It's opposite day at the Whitehouse

I have to confess I got a queasy feeling in my stomach when I read this:
Powell Acknowledges Errors in Annual Terrorism Report

It isn't like it's a small little error. It isn't like maybe the page was printed crooked or one of the graphs was upside down or something. The entire report was absolute garbage.

Salon's Joe Conason says that the report was given with much fanfare in the belief that Terrorism had sharply decreased:

On April 29, the department released the report's 2003 edition with considerable fanfare. Presenting its optimistic findings at a special press conference were Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Ambassador at Large J. Cofer Black, the former CIA official who serves as the department's coordinator for counterterrorism. While acknowledging that terror continues to take a terrible toll, Armitage emphasized that the United States is fighting back with a worldwide coalition of allies. 'Indeed, he said, "you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight.'

Unfortuately, this is simply not true:

The moment of truth came on May 17. A sharp Washington Post opinion piece by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stanford political scientist David Laitin sliced "Patterns 2003" to shreds. Their review showed that the "number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003," or 36 percent, and that "the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years."

Powell, of course, denied any political purpose in the "errors." He also has to be credited with giving an immediate confession. But do you notice that it is always up to other people to blow the whistle on these jerks? And do you notice how the "mistakes" always seem to benefit them?

I do not believe there are any lengths to which these people will not go to preserve their power. The one thing, God knows why, that people believe about president Bush is that he is more capable than Kerry of protecting the US. He has to maintain that image. His campaign depends on it. If he can't do that...look for him to cheat in other ways.

A lie of this magnitude is an impeachable offense, in my opinion. Think for a minute about the process through which a report like this must go. Do you think "mistakes" like these just happen to appear? I don't. I think Bush is lying to you about your safety for the express purpose of political gain. If Bush doesn't fire someone over this, he should be impeached. I have resisted that call. But this is too much for me. He just has to go.

Cook down coherence for a change

Something has been bugging me.

Back in January of last year I was out marching against the war in 10 below Minneapolis weather. It was no big deal. Winter is just winter in Minnesota. I had a "No War In Iraq" sign stuck in a snowdrift in my yard. I watched the congress roll over like a big fluffy dog and let the neocons scratch its tummy. They voted to empower the president without any kind of serious debate. They were cowards huddling in their groupthink and sound bite storms. The famously cynical media got dressed up in their footie pajamas, wrapped themselves in their blankies and swallowed Bush's Iraqi-wanna-nuke-ya bedtime story in one sitting, then begged for another story, and another. Bush wanted us to shop. I thought, yeah, I'm gonna shop for new representatives. I'm gonna shop for real information.

I was against the war. It felt like folly. You could smell the lies coming out of the tube and off of the newspaper. Everybody could. Reality was warped by the people telling the news to the people telling us the news. Every scrap of information had a point, was framed with intention, was phrased just so. Your mind could barely cope. You stepped outside and you were coated with lies. War ought to be waged for truth. But all you heard was terror, terror, terror, Saddam, terror, madman, Weapons of Mass Destruction, smoking hole, Saddam, terror, terror.

A couple months later, I was in Mexico City when the US started bombing Baghdad. 1,500 protestors showed up at the US embassy to throw rocks at the gate. When I saw the bombs go off on CNN, I was shocked and awed. I felt that the US was a giant wooly mammoth that had been sniffing around the edges of a tar pit and in the end finally said, "The heck with it," and did a swan dive into the black. I took down my yard sign. There wasn't much sense in having a "No War" sign if we were already at war. I have friends in the Guard. I wanted them to stay alive. Even if we went over there chasing our tail in search of a reason to justify going over there, Saddam was a bad man, right?

Then came what you knew would come -- 24-hour, blue-screen to blue-screen coverage of the coalition's march to glory. Embedded reporters phoned it in as sandstorms raged: This is Operation Iraqi Freedom. Every station with a flag waving in the background, fire fights in the green light, Geraldo drawing maps in the sand, tracers sent to smack my eyeballs via a cell phone camera. They are banned at the gym but not at the front. Pickups with flag poles in the trailer and "Support the Troops" bumper stickers whiz by me on the highway. I had goose bumps in the pattern of the stars and stripes. I swear.

