Fred Gets In

Sorta.

Dropping the penultimate boa of the longest political fan dance in memory, Right Enough Said Fred announced that he's...going to announce...on September 6th.

Thus theoretically bracketing the long Labor Day weekend with his Aqua Velveteen Rabbit Fredness.

Or something.


From the Boston Globe:

Thompson says he's definitely in the race
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff and James W. Pindell, Globe correspondent

Fred Thompson, the actor and former Tennessee senator whose flirtation with a presidential bid has frustrated some supporters, will file papers to officially enter the race next Thursday, his campaign manager told key backers this afternoon.

"Fred is definitely is going to make the race," campaign manager Bill Lacy told members of the Thompson campaign's national finance team in a conference call. "We are in this race to win."
Lacy said Thompson will also announce his campaign on a webcast next Thursday. After that he is expected to visit Iowa Sept. 7, New Hampshire on Sept. 8 and 9, and South Carolina after that. There will also be events Sept. 13-15 in Florida and Tennessee, Lacy said.

Thompson's national finance chairman Phil Martin said the campaign has raised over $6 million already, but that "September needs to be a big month" in raising campaign funds.

Thompson's entry in the race has been a foregone conclusion for weeks, but his refusal to definitively declare his candidacy had begun to irritate some backers who were concerned he had lost precious momentum. Nonetheless, in most national polls he is in second place among Republican hopefuls, trailing Rudy Giuliani and leading Mitt Romney.
...

Watching a sleepy old guy take a year to strip down to his black socks, hernia truss and arm candy is not my idea of fun.

In fact, its straight up creepy.

Then again, I'm not in this guy's Party,

so what do I know from what makes the wingnut masses get up on their hind legs and throb with joy?

Republican Senator Larry Craig

pictured here demonstrating that if you use a robotic hand to fondle another man’s penis, you’re still definitely NOT GAY...

..and singing "Sittin’ Here Being NOT GAY".

(Otis,

please forgive me…)

Sittin' on the potty seat
I'll be sittin' here lookin’ at feet
Watching the wingtips in
Then I watch 'em tap away again,
I'm sittin' here being NOT GAY
Watching my term slip on away
Ooh, I'm just sittin' here being NOT GAY
On prime time

I stopped huntin' Midvale rabbits
To join up with the Party o' Life
Forget that "Men's Room With Benefits"
I'm so NOT GAY I even got me a Wife
So I'm just gonna sit here being NOT GAY
Watching my life slip on away
Ooh, I'm just sittin' here being NOT GAY
On prime time

Look like something's gonna change
Everything cannot remain the same
Can't go on callin' it the Party of God
Bein' run by Wang Wranglers, Pampers and "Bob"


Sittin' here workin' my bone
And the Evil Liberals won't leave me alone, listen
Two thousand miles I ride
Just to get a little dick on the side
Now I'm just gonna sit here being NOT GAY
Watching my "friends" ruuuun away
Ooh, I'm just sittin' here being NOT GAY
On prime time.

As flies to wanton boys

are we to the Mainstream Media;

They kill us for their sport.



From the Associated Press

Jewell, falsely tied to '96 blast, dies

By HARRY R. WEBER, Associated Press Writer

Richard Jewell, the former security guard who was wrongly linked to the 1996 Olympic bombing and then waged a decade-long battle with news organizations to defend his reputation, died Wednesday. He was 44.

Jewell was found dead in his west Georgia home. An autopsy was scheduled for Thursday.

"There's no suspicion whatsoever of any type of foul play. He had been at home sick since the end of February with kidney problems," said Meriwether County Coroner Johnny Worley.

Jewell was diagnosed with diabetes earlier this year and later had a few toes amputated. He had recently been on dialysis, the coroner said.

Lin Wood, Jewell's longtime attorney, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he was "devastated" by the news. He described Jewell as "a dedicated public servant whose heroism the night of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing saved the lives of many people."

"He will be missed, but never forgotten," Wood said.

The Jewell episode led to soul-searching among news organizations about the use of unattributed or anonymously sourced information. His very name became shorthand for a person accused of wrongdoing in the media based on scanty information.

Jewell, who was working as a sheriff's deputy as recently as last year, was a security guard in 1996 at the Olympics in Atlanta. He was initially hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack in a park and moving people out of harm's way just before a bomb exploded during a concert.

The blast killed one and injured 111 others.

Three days after the bombing, an unattributed report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described him as "the focus" of the investigation.

Other media, to varying degrees, also linked Jewell to the investigation and portrayed him as a loser and law-enforcement wannabe who may have planted the bomb so he would look like a hero when he discovered it later.

The AP, citing an anonymous federal law enforcement source, said after the Journal-Constitution report that Jewell was "a focus" of investigators, but that others had "not yet been ruled out as potential suspects."

Reporters camped outside Jewell's mother's apartment in the Atlanta area, and his life was dissected for weeks by the media. But he was never arrested or charged, although he was questioned and was a subject of search warrants.

Eighty-eight days after the initial news report, U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander issued a statement saying Jewell "is not a target" of the bombing investigation and that the "unusual and intense publicity" surrounding him was "neither designed nor desired by the FBI, and in fact interfered with the investigation."

In 1997, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno expressed regret over the leak regarding Jewell. "I'm very sorry it happened," she told reporters. "I think we owe him an apology."
…

It is well to remember that once you have had a target painted on your back and the shelling begins, you are never whole again.

You can win in court, you can slug your way back from being a pariah, and if you have the backing of millions of dollars and voters, you can ride it out and even hang on and remain President for eight relatively prosperous and peaceful years.

But one of the few people I ever knew of who more-or-less completely recovered was Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, who was accused of child sexual molestation in 1993, at the height of that period’s “recovered memory” witchhunting fever. Given the hideous reputation the Catholic Church has earned as a haven for pedophiles, I never thought he would get his good name back, but he did.

He is the exception.

And it is also well to remember that this ever-hungry slaughterbeast that rips men apart and drives them falsely to infamy, despair, suicide and ruin is the favorite pet of the GOP; deployed almost daily for petty, partisan gain by the racist, bible-pounding, bottom-dwelling denizens of America’s culture Men’s Room with Benefits.

And that it was not Richard Jewell who murdered and maimed so many in Atlanta, but White Conservative Christopath Terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph.

Who, like White Conservative Christopath Terrorist Timothy McVeigh, did nothing more than implement in deed the kind of homicidal Jebus Jihad against liberals and government employees that the Mullahs of the Christopath Right like Tom DeLay, Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberston, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage (to, sadly, name only a few) have been relentlessly and hysterically fomenting for the last 30 years.

God's peace be with you, Mr. Jewell, and with your loved ones.

I'm sorry our culture destroyed you.

You are not of the Body -- Afterwards

File under: It’s 8:30 and I’m just getting home from a j-o-b? WTF? Where are the hovercrafts we were promised? Where’s my fucking jet-pack and hot robot maid?

Anyway…

There was a lot of conversation below decks about the Rich Blog/Poor Blog thing, and it has been commendably thoughtful, considerate, and never degenerated (as commenter sharoney noted) “…into recrimination, namecalling, "poor-me"-ism, and accusations of selling out.”

Amen.

The poo cannons have been largely silent, and some frank questions and critiques got raised which seem to pretty accurately represent the general sorts of objections one hears on the subject.

So let's take them on, one-by-one.

But first, an industrial-size “Thank you” for your comments, emails and kind words. They are Cap’n Crunch for my occasionally weary spirit and often ass-dragging corpus.

Second, let me reiterate that I have no money on this horse. I do more than fine:

“…I believe I am spectacularly fortunate. I am the sole proprietor of my own funky little café on the edge of the Sprawl. The rent is zero – my day gigs cover the expenses for my meager vices, and any “value” the place has comes from word/sweat equity and the cool people that hang out there.

I set my own hours and whip up any kinda pie (or pictures of pies) that suits me. And when I set them out, smart, accomplished, passionate humans come by to nosh, read, chat, rebut, add, call me a smartass commie, riff, whatever.”

But there is an earnest debate roiling right at the heart of the digital Left about who we are, and about how closely our gallant ““Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” words do and do not match our mundane, daily deeds.

And when that debate is roiling among writers?

Among the kind of people Voltaire must’ve meant when he said, “To hold a pen is to be at war?”

Well, it gets pretty interesting. Kinda draws my attention.

Third, commentor Swopa said...

If I may offer a rebuttal on behalf of a clique to which I don't belong...

