Tristero

Friday, March 12, 2004

Bushed  

The number of outrages and just plain silliness coming out about the Bush administration is just overwhelming right now. I'm gonna take a few days off from blogging, as I've written quite a bit recently and I want to see if, perhaps, I can focus on just a few of the issues. Meanwhile, be sure to read Atrios today as there's lots to great stuff. And while you're at it, Gail Sheehy and Joe Conason have some great stuff in The New York Observer.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:13 AM

Thursday, March 11, 2004

Who Designed The Homeland Security Color Code?  

Click the link and watch the most laughably bizarre film since Mr. Death. Best line: Oh, I can't tell you. It's too funny and sick.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:57 PM

Kwiatkowski Gets Fauxed  

It's impossible to summarize. Just read the whole thing and be amazed.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:37 PM

Scalia's Ducks Quack Back  

Ginsburg Has Ties to Activist Group

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has lent her name and presence to a lecture series cosponsored by the liberal NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, an advocacy group that often argues before the high court in support of women's rights that the justice embraces.

In January, Ginsburg gave opening remarks for the fourth installment in the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture Series on Women and the Law. Two weeks earlier, she had voted in a medical screening case and taken the side promoted by the legal defense fund in its friend-of-the-court brief.

Had she gone duck hunting with them and flown there and back on a private jet, that would have been fine.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:23 PM

The Iraq War Lie Mutual Embrace  

Josh Marshall points out the obvious, but lets Kerry off the hook by oversimplifying the events of 2002:

People don't think [Kerry's position] adds up because they think the president was lying -- that he had already decided to go to war no matter what [by late 2002]-- and that Kerry must have known.

Yes, that is exactly what I think but there is much more to Kerry's vote.

To explain, let's start with Josh's somewhat inaccurate summary of the issues back in 2002:

The president's argument at the time was that he needed to be empowered by the congress to go to the UN with a credible threat of force and a united congress behind him. That was the best way to assure that Iraq would be disarmed and in fact the best way to avoid war.

Not quite. In the spring of 2002, Bush claimed he had all the empowerment he needed to go to war with Saddam, that the resolutions from Congress approving Gulf War 1 and the UN at that time gave him all the legal authorization he needed.

Brent Scowcroft, in the Washington Post, made Bush think twice about saying much more about this. Consequently, Bush adopted Powell's plan to seek both Congressional approval and a new UN resolution. Hence, 1441. Hence, the Iraq War resolution. The fact that Bush needed time to amass his troops (and oh yes, those enormous additional troops provided by the coalition of the willing) meant that little was lost by seeking the appearance of an imprimatur from the rest of the country and the world.

And indeed, in the fall of '02, both Congress and the UN went along with it because they were afraid to stand up to Bush's popularity post 9/11. It is difficult to recall how powerful he was, but at the time he also had a lock on the American press's perception of his administration; no one was asking any hard questions (except for bloggers, and no one was reading them). Had Congress challenged Bush and refused to pass a resolution in '02, he simply would have gone to war anyway. He really was that popular. He would have demonized Congress with his patented viciousness. Just as viciously as he trashed the UN in March, 2003 when it became clear they would not pass a followup to 1441 specifically authorizing war, rather than just "consequences."

In other words, the Iraq resolution was simply a wink-wink nudge-nudge rubber stamp of a vote, necessary merely to perpetuate the facade that the modern Congress actually had a say in the matter of whether the US should go to war. Everyone knew war would come no matter what, so why not support the inevitable? Those who voted it for it made a crass, political calculation: if Bush/Iraq succeeded, if a cache of nukes, or even mustard gas was found, then they could demonstrate that they had supported the war and a wildly popular president in a "noble" quest to topple a terrible dictator. If it failed, well how could it? The US would certainly prevail militarily and surely Saddam was hiding something.

Heh.

No one, at the time, believed that Bush's diplomacy AND the aftermath of the war would fail as spectacularly as it did. True, most thinking people saw a quagmire as inevitable. But very few people believed that there wasn't a single WMD, or at least a well-developed WMD program, anywhere to be found in Iraq. Not even Blix believed that.

