Category: Politics

There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past few weeks as the Obama administration has started to propose Cabinet secretaries and various “left-of-center” groups have expressed dismay over:

• Iraq war supporter Hillary Clinton as proposed Secretary of State;
• Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates continuing for an indefinite period;
• Deregulation proponent Larry Summers advising Obama as the Director of the National Economic Council;
• Dissent-intolerant Eric Holder for Attorney General;
• And whatever else…

Over and over progressives are told that it doesn’t really matter who gets nominated and to just shup and stop whining. Obama will give his Cabinet their marching orders and they will follow them to the letter. Presumably, the concept of “plausible denaiability” is out with this administration, and if anyone did something wacky like, say, selling arms to a country considered an enemy to fund “freedom fighters” in another country, there isn’t going to be the hemming and hawing about how Obama was “out of the loop” or that the whole thing was “compartmentalized” for his safety. Nobody’s going to do anything he doesn’t approve of and the only things they do are going to be things he approves of.

I was thinking of this while reading a section of Hooman Majd’s book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran. Majd, the Iranian-born and Western-educated son of a Shah-era diplomat writes of a visit to the Iranian Foreign Ministry shortly after the 2006 conference on the Holocaust. The conference invited former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana politician David Duke to speak, along with a crew of Holocaust deniers.

Majd met with Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi, the actual organizer of the conference (on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s order), and discusses with him the fact that Duke wasn’t simply anti-Semitic but promotes the concept of the inferiority of people like Iranians and Africans. The conversation wanders away from the subject then is brought back up by Mohammadi himself as Majd is about to leave.

“On the Holocaust, by the way, you should know that I conducted my own very extensive research into it. You know I’m a scholar, of course.”

“Really,” I said, a little surprised that he’d want to revisit the topic.

And I discovered the truth.” he continued proudly. “There was no Holocaust.” He gave me a knowing smile. “Sure some people died,” he carried on, perhaps because of my hanging lower jaw and dead stare, “but you see, there was an outbreak of typhus in the prison camps, and in order to stop its spread, the Germans burned the corpses. All told, something like three hundred thousand people died from typhus.” Mohammadi smiled again, a little triumphant smirk.

I stood still in disbelief, not knowing what to say. In the space of minutes he had gone from being Holocaust agnostic, like his president, to a full-fledged denier, like Duke.

Majd mentions in the text that if Mohammadi had simply gone back in records of the ministry he belonged to he could have found the stories of Iranian diplomats in Paris issuing passports to Jews escaping “the very Holocaust they were aware of, but that he now denied.”

I felt relieved to be out of his presence, and as I walked across the perfectly manicured lawns outside, I wondered just how much influence men like him could have on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thinking. Ahmadinejad may be open to questioning the Holocaust, I thought, but he was a far smarter man than the deputy foreign minister. A few days later, when I was relating my meeting with Mohammadi to President Khatami, he screwed up his face in disgust at the first mention of his name. Mohammadi has held senior positions at the Foreign Ministry even under the reformists, just as other hard-liners have, and their apparently untouchable status only serves to illustrate that the “Ahmadinejad element,” always a factor, will remain a constant in Iranian politics long after he’s gone.

The point isn’t that any one of Obama’s picks is going to influence him to deny the Holocaust or undertake any other major abrogation of perceived reality. It’s far, far easier to sway people to your position when the distance between two points is shorter, when you’re talking about two potential outcomes of different policies instead of historical evidence.

And whether it’s expressed in those terms or not, I think that’s what makes people unhappy (those who are) about some of Obama’s choices. A president doesn’t have endless time to fact-check the recommendations his Cabinet places in front of him. If you pick Joe the Hammerer — someone with a propensity for treating everything like it’s a nail — as your advisor, don’t be surprised if your advice involves a lot of hammering.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, the Democratic Whip from South Carolina said the other day that one of the conditions for a bailout of the US auto industry ought to be that the people who guided it into a wall ought to be held responsible for doing so, and lose their jobs not just cut their salaries.

“We need to have new leadership. That’s what we would do if we had this kind of failure on a football field. We would be getting a new coach [and] sometimes a new athletic director,” he said. “We need to clean house with these guys and bring in new people.”

I can’t say that I disagree with that. Why would you want to leave the same miserable failures in place to continue screwing up? I suspect that any number of Clyburn’s colleagues in the House and Senate might share his views, although I don’t remember hearing much about the need to oust the CEOs of financial institutions when they came looking for government money.

I wonder why hardly anyone ever took to that idea when someone incompetent was running the country, though?