1. It's kind of cheating to debate "the received wisdom of the Elders of the digital Left" rather than the specific words anyone has said. If I could paraphrase your argument to my tastes before starting, rest assured that as brilliant as you are, I could kick your ass on any topic -- and it would prove nothing.

I abbreviated, but fair enough.

To be clearer, I have heard this received wisdom echoing many times, but most recently at the YearlyKos Panel “Evolution & Integration of the Blogosphere” which Micah Sifry has done a fine job reporting on here (and which I have sullied by adding emphasis):

Some specifics:

Chris Bowers starts out by asking: In terms of traffic, the top 50 national blogs who focus on politics has remained almost identical for the last two years. Instead of starting their own blogs, new people blog at DailyKos or HuffingtonPost, two mega-blogs. The top 50 receive over 95% of all the traffic. Is it fair to say that a blogosphere establishment has formed, at least in terms of urls, if not in terms of people?

…

Tracy Russo answers that yes, at least in terms of people, a "tight-knit network" has formed. It's harder for new voices to draw readers away from their established reading habits.

…

Amanda Terkel says that because the top blogs produce so much content, it's very hard for anyone to match that. HuffPost has 40 employees. ThinkProgress has four. You also see the establishment trying to co-opt the blogosphere. Ultimately it still depends on good content, not whether you come from an established organization. But overtime she agrees its natural for an establishment to form.

Amanda Marcotte says a lot of the feeling that there is an establishment comes from the sense from people with teeny blogs who feel that they can't get more attention.

…

Matt Stoller notes that broadband adoption has slowed, except among black and latino communities. If you look around the room, this [the blogosphere] is a media model for liberal whites. That market, I think, there's no more there. At least not now.

...

Tracy Russo responds: It's really hard to be one of those top 50 people, producing all that content every day, and promoting it to their fellow bloggers. You can work at it, however, but it's really hard to be a good blogger.

...

Ali Savino: There really isn't a single blogger type. Even Duncan has his guest poster minions. Unless you have five friends who want to start a site with you, I don't know how you can do it.

...

Duncan Black: My blog is really my voice. I don't write a lot. I link to other people, link to new sources, link to people who make jokes I wish I had made or wrote things that I wish I had written. When we move out of my zone into communities of people who are talking about things I don't really know about, I may read them and find them fascinating, but there's a barrier to linking to them because they're not really in my voice.

There was some interplay, but c’mon: it’s hard to get wisdom more “received” than from this group.

And note what it is that Duncan identified as his specialty: “I don't write a lot. I link to other people, link to new sources…” (might actually be “news”)

Bob Geiger, on the other hand, was very supportive as he facilitated “How to Get Your Blog Noticed”. Sorta pooh-poohed a lot of the received wisdom and gave a very good presentation, peppered with funny anecdotes and practical advise.

He’d make a fine teacher.

Then again, Bob is going on indefinite blogging hiatus.


Commentor Swopa also notes:

2. As a specific example of the above, when I've read high-traffic bloggers opining about what creates high traffic, they've emphasized not brilliant writing so much as lots of output. In fact, thanks to a quick Google search, here's Atrios: "People click on a website regularly when they expect it to have new content. If you're a thoughtful writer who tends to write longer essays then you're at a disadvantage."

Actually, if you dig 1/4 inch below the surface you find that these two issues are related, and mutually annihilating.

One, that people come by often to see New!Content!

But, two, they don’t wanna read essays.

OK, but if your “new content” is mostly 10-syllable epigraham-crackers that advise “What Digby said…” or “Go read Ezra…” that hardly qualifies as either "content" or “new”.

And when you go over to Digby or Ezra, odds are 6-to-5 and pick ‘em that you will be staring at -- gasp! -- an essay!

Maybe even a thoughtful essay.

Commentor Swopa also notes:

3. You're right, though, he does tend to link to a rather limited universe of blogs. But then, so do you. And the dirty, nefarious truth in both cases is probably the same: You link to blogs that you read and like.

Folks seem to forget that Markos, Duncan, and the rest didn't run for office as Representatives of the Blogosphere on a platform of linking to a broad and demographically representative sample of all liberal blogs everywhere...

OK, first let's dispense with the "reductio ad absurdum" strawmen bullshit of "...all liberal blogs everywhere...".

Second, yeah, guilty!

However, speaking only out of my own experience, I am compelled to cite the 1977 Supreme Court case of Apples vs. Oranges to point out some important differences.

Although I do link to others, and try to scatter it around, that is not predominantly my thing.

I do mostly (semi)original compositions. I might cite “The Tempest” or Harlan Ellison. Or parody “The Raven” or do a slide show, or write a children's story, or riff on the MSM, or a Dreaded Essay.

Maybe pen a commercial. Or perhaps a lexicon of GOP-types.

Or a lot of stuff that's sort of sui generis.

Also, for my size, I do rather a lot of original artwork, most of which is fairly well-received, but which isn’t much to do with driving traffic here or there.

I do 8-12 posts a week, not 85 (although by being persistent, I am now up to post #1,180)

I don’t do this even close to full-time.

“Dependable Renegade” (to pull an example of a site I like a lot) does the best snark captioneering in the business. But again, that site’s raison d’etre isn’t acting as a router to other people’s work; it is (to coin a phrase) a Destination Blog, and not an Aggregation or Transit or Base-Camp Blog.

Eschaton, OTOH, is predominately an outlet mall of short links to the other sites.

“I don't write a lot. I link to other people, link to new(s?) sources…”

There is nothing at all wrong with that -- it’s a useful resource and I loiter there myself from time to time -- and I’m glad Duncan has prospered. And if I were King of the Better Universe I wouldn’t want the blogosphere configured in any other way than as a place where people are free to do with their own sites whatever they wish.

However when:

• Your self-identified operational model is mostly driving your very large readership to other sites.
• You do it professionally: full-time and with a revenue-stream that is in no small measure traffic-based.
• You routinely and rightly deride the Old Media for the corrupting effect of its old boy, in-group clubbiness.
• You are a leader in a movement that stresses the democratization of the soapbox. Whose unofficial hajj next year will be called “Netroots Nation”.

And yet you rather conspicuously drive traffic to the same tiny handful of friend’s sites, who drive their traffic over to you, well y’know the neighbors are gonna talk.

In the end, I kinda figure this first iterations of bloggers will end up like first generation stars.

Q: Do you mean big, gassy and unstable?

A: OK, that was just cheap. Cheap and unworthy.

But, well, sort of because natural selection never loafs on the beach doing nothing for a couple of weeks in August.

Hell, in 4.5 billion years, natural selection has never so much as taken a sick day or pee break.

And because of that, the Olympians will always displace the Titans, the reign of the Elves will always taper off and give rise to the Age of Men, and already you can see the curtain going up on the final act for the Solo Blogger like me.

Which, for the most primal of reasons, makes perfect sense. Because in the end we are mammals that survive best by huddling together for warmth, efficiency and mutual protection. (And, of course, naughtygoodfun.) Creatures made up, in turn, of cells that figured out more than a billion years ago that specialization within a single organism was their collective ticket to the Big Show.

Nature favors biological organization that behaves like, well, Genesis:


knock out one lead singer, the drummer steps up, takes the mic,

and the band goes on.

I miss Billmon. Also DC Media Girl. And, of course, Gilly. And both Max Sawicky and the aforementioned Bob Geiger are boxing up their adjectives and calling it a day (h/t Crooks and Liars, via Mike’s Blog Roundup, ably pinch-hit by Blue Gal. Whew; links got more lineage than Russian royalty.)

But they’re individuals and not organizations, so their sites do not survive the loss of their auteurs.

There is a definite beauty in that; a purity of the singular artistic voice. Where it alights, it fills up all the rooms and re-tints the walls and floorboards with the distinct hue of its talent.

But when it’s gone…its gone.

And in a world of

“Oh Lord,
Thy snark is so vast
And my blog is so small”.

the group site offers some shelter from the storm.

And a Dread Pirate Roberts

can theoretically go on forever.

And finally, Tanbark, you have indeed correctly identified the true identity of the Three Caveats: step up to ChiTown and collect a beer.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Après le deluge edition.

The Mouse Circus and there was little of quote-quality, but the “meta” – watching as the framing of how Conservatives are going to try to download their guilt and complicity for George Bush’s Iraqi War onto the Dirty Hippes come into sharper focus -- was interesting.

In Iraq, There Are No Good Options Left. They’ve all been used as ass-paper by the neocon cabal that rule and ruin America. Traded away for short-termn partisan gain at every decisive juncture as the GOP opted – every single fucking time – to choose Party over Country.

