Apropops my previous post, on the down-side the internet's empowering publishing ability lets idiots run free. It's often less than pretty.

FWIW I don't think it's a great idea for anyone (left or right) to try and liken their political opponents to Adolph. It's tasteless. Goodwin's law, and all that, you know? But whatever, it happens.

However, the author makes a defensive attempt to point out Charlie Chaplin's work in that vein -- The Greatest Dictator -- saying "it's just a joke" like that but this only makes things worse. This unchecked aggression on the meaning of clowning cannot stand. I'm fully willing the believe she thought what she was doing is funny (which you can judge however you like), but the Chaplin comparison is insulting to anyone who's actually tried to do comedy, not to mention patently illogical.

Let's break it down. Charlie Chaplin was a comic genius (hint: you're not), who dressed himself in the likeness of Hitler (hint: you photoshopped Howard Dean, not yourself) and made a fairly relavant point about international politics (hint: your work is at best a blaring
non-sequitor... it's not even on-topic for your post). Also, quoth imdb Charles Chaplin said that had he known the true extent of Nazi atrocities, he "could not have made fun of their homicidal insanity".

So don't compare yourself to Chaplin, lady. It's embarassing for all of us.

John Robb has a good post on the inevitable failure of our clear and hold strategy in Iraq. When I mentioned in my little critique of Bush's "Strategy for Victory" that Clear and Hold weren't going to work as military strategies, this is what I was talking about.

The bottom line is that this can't really create order. A secondary downer is that the transition from US forces to Iraqi forces in the "hold" portion will likely exacerbate the violence in the short term.

In the long term, though, that's the only way. We've got to leave and we've got to leave soon. Iraq will never be remotely peaceful (or even orderly/stable) as long as US troops are stationed there.

Today's NYT:

[Mr. Muhammad] described in harrowing detail a night spent at a military police building with 350 other captives, where he saw people being tortured with burns and electric shocks. Seven of his 10 brothers disappeared or were killed after the arrests, he said. He was only 15 years old at the time, he said, but he was tortured and kept in prison for almost four years.

Mr. Hussein interrupted Mr. Muhammad's narrative at least once, saying "these are not our ethics," after Mr. Muhammad described the torture he had witnessed.

A few weeks ago:

Bush did not confirm or deny the existence of CIA secret prisons that The Washington Post disclosed last week, and would not address demands by the International Committee of the Red Cross to have access to the suspects reportedly held at them.
...
The U.S. government is aggressively taking action to protect Americans from terrorism but "we do not torture," President Bush said on Monday, responding to criticism of reported secret CIA prisons and the handling of terrorism suspects.

UPDATE: another instance via Digby: you hear a stray reference to someone being taken to Abu Ghraib and abused. Is your first assumption that this is something we did, or something done by Hussein's regime?

I'm not trying to exculpate Hussein here in any way shape or form, just noting a disturbing parallel. I hope the people in Iraq are able somehow to come to terms with what he did to their country and their families and move on.

I have the same hopes here in the US w/President Bush.

A problem we have on the Left is that many of our most ardent activists have no sense of humor.

For the record, "having no sense of humor" here means trying to rationally respond to the diary with an argument about the probability that the 2004 election was rigged electronically.

It's a big debate that's gone on there (and elsewhere) for quite a while. My take is that the possiblity is quite distinct given that the systems Dibold sold the government were ludicrously insecure and downright faulty in a lot of cases. However, no hard evidence exists that anything went on that might have swung 100k votes in Ohio. While I recognize the potential for widespread fraud -- and I absolutely hate the fact that there were actual, measurable, voter supression activites that were actively witnessed -- I'm not about to accuse the Bush administration of subverting democracy in the 2004 election.

Nor am I willing to call for the heads of any members of their campaign other that Kenneth Blackwell, who served as both Ohio Secretary of State (thus overseer of all election-related activities) and Ohio Chair for Bush/Cheney'04. Last person who did that was... Katherine Harris, who more or less did steal the 2004 election by purging 30,000 elegeble voters, overwhelmingly African Americas, from the rolls. A turnout of 5% among those voters would have swung the election in favor of Al Gore. Yeah. She stole it, just like Kenneth tried to do.

But Kenneth's state wasn't within the margin of error for that sort of skullduggery. The reality is that the GOP, the "conservative movement" and the religious right put together a politlcal machine which turned out more votes than the Democrats and their coalition were able to match.