[If someone from South Carolina happens to read this, they should drop Clyburn’s office a note to let him know that the link to the Congressional Black Caucus on his Memberships page is bad. I can’t use his web form because I’m not from SC, and I’m not going to lie about my ZIP on a government web site.]

Me, I just think it’s bad juju to appoint a guy named Jim Jones as National Security Advisor just a couple of weeks after all the thirtieth-anniversary remembrances of the Jonestown massacre.

With another year or so on my Sprint contract tying me to my trusty old Treo, I missed out on the Obama iPhone application frenzy during the last month of the election.

Politico has a story out this weekend about a panel on campaign technology in which the McCain participants spin the story that it was simply impossible for them to put together something similar because all the tech people supported Obama:

“Memo to self: next time get the co-founder of Facebook on your team,” said McCain-Palin veteran Becki Donatelli. “The CEO of Google was in the Obama commercial. I mean, you don’t get more out front than that.”

Speaking on a panel about the role of technology in the 2008 campaign, Donatelli said the McCain team had plans for using the Internet to reach voters, but ultimately lacked the resources and the personnel to put them into action.

“We’re very jealous. We loved your iPhone application,” she told her co-panelists from the Obama campaign, Joe Rospars and Sam Graham-Felsen, explaining that the McCain campaign had wanted to harness the iPhone for their effort as well. “We had it sketched out. We had it planned and no way to get it done.”

A couple of things ought to be mentioned here, however. John McCain’s national campaign co-chair for most of the year was Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay. McCain mentioned her as a potential choice for Secretary of Treasury in one of the presidential debates. The idea that McCain’s campaign was shut out of the world of high-tech should end right there.

But what should really put a nail in the touchscreen of this conceit is that Republican Congressman Ron Paul was on the iPhone with a Web 2.0 application months before the iPhone Software Development Kit was publicly released and the App Store was up and running, with a number of the same features as the Obama application.

Bad enough for McCain’s people to lie about how they couldn’t keep up with Obama because all the competent programmers were on the other side, but they couldn’t even bring themselves to take notice of what Ron Paul had done a year earlier. Surely that would have given them some time to build something.

A post from kos (based on an AP story) praised newly-minted Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley for siding with members of the Democratic caucus who called for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman to be removed from the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Problem is, AP changed their mind half an hour later.

(This version CORRECTS by DELETING Merkley from lawmakers who opposed Lieberman; Merkley did NOT oppose Lieberman.)

But I enjoyed one of the comments from poster Churchill (who did correct himself in a subsequent comment):

Meatley should replace Reid (2+ / 0-)

[UPDATE] The story never ends. Politico reported via “Democratic sources” that Merkley spoke out in favor of Lieberman. Jeff Mapes at the Oregonian says he expressed “disappointment bordering on anger” although he doesn’t attribute that to anyone (he does have direct comment from Merkley in the same piece, saying he “stopped just short of saying Lieberman should be stripped of his committee chairmanship.”)

Hard to pin down and he’s not even in office yet.

C’mon. Nobody really thought the Democrats were going to make Al Gore’s 2000 running mate and the long-time former chair of the Democratic Leadership Council give up his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just because he thought it was more important to try to elect John McCain instead of doing his job, did they?

There have been seventeen Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. The first of them to be appointed in the era of the “modern” Democratic/Republican two-party system was the sixth Chief Justice, Salmon Portland Chase, who was brought to the Court by President Abraham Lincoln shortly after his re-election in 1864.

Of the eleven other Chief Justices who’ve served in the 144 years since that appointment, only three were selected by Democratic presidents, and those three served a total of about 24 years (Democratic presidents were in the White House for 60 years of that span). The last Chief Justice selected under a Democratic administration was Fred Moore Vinson (appointed by Harry Truman), who died in office more than 55 years ago.

In August of 2007 at his Town Hall on Iraq, one of the bones of contention between members of the audience and Sen. Ron Wyden was his repeated statements about the implication of Iran in providing weapons to people making attacks in Iraq. Each time he brought it up a hubbub would rise from the crowd — many of whom were uneasy about Bush administration intentions to attack Iran — and Wyden would assert that it was all real.

A number of reports since then have cast doubt on the scale and scope of Iran’s activities within Iraq (you’d have to be an idiot to think that there was no Iranian influence in Iraq given that many of the Shi’ite leaders in the government spent time in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign). but the US military has repeatedly made claims about large weapons caces of supposed Iranian origin, only to have those stories disproved or walked back by the military themselves. By May of this year, even TIME magazine reported on the Iraqi pushback of the view promulgated by Wyden and others.