And now, There Are No Good Options Left.

In case you do not know what “There Are No Good Options Left” means, Graham Chapman explains here:


Monty Python Funeral Arrangements - For more funny videos, click here

And yet, increasingly, your MSM Republican water-carrier are digging in and grilling whoever proposes anything other that Stay The Course v3.0 like Ken Starr going after a White House aide.

As if there was some magic, hidden Good Alternative that America Hating Liberals refuse to recognize.

So this is how teevee is going to be for awhile.

Fictional Questioner: So you admit there may be a bloodbath in Iraq if we pull out? There you have it ladies and gentlemen; Senator Verisimilitude say’s he’s “Pro Iraq Bloodbath”. Up next, the mother’s of some disabled veterans explain why they support our noble mission in Iraq.

Because until Jim Webb grabs Chris Wallace or Terry Moran by his festive tie, drags him backwards through the alimentary system of a Brown-throated Three-toed sloth, and then asks him, in his best Dirty Harry voice, “What in the fuck is it about ‘There Are No Good Options Left’ that you don’t understand?”…nothing at all is going to change except for the worse.

Oh and quit bothering to try to find ”The Chris Matthews Show” in your teevee guide anymore.

It’s gone.

Replaced by something called The Hillary Show.

Basically this guy,

apparently hammered on bad county lockup Pruno, waxing slurriedly about All Things Hillurry and jerking angrily off while his paid guests watch, revolted.

But Sunday would have been a day wasted if I hadn't spent it walking, biking, smelling, listening.

Don't let anyone tell you Chicago is walkable. It isn’t; its neighborhoods are.

Today was a day for sudden urban gardens, appearing like little Brigadoons here and there; lavish testaments to what some people can do with Kubla Khan’s ambitions and 25 square feet of sward, invisibly small if you are moving faster than a fat pug can amble.

A day for noticing that the dappling of the noon light as it falls through trees sets up pockets of air which breath alternately fresh-baked bread warm and underside-of-the-pillow cool.

For a dozen languages at picnic along a murmuring beach. Where half the world is a big, bald, blue head, with a rind of sandy yellow hair and a rumpled green collar. For senior couples walking arm interlaces past young gay couples walking arms interlaced.

For the sundial shadows of buildings to coolly nudge drowsy beachgoers, reminding them that suppertime approaches.

For six guys with a video camera and a bunch of reflectors filming who knows what in ass deep water.

For seeing what the storms had done.

For stopping at a door caged open to catch the breeze and hearing a cool dark within. Filled, it seemed, with millions of unseen worshippers, inhaling diesel fumes and urban clatter into the belly of their sacred place, and exhaling incense and cowbells. Ancient mysteries and chants.

For dodging into a hole-in-the wall for noodles.

Inside, judging by the sheet-metal-dying-violently sounds it made, the A/C was technically working.

Practically it drizzled out an incontinent trickle of cool dust that got pushed around like an asthmatic mathlete in a locker room shower.

But the noodles were first rate.

The Best Example Evah

of why, from time to time, being shrewdly vituperative and judiciously foul-mouthed is indispensably important.

A shout back out

to Hubris


David Bowie -- Never Get Old

And the rest of the Justice League at the GNB, which is hitting on every cylinder.

You are not of the Body -- Part 1

File under: Fun with numbers.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or in the West Wing and didn’t know about it, there is a longstanding pie-fight over here in Left Bloggistan that cycles hot and cold, high and low, and is fought through many proxies.

But what it comes down to is this:

1. The digital Left came into its own in response to the suffocating “Fuck You, Rabble” Play-Doh Bullshit Factory hierarchy of traditional Media and Political entities.

Year after year, the Wise and Serious Men of the Center dined out lavishly on the simple premise that no one could be too far to the Radical Right not to be taken Seriously…and no one could be Moderate Left enough to avoid a beatdown for Not Compromising More on Stuff.

And so as the Newt/Rush/Rove/Falwell Party of God bum-rushed the nation into oblivion, the Mainstream Media took up their brickbats to castigate…

…the Left…

…for not being even bigger pussies than they already were.

Which, among other things, also helping to breed new strains of gooey-spined Dems who now have to be taught to fight for us as if their country depended on it -- because it actually does -- or need to be weeded out and sent back to whatever the hell glad-handing, professional vacillator job they had before they ran for office.


2. And they got away with both abdicating their fundamental role of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” and betraying the nation into the clammy hands of its internal enemies largely because, for all practical purposes, there was no alternative and comparable source of information, analysis or means to engage or rebut the opinion-makers who were shaping the national dialogue.

There was nothing to drink but the toxic effluence of the MSM, which meant you could either die of thirst and cede the whole game as hopelessly rigged to the pig people and their avatars, or drink the poison and hate it, while hooking up in small, isolated islands and trying to move the pyramids one brick at a time.


3. That is, until blogs arrived: a cheap, publicly-available platform for analysis, opinion-journalism, kittens, knitting, porn, fund-raising, penis-embiggening unguents, and some old-fashioned reporting.

The Right adopted it as a newfangled form of their Old Media mainstay: Hate Radio. Another virtually zero-cost way to reinforce their Hive Mind caste system and keep the smothering Rovian Goodthinkfullness Machine rolling.

The Left, on the other hand, seized on the technology almost literally as the desert-parched survivors in the “Flight of the Phoenix” would have seized on the miraculous appearance of a case of cold beer and a brand-new airplane. Suddenly there was a way to make democracy’s pie higher by activating those myriad voices on the Left that had been systematically and deliberately disenfranchised by Big Media and Professional Politics.

And that’s right about when the pie-fight starts.

When…


4. …it begins to look as though some of the champions, early-adopters and financial beneficiaries of this tool of lively and participatory democracy might be using their size to nudge things down precisely the same kind of Insider/Outsider clique-track that was supposed to be the Evil Bane of Big Media and Professional Politics, against which we were all going to link arms and march and sing. Or something.

When it begins to look as though the heroes of the “Battle of the Cowshed” are getting too cozy wearing Farmer Jones’ pants and sleeping his bed.

For myself, I have no particular axe to grind.

First, my ego does not live or die by hitcount; being shot down by countless libidinous liberal lasses and having one’s lit’rary efforts form-letter-shredded and returned in the SASE (My Preciousesses! What have they done to My Preciousesses!) by legions of magazines -- large and small, good and execrable -- are great curatives for such disorders.


Second, this site, you may have noticed, takes no ads and runs no fundraisers. And while I thank the many readers who have asked if there is a hat into which they can kick a few bucks (and while that situation may or may not change in the future), I have no vested financial interest in the patterns and volume of traffic flow.


Third, and most important, far from feeling cranky or somehow underappreciated, I believe I am spectacularly fortunate. I am the sole proprietor of my own funky little café on the edge of the Sprawl. The rent is zero – my day gigs cover the expenses for my meager vices, and any “value” the place has comes from word/sweat equity and the cool people that hang out there.

I set my own hours and whip up any kinda pie (or pictures of pies) that suits me. And when I set them out, smart, accomplished, passionate humans come by to nosh, read, chat, rebut, add, call me a smartass commie, riff, whatever.

Sometimes a bighearted Great Fish like Crooks & Liars or Firedoglake will grab my little tart shack by the door jamb and drag it way, way out past the continental shelf where you can’t even see the ocean floor anymore, and huge things bump at your toes.

Which is certainly exhilarating.

And then, in a day or two, the tide drifts me back to my thigh-deep bioswale inlet, which is just fine too.


Fourth, I am a believer in intellectual and real property rights. If you build a site and a loyal readership/commentariate, then you should be free to take your thing in whatever direction suits you.


And fifth, I believe in the Advice to Young Bloggers once offered by Steve Gilliard. To wit, roughly: Shut the fuck up and write and quit worrying about seeking other people’s approval.

Which is true, but it is not sufficient.

Because it is entirely true that if you keep making a great beef sammich, customers will eventually show up at your door.

But it is also true that if you publicize honestly and wisely, then even more people will show up at your door to share in the sammichy love, which is kinda the point of going into the beef sammich trade.

Conversely, however life-alteringly wonderful your beef sammiches may be, no matter how cleverly or aggressively you promote your wares in “The Vegan Pantograph”, your ads there ain’t gonna move any product.

So while your obligation as a writer is to read and write, well and regularly, as an activist your job is to figure out the rules of the arena in which you have chosen to operate: because there is just no sense in working yourself up into a state of High Pissoff over getting knocked around by the other basketball players, or how unfair the third base umpire is being…when you’re actually smack in the middle of a rugby match.