Now that it's all come tumbling down around everyone's heads - including the press that gave Bush a free ride in 2001, 2002 and the first half of 2003 - those who voted for the war but were actually opposed to it are left with no excuses that sound real.

Because everyone knew back then that Bush was lying: the decision to invade Iraq was made immediately post 9/11, if not in the earliest days of the administration. Everyone knew the votes for the resolution were meaningless in terms of approving or stopping a war. A vote for the resolution was merely a craven, cynical political act. And everyone knew that, too.

However, simply because Kerry made an inexcusably foolish miscalculation -one which he was warned against, by the way, by ordinary people like myself - does not disqualify him from the presidency. Especially since his opponent has proven himself to be totally incompetent to the point of placing the United States in serious danger, by destroying the world's good will towards us post 9/11. Especially by creating a lawless, unstable, breeding ground for a thousand new bin Ladens. As for making bad decisions, well Bush takes the cake. Starting with September 11 itself and going all the way through the the FMA, Bush has made nothing but bad decisions.

By any standards, Kerry is not only the better man. He also has the potential, unlike Bush, to become a great president. His serious slipup on the Iraq war resolution, in a career that has been spectacularly astute, will always remain a serious slipup. Unfortunately (perhaps), our system rewards compromised politicians over principled ones. Lincoln would never have won had he declared himself an abolitionist, rather than parsing words and positions as carefully as he did. Kerry, although seriously compromised by his vote in the fall of 2002, is nevertheless the right man for the presidency. He will do a tremendous job.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:19 AM

One More Must Read  

Regarding the post 911 flights of Saudis out of the US. While all private aircraft was grounded in the US in the days after 911, Saudis and their servants were flown out of the US, apparently with White House approval.

Among the numerous passengers, the article reports, "There were roughly two dozen bin Ladens."

In addition, one of the passengers was a wealthy Saudi royal who may have known of September 11 in advance. He has since died of a heart attack at age 43.

As they say, even paranoids have real enemies. Yeesh.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:40 AM

Must Reading  

An article entitled The new Pentagon papers by an insider who observed the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans in action, and is utterly scathing:

War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate.

President Bush has now appointed a commission to look at American intelligence capabilities and will report after the election. It will "examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st century threats ... [and] compare what the Iraq Survey Group learns with the information we had prior..." The commission, aside from being modeled on failed rubber stamp commissions of the past and consisting entirely of those selected by the executive branch, specifically excludes an examination of the role of the Office of Special Plans and other executive advisory bodies. If the president or vice president were seriously interested in "getting the truth," they might consider asking for evidence on how intelligence was politicized, misused and manipulated, and whether information from the intelligence community was distorted in order to sway Congress and public opinion in a narrowly conceived neoconservative push for war. Bush says he wants the truth, but it is clear he is no more interested in it today than he was two years ago.

Proving that the truth is indeed the first casualty in war, neoconservative member of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle called this February for "heads to roll." Perle, agenda setter par excellence, named George Tenet and Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby as guilty of failing to properly inform the president on Iraq and WMD. No doubt, the intelligence community, susceptible to politicization and outdated paradigms, needs reform. The swiftness of the neoconservative casting of blame on the intelligence community and away from themselves should have been fully expected. Perhaps Perle and others sense the grave and growing danger of political storms unleashed by the exposure of neoconservative lies. Meanwhile, Ahmad Chalabi, extravagantly funded by the neocons in the Pentagon to the tune of millions to provide the disinformation, has boasted with remarkable frankness, "We are heroes in error," and, "What was said before is not important."

Now we are told by our president and neoconservative mouthpieces that our sons and daughters, husbands and wives are in Iraq fighting for freedom, for liberty, for justice and American values. This cost is not borne by the children of Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush's daughters do not pay this price. We are told that intelligence has failed America, and that President Bush is determined to get to the bottom of it. Yet not a single neoconservative appointee has lost his job, and no high official of principle in the administration has formally resigned because of this ill-planned and ill-conceived war and poorly implemented occupation of Iraq.

Will Americans hold U.S. policymakers accountable? Will we return to our roots as a republic, constrained and deliberate, respectful of others? My experience in the Pentagon leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq tells me, as Ben Franklin warned, we may have already failed. But if Americans at home are willing to fight -- tenaciously and courageously -- to preserve our republic, we might be able to keep it.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:18 AM

John Ashcroft, DOJ Petioned To Flack Gibson Flick  

Gevult!

Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of the Christ," through purposeful rewriting of the Christian Gospel mythos has, itself, become an anti-Semitic diatribe which, since it’s February 25, 2004 release resulted in hate crimes against Jews, Synagogues and Jewish Cemeteries in cities throughout the US. Mel Gibson’s unbiblical and a-historical account of the "crucifixion" story has taken Hutton Gibson’s claims that the Holocaust is "fiction," even one step further.
...

A digital petition at www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/765533849 implores US Attorney General John Ashcroft and the US Department of Justice to evaluate the anti-Semitism clearly presented in Gibson and Fontana’s portrayal, and asks that civil, criminal, and Federal hate-crime laws, as appropriate, be utilized not only against the perpetrators involved in each and every act which it has encouraged, but against the directors, producers, and screen writers responsible for the work itself.

The Messiah Truth Project, Inc. is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization established to combat the deceptive missionary techniques of evangelical Christian denominations and the Messianic movements through Torah education.

Eh, it's just a movie, boys and girls.

via Atrios
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:46 AM

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Lynne Cheney's Lesbian Novel  

What next? Santorum's dog training guide?

Lynne Cheney's still-remembered 1981 lesbian romance novel, "Sisters," was feted Monday night in a special performance by the "Lynne Cheney Players" - to the delight of an audience of liberal East Village types.

The performance at the New York Theatre Workshop was part of a celebration of left-leaning radio personality Laura Flanders' new book, "Bushwomen: Tale of a Cynical Species."

Yesterday, Flanders told Lowdown that Cheney's novel "is a breathy, gothic romance, horribly written. It's celebrating lesbian love and promotes the value of preventative devices, condoms, to women who want to remain free. It features a woman who has unmarried sex with the widow of her sister - all this by Lynne Cheney, the culture warrior of the right."

Monday's crowd of 200 - which included actress Janeane Garofalo - laughed throughout the satirical staging.

Choice scenes adapted from "Sisters" included one in which two female characters write to each other: "Let us go away together, away from the anger and the imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement."

One of Cheney's characters swoons to a Sapphic love letter: "How well her words describe our love - or the way it would be if we could remove all impediments, leave this place, and join together ... Then our union would be complete. Our lives would flow together, twin streams merging into a single river."

Vice President Cheney's wife has been silent on the hot-button issue of gay marriage, although their 34-year-old daughter, Mary Cheney, is openly gay. President Bush has come out in a support of a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage.

"Here's a whole book where she gloried in lesbian love affairs," Flanders said. "The hypocrisy is rank."

Lynne Cheney's spokeswoman didn't respond to Lowdown's request for comment

"The imperatives of men?" Oh, dear, oh dear. Well, the sentiments are fine, but the quality of the writing approaches the immoral.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:24 AM

Salon On Fire  

Sid Blumenthal, Karen Kwiatowski, and then this:

On Thursday, Salon will publish the first of several advance excerpts from "House of Bush, House of Saud," a new book by Craig Unger that explores the relationship between the two dynasties, whose explosive contents have been embargoed. In the first installment, Unger, who has written for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, will expose shocking new details on the flights approved by the Bush White House that carried members of the bin Laden family and other prominent Saudis out of the U.S. to Saudi Arabia after Sept. 11. Salon will publish for the first time the manifest of the passenger list and identify one passenger as a suspected al-Qaida funder who was aware ahead of time of the Sept. 11 attack.

Whoa.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:48 AM

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Hijacker of Achille Lauro Dies in Iraq  

And he died a little bit mysteriously:

Mohammed Abul Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship in which an American tourist was killed, has died in U.S. custody in Iraq, Palestinian and U.S. officials said Tuesday. He was 56.

Abbas' small Palestine Liberation Front commandeered the Italian cruise ship, demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and threw an elderly wheelchair-bound Jewish American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard after shooting him.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that Abbas died Monday, ``apparently ... of natural causes.'' He said there would be an autopsy.