Or rather, that's what I believe. I believe it because there's nothing solid pointing to another reality, and this is the world you have to play in if you want to participate in the politlcal process. Even though there was the potential for electronic fraud, and we all know the people in charge are ethically challenged, you can't call the other party illegitimate -- essentially guilty of treason -- without some sort of hard evidence implicating specific individuals.

Otherwise there's no bottom. It's just a war of all against all. I don't believe in that kind of reality.

Wow. Gotta watch this video. Here's a man with over 2 million viewers. He's quite the performer, but I wonder who's writing this script. Does this shit really resonate with some subset of America? Is O'Reilly making it up himself?

My read is that he's pretty egomaniacal so I can't imagine he'd carry water for someone else. However, it's virtually impossible to take what he's saying here seriously, though he certainly seems to.

Nervous breakdown waiting in the wings? Maybe. I dunno. As egomaniacal as he his, I also think he knows he's a performer on some level, so maybe it is all just script to him.

Bush lauds progress of Iraqi security forces, which seems to be mostly hokum, suggests a token troop reduction. Meanwhile Sy Hersh says bombing will increase; others suspect the El Salvador option.

Out of sheer nerdly compulsion, I'm poking through the National Strategy For Victory In Iraq Report, a very corporate, bullet-pointed, repetative piece of communication that's less a plan and more a summary of everything we already know.

This isn't a strategy document; it's an extended tautology. Victory through the winning.

To the extent that there are any tangible specifics, it reads like wishful thinking. From the executive summary, the three tracks to victory:

• The Political Track involves working to forge a broadly supported national compact for democratic
  governance by helping the Iraqi government:
  • Isolate enemy elements from those who can be won over to the political process by countering false propaganda and demonstrating to all Iraqis that they have a stake in a democratic Iraq;
  • Engage those outside the political process and invite in those willing to turn away from violence through ever-expanding avenues of participation; and
  • Build stable, pluralistic, and effective national institutions that can protect the interests of all Iraqis, and facilitate Iraq’s full integration into the international community.
• The Security Track involves carrying out a campaign to defeat the terrorists and neutralize the
  insurgency, developing Iraqi security forces, and helping the Iraqi government:
  • Clear areas of enemy control by remaining on the offensive, killing and capturing enemy fighters and denying them safe-haven;
  • Hold areas freed from enemy influence by ensuring that they remain under the control of the Iraqi government with an adequate Iraqi security force presence; and
  • Build Iraqi Security Forces and the capacity of local institutions to deliver services, advance the rule of law, and nurture civil society.
• The Economic Track involves setting the foundation for a sound and self-sustaining economy by
  helping the Iraqi government:
  • Restore Iraq’s infrastructure to meet increasing demand and the needs of a growing economy;
  • Reform Iraq’s economy, which in the past has been shaped by war, dictatorship, and sanctions, so that it can be self-sustaining in the future; and
  • Build the capacity of Iraqi institutions to maintain infrastructure, rejoin the international economic community, and improve the general welfare of all Iraqis.

Three tracks with three bullet points each -- this is as meaty as it gets. I don't doubt that acheving all these things would signify great success in Iraq. But unfortunately it isn't going to happen.

While the political process can be slogged out, there's no way I can see creating even the appearance of success on the security and economic tracks. This strategy will fail because the political track alone isn't going to do squat. It's one thing to have an election on a date, to have some guys who are your "government." It's another thing to have them actually able to govern (e.g. some degree of security) over a society worth living in (e.g. one with electricity).

The reality is that Clear/Hold operations can never be successful against a Guerrilla opponent. The reality is that protecting critical economic infrastructure from motivated attacks by native people is impossible without imposing a complete police state. Steps 1 and 2 of the security track and step 1 of the economic track are unachievable unless some sort of cease-fire can be reached with insurgents. Since (as the document points out) there is no entity with which to negotiate, this will not happen.

And so it seems the war will grind on. Maybe more bombing; maybe more local paramilitaries; but basically the same war. Something's gotta give.

That's the buzz around the water cooler. Another "major speech" announced for tomorrow, and the word of the day is "widthdrawl." As in "pulling out." As in we're going to unleash our load of freedom all over the supple belly of Iraq. Dirty.

I wonder how tense it will be around the White House what with Cheney thinking Bush is a trator now.

Anyway, snark aside, this can't begin a moment too soon. It's abundantly clear that our kung-fu is not working. As much as it may pain the pulsing masss of Angry White Males at the core of the GOP, we're shitty imperialists and we need to stop.