So rather than sit on the parapet of Castle Driftglass

(pictured here after a series of recent storms
reformatted the local trees and viaducts)

drinking Blue Moon beer with mineola wedges (oranges slices are for rubes) and speculating, I thought maybe I'd kick the shrubs statistically and see if anything interesting falls out.

To test the received wisdom of the Elders of the digital Left that --

A) A-listing is hard, hard work.

B) The market is saturated, so stop trying to break into the top tier. And/or,

C) It’s a matter of quality. If you would just Blog!Harder!, your wonderfulness will be eventually be recognized.

-- against the proposition (often spoken of below decks) that the commanding heights of the Left Blogosphere are dominated by a self-reinforcing, self-referencing clique who talk mostly among themselves, and past whose velvet rope you will almost certainly never be invited, no matter how well you write, or how Hard!You!Blog!

Which would otherwise not be a very interesting phenomenon to take apart and fiddle with, were it not for the fact that the digital Left rose to prominence by denouncing precisely such hierarchies in the Old Media.

Before proceeding, here are a few caveats.

End Part 1.

You are not of the Body –- Part 2

The Three Caveats

(shown here during the first encore at their
legendary 1961 reunion concert)

Methodology:

Because I am very, very lazy For the sake of clarity, I kept it simple: pulled a random 10-week sample (from 2006-2007) from the archives of one of the undisputed A-List heavyweights – Duncan Black of Eschaton – and just counted the links.

How often does he link and to whom?

Of the total universe of possible sources to link to (thousands? millions?), what was the actual size of the constellation of locations to which he chose to direct his reader’s attention?

And what, if anything, does the distribution of those links tell us about the truth or falsity of the myth of the Great Clique in the Sky?

Accuracy:

Although I believe my SQL-fu is adequate to the task, my Trimming Dragon and Parsing Claw techniques are far from perfect, leading no doubt to a few truncations and omissions. When I starting collecting that good George Soros money for such services, I will be able to take more time and refine my methodology. As it is, I eye-checked the data carefully enough to vouch for its overall veracity.

Rounding upward:

Affiliated people/sites have different URLs, and so one group or realm’s frequency on the dance-card may be higher than the raw numbers suggest simply because the mechanical means I used to tally the data didn’t round up all affiliates into one bucket.

So, for example, the full name of “Electioncentral” is “electioncentral.tpm.blog”, an affiliate of the TPM Federation. As is the TPM Café and TPM Muckraker. Each of these was counted separately under its own name, rather than as one entity.

Similarly “Yglesias.tpmcafe” crosses boundaries into both the Yglesiasverse and TPM. Likewise the most excellent Glenn Greenwald tracks across from his old home – “glenngreenwald.blogspot.com” – to his new place at Salon.com (which, in turn, became a much more linked-favorite site once Glenn had parked there.)

So, what were the results?

A 10-week sample taken from 2006-2007 yielded the following:

• Total number of outgoing links: 819.

• Average number of outgoing links/week: 82.

• Average number of outgoing links/day: 12.

• Total number of individual sites linked-to: 241.

• Site most often linked to: Thinkprogress.org. Linked 66 times.

• Relationship between Thinkprogress.org and Eschaton?
• As of mid-August 2007, “Atrios” has been cited, featured or linked-to by ThinkProgress 210 times (per site search engine)

• Site second most often linked to: Mediamatters.org. Linked 56 times.

• Relationship between Mediamatters.org and Eschaton?

• Eschaton proprietor Duncan Black is a Media Matters Staff/Advisor.

Fun with Percentages #1: These top two sites accounted for

• 0.83% of the overall universe of unique sites (2 out of 241)

• 15% of all outgoing links.

Fun with Percentages #2: The top six (6) sites –

Thinkprogress.org
Mediamatters.org
Prospect.org
Talkingpointsmemo (TPM)
Matthewyglesias
(The) Washingtonpost

accounted for --

• 2% of the overall universe of unique sites (6 out of 241)

• 30% of all outgoing links.

Fun with Percentages #3: The top ten (10) sites accounted for

• 4% of the overall universe of unique sites (10 out of 241)

• 39% of all outgoing links.

Fun with Percentages #4: The top 18 sites accounted for

• 7% of the overall universe of unique sites (18 out of 241)

• 50% of all outgoing links.

Fun with Percentages #5: In that Top 18, you will find six (6) traditional news organizations (NY Time, Washington Post, etc) or blogs owned-and-operated by traditional news organizations (Times Swampland) that are often merely being sourced.

So the number of what one might consider to be actual blog blogs represented in the top 50% of all outgoing links is 12, or 4% of the overall universe of unique sites.


Fun with Percentages #6: The bottom 121 sites accounted for

• 50% of the overall universe of unique sites (121 out of 241)

• 15% of all outgoing links.

So based on this sampling, how do those ingots of received wisdom from the Elders of the digital Left stack up.


#1: “A-listing is hard, hard work.”

No, its not.

Between the other dozen things I do every day, I read a lot of news…because I fell into the savage grip of reading at a young age and have never been able to pry that ink-stained monkey off my back. And based on tests conducted on my own sofa, tossing up a 15-10 word link to a story that interests me simply isn’t that hard. Be generous and call it 20 – 30 minutes per, and 12 links a day is, at most, 4-6 hours.

Granted that only puts you in a distant exurb of Xanadu, but it ain’t exactly chopping cotton either.

Also I have to believe that if I routinized the harvesting of half of my content so that I got it from the same handful of sites every day, it’d get even streamlined.

#2: Just Blog!Harder!/Write better.

No, sorry, not buying any.

Take a good look at the good Dirty Fucking Hippy writers. Other than Digby or Glenn Greenwald – who each can kick seven kinds of ass before their morning Ovaltine – the degree to which the massed might of the sparkling writers of the Left budge the link-needle certainly appears to be negligible.

#3: “The market is saturated.”

I suppose this could be the case; I don’t think in terms of markets, and have no data from which to draw definitive conclusions.

However, given the facts in evidence, isn’t this also an equally plausible explanation?

Monopsony/ monopsonist:

A market similar to a monopoly except that a large buyer not seller controls a large proportion of the market and drives the prices down. Sometimes referred to as the buyer's monopoly.

I will note without comment or judgment that the received wisdom of the Elders of the digital Left appear to be extraordinarily similar to the arguments offered by WalMart as to why it is simply value and the White Magic of the marketplace that drives customers to its doors, and not because it uses its sheer size to pick winners and losers based on its own, self-serving business model.

Sure Sam and Ella’s Farm Fresh Eggs are free to set up shop in the giant shadow cast by Sam Walton’s Mutant Child.

But to pretend that WalMart does not effectively control access to the market in that area, or that Sam and Ella’s success does not depend on how well their little dreams conform to WalMart’s Grand Strategy, is condescending and ridiculous.

So there you have it: just the facts as I found them, reported mostly without fear or favor, and overall quite an interesting little project and change of pace for me.

And now I’m going to unwind from a very long week and shoot a little pool: a game, which, assuming the table is true and the balls aren’t chiseled, you win or lose based on nothing but your prowess with the stick, and your ability to hold your liquor.

I'm sure there's a lesson for the kids in there somewhere.

And Ah Wuz Thereses!

Our Two-Fisted Dr Thinker-in-Chief

(From "Patton")

It was here.

The battlefield was here.

The Carthaginians defending the city were attacked by three
Roman legions.

They were brave, but they couldn't hold. They were massacred.

Arab women stripped them of their tunics and their swords and lances.

The soldiers lay naked in the sun, 2000 years ago.

I was here.

Because if you think you were there hard enough, you were.

And if you think the Dirty Hippies lost Vietnam hard enough, they did.

Which is why, in the end, a entire division of wingnut-wishful-thinking-powered unicorns, supported by one hundred fighter groups of Tinkerbells, will save Iraq after all.

File under: Everything old and sickening is new and sickening again.

I was cooking something else when the Inmate of the Oval Office scampered over the White House wall, skittered across Pennsylvania Avenue, hitched a ride to KC and started ranting about Vietnam at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention.

Off his leash and off his meds, this AWOL wastrel -- who apparently learned everything he ever knows about America's longest war, face down in a beer trough, listening to Nixon Regime dead-enders scheme about the Dirty Hippies, and the whelpings of the wealthy brag about beating the draft -- swaggered to the microphone to tell 'Murrica that we "Coulda Wun Tha War!"

This is a speech History will note.