Indeed, the U.S. allegations appear to be based on speculation, spurred by the appearance about a year ago of a new breed of roadside bomb in Iraq. Explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, proved effective at piercing American armor by firing a concave copper disc from a makeshift cannon, which transformed the slug midair into a molten jet of super-heated metal. Accusations that Iran was shipping the things into Iraq grew louder as U.S. casualties from the weapon rose. But no concrete evidence has emerged in public that Iran was behind the weapons. U.S. officials have revealed no captured shipments of such devices and offered no other proof.

And speaking of “captured shipments” brings us to the latest bit of information, based on a paper by Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman at West Point (via IPS’s Gareth Porter):

According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi’a areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

…

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi’a militia caches during that period.

…

Only two months before the new high-level propaganda push on alleged Iranian weapons supply to Shi’a militias, the U.S. command had put out a story suggesting that large numbers of Iranian-supplied arms had been buried all over the country. On Feb. 17, 2008, U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told reporters that Iraqi and coalition forces had captured 212 weapons caches across Iraq over the previous week “with growing links to the Iranian-backed special groups”.

The Task Force Troy data for the week of Feb. 9-16 show, however, that the U.S. command had information on Iranian arms contradicting that propaganda line. According to the task force database, only five of those 212 caches contained any Iranian weapons that analysts believed might have been buried after the U.S. invasion. And the total number of confirmed Iranian-made weapons found in those five caches, according to the data, was eight, not including four Iranian-made hand grenades.

The task force database includes 350 armour-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. However, the database does not identify any of the EFPs as Iranian weapons.

That treatment of EFPs in the caches appears to contradict claims by U.S. officials throughout 2007 and much of 2008 that EFPs were being smuggled into Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The allegedly Iranian-manufactured EFPs had been the centrepiece of the U.S. military’s February 2007 briefing charging Iran with arming Shi’a militiamen in Iraq.

Press reports of a series of discoveries of shops for manufacturing EFPs in Iraq in 2007 forced the U.S. command to admit that the capacity to manufacture EFPs was not limited to Iran. By the second half of 2008, U.S. officials had stopped referring to Iranian supply of EFPs altogether.

Felter and Fishman do not analyse the task force data in their paper, but they criticise official U.S. statements on Iranian weapons in Iraq. “Some reports erroneously attribute munitions similar to those produced in Iran as Iranian,” they write, “while other Iranian munitions found in Iraq were likely purchased on the open market.”

The co-authors note that Iranian arms can be purchased directly from the website of the Defence Industries of Iran with a credit card.

Wyden implied that he’d seen hard evidence of Iran’s involvement in supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. I think it’s time for him to put his cards on the table or tell us how he;s going to provide actual oversight on stuff like this in the future.

It’s over.

Thomas Schaller at Salon.com wrote an article on election day titled “The end of the satirical industrial complex?” in which he predicts that “An Obama era almost certainly promises to be less funny — at least in terms of satire.”

He bases this largely on the instant popularity of Tina Fey’s imitations of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, during a “very unfunny time for America” in which:

U.S. troops are fighting two very different wars in two very different countries, and neither campaign is succeeding as promised. Many Americans are uninsured, left to battle catastrophic illness on their own. Oh, and the American economy is in the crapper.

He goes on to quote James Downey, a writer at SNL and comedian Will Durst on what they perceive will be a difficulty in mocking Obama (Durst: “Until I can say ‘President Homey’ and get away with it, it’s going to be a little tougher.”)

In a way Schaller’s right. If your primary take on a President Barack Obama is that the guy’s skin is a few shades darker than George W. Bush’s hide, and you’re — in Durst’s words — “a white guy” or you’re SNL where the current brand of political humor barely penetrates to the skin-deep, then Obama might pose some challenges.

But the idea that political comedy and satire is about to enter a drought cycle for the next few years is in itself hilarious. And from an historical standpoint, it’s grossly mistaken.

Even if a President Obama was to do absolutely nothing mock-worthy over however long he holds the Oval Office (and here I’m just going along with Schaller’s apparent assumption that there are no funny conservatives who would be mocking Obama for doing something for which Jon Stewart presumably wouldn’t mock him, because I do agree that there are no funny conservatives), even if Obama is completely and miraculously unmockable, there’s a lot going on in the world that’s not going to magically change after Inaguration Day. Just the stuff the Bush administration has done is going to be with us for years; heck, David Letterman was still making Monica Lewinsky jokes on a regular basis in his monologues in 2006! Seven years into Bush’s administration.