And does Jesus love a good war? Boy, does He ever. Our soldiers had enough prayer power to slay a country a million times as big as Iraq. They could have taken the world. They could have driven their ultra-light, ultra-fast, all-Rummsfeld Hummer-and-machine-gun convoys around the world blasting little countries like France along the way until they came full circle back to Iraq. Preachers and priests appeared on the tube to tell us that we are on the side of the Lord. We had generals telling us that our God is strong and theirs is puny. Jesus listens to our prayers and puts in the holy ear plugs when the terrorists start talking. The proof is in the pudding, folks. They die a lot easier than we die. See what I mean? Jesus has the juice.

Cute blond, Jessica Lynch, gets shot up, taken prisoner then rescued in Technicolor. She was supposed to have surrendered after shooting six hundred screaming Iraqis then gnawing off the hand of the first one that came for her before she blessedly passed out in an aura of angelic light. After the rescue she is sequestered in her sick room. She emerged on TV after she woke up. She says she's no hero. She was in a car crash and the Iraqis treated her as well as they could. Oh. Were you raped, Jessica? Yes, says the media. "They used me to symbolise all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say these things." says Jessica. I admire her.

The troops got to Baghdad. The Iraqi information minister said we didn't exist even as the hands of the marines reached out to throttle him. A US soldier scaled a bronze Saddam and hung a US flag over his face. Now that's branding. You can't buy exposure like that. That firm we hired to enhance our international image could learn a thing or two from that marine. "America: We will invade your country with a dagger in our teeth and stab our flag to the head of your toppled leader."

That single act personified what would follow. We didn't understand what we are doing. Sure we killed lots of actual people. But the real casualty was Iraqi national dignity. We could have preserved it with a little restraint. "What would Miss Manners do," I thought. She might have suggested that we not fight our way into our neighbor's house and immediately start rearranging the furniture, at least without asking first. I think she might say, "One might go a little easier on the jingoism, there, dear."

Then the Iraqis started singing, "Loot, loot, loot for the home team." Bush and the Bushettes - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz - busied themselves with the hard task of blowing smoke up our asses. Bush landed a plane on an aircraft carrier. Bush wore a flight suit. G. Gordon Liddy admired the presidential package on Hardball. The President stood under an enormous "Mission Accomplished" banner and announced that "Major combat operations are over." He add there there was "...still hard work to do." When President Bush says there is work to do, he means that soldiers will still die. And they did.

In the first weeks in Iraq rumors flew about WMD. There's a dripping barrel. Ooops, that's fertilizer. Wait, here's a warehouse full of shells, could they be WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!? Reporters walked right up to the shells, which were stored in what the farmers in Minnesota would kindly call a tool shed, and ask the camera in all earnestness whether or not this was an Iraqi WMD "Storage Facility." They must have thought something like 90% of us had carved out our brains with a butter knife. Given the fact that the reporters weren't melting, and were standing next to the "facility" with no protection, it seemed sort of obvious that, no, those weren't WMD. It was more terror, terror, WMDs, sarin and nukes, terror, terror. But after a few months, even the media got sick of the WMD shaggy dog story. It was a $200 billion "Al Capone's Vault's." It was a disaster. If there were no WMD, why would people pay attention to the brave reporters? Not to worry. The US had a higher motive. The US jilted WMD and started dating "Iraqi Liberation."

Jay Garner and company sprinted into and out of Iraq. Paul Bremer put down roots in Baghdad. He promptly fired 30,000 Baathist leaders from the Iraqi civil service, and disbanded the entire army. Those of us in the cheap seats looked at each other when that happened. We saw a really bad managerial mistake. Just a case of the rookie jitters, really. It was probably bad scouting. The Iraqis were just playing hard to get. Still, when facing a budding counter-revolutionary movement in which one might reasonably expect the enemy ranks to swell if only they had access to massive amounts of armed men with nothing to do...hmmm let's see what we should we do... hmmmm... oh I don't know...Hey, I've got it! Let's fire the army, send them and their guns back into the civilian population with no means to support their families and hope for the best! Next, Bremer began rebuilding Iraqi schools by firing 28,000 Baathist teachers.