I'm going to rap here a little bit, and as a starting point I'm going to pick a couple sentences from TPMcafe, where Matt Yglesias reveals himself to be the left-wing commie pinko we all suspected:

Record companies and their movie studio allies have managed to convince a shockingly large swathe of opinion that the purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent copyright infringement. In fact, the purpose is to advance the general welfare of society. Infringement should be defined, and the law should be enforced, in a manner designed to improve overall welfare. There's essentially no reason to think that a hard-core crackdown on file-sharing programs would achieve that goal.

Matt, of course, is right. And he's not really being a commie pinko here. He's being an American.

This is a pretty core piece of thinking to develop: the notion that Profit and Social Value are distinct things, and that the purpose of Law (and by proxy the State, which exists in large part as a living instantiation of Law) is to maximize the latter rather than the former.

This is something we lost somewhere along the way, maybe while we were fighting the commies, maybe when our elites -- the educated, upwardly-mobile middle class -- felt the pull of stock options and ever-expanding portfolios of wealth. It certainly was dealt a serious blow by Ronald Reagan and his lofty (and deeply duplicitous) rhetoric of "trickle down" economics.

There are millions of Americans who think they're smart and "realistic," but who really just have a dangerously narrow understanding of what Adam Smith was on about with his breakfast table metaphor. These misperceptions have been furthered by a school of economics which has been supported, propagated and venerated -- essentially as "useful idiots" -- by a malignant corporate business culture which seeks to escape regulation and gain access to new markets under the auspices of "free trade," while simultaneously maintaining privileged status through multi-million dollar lobbying, subsidies, bailouts, lopsided treaties, monopolies, syndicates and cartels.

Want an example? Why couldn't Red China buy out Unocal? Free market ain't so much fun when there's a bigger bully on the block, eh pancho?

It runs deep. I once had a debate with very wealthy, very smart, very progressive man I know in which he said we had no choice but to allow US corporations to utilize the products of slave labor, because if we didn't we'd be constraining the ability of our corporations to compete. Essentially, we have to make use of slave labor, or someone else will. Granted, I sort of backed him into that corner, but that's a mindset which exists, and it's incredibly pervasive.

Wake up! It's time to redistribute the wealth!

Well, that's a bit provocative. Really it's time to distribute (and to decentralize) the Power. Some direct wealth redistribution -- adjusting the tax code, investing Publicly in infrastructure, making sure no one goes hungry who doesn't want to -- is necessary as a catalyst, and the likely source of this catalyst is the central government. But the objective is to make sure that Power is distributed more evenly, that it isn't institutionalized in an oppressive configuration. Do this, and the question of Wealth will sort itself out over a generation or two.

I think we're ready for it. Our current decision-making systems are manifestly failing. Our social elites are proving themselves largely unfit. In spite of our fear of one another, if individual human beings were to sit down around the table and explain their positions to one another without any demagogues there to stir up polarizing dissent, we could probably reach some powerful points of consensus in short order.

Some ideas.

Corporations have to die. I don't mean they need to be eradicated, but they're currently constituted as immortal institutions which accumulate financial gravity for ever and ever and ever. That can't go on.

Maybe there should be some kind of life-cycle, where after 100 years if your corporation is still around and kicking, you have to go through some sort of transition. Maybe when a financial empire assumes the size of a state or country, some additional responsibilities kick in; with great power comes great responsibility and all that jazz. I don't have a solid answer here, but it's clear we need to address this.

We have to break out of the institutions which unnaturally polarize us. Political parties -- and their associated opinion outlets and advocacy organizations -- do this, as do Big Jesus, Ghettos, Universities and a lot of other institutions which are important, but which set up false barriers between us.

We have to drive human solidarity, build trust, create social capital, create bridges between small worlds.

Tall order, I know, especially given how fallible human beings tend to be. But it's not like we've got many options. Solidarity doesn't mean everyone has to love one another, even that we have to be friends, just that we realize on some level that we're in the universe together and we have a lot in common, and there's very rarely any reason for killing or brutality.

Zesty Ping posts the Top Ten Reasons Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal, which is delightfully snarky.

This is one of those issues where we just have to wait for the irrational fear to clear away, maybe for some older folks to just give up.

The latest in blue/red cartography:

It's about a year late, but politics is a long game. I'll take it. Let's make sure this means something.