eye--post Abu Ghraib, it is well understood that this sort of thing does not help.

But here is Bush--easily admitting he authorized an action we would today and historically have considered torture, with no story prefacing it of any agonizing decision, 3 am talk with God, or call to his own dad. Nope. "Damn right." That is how I think it happened. And why I think the former administration needs to be called on it. The rule of law just didn't matter. And while I don't care a whole lot about KSM--that anyone was subjected to this is a shame.

Violatin' Godwin

Now, this picture over to the right is a clear violation of Godwin's Law, and of course, it would be utterly inappropriate for anyone to use this kind of image if one were the sort of blogger given to throwing red flags over the Teahadist's use of similar images with respect to President Obama. It's symptomatic of the kind of mindset that the right characterizes as "Bush Derangement Syndrome."

It becomes very hard, however, to refrain from comparisons (which are, as noted by the Bard, "odorous") when reading a story like this:

Reporting from Washington — A prominent human rights group accused the CIA of conducting illegal human experiments and unethical medical research during interrogations of high-profile terrorism suspects under the George W. Bush administration.

Physicians for Human Rights charged Monday that CIA doctors and other medical personnel collected data to study and calibrate the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, severe pain and other "enhanced" interrogation techniques, but did so under the guise of trying to protect the detainees' health.

It's very hard not to make the comparison. So I won't in so many words.

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent

From The Times (UK):

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

The Cheneys would maintain, of course, that the people still at Guantanamo are still the "worst of the worst" and it would be impossible to try them or even hold them in the mainland US. But it's not too diffucult to recognize that the Bush/Cheney administration swept people up in great numbers to make it look like there was a great threat, and then held them because they never had any forethought regarding giving them due process.

That would probably be why Liz Cheney yammers on to this day that the foreign or enemy combatants don't have the same Constitutional rights as US citizens. Which may even be, but they do have protections under the Geneva conventions. And even our most dire enemies, such as the Nazis, got military tribunals. So?* as Mr. Cheney might say.

But the point is, we can't establish guilt or innocence without a trial--this isn't Wonderland, where the Red Queen can just cry "Off with their heads" without a trial. It strikes me as inhumane and injust.

*So! Holding innocent people doesn't make us more safe, but it should make everyone in the US just feel a bit less safe because there is a precedent for the government deciding to lock people up and throw away the key. Also, the Iraq war wouldn't have happened but for its being associated with the terrorism of 9/11 and the greater war on terror. So! When do we look at Cheney, who got bids for Halliburton to all kinds of things, including building a new facility at Gitmo-- as being more than unusually self-interested, that being his old company and all?

*shrug*