Will record as one of those moments when the world saw Bush in a clear and unfiltered light as the incompetent ruin of a man he has always been. A slouching, mush-mouthed suit, propped up by nothing but real hubris and a Fake Jebus, for whom there is literally no depth to which he will not sink to slither away from his responsibility for the disasters he and his henchmen have wrought.

In its own grotesque way, the flogging of what's left of his Iraqi Debacle by inverting, distorting or simply lying outright about settled historical fact -- in front of veterans -- was genuinely breathtaking.

Because the substance of what he said was so completely, lavishly wrong -- as if he had gotten up in front of the Chicago City Council to assert that Venusians started the Chicago Fire, and that it could have been extinguished earlier with Dandelion-flavored Fizzy Lifting Drink if only Jane Addams hadn't bombed the Fizzy Lifting Drink factory -- that the content of comments themselves stop being the issue, and instead the Nation is faced with two, deeply-troubling questions:

1. Holy Mother of God, is this fucknozzle really that stupid? Or, Holy Mother of God, is he actually insane? And,

2. What humane method of electoral containment can be found that will be sturdy enough to insure that the people who voted for this catastrophe of an Administration – twice – and continue to Stand By Their Manque never get to say another fucking word about public policy in this country?

I realize I am a couple of notches short of being the guy to take a hot poker to some idiot who is trying to draw dishonest comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq.

Fortunately the Left had such a guy.

And his powerful words live on after him.

Steve Gilliard, from April 11, 2004 on the real parallels with Vietnam...

...

George Bush has spent 40 percent of his time as President on vacation. He wants to be considered a wartime president, yet has spent more time raising money and fishing than doing his job.

The Coalition forces in Iraq, by a series of miscalculations, has forced a crisis which will lead to the defeat of our military and the creation of a theocratic state. A complete and total reversal of our stated policy, yet possibly, the only outcome which could have happened after Saddam killed all his secular political opponents.

No one is saying this in the Beltway, and few even online, but the fact is that no Iraqi government could survive with US troops as even a security force and be considered independent. Any legitimate Iraqi government will be judged not on electricity or oil sales, but how many American soldiers are left. If the number is not zero, they will be deposed by force.

Does Bush adjust his strategy? Does he admit error? No. It's a zero defect government. No mistakes possible.

So instead of treating this crisis like a crisis, he's hiding in Texas, as disengaged as ever. The talk coming from the White House was so at varience with reality you could only scream at the TV screen. They have killed 58 Americans in 11 days. The Americans lost 82 in all of November. At this pace that's nearly 6 men a day. Multiply it out and that's 180 men killed at this rate. Saddam's army wasn't that effective.

Bush shouldn't have run back to DC, but video conferencing? Shouldn't he drag his secretaries down for a meeting? Why the managment by remote control when Iraq is dragging his presidency down the tubes? Does he live so isolated from reality that he thinks Iraq will get better?

LBJ was so misled by his intelligence, he missed what anyone watching TV could learn, which is that we were losing in Vietnam. By the time we hammered the NVA at Tet, public support was evaporating. Even our tactical victory looked messy and incomplete.

Bush has a NKVD HQ running Iraq, a rebellion which could turn from Sadr and the Sunnis to the Shias and the Sunnis at any minute and his response is to sit around Crawford and make phone calls.

Never has a president so misused the power of his office. Instead of dealing honestly with these issues, he repeats the same misguided mantra that the people fighting us in Iraq hate freedom. As if freedom can only be gained by servicing the US. What I mean is that a president has the power to go to the American people and level with them, tell them the truth. Not just patronizing slogans about the "war on terra".

If Bush had said he screwed up over 9/11, people would have forgiven him. Instead, he lies until he is exposed. He jokes about WMD. He shows neither sympathy for the dead nor recognition of their sacrifice. It is all rote statements, while his supporters contort themselves to deny the truth.

…

Iraq isn't going to get better. The Americans have worn out their welcome in the most nationalistic of Arab countries. Iraqis have a sense of self which sees occupation as an insult. No matter what we offer, and it hasn't been much, eventually, they would have tired of us. With anarchy, death and violence as our gifts to Iraq, they want us gone that much sooner.

And from Gilly from May 2006, blunt-force correcting someone else’s misreading of the lessons of Vietnam:

OK, in the long essay on Iraq, there are just some stunning historical whoppers here which need to be addressed

Moktada Sadr's troops and commanders were appallingly inept, and were crushed in their abortive uprising. While other, more sanguine commanders, such as the Badr Brigade and the rump Fedayeen Saddam maintained an effective Mao-type insurgency, Moktada Sadr and his soldiery duplicated the disastrous techniques of the Vietcong in the Tet Offensive, and Sadr's troops were crushed by the same Marines who beat them to a pulp at Hue and Khe Sanh.

Uh, no. The VC were well-organized , but largely faced the US Army and Australians during the Tet Offensive, while regular NVA troops fought the US and South Koreans in the Northern two Corps of Vietnam. The Marines didn't face the VC at Khe Sahn or Hue.

John Dos Prados. history of Khe Sahn is a good place to start because it explains how US air power, especially large bombers, kept the NVA in the Laotian mountainside. When there were battles for Hill881N and 881 S, all hell broke lose and the Marines were lucky to fend off the human wave attacks. Survive is a lot better word than crush. Because the 1stCav had to eventually relieve the Marines at Khe Sahn

Giap's stupid gamble at Tet, (for which Giap was relieved of command) is now well-understood. General Odom and Jack Murtha seem quite willing to repeat America's parallel idiocy of unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam in Iraq. Walter Cronkite stood atop the Caravelle Hotel, with the smoke of Cho Lon rising over his shoulder, and told America the war was not winnable, leading LBJ to say, "If we've lost Cronkite, we've lost America".

Wrong again. Giap did not lose his job. And Cronkite said that after the VC sapper teams charged the US Embassy and were fended off only after hours of fighting. But the fact was that Westmoreland had been saying for two years that the VC were on the run, citing the hill fights, DakTo and Junction City, while the NVA was hiding in Laos and Cambodia waiting

So when Tet happened, people were astonished, no stunned, to see that after all of Westy's charts and numbers, the NVA and VC was alive and kicking ass. Giap and Ho expected a nationwide uprising, but the US had enough firepower to force most of the attackers back from places like Tan Son Nhut and Chi Lai. But fighting in Pleiku and other areas didn't end quickly

We left Vietnam because the army was pushing towards open revolt and the middle class no longer supported the war. There were fraggings and combat refusals and drug use. It was either leave Vietnam or destroy the Army

Reality Check: the smoke rising from Cho Lon was a city block on fire, set by the ethnic Chinese, burning out the Vietcong who had murdered hundreds of Chinese during the Tet Offensive. The Vietcong at Tet learned the ordinary Vietnamese had no interest in supporting the cause of Communism.

Please. The NVA had fully penetrated the ARVN. What Tet proved was that lightly armed guerrillas and light Infantry die when running into Arc Light, Armor and artillery, When the NVA came back in 1972, they did so with Armor , and took much of I Corps in the process and nearly took An Loc

The Tet Offensive, we now know from the historical record, nearly drove the North Vietnamese to surrender.

No we don't. They kept fighting into May, 1968. In fact, the pace of combat increased after Tet, the US reached peak combat strength in May,1969, at 543,000. The NVA was fighting a defensive war, but in a series of battles, like Hamburger Hill and battles in the Arizona Country, they were heavily engaged with US troops.

Ronald Spector's history After Tet, explains this clearly. To say this is to misread history.

Only the antiwar movement in the USA saved them from defeat.

In what fantasy world? The peak of the antwar movement came in 1971-72 as US troops were being withdrawn. The fact was that the US Army was collapsing in the field. After Hamburger Hill, the lead battalion commander had a $10,000 bounty placed on his head and was nearly assassinated seven times. Racial strife led to riots, smuggling and corruption exploded, drug use was endemic. Then you had the GI resistance to the war at home and in Vietnam. The antiwar movement didn't save the NVA. Armor did. By 1971, the NVA was better equipped, better led and far more professional, as was demonstrated in Lam Son 719, when they blew helicopters out of the sky and the ARVN panicked.

Nixon went to the Communists, and cynically sold the Vietnamese and Lao people into abjectest slavery. How could this be? We had achieved a stunning victory over an entrenched guerilla movement, heroic victories at Hue and Khe Sanh, the obliteration of the Vietcong. But by then, so many Bright Shining Lies had been told, the truth was not believed.

