June 08, 2006
Cautionary Tales
This time Arlen is really mad. He wrote a letter to Dick (maybe he didn't want to worry W. OR maybe he knows who really runs the country from the crusted bottom of his black bionic heart)-- which begins
"I am taking this unusual step in writing to you to establish a public record. It is neither pleasant no easy to raise this issues with theAdministration of my own party" .......
and ends
"We press this issue in the context of repeated stances by the Administration on expansion of Article II power, frequently at the expense of Congress's Article I authority. There are Presidential signing statements where the President seeks to cherry-pick which parts of the statute he will follow. There has been the refusal of the Department of Justice to provide the necessary clearances to permit its Office of Professional Responsibility to determine the propriety of the legal advice given by the Department of Justice on the electronic surveillance program. There is the recent Executive Branch search and seizure of Congressman Jefferson's office. There are recent and repeated assertions by the Departmentof Justice that it has the authority to criminally prosecute newspapers and reporters under highly questionalrble criminal statutes.
All of this occuring in the context where the Administration is continuing warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is preventing the Senate Judiciary Committee from carringing out its constitutional resoonsibility for Congressional oversight on constitiutional issues. I am available to try to work this out with the Administration without the necessity of a constitutional confrontation between Congress and the President."
Arlen dear, if we wait much longer there will be no constitutional confrontation, because there will be no more constitution. You have worked yourself up into a constitutional confrontation frenzy several times, then fizzled out like an alka seltzer. Come on Arlen, and all you men of conscience in the Senate, it's time for a Willed Moral Achievement.
Oh, I forgot, we got Zarqawi last night. What wonderful news! That changes everything. The administration was right all along. In appreciation of their successful effort to drive evil from the face of the earth, we will now be expected to celebrate their tactics, rather than challenge them.
In "The Fog of War", Robert McNamara outlines eleven life lessons, many gleaned from his experience as an architect of the Vietnam War. Lesson Number One is:
* 1. Empathize with your enemy.
I might as well print the other ten while I'm at it.
* 2. Rationality will not save us.
* 3. There's something beyond one's self.
* 4. Maximize efficiency.
* 5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
* 6. Get the data.
* 7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
* 8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
* 9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
* 10. Never say never.
* 11. You can't change human nature.
Well, maybe our empathy is developing. "Condolence payments", money we pay Iraqi families whose members we have maimed and killed wrongfully, have soared from 5 million dollars in 2004 to 20 million. I personally would rather have my husband or child than a check from the USofA, but I'm no 9/11 widow.
Sadly, most of the people we have labeled insurgents are Iraqi nationals who believe that their country was been invaded by folks who have no right to be there. Ordinary citizens, as well as the entire Iraqi army, have lost their jobs, their homes and their families. With little else to lose but their homeland, they are, understandably putting up quite a fight. Often a despot will take advantage of a situation like this, and emerge as a leader. The "insurgents", given renewed purpose, will fight forever with all their might. I think we saw that in Vietnam, but I could be mistaken.
Having a despotic leader has proven useful to this administration as well. When a single individual can be demonized and then eradicated, like Zarqawi, (notice Bin Laden's name hasn't been mentioned much lately) a major victory is declared in what is really an amorphous, neverending, complex conflict. It is easy to discount, at least for the moment, the 9000 little field units made up of disenfrancised citizens who have lost everything, and now have a cause for which they are fighting to the death. It is no wonder that the attempt to shower them with "freedom " blows up over and over again.
Cautionary tales for photographers, for poets, for twenty somethings and to the objects of right wing Christian projections
Photo note: I couldn't decide whether to publish a wiretap shot, an American flag shot or the pansies. This is not to say that there are any pansies in Congress, of course -- certainly not the gay kind.
Addendum: Dan Froomkin says everything much better than I did, but I missed his piece before I went on and on.
Addendum #2: Here's an on the scene report from Baghdad Burning a girlblog written by an Iraqi.
Posted by Dakota at June 8, 2006 06:06 AM