“Not necessarily, say political scientists studying media coverage of minority candidates. Their research on black politicians running in majority-white districts turns up some touchy historical patterns that are germane to both Obama-mania and also the national media’s readiness to cover a highly competitive white-black contest.” (Columbia Journalism Review)
Daily Archives: 29 Jan 07
Our Delusional Hedgehog
Harold Meyerson: “The decline in Bush’s support to Watergate-era Nixonian depths since he announced that his new Iraq policy was his old Iraq policy, only more so, stems, I suspect, from three conclusions that the public has reached about the president and his war. The first, simply, is that the war is no longer winnable and, worse, barely comprehensible since it has evolved into a Sunni-Shiite conflict. The second is that Bush, in all matters pertaining to his war, is a one-trick president who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never mind that it hasn’t worked. In Isaiah Berlin’s typology of leaders, Bush isn’t merely a hedgehog who knows one thing rather than many things. He’s a delusional hedgehog who knows one thing that isn’t so.” (Washington Post op-ed)
Pelosi puzzled by Bush’s ineptitude
Wake up and smell the coffee, Nancy: ‘In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.
“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’ ” ‘ (The Politico) When has Bush’s rationale for any Presidential decision ever gone beyond groundless confidence and infantile willfulness?
Robert Novak: Pelosi’s first 100 hours a ‘success’; Bush and staff ‘irrelevant’
“Bush completely ignored the social issues dear to much of his conservative base [in the State of the Union] … Republicans are divided and disorganized. Senior Republicans in Congress refer to President George W. Bush and his staff as irrelevant and out of touch. Younger conservative members are going their own way, feeling that neither the White House nor the party’s congressional leadership shows the way for the GOP.” (The Raw Story)
Our Mercenaries in Iraq
In the wake of the insurgent downing of a Blackwater helicopter and the execution-style killing of its crew hours before the State of the Union address, Democracy Now! interviews Jeremy Seahill, author of a forthcoming book profiling Blackwater . Does Bush’s call for a troop surge obscure a more substantial but undeclared private mercenary surge in Iraq?
‘There is no war on terror’
![//www.cps.gov.uk/assets_new/images/2004/k_macdonald.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.cps.gov.uk/assets_new/images/2004/k_macdonald.jpg "Sir Ken MacDonald") |
Exactly my sentiments:
“‘London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.
‘The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.'” — Sir Ken Macdonald, Head of the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions (The Guardian via rc3) |
Amnesiacs Not Only Forget the Past, They Cannot Imagine the Future
“The attempts of brain damage victims to imagine falter thanks to an inability to marshal the places of the past.” (Scientific American) Bilateral damage to the hippocampus is known to cause amnesia. Now a study from the University of London found deficiencies in the abilities of five amnesiac men, compared with matched subjects, to imagine. It points to a greater role for the hippocampus in adding a temporal dimension to our experience; without its functions we exist in a timeless present. It makes a sort of sense that if you cannot have the experience of remembering a time gone by, you cannot imagine a time when the present moment will have passed. And one FmH reader [thanks, Joel] noted the resonance with T.S. Eliot:
And right action is freedom
From past and future also. (The Dry Salvages)