Because the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and lacked the support of the people. Officers were appointed because of favoritism, troops cheated out of pay, people refused to rally around the ARVN, while some bravery was seen.most of it was inept and poorly led.

Fantasy revisions of the Vietnam War doesn't explain Iraq.

But fantasy revisions of the Vietnam War sure as shit explains the Right.

Rest easy, Steve.

The World

as it should have been.

Go over to "Sadly, No!" and say thanks for the Shouldabeens (and h/t to the irrepressible res ipsa loquitur for the alert.)

"Sadly, No!": Creating alternate history a million times better than Newt Gingrich since 1308.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down -- Part 1

Rove.

Other than The Debate, Sunday was an All Karl Rove Kick-line.

Just imagine an ugly dog’s shaved ass swaggering from station to station, flipping off the world, shitting on the Constitution, and laughing all the way to the bank.

That was Sunday, and I’ll not dwell on it other than to say this.

Rove is not a genius; he is a sociopath.

Karl Rove is good with teh maths, and has a good eye for weaknesses, but where he excels is in understanding The Base right down to their bituminous hearts.

Weak, myopic, doughy, privileged, hateful.

A liar by nature and a sleaze-merchant by trade.

Self-righteous invoker of a deity whose teachings his every action insults and defiles.

Emotionally malformed, button-busting proud of his bigotries and wattle-quiveringly indignant about every imaginary slight against the Dear Leader.

Hell, Rove is the Base with a better vocabulary and suit of clothes.

It has been said by the Right that Karl Rove did not create a Divided America, but inherited one. That assertion, as with most assertions from the Right, is a thin patina of fact camouflaging a deep and cancerous lie.

This country, like the Fisher King, has always been afflicted with a marrow-deep wound; in our case it was self-inflicted, arising from our Original Sin of trying to build a temple of Democracy on a foundation of Slavery.

The need to justify why it was OK to maintain proto-fascist Slave States in the heart of our Republic led us to waterboard our Bible and our Lord until we tortured out of them a scriptural rationale for our murderous bigotry. And its many guises (God, Ropes and Negroes) and mutations (God, Guns and Gays), that Southern White Male Conservative Dominionist disease has hag-ridden our beloved country ever since.

We have, almost since our nation’s inception, fought wars – cold and hot – with and among ourselves because of that evil legacy.

From time to time there arise leaders who use every means at their disposal – religious, political, economic, rhetorical -- to try and close and cleanse the wound. To drag what is dark about America into the light by demanding that we do no more or less than live up to our own pretty words.

And then, more often, there arise other leaders. Ones who picnic on this wound like a staph infection. Who, for partisan gain, use every means at their disposal – religious, political, economic, rhetorical -- to try and widen and deepen the wound. To spike the fever. To rip new holes in the body politic and swab the lesions with shit and hate.

Rove proudly serves the latter group, and here, from across the dial, are a few of the little, hardened owl pellets he horked up on his way out of town:

Q; Why are you doing this “farewell tour”?

Rove: I vas ordered to.

Rove: I don’t accept the idea that I “play to the Base”.

Rove: You cannot win an election like we won on 2000 or 2004 by “playing to the Base”.

Rove: The Leader of the Senate stands up and calls the Preznit a liar and then wonders why we can’t work together.

driftglass: Uh, because the President is a liar?

Rove: This Preznit wants to be a Unifier. But some Evil Democrats never accepted his legitimacy. Some Evil Democrats saw their political fortunes in obstructing him no matter what.

Rove: Max Cleland was blocking the whims of my Lord and Master. Therefore, by the transitive properties of Republicanism, he was a Bad American who deserved to be destroyed my any means necessary.

Q: Now Democrats are far from blameless…but haven’t you gone too far.

Rove: Democrats routinely call the Preznit a liar, but whether its Dick Durbin calling soldiers Nazis (which he never did) or conflating one ad by MoveOn.org into representing every Democrat everywhere, we Tell The Truth about the Evil Liberals who want to Kill Your Children.

Q: What about your polarizing politics?

Rove: I don’t accept that we didn’t build coalitions.

Q: But…but…there was a shitload of opposition from inside your own Party?

Rove: It was “inexplicable opposition” on the part of Democrats that was responsible for every problem. “Democrat” leaders have told me, face-to-face that they love me and wanted to work with me, but Michael Moore and George Soros refused to let them be good Americans and get down on their knees and fellate me.


Rove: I refuse to testify under oath and with a transcript because of my gweat, gweat love of the Constitution of the United States. Imagine if we could drag Supreme Court clerks and force them to testify about court decisions!

driftglass: Yes. Just imagine what an awful, awful world it would be if a Supreme Court clerk were using his office to, say, deal heroin. Or fence stolen rims. Or rig elections. And some despicable soul exercised his or her Constitutional authority in to make this criminal betrayer of the public trust A) stop eviscerating the very laws they swore to uphold and, B) pay for their crimes.

Yes, truly that would be a Hell on Earth.

Q: But this isn’t a court or Congress. It’s bad teevee, and we wuuuuvs you Karl. So howzabout telling us why you had those US Attorneys fired?

Rove: Fuck you; my every boil and bowel movement is protected from on high by the Prince of Drunkness by Executive Privilege.

Rove: I am the Constitution’s Greatest Luvah!

Q: You’re famous for turning people’s strengths into weaknesses. How do you do that?

driftglass: By lying. Repeatedly. Also having a Base with a median IQ of 43 is incredibly helpful.


Rove is not a genius; he is a sociopath with a good head for figures.

He is what you get when you surgically remove a CPA’s conscience, cross-pollinate him with back alley dogfight breeder, and tell the resulting mound of giggly meat to go forth and win elections at any cost.

In any normal community he’d be on every watch list; parents would warn their children to blow their Rove Whistle with all their might and run like hell whenever they caught sight of him.

But in Punditland he is an admired village elder, and if his reek of sulfur, rotting flesh and old blood is whiffable a full five minutes before he enters a room, a quick swab of the nostrils with triply-rectified Aqua Velva is enough to keep the press corps from vomiting.

However I (mercifully) do not live in Punditland, and unless he was going on the air to announce his intention to commit honorable .38 caliber seppuku to atone for the firestorm of lies and slander and fraud he rained on America for the last seven years for the sole purpose of getting the Worst President in History “elected” and then “re-elected”, what Fat Karl has to say about anything is of zero interest to me.


End Part 1 of 2.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down -- Part 2

Friedman.


The ‘Stache Sez:

“Doan Truss Smart Peopleses!”


Instead of picking through the Mouse Circus dumpster in greater detail I chose to expend some time on one, specific column by Thomas L. Friedman entitled “Seeing Is Believing”, also from Sunday.

Sure it was partly as an excuse to recycle my spiffy artwork, and partly because the Fat Karl Show was such an entirely predictable trainwreck of Jello-pundit wankery and political snuff-porn that it was virtually unwatchable.

But mostly it is because this latest bucket of tepid eyewash from The Moustache of Understanding is, arguably, the purest distillation of his bankrupt ideology I have seen in a very, very long time.

Read these snips and see if you can spot the atrocities. (Only a little sip: more would make your tummy hurt.)

From the NYT, smuggled by friendlies though a hole in their rabbit-proof fence….

“Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions.

It is not because I don’t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I’m still not interested in their opinions. I’m only interested in yours. Yes, you — the person reading this column. You know more than you think.

You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.

Either a peace overture is so obvious and grabs you in the gut — Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel — or it’s going nowhere. That is why the Saudi-Arab League peace overture is going nowhere. No emotional content. It was basically faxed to the Israeli people, and people don’t give up land for peace in a deal that comes over the fax.

Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working.

…

Because many Americans no longer believe anything President Bush says about Iraq, he has outsourced the assessment of the surge to the firm of Petraeus & Crocker. But this puts them in an impossible position. I admire their efforts, and those of their soldiers, to try to salvage something decent in Iraq, especially when you see who we are losing to …

Most likely the Bush team will say the surge is a “partial” success and needs more time. But that is like your contractor telling you that your home is almost finished — the bricks are up, but there’s no cement. Thanks a lot.

The Democrats should not fight Petraeus & Crocker over their answer. They should redefine the question. They should say: “My fellow Americans, ask yourselves this: What will convey to you, in your gut — without anyone interpreting it — that the surge is working and worth sustaining?”

…”

Truly “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters”, because in this last-ditch defense of his failed dogma, what Friedman has finally resorted to is nothing less than explicitly arguing for jettisoning the first and most important role of the journalist: explaining the complexities of an area of expertise to people untutored in the nuances of that field. And doing it in a way that is engaging, thoughtful, non-condescending and increases your audience’s understanding of the issue under discussion.