Whitman declined to answer further questions, including whether Abbas still was being interrogated in the period before his death.

Whether he is dead or alive is unimportant. But if Abbas was killed, that was very important. I'd like more information about that.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:07 PM

US Soldier Killed in Iraq, One Wounded  

Come March, there weren't supposed to be any more deaths.

The soldier was the first member of the 1st Infantry Division, which is replacing the 4th Infantry Division, to die in Iraq, said Maj. Debra Stewart.

The soldier was killed after the Humvee he was riding in was hit by the bomb in Balad Ruz, just east of Baqouba in the Sunni Triangle. A second soldier was wounded in the explosion and airlifted the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad and was listed in stable condition.

The names of both soldiers were withheld pending notification of their families.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:59 PM

LA Times: Computer Voting Problems In Orange County  

7,000 Orange County Voters Were Given Bad Ballots but wait! There's more:

Poll workers struggling with a new electronic voting system in last week's election gave thousands of Orange County voters the wrong ballots, according to a Times analysis of election records. In 21 precincts where the problem was most acute, there were more ballots cast than registered voters.

Wide margins in most races seem likely to spare the county the need for a costly revote. [????? Wha? Um, mebbe those wide margins are a result of the overcount.] But the problems, which county officials have blamed on insufficient training for poll workers, are a strong indication of the pitfalls facing officials as they try to bring new election technology online statewide.

"The principal of democracy is every vote should count. That's why we need a better election system," said Henry Brady, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and an expert on voting systems.

At polling places where the problem was most apparent because of turnouts exceeding 100%, an estimated 1,500 voters cast the wrong ballots, according to the Times' analysis of official county election data. Tallies at an additional 55 polling places with turnouts more than double the county average of 37% suggest at least 5,500 voters had their ballots tabulated for the wrong precincts.

Problems occurred in races throughout the county — including five out of six congressional races, four of five state Senate contests, and five of the nine Assembly races that are decided in whole, or in part, by Orange County voters. [Emphasis added.]

via Kevin Drum
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:51 PM

Broken Record  

Josh reproduces some of today's press gaggle at the White House. McClellan uses a hoary technique they teach you the first day in assertiveness training, Broken Record, where you simply say something and despite every effort to get you to change or elaborate, you simply repeat it over and over again, like a broken record and never add or subtract anything from it. Thus McClellan today:

...the President looks forward to meeting with the chairman and vice chairman and answering all the questions that they want to raise.

...he’s going to answer all the questions they want to raise.

I just said that the President will answer all the questions that they want to raise.

The President looks forward to answering all the questions that they want to bring up.

...now they’ll have an opportunity to come to the President, and ask any question that they want to. The President is glad to answer their questions.

I said he's going to answer all their questions.

But I'm just stating a fact -- the President will answer all the questions they want to raise.

But I'm saying the President, of course, is going to answer all the questions they want to raise.

Again, from this podium I'm telling you that the President, of course, will answer all the questions that they want to raise.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:48 PM

Abstinence Doesn't Help STD Rate (Of Course)  

Why we are spending money proving what everyone except a few right wing nuts knows to be true - that abstinence only education is worthless - is beyond me. Another restatement of the obvious:

Teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who don't pledge abstinence, according to a study that examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents.

Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups' STD rates were statistically similar.

The problem, the study found, is that those virginity "pledgers" are much less likely to use condoms.

"It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex," said Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University's Department of Sociology, who co-authored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale.

"The message is really simple: 'Just say no' may work in the short term but doesn't work in the long term."

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:56 AM

Kennedy Questions Bush Recess Appointment  

No retreat, no surrender:

President Bush (news - web sites)'s appointment of former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to the U.S. Appeals Court during a congressional recess may be unconstitutional, contends Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

Bush on Feb. 20 gave Pryor an almost two-year stint on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Atlanta, calling him a "leading American lawyer" and saying Democrats had used "unprecedented obstructionist tactics" last year to stop his confirmation by the Senate.

The appointment came on the last day of Congress's weeklong President's Day holiday break. The Constitution gives the president authority to install nominees in office when Congress is not in session.

Pryor has already been sworn in.