It looked like things were happening that nobody thought about except the people who weren't in a position of power, like naysayers and protesters and peaceniks and the odd ex-general. The Iraqis weren't greeting us with kisses and candy. They were throwing things at us, like grenades. Soldiers kept dying. Car bombs kept blowing up. Mortar shells landed in the Green Zone. The whole next year was punctuated by a steady drip drip of blood. Jesus stayed strong, though. Way more Iraqis died than Americans. Saddam came crawling out of his spider hole. The Red Cross blew up; the UN blew up. The US rehired the Baathists to protect Falluja because we realized that we would have to level the town and kill the inhabitants to pacify it. I guess a town could be pretty peaceful if everyone it was dead.

Oh yes, Abu Ghraib. Linndie England pointing, grinning, pointing. All that's missing from those photos is a pointy party hat. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that she and here co-torturers were ordered to torture. But nobody ordered them to like it. Those shit-eating grins are all their own. Back home I am thinking, "Would I do that?" I don't think so. But lots of people are telling me it's ok. Some of them are Senators. They tell me it's better to be outraged over the outrage than it is to be outraged over outrageous behavior. That army is really good at branding the United States. Somewhere in there Nick Berg got his head sawed off.

Meanwhile the Iraq governing council approved a constitution. They stumble to a signing ceremony that is boycotted and then it isn't and the document is signed. Bush fired Chalabi, the guy that maybe talked him into invading in the first place, for spying for Iran. Ghazi al-Yawar is appointed President. Iyad Allawi is appointed Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has deep ties to the CIA and used to bomb Saddam himself. He hasn't lived in Iraq for 35 years. Bush decides he needs the UN after all. He would normally pee on their desks, but the happy flip-flopper decides to ask for the help of the international community. The conservative pundits start talking about how Bush's "With us or against us" policies are convincing people to join us. Instead of kicking us in the shins, which is what I thought we deserved, the US gets a unanimous gesture of support from the UN in the form of a new security resolution. That's because their foreign policy is directed towards peace, not war. The resolution will allow the US to gracefully exit Iraq provided the security thing can be solved. Our allies rock. The world is marching in the same direction. June 30 is going to be a sweet day for Iraq.

And that's where I come to a hard stop. I still don't know what is true and what isn't about Iraq. The future is impossible to discern. More will be revealed. The truth is elusive. I seek it, but it eludes me. Some of the bedtime story was true. Saddam was a bad man. Iraq has a future that is better without him. The world will slowly unite in support of that future. But I worry it won't be enough.

In America, we mainline nostalgia and patriotic bullshit. If we don't cook down our daily dose of nobody-knows-liberty-like-we-know-liberty blended with a sweet dollop of love-it-or-leave-it hegemonic racism and jam it into our eyeballs through the needle of the media, well, we just fall into a junky fit. Without our daily fix how are we supposed to keep denying that the down side of our vaunted way of life is that, left unchecked, it is a rapacious carnivore steadily devouring the earth's resources and the livelihoods of our fellow earthlings leaving a trail of terrorists in its wake? I am guilty. I raise my hand. I confess, man, I love America in all its glorious excess. Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie my America, coursing through my itchy veins.

Still, I ask myself, are we are taking this delusion to new heights? When we invaded Iraq, we didn't make war on the terrorists as much as we made war on ourselves. Rumsfeld admitted as much when he said "It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this". He ought to know, he helped invent the approach we are using now. The problem is, according to Rummy , is that terrorists might be able to turn out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them, even with Jesus and reality TV on our side.

That bugs me.

Reality trumps nostalgia

In my quest to frame Reagan's legacy with some semblance of balance, I came across this Joe Conason piece, Reagan without sentimentality. I like it. He doesn't just rip the Gipper in a visceral reaction to being force fed Reagan eulogies. Instead, Conason calmly notes that:

138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations.

He concludes in what I think is as apt an epitaph as any:

So let the former president be remembered for his optimism, his achievements, and his love of country. But let his mistakes be remembered as well. Reagan deserves no less. The sentimental version doesn't do justice to him and his legacy, for better and worse.