And in this absolutely textbook example of exactly how debased and dishonest the Centrist/Neocon mind becomes when confronted with facts its Prime Directives refuses to process, the New York Times’ Three-Time Pulitzer Prize Winning Foreign Affairs correspondent tosses that sacred obligation under the bus without a backwards glance.

So, what are the Pundit’s Prime Directives?

What are their “Three Laws of Verminotics”?

Law #1: The Center – as redrawn daily on the Holy Etch-A-Sketch by the Priests of High Broderism -- is Always Correct.

Law #2: Except where specific events which conflict with Law #1 are too overwhelming to be ignored any longer, the Iraqi War was generally a Good Idea promulgated by Honorable Men.

Law #3: The Pundit must always act to preserve his prerogatives and aura of inerrancy, and will therefore always find the shallowest, most narcissistic and self-deceptive means available to fulfill the requirements of the first two Laws.

Scan Friedman’s firmware and I guarantee you this is all you will find in there, running around and around in panicky, ever-diminishing circles.

And in the context of these three behavioral axioms, what Friedman is attempting here is at once despicable and predictable.

It is now incontestably true that, as Friedman points out, “many Americans no longer believe anything President Bush says about Iraq”.

And yet it is equally, incontestably true that Tom Friedman is congenitally unable to force his mouth the form the words “The Bushies were wrong, I was wrong…and the Dirty Fucking Hippies were Right.”

Because for Friedman, like so many of his overpaid, underclocked journalistic species, adherence to the Laws of Verminotics has actually mutated from mere programming into a ferocious strain of Idolatry. A Shiny God which demands daily sacrifices and away from which they dare not look for fear of seeing the Hell into which their own monstrous egos have led them.

And therefore to appease his God and obey his Law, Friedman must continually conjure out of thin air rhetorical formulations in which both sides are equally at fault for everything.

The Friedmaniverse simply has no place for those legions of people -- from Scott Ritter to Jay Garner to Al Gore to Howard Dean to General Eric Shinseki to Steve Gilliard – who got Iraq mostly right all along. And so, by the magic deliberate and glaring omission, Capt’n Obvious simply wishes those people all away into the Centrist cornfield and pretends they did not and do not exist.

And of course once the war’s original critics have been safely proclaimed non-persons in the eyes of the MSM, the terrifying concept that One Side was largely right, and the Other Side – Friedman’s side -- was simply lying-slandering-dead-fucking wrong, vanishes too.

Which frees the Moustache of Understanding to commit his second great atrocity: declaring Truthiness Triumphant…because there is no one left who can be trusted to tell you the Real Truth about Iraq.

The Middle East in a genuinely complex place, and the issues are difficult and nuanced. And, yes, there is much that is inherently unknowable and unpredictable about the exact trajectory of the van that the Bush Administration – ably assisted by people like Friedman – has driven off of the cliff.

But instead of a little humility and grace, he simply doubles down on the narcissism.

Shorter Friedman: Because I got Iraq wrong, everybody must have gotten Iraq wrong. And because everybody got Iraq wrong, it must therefore be fucking incomprehensible. And since I have declared it fucking incomprehensible, your only hope is to leap completely into the abyss and embrace irrationality. Drink aaaaall the Koolaid and do whatever the fuck your “gut” tells you to do, because ain’t nobody knows nuffin,

And so as Friedman hits bottom with this breathtakingly dishonest and almost cartoonishly anti-intellectual/elite-hating thesis statement – “Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering.” – consider how it would have played if, instead, he had dared to pen any of the following:

“Any ‘quantum mechanical’ thingie that requires a physics expert to explain to you is not worth considering.”

“Any ‘packet-switching’ thingie that requires a technology expert to explain to you is not worth considering.”

“Any kind of space exploration that requires a rocket scientist to explain to you is not worth considering.”

“Any brain surgery that requires a neurologist to explain it to you is not worth having.”

“Any old timey stuff that requires a historian to explain it to you is not worth considering.”

“Any discussion of flight that requires a pilot to explain it to you is not worth considering.”

“Any math that requires a mathematician to explain it to you is not worth considering.”

Had he dared assert this kind of “If it don’t fit on a bumper sticker it ain’t true” bullshit about any other field of complex endeavor, Friedman would have been laughed out of his job. But on this issue far too many of his fellow Big Media Pharisees also depend on the Great Lie of Centrism for their daily bread for any of them to dare to call him to account for this final, terrible betrayal.

And so, to protect his Shiny Centrist God, Friedman has at last stooped to pilfering Steven Colbert’s hysterically funny “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.” schtick, chapter and verse.

Difference is, Capt’n Obvious is dead serious

End Part 2 or 2.

Superfuckingpatrioticexpialidocious

(Original dress pic before I abused it from this terrific site.)


It's a little out of my line of country, but in honor of the esteemed Watertiger’s “What Would Jenna Wear?” series, a little something for the mother of the bride.



Because...

Even though the look of it is something quite atrocious

If you wear it loud enough you'll always sound bellicocious

Superfuckingpatrioticexpialidocious.

The ‘Stache that Wouldn’t Die.

Captain Obvious to World: I apologize…for loving too much!

(All quotes and citations either approximate or given a shamefully mocking verisimilitude by me.)

I saw “No End in Sight” (NOW segment, review and video clips here) last evening after marking up what I was going to write about Captain Obvious’ appearance on the Cholly Rose Show (What with the war in Iraq reaching it’s eleven-hundredth “decisive stage”, hey, why not have the Moustache of Understanding back on? For an entire hour. To emote badly all over our shoes.)

And now I find that it is harder than I thought to finish this post off without letting the awful, grieving “Why in the name of God was this allowed to happen?” sensation that I took away from the theater inflect every inch of it.

“No End in Sight” is not the saddest movie I’ve ever seen, but it is possibly the most tragic. Precisely because it is a story told without frills or hyperbole, by level-headed pros and insiders, the sheer weight and magnitude of the Hell on Earth that the Bush Administration has unleashed on the world leaps immediately into awful focus and stays center-stage for the entire 1:42 run time.

And against that backdrop, the pompous, precious, clatter of Tom Friedman’s self-rationalizing fart-sniffery stands out like a yipping, attention-starved, diuretic teacup poodle running wild at a state funeral.

At some point you realize don’t just want to drop-kick the dog into a blast furnace, but you also want to track its trail of drool and poop back to its owner and ask: “What in the fuck were you thinking turning that mangy, howling, turd loose at these solemn proceedings in the first place?”

There was, of course, the obligatory commercial for The Book, featuring painfully unfunny Flatworld badinage about what Grandma Friedman told him as a mere barefoot hack with cheek of tan back in Minner-sowder.

What is Captain Obvious most afraid of trade-wise? Why, when he hears “some Democratic candidates who say ‘Woe is me!’ and want to build walls”, of course.

Problem is, I have not heard a single fucking Democrat moaning ‘Woe is me!’ and not a one of them wants to build walls.

Friedman notes that the downside of the blogosphere is that the norms of good journalisming aren't followed.

When I stopped laughing at this Emperor of Shallow -- this poster-child for Big Media intellectual dishonesty, who somehow never lacks for just the right jaunty, colorful, local cab driver in Bangalore or Qatar...to be on hand at exactly the right moment...to magically declaim the prefect quote...that just happens to slot exactly into the two, remaining empty column-inches of the twaddle Friedman just happened to be writing right then -- complaining that the Little People were not jounalisming right, I also noted that he dinged the blogosphere for “bad sourcing” and for the fact that the “dishonorable user” has lots of power.

So I promptly filed that under “Judith Miller”, cross-referenced it with “Fox News”, “Matt Drudge” and “Twenty Unrebutted Years of Hate Radio” and then immediately convened a Blogger Ethics Panel.

Captain Obvious continued…doggedly excreting little, empty, eyebrow-arched epigrams of Moustachy Enlightenment in exactly the same manner as a rabbit producing pellets.

Friedman: The things that are connecting us…(Lavish Shatner pause) are also dividing us.

Friedman: We were in touch with the Web, but Humberto (his humble native guide through the rain forest) was in touch with…(Lavish Shatner pause) the web of life.

Friedman: What can be done in business…(Lavish Shatner pause) will be done.

This last is, in fact, his Big Flat Rule of Business; the one he insists we all need to get used to.

Well, slavery “can be done”, right? And lucratively, too.

Child sexual exploitation for profit “can be done”.