In a letter released Monday, Kennedy, a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee (news - web sites), wrote to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that "a serious question exists as to whether Judge Pryor's recess appointment is constitutional." He asked the court to determine the validity of the appointment, so as to not taint any decisions in which Pryor may be involved.

Recess appointments can only come "at the end of a Congress or the recess between the annual sessions of Congress," Kennedy wrote.

"No other Article III judge in the nation's history has ever received a recess appointment during a brief holiday period in the midst of a session of Congress," Kennedy added in a memo attached to the letter.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:23 AM

Political Hate Speech  

Here is the latest headline from GOP.com:

Communist North Korea Is Only Government On Record Supporting John Kerry


Hmm...Well, I suppose the riposte can only be:

Extreme Fascist Uzbekistan On Record Supporting George W. Bush

The site is so bizarre that my smart spouse assumed it was a parody.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:42 AM

Krugman  

And read his commentary on it
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:09 AM

Monday, March 08, 2004

Spalding's Body Is Found  

Not a surprise but still a sadness:

Spalding Gray, the wry monologist and actor who transformed his personal experiences, fascinations and traumas into such acclaimed pieces as "Swimming to Cambodia" and "Monster in a Box,"was confirmed dead today, two months after his wife reported him missing, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner's office said. He was 62.

I knew him a little bit, in 1995. A charming, and very strange but brilliant man.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:53 PM

Bush Sinks Lowers In Polls  

Still not low enough:

In the first national poll since the presidential campaign became a two-person race, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry leads President Bush, 52%-44%.

via Atrios
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:45 PM

California dreaming  

Richard Leone on the crass, cynical politics that the walking piece of garbage that is the governor of California is up to:

...in the movies, when the hero is handed a ticking time bomb, he seldom hands it over to kids and says, 'Here, you handle it; I'm out of here!'

Amazingly Schwarzenegger is planning to do just that by cutting spending on elementary and secondary education. Thus, the very Californians who will have to pay this debt over the next 30 years or so will be the graduates of a school system once noted for its excellence but now near the bottom of the 50 states in terms of state support. Given the strong relationship between educational achievement and income, this is a combination that could be celebrated only in fantasy land...

What makes the California story really exceptional is the passage of a companion measure to the big bond issue. This second referendum essentially involved a promise never to do this sort of borrowing again. It also mandated balanced budgets in the future. What seems to be lost in many of the reports about these actions is the irony: 'I'm going to borrow huge amounts of money and leave it to future generations to pay it off, but what I am doing is so bad that we can never allow those future generations to do the same irresponsible thing.'


Thus, only this governor will be allowed to mortgage the future rather than take real political risks. Once Arnold has moved on, everyone must face reality and either raise taxes, lower services, or use some combination of both to meet the balanced budget requirement. In fact, balanced budget requirements have long been enacted by most states.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:42 AM

Bush's High Crass Character  

Josh Marshall:

... a GOP insider told The Hill a couple weeks ago that there is a "real possibility ... we could see President Bush giving his acceptance speech at Ground Zero. It’s clearly a venue they’re considering.”


Let's be clear. The White House hasn't said they're going to do this. And we don't have any direct knowledge that they're considering it. But the idea is apparently being widely discussed in Republican circles.


I mean, the question isn't whether that would be a crass use of the 9/11 tragedies for political gain. The question is whether it's possible to imagine anything more crass. Isn't ground zero something like a graveyard?


What could be worse? The president addressing the crowd wearing a pelt from a recently executed Guantanamo prisoner? Personally executing Saddam on stage with a scimitar?


Not to be flippant, but could anything be more crass than accepting a presidential nomination on ground that is still mixed with the bodies of thousands of Americans?


Lincoln dedicated a cemetery at Gettysburg; he didn't hold the 1864 Republican convention there.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:09 AM

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Afghanistan Remains Awful For Women  

I thought things were supposed to improve post Taliban:

more and more young women who have set themselves on fire, desperate to escape the cruelties of family life and harsh tribal traditions that show no sign of changing despite the end of Taliban rule and the dawn of democracy.

Doctors and nurses in Kabul and Jalalabad say they have seen more cases recently, partly because the population has been swollen by the return of two million refugees and because cases are being tracked for the first time by rights groups, hospitals and the government.

