Category Archives: News

The Tangled Web They Weaved

Donald RumsfeldIt just seems to me that a pretty clear case can be made against the credibility of the Bush administration if one just takes a clear, objective look at what they’ve said. The increasingly well-known MoveOn.org has demonstrated how powerful this approach can be with this commercial that features Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” trying somewhat lamely to discredit the notion that anyone in the Bush Administration ever used the term “immediate threat” in the run-up to the war in Iraq. For once, CBS avails itself of its responsibilities as broadcasters and as a news organization and calls Rumsfeld on his blatant untruth. The effect is very, very potent.

The shame doesn’t end there; Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has commissioned a report on all the misleading statements made by the five most prominent war supporters in the Bush Administration, from George W. on down. The results are again incredibly damning, and they are available not only in PDF form, but as a searchable online database, which lets anyone plainly see what specific statements have been made about Saddam Hussein’s danger to the United States. In the end, I just hope the public pays attention to all of this.

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How to Chart Untruths

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman published a damning, evidentiary indictment of the Bush administration’s wantonly optimistic — and highly inaccurate — jobs forecasting. It’s wonderfully concise, to the point, and heavily reliant on a powerful graphic that charts predictions that the White House has made for “nonfarm payroll employment” in 2002, 2003 and 2004 against the actual data provided in a joint report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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Duplicate and Die

DVDWhen conservatives complain about “activist judges,” I wonder if they would include the growing number of adjudicators who have been systematically destroying consumers’ fair use rights (or, for that matter, those appointed under Republican presidents who have been diligently repealing environmental protections). The latest of these is Judge Susan Illston, who sits on the federal bench in San Francisco, and who last week in a suit between 321 Studios and the Motion Picture Association of America, ruled that DVD-copying software is illegal.

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Kerry That Wait

John KerryThe way the race for the Democratic nomination has turned out, I feel that my “amateur pundit’s license should be revoked,” as a friend of mine put it in reference to his own opinions on recent events. Certainly, I had no idea that the last men standing would be Senator John Kerry, he of Central Casting Presidentiality, and retiring Senator John Edwards, graduate of the Alex P. Keaton School of Law and Grooming. Who woulda thunk it?

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Don’t Mess with Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day, which passed innocently over the weekend, got me thinking about gay marriage. It’s all well and good to protect marriage as an institution between a man and a woman (as lots of right-minded people who obviously have learned how to prioritize the truly important issues facing us as a nation are doing), but has anyone stood up in defense of the great tradition that we owe to Saint Valentine — whoever the heck he was? This cherished holiday is clearly intended to celebrate romantic transactions between a man and a woman — and only between a man and a woman — and anyone who tells you otherwise, I’m sure, had better think twice about his or her relationship with the Big Guy.

I swear, if I hear of even one gay couple exchanging candy in heart-shaped boxes, filling out little pink greeting cards, or buying individually wrapped roses as a way of expressing their romantic intentions to one another on the Fourteenth of February — all of these being blatant attempts at undermining one of the founding Hallmark holidays or our society — then they’d better be ready for the onslaught of protest letters sent to newspapers and on-air call-ins to radio shows that only the dedication of all my bountiful free time can produce. Also, don’t even make write a letter to my congressperson with the words “constitutional amendment” in it. You just don’t want that.

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Reading the Unsteady State

Unsteady StateThere’s still no way to get online access to archives of The New Yorker’s rich bounty of essays, articles, reviews and humor — not even if you’re a subscriber, nor even if you want to pay for it — so you’d better hurry over there and read Hendrik Hertzberg’s contribution to this week’s Talk of the Town section before it’s no longer available. The piece is called “Unsteady State,” and it nicely wraps up President Bush’s troubled first few weeks of 2004, bookended by his weak and disingenuous attempt at re-igniting the space race and the partisan polticking of his State of the Union speech.

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Shake ’n’ Bake

New Hampshire PrimaryThe good news is that there’s less than a year to go in the disastrous, one-term presidency of George W. Bush. Next 20 Jan a new president will be sworn in, a Democrat, and we’ll finally put an end to the far right’s ideological foreign policy and avaricious economic roadmap.

Granted, here after the New Hampshire primary, I have very little idea of who that Democrat’s going to be, except to say that it won’t be Joseph Lieberman or Wes Clark — the former is dogged but pathetic, and the latter has proven to be too ill-prepared a candidate to last the long haul.

It just goes to show that I know jack shit about politics, because I am perplexed by the underwhelming nature of John Kerry’s momentum — in spite of his convincing win this evening, there’s still a fragile quality to his candidacy, as if that stony face would crumble under just a few degrees more of intense scrutiny.

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How to Get Ahead in Iowa without Really Trying

The Iowa CaucusesFor someone who has been more or less rooting for Howard Dean since last summer, the sudden tightening of polling data in the Iowa caucuses this weekend is somewhat worrisome. In fact, when I first heard that a Zogby poll put Senator John Kerry in the lead, I scoffed at the absurdity of the idea and loudly called into question the dependency of Zogby in general. I was talking out of my ass of course, basing my reaction more on my investment in the idea that this race has had an air of predestination for months than on any attention paid to the very recent events in Iowa. To paraphrase a friend’s characterization of my inability to focus on the primaries of late: “It’s a tough week to have a job and be a political junkie.”

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Crazy Old Wizard

Saddam KenobiThere’s something pathetic and familiar about the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was captured this weekend by coalition troops. It took me all day to figure it out, but I finally realized that, in that gray beard, nappy hairdo and especially those disheveled robes, he reminds me of ‘old Ben Kenobi,’ living like a hermit somewhere in the treacherous, dry hills of Tatooine. There’s nothing nearly as benign about this murderous former dictator, though, and for the fact that his capture will provide a more definitive kind of closure to Iraqis, this turn of events strikes me as significant, and in a storybook fashion, a real triumph of justice. On the other hand, I am bracing myself for the political ramifications, the trickery that the Bush administration will undoubtedly employ in order to reap the benefits of this big win, and the confused, panicked scurrying among Democratic contenders for the Presidential nomination as they try to make sense of their diminishing chances in 2004.

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The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker

Al GoreBefore I learned to like baseball, the race for the Presidency of the United States was all the baseball I needed: an intensive, protracted race that changed daily, full of odd twists and turns and intricate, obscure statistical bellwethers. The news that former Vice President Al Gore will endorse Howard Dean tomorrow is exactly the kind of grand, highly dramatic turn of events that makes this race so compelling, at least to me.

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