It would be interesting if Americans had nearly the appetite for facts that they do for nostalgia. Maybe we are all facing down the question of what it means to be an American in these complicated times. Here I am, sitting in my living room writing, an American, gol durnit. Is that a happy accident of birth or a frame of mind? Physicist, Manuel García, Jr., examines the stream of American sub-consciousness in this way, while NYC writer Phil Rockstroh asks, America, How Did It Come To This?

In any case, warm fuzzys from the past can't touch car bomb after Iraqi car bomb.

Epcot, Universal, Waltopia, Reaganeers...

Ok. Here's an idea I can get behind. It would save us all a lot of time. Who wants to suffer through a decade of Grover Norquist's" historical contortions. Let's get it together early and follow Tom Carson's program. Let's embalm Reagan at Disneyland.

From the "Keep your hand off the button," Dept.

So I am merrily poking through my email, making my online rounds, and buried in one of the missives from one of the newslists I receive is this:

Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

I wouldn't go around quoting this article, because it is largely unsourced. But the muckrakers that run Capitol Blue have been around the block and back again. They are relatively non-partisan in their willingness to skewer rapacious pols. The Bush portrayed in this article doesn't sound too out of character to me.

Vonnegut speaks

I like this essay by Kurt Vonnegut. It is absolutely, fabulously cantankerous.

Time to get out the hip waders, Ronnie's gone

I'm not sure what to think about Reagan's passing. The sea of nostalgia in which we will doubtless find ourselves drowning is sure to trigger my urge to withdraw from the real world. I am steeling myself for Reagan this and Reagan that, Reagan on the dime, Reagan on Rushmore, Reagan on the half shell, the baby Reagan in a manger. Republicans and conservatives from around the world, like Margaret Thatcher, love Reagan, I guess. Do they love him past the point of reason? I don't think I am altogether objective about whatever his legacy is. So I can't really say.

The first vote I cast in a national election was cast against Ronald Reagan, as was the second. In 1980 he just didn't connect with me, though at the time I could hardly articulate why. By 1984, I had traveled to Mexico and Nicaragua to study American Foreign Policy in Central America. In 1983, when I spent time there, the Sandinistas had fought a hard revolution against a horrible dictator, Somoza, and were proudly leading their country out of the dark ages with massive popular support. I thought then and think now that the US missed a golden opportunity to open markets, hurt Castro and spread democracy in an unprecedented way by simply becoming an ally of the Sandinistas. They were poor and starving and asked the US to help them remake their country. We could have sent spare parts and teachers and food. Instead Reagan armed the Contras, cut off the supply of spare parts and mined their harbors.

I am not an apologist for some of the later behavior of the Sandinistas. But whenever I think of Reagan, I think of how he basically exported death to that region when he could have chosen to export life. In a weird way, he actually advanced communism by refusing to help the Sandinistas, because Castro sent 10,000 teachers to indoctrinate an entirely new generation of Nicaraguans.

Then there was Iran-Contra and massive deficits and Reagan announcing to the world that "we start bombing in five minutes," and on the good side, arms control and the "Mr. Gorbachov, Tear down this wall" speech. I remember being consistently amazed that this affable, somewhat forgetful, ex-actor was president. And did Nancy really go gaga over astrology? Whatever your personal views of him are, there are a variety of obituaries out there.

No doubt, the Reagan SWAT team will try to sell us the idea that Ronnie single handedly brought down the House of Russia and saved us all from reading and writing Cyrillic. He might have given the final push, but doesn't it seem like Russia’s collapse was due less to the eight years of Ronald Reagan than to a deeply flawed system of government and to the 40-year pressure of the rest of the world? This Guardian obituary thinks so.

You can also bet your 401k that Bush will try to spin himself as the heir to Reagan's legacy. He will compare the War on Terror with the Cold War. Bush will cite Reagan's penchant for cutting taxes, his optimism and old-timey vision of America, wrap it up with 9.11 and serve it to us with a nice flakey crust. The RNC will ceaselessly shovel this crap into the US media machine which will puke it out in stories like this one until our eyes are spinning whirly discs and the Bush-Reagan-Bush brand is burned into our consciousness.

Keep your propaganda filters set on high for the forseeable future, ladies and gents. It's about to get thick out there.