But the trauma and social upheaval of decades of war, poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan have also intensified the traditional pressures on young women, they say.

The recently formed Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission recorded 40 such cases in just the past six months in Herat, a western city of half a million people.

Karima Karimi, one of the commission's officers, says she suspects that the actual figure is higher, and President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation. Officials at the commission said it was reasonable to estimate that Afghanistan had hundreds of such cases in a year.

"It is not only in Herat, it is in all of Afghanistan," said Dr. Soraya Rahim, deputy minister of women's affairs, on her return from a government investigative trip to Herat.

"It takes different forms in different provinces," she said in a telephone interview. "Some take tablets. Some cut their wrists. Some hang themselves. Some burn themselves.

"But the reason is very important. The first reason is our very bad tradition of forced marriage. Girls think this is the only way, that there is no other way in life."

Educated women in the cities who were repressed by the old Taliban government have benefited from the changes in Afghanistan, and many are now working and studying. But in villages and remote tribal areas, the new order has not improved women's longstanding low status.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:58 PM

From A September 11 Widow  

via Salon:

March 5, 2004  |  Dear President Bush:


My husband, Luis Eduardo Torres, was at his second day of work at Cantor Fitzgerald when he was killed on Sept. 11. He jumped from the 105th floor of the North Tower. Most of his upper body was recovered, identifiable only through dental records. I was seven months pregnant at the time.


It is with him in mind that I'm writing to you, to question your disturbing reelection ad campaign. Yesterday I saw the three ads you're now running all over the country, specifically on cable stations in the "swing states," where you feel you need to come out fighting strong. It was the "Safer, Stronger" ad that shocked me the most. At the commercial's midpoint, the words, "Then ... a day of tragedy" dramatically appear on the somber black screen. And the centerpiece: an image of ground zero, the hulking remains of a tower, alongside a human corpse, carried out by several firefighters. Both the tower and the human are draped in American flags.


The flags were intended to honor ground zero and the remains of the dead, but here they are merely props, used to add a powerful patriotic punch to your message. The tower and the corpse are two hideously broken and disfigured things behind and under the flag, and your image -- with your red tie, white shirt, and blue suit, standing in front of thick strong white columns -- serves as another, symbolic, flag.


That image of ground zero, and the body shrouded with the flag, reminded me of the sulfur from the few pathetic remnants of my husband's last day: his Cantor ID, Debitchek Meal Card and subway Metrocard.


I thought I'd finished dealing with the gruesome aspects of his dead body, but it came back to me during your commercial. I had a thought I'd never had before: Was every corpse draped in an American flag as it emerged from ground zero, or was it just an honor bestowed upon the uniformed workers? What if that was my husband's body, now serving as a "spokesman" for your campaign?


I canceled my toddler's afternoon activities so I could do research. I could hear my voice quake as I called the medical examiner and the mayor's office. Initially, uniformed personnel were the only ones wrapped in the flag, I learned -- but it became standard practice to cover all the dead in that way.


In effect, then, Mr. Bush, you've paraded all our 9/11 dead out as the official mascots of your reelection campaign. You use them to show our nation that you can protect us against what we should all fear the most -- being an anonymous corpse in another attack.


But these sleights of image and crafty juxtapositions are the only true demonstrations of your leadership abilities. After all, on that tragic day you didn't actually lead the nation: according to the work of the "Jersey girls" -- the four 9/11 widows who fought to have an independent commission investigate the tragedy -- your first reaction to the plane hitting the North Tower was to blame the pilot. And you continued your activities -- reading stories to a group of young schoolchildren. And as you try to impress our nation with your role during and after 9/11 in these ads, you refuse to talk meaningfully to the independent commission about the specifics of your role prior to 9/11 and how much you knew about a potential large-scale al-Qaida plot.


I didn't think that co-opting 9/11 with such disregard for those of us who have been affected by this tragedy would anger me so much. I hope that John Kerry doesn't use 9/11 to strengthen his own candidacy . But so many 9/11 families are sick at your use of our sadness ... I can't imagine it being any worse than where you have already led us.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:53 AM

Seraphiel's Daily Cartoon Roundup  

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posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:31 AM