Daily Archives: 15 Jul 04

"I’m not reading this. This is bullshit."

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More Proof They Knew: “This morning’s Los Angeles Times

uncovers an explosive document buried at the end of the recent Senate

Intelligence report. It shows that before Colin Powell’s

now-discredited U.N. speech justifying war in Iraq, State Department

analysts told Powell and top administration officials about “dozens of

factual problems” in the address (which was written by Vice President

Cheney’s staff). According to the Jan. 31, 2003 memo, there were

problems with 38 of the claims made in the speech draft, which was

crafted at the behest of the White House. (It was “intended to be the

Bush administration’s most compelling case” for war in Iraq.) In

response, 28 were either “removed from the draft or altered” – but the

others were left in. Powell was reportedly irate when first given the

speech: According to the 9/3/03 U.S. News & World Report,

Powell threw the speech in the air, yelling, “I’m not reading this.

This is bulls–t.” This past May, he reiterated his displeasure with

the speech, saying, “It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and

wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading.”” (Center for American Progress)

And some are suggesting that Powell might even consider running with

Bush if he dumps Cheney?? If he were so craven an opportunist as to

ditch that many of his principles, he would have done so long ago…

Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game

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“Here’s a fun game… First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on ‘Customer Reviews,’ and sort them by ‘Lowest Rating First.’ Hilarity ensues! It’s the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!” (waxy via boing boing) F’rinstance:

Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue”

  • “This is one of the worst albums I’ve ever bought. It’s so boring and lifeless. Good to fall asleep to.”

  • “its boredom,nostalgia and scarcely concealed contempt make it the perfect background music for this narcissistic age of ours.”

  • “I found Mr. Davis’ playing to be laughable at best. Finally, it’s irritating; and confusing that so many people laud it.”

  • “If pretension, tedium, and self-indulgence are your idea of what should animate music, then this is the album and Miles Davis is the ‘artist’ for you.”

The war for the soul of literature

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“James Wood is the most admired literary critic at work today, and Dale Peck is the most reviled. Yet they share the same loathing, for a type of fiction that Wood calls ‘hysterical realism’ and that Peck labels ‘recherch? postmodernism.’ Most people who follow contemporary fiction can confidently name some books that fall into this category and can tell you what they’re like: They’re big, they’re full of information, ideas and stylistic riffs; they have eventful plots that transpire on what’s often called a ‘broad social canvas’; they experiment with form and voice; they’re overtly (or maybe just overly) smart. Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to be like.

Maximalism, to use this genre’s most reactionary name, turns out to be a lot less uniform than minimalism. If minimalism’s paterfamilias is indisputably Raymond Carver, maximalism’s is Don DeLillo — unless it’s Thomas Pynchon. (DeLillo is the star that some younger maximalists claim to steer by, but the less solemn Pynchon seems the better fit.) The novelists usually rounded up in this group include Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen (who wrote a famous 1996 essay on the ‘social novel’ for Harper’s Magazine), Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggers, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith and, especially, David Foster Wallace. But the books these writers produce don’t always have much in common. Some of them (Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ for one) aren’t even especially long — which seems like the minimum you’d expect from a maximalist novel.” (Salon)

It’s not always about you

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“…(W)hy does almost all public discussion in the U.S. about the goals of the Islamist terrorists assume that they are driven by hatred for the domestic political and social arrangements of Americans? Because most Americans cannot imagine foreigners not being interested in the way they do things, let alone using the U.S. as a tool to pursue other goals entirely.” — Gwynne Dyer (Toronto Star)

Related:

The Misunderstood Osama: “The anonymous CIA analyst who wrote Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror managed to preserve his cloak of anonymity until two weeks before his book’s publication—a stealth operation that made the agency’s WMD spycraft look masterful by comparison. The Boston Phoenix reports that the analyst’s name is Michael Scheuer.

He spent three years as the Counterterrorist Center’s Osama Bin Laden station chief. In Imperial Hubris, Scheuer argues that Americans misunderstand Bin Laden and al-Qaida and have little sense that we’re losing the terror war.” (Slate)

The Coalition of the Increasingly Unwilling

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U.S. Under Pressure to Sustain Coalition in Iraq: “Four nations have left while four more prepare to leave international force; others quietly planning to depart.” (Washington Post)

And The Nation‘s Tom Englehardt describes how the US is increasingly scraping the bottom of the barrel to get international contributions to the ‘multinational’ effort (TomDispatch)

And among other recent observations of note in his column, Englehardt remarks that US troop deaths in Afghanistan/Iraq recently passed the one thousand milestone with almost no media notice. He also comments, “In the thirteen days before the surprise early “transition” non-ceremonies, there were 19 American military deaths in Iraq. In the thirteen days since, there have been 31.” And he notes that, in all the talk about possible ‘July-‘ or ‘October-surprises’ (and the most recent conspiracy theories about Republicans scenarios for a government-of-national-unity type refusal to hand over power by postponing the elections citing a terrorist threat), no one seems to be thinking about what Bush-Cheney might do in the period between an election defeat in November and Kerry’s inauguration in Jan., ’05.

Hear the Rumor on Cheney?

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Capital Buzzes, Denials Aside: “The Washington summer clamor about Vice President Dick Cheney’s future on the Republican ticket has greatly intensified.” (New York Times) Of course it has, in the run-up to the conventions. Not a joke candidate like Dan Quayle was, Cheney is nevertheless increasingly seen as a liability to the reelection effort, even in Republican circles. For the Democrats, he is a convenient way to get to the President, so much so that many relish the prospect of his remaining on the Republican ticket. I do; I pray Bush doesn’t choose this issue as the one on which to get over his constitutional inability to admit he made a mistake or rethink a decision. Part of Bush’s problem maybe that it is difficult to see whom he might tap for the job — who would be willing to take it, is a prominent enough Republican but sufficiently devoid of polarizing baggage. That lets out the most-commonly discussed possibilities such as McCain, Powell or other cabinet members. My God, what could be worse than Bush-Cheney ’04… Bush-Ashcroft! But a more important reason Bush wouldn’t dump Cheney is that… it is Cheney who has always made such important decisions for Bush.