Murder, blackmail and extortion “can be done”.

The wholesale looting of a country’s natural resources and intellectual properties “can be done”.

And have been done. And are being done.

Philosophically, gangsterism and robber-baron capitalism run along side-by-side: twin rails carrying nations and people packed into a “What Can Be Done” cattle-car into a Hobbsean abattoir where morality has been aggressively excised from the marketplace.

Yes, some jobs will always fly, fly away. Some parts of some industries will die or disappear over the horizon. But Friedman is simply, flatly wrong to conflate these thing into some Larger Morality and suggest that greasing the skids for a universal race to the bottom is a Good Thing.

That the proper reaction to the ugliness of unfettered globalization is, apparently, to relax, get some more C++ training, and be quick like a bunny to keep your family and your 401K out of the path of the avalanche.

He simply ignores the fact that these are human institutions, and can be moved by values as well as valuta. Dismisses the fact that principled men and women who believe in and work for environmentalism, worker’s rights, human rights and Fair Trade are not Evil Liberal Fortress America panic-peddlers who “want to put up walls”.

On Iraq...

Friedman: The only measure of the success of the surge…(Lavish Shatner pause) is if there is an Iraq.

Friedman: We have the military surge, but where…(Lavish Shatner pause) is the diplomatic surge?

Friedman: I’d send Big Time Serious Diplomats over and have them come back and tell me one of three things:

1. We can win.
2. We can partition.
3. We cannot win.

So Captain Obvious has boldly taken the whole “We will wait until Iraq sprouts wings and flies to the Arctic circle where we’ll call it Nour’Way” option.

Merciful Zule, what an ass. What an embarrassment, and yet there he and Cholly Rose sat, rubbing their tiny paws together, smirking, lobbing around meaningless platitudes and excitedly interrupting each other as if they were on the verge of personally developing -- then and there -- a working cold fusion reactor.

Or like two, basement-dwelling 40-year-old virgins breathlessly sharing ancient, yellowed smut mined from the neighbor’s dumpster.

Friedman: One good example is worth …(Lavish Shatner pause) a thousand theories.

Friedman: I do (believe we need a deadline). I’ve believed that now for a year and a half.

OK, doing the maths…year and a half…today’s the 8/18…carry the friedman unit…OK, that’d be on or about February, 2006.

So let us go a wassailing back to the wintry days when 2006 was only one month old:

First citation cluster via this invaluable timeline.

January 2006: "I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding..." --Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show"

March 2, 2006: "I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq." --Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on NBC's "Today" show

April 23, 2006: "So one way or another, I think we're in the end game in the sense it's going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us." --Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on CNN

May 11, 2006: ""We're going to find out... in the next year to six months -- probably sooner - whether a decent outcome is possible..." -- Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball"

Less than a year ago, on November, 29, 2006, (from the NYT via this site): "Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years.

Now lately Friedman had sidled quietly over in the general direction of the "deadline" side of the bunkhouse, but his is still a deadline-of-the-mind.

Instead of "Get the fuck out by ??/??/??" -- which is what an actual deadline would look like -- Friedman prefers the idea of a deadline.

A conditional, theoretical, “either we leave soon or, hey, just maybe…” deadline.

The threat of a deadline.

The notion of a deadline.

And even, festooned with “yeah, buts”, the lazy, Mindless-Reflex-Centrism, declarative-sentence-phobic Friedman always leaves himself a back door.

As in this NYT column from March of this year, which, near the top, offers this hopeful sentence:

"I hope the Democrats, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, keep pushing to set a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq..."

And then his sentiment collapses like public infrastructure under Republican rule when it comes to the details. (emphasis and “Lavish Shatner pause” added for entertainment purposes)

"The other useful function Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are performing is to give the president and Gen. David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, the leverage of a deadline without a formal deadline. How so?

The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, which means Sunni-Shiite negotiations — and such negotiations are unlikely to work without America having the “leverage” of telling the parties that if they don’t compromise, we will leave. (Deadlines matter. At some point, Iraqis have to figure this out themselves.)
...

As for General Petraeus, I have no idea whether his military strategy is right, but at least he has one — and he has stated that by “late summer” we should know if it’s working. As General Petraeus told the BBC last week, “I have an obligation to the young men and women in uniform out here, that if I think it’s not going to happen, to tell them that it’s not going to happen, and there needs to be a change.”

We need to root for General Petraeus to succeed, and hold him to those words if he doesn’t — not only for the sake of the soldiers on the ground, but also so that Mr. Bush is not allowed to drag the war out until the end of his term, and then leave it for his successor to unwind.

“But how will General Petraeus or Congress judge if the surge is working?

“It may be obvious, …(Lavish Shatner pause) but it may not be.
...

To his credit, Rose did ask something like the following: People want you to write a column apologizing for being such a relentlessly asshatted moron. What say you?

Which – although it had the sharp stink of a well-rehearsed puppet show -- I do believe is the very first time anyone has dared to ask Captain Obvious that question.


Friedman: If you look at what I wrote before the war…that this was really important, and I won’t apologize for that. I won’t apologize for believing that unicorns are wonderful.

Friedman: It was hope over experience…

Friedman: After 9/11…

Friedman: Very much affected by my travels in the region (so many cab drivers told me of their great love of my American dollars.)

Friedman: The pathologies of the region are so deep…

Friedman: If I’m guilty, it’s of three things.

Notice how creepily Friedman deploys the First Person Pronoun: as if he and Iraq were personally in divorce court together, and he’s on the stand, fetal-ed up in an angry ball, moaning how he did everything he could, and how it was all her fault.

Friedman: To just go on like this. The chase some rainbow…

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) wanting it more than they did. So many people wanted this to work. (I was too good a husband.)

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) misunderestimated how broke(n) Iraq was. It was even more broken than I thought. (She was more fucked up than even I, The Noble Moustache of Understanding, could redeem.)

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) misunderestimating the depths of depravity of our opponents. (I was just trying to do what was best for this poor, ignorant, emotionally unstable woman, and she cut my balls off. It’s almost as if she didn’t want me there anymore?)

What doesn’t he mention as one of the The Three Things he feels he just fucking blew is Rumsfeld

Or Bush.

Or Cheney.

Or Powell.

Or Rice.

Or Kristol.

Or Wolfowitz.

Or Feith.

Or Perle.

Yes, he does get cranky at the Administration for believing the decapitation and reformatting of Iraq would be easy. Yes he does “damn them” for putting in “just enough troops to lose”. But he stands strongly by his “tilt theory”...

Friedman: Like with the former Soviet Union, which world leaders combined to give a positive slope that may manifest itself into a really new Russia in a generation, I thought is we could just take a country in the heart of the middle east and “tip is upwards” then…

Really? And when exactly was it, Tom, that be bombed the guts out of Russia, invaded, disbanded the Soviet Army, and set up a pasha palace in Moscow?

Friedman: I wanted to find a way to collaborate with people there to build a different future. Not “war” necessarily…

Ah, and there it is; the Big Lie at the heart of Friedman’s timorous, NeoCon soul. He sets up a theoretical problem that can only be “solved” on his timetable militarily, and then flees in horror when the consequence of that militarism become apparent.

Sorry, Tom, but under the simple doctrine of “when you will the ends, you will the means” there is no escaping your complicity.

Oh and in case you’re wondering, “they” are angry at our conquest and illegitimate occupation “because of the pathologies in the region”.

Friedman: If I am guilty of anything, it is…(Lavish Shatner pause) being too hopeful.

Shorter Captain Obvious: I loveses too much! I careses too deeply. Look! Look how I bleed!

Friedman: Color me foolish, but when it came to this issue I kept my politics at the door. I will think about things irrespective of whether or not I like or agree with this Administration.

Friedman: We didn’t to the basics.

Other, shorter Friedman: Fuck you. I’m not taking back anything. I’m not apologizing for anything.

Friedman thought we could march in and democratize a foreign land at the point of a bayonet. He still believes it.

And of course, ever the Neocon, Flathead Tom leaves the door open for making the same blind-drunk imperial mistakes over and over again.

Friedman: (In Iraq) “we didn’t have a proper lab test” for my Genius Neocon theories. I still think using Western Christian Occupiers with Swords to humiliate the Brown Hordes into beat their swords into plowshares is a fucking brilliant idea.

Over in the Better Universe, Charlie Rose would’ve slung an M16A4 M4* and an Army contract across the table and said: “OK, dickhead…(Lavish Shatner pause) suit up or shut up.”

But this is not that Universe.

*(Thanks, Robert)