But Obama’s going to do plenty of things that people will write jokes about. He’s human.

What really got to me is the utterly ahistorical tone of Schaller’s piece.

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and co-founder of the satirical magazine Spy, predicted “the end of the age of irony” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Roger Rosenblatt of Time simultaneously lashed out at “‘the vain stupidity’ of ‘ironists'” according to — and ironically — a 2001 article by David Beers in the very same online publication Schaller’s writing for.

Beers hoped for “a golden age of irony,” recalling the words of writer Randolph Bourne, who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic at 32: “The ironist is ironical, not because he does not care, but because he cares too much.” I don’t think that we’ve gotten the golden age of irony Beers wanted but I’m pretty sure that it hasn’t died off.

Carter, Rosenblatt, and their ilk were, of course, forgetting even their own lived history. The magazine Carter was editing a dozen years before 9/11 had — ironically enough — predicted irony’s overreach with the theme “Isn’t it Ironic?” and a picture of Chevy Chase pulling air quotes on the cover.

But more particularly, the idea that serious times and serious leaders are anathema to irony, satire, and humor in general belies a complete lack of knowledge of precedents. Think back to our American Camelot, with the tousle-haired, war hero, socialite, Pulitzer Prize-winner John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the White House along with his debutante wife and their wonderful children.

In the fall of 1963, the pilot for a new series ran on NBC. Henry Fonda hosted the first episode of That Was The Week That Was (abbreviated TW3), Mike Nichols and Elaine May were guests. Twelve days later President Kennedy was assassinated. Nonetheless, the pilot was picked up and began running in January. Among those who appeared on or contributed to the show were David Frost, Buck Henry, Alan Alda, Gloria Steinem, Calvin Trillin, and Tom Lehrer. It ran for sixteen months. I grew up listening to a collection of Lehrer’s lighthearted songs from the show, which covered the decidedly non-lighthearted topics of racism,

Cold War politics, pretentious folk singers, US militarism, pornography, pollution, nuclear annihilation, nuclear proliferation, and letting ex-Nazis run the space program, among other topics. And that’s just some of the songs from the show, which had plenty of other material, as well.

The same month that TW3 began its regular run, Columbia Pictures released Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, one of the greatest pieces of satire ever produced for American consumption.

Between 1960 and 1963, Nikita Khrushchev had famously pounded his shoe on a table at the UN, an American U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union, Nixon and Kennedy went at it for the Presidency, Eisenhower cut off relations with Cuba, Gagarin became the first man into space, Ike’s Bay of Pigs invasion blew up in JFK’s face, the Freedom Riders started their campaign, James Meredith enrolled at UMiss, the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went, George Wallace promised segregation forever in his inagural speech as governor of Alabama, a US nuclear submarine (Thresher) sank, Martin Luther King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Bull Conner sicced dogs on African-American marchers there, a nuclear test ban treaty was signed, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in DC, JFK was killed, and newly-minted President Lyndon Johnson promised more aid to the coup leaders in South Vietnam. Overlaying the whole thing was more than a decade of Cold War tension. You’d think that if there was going to be a somber pall cast over the country — and the world — that would be the time (although things had been seriously worse during the World Wars).

Working through those years of turmoil, Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George put together a crazy-but-plausible tale about the end of the world, in which an Air Force general subscribing to a “purity of essence” philosophy — and worried about the Commies flouridating the water supplies — intentionally triggers a nuclear standoff between the USSR and the US, leading, of course, to the explosion of a Soviet “Doomsday Device” which will make the surface of the Earth uninhabitable for a hundred years and necessitate — in the words of the title character, a former Nazi working in the US government — a group of humans to live at “the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.” Ideally, with a “ratio of, say, ten females to each male” to better propogate the species (there’s a logical problem in that assumption, but I’ll let you figure that out).

The idea that comedians, satirists, and ironists are going to be at a loss for material in the upcoming years is itself laughable. The 1960s — a period of assassinations, riots, civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, and so much more — was a breeding ground for mockery of the government. It didn’t matter that the White House and Congress were controlled by Democrats for most of the decade, political comedy was on the rise. So far as I know, there weren’t any notable LBJ impressionists in the same way that there were of JFK and Richard Nixon, but he still got heat from comedians.

So I’m not particularly worried about not having anything to laugh about over the next four years.

OPE, by the way, was the code programmed into the decoder units of the bombers in Strangelove to authenticate any message to recall them from their targets, the message that Major Kong’s plane didn’t receive.