Whiskey Fire

Softer Tits Will Greet You

or... With Great Cleavage Comes Great Responsibility
by Molly Ivors

I know I'm not the one in the relationship charged with picking on Ann Althouse, so this is something like mowing the lawn or taking out the garbage for me, but she's really gone around the bend this time.

Our favorite poster child for adult-onset ADD (Breasts! Terrorists! Sanjaya! Flower pretty!--and that's just the front page) tells all us girls who haven't yet noticed that we have breasts. And that men might look at them, so for god's sake, keep them put away when men might have to think or something.

What looks sexy for a night out on the town may not be appropriate in the workplace. In fact, [Elisabeth] Squires said cleavage should never make an appearance in the office.

Even in the summer at the law school when there's almost no one around?

"It's way too big of a distraction for men and women," she said. "If cleavage isn't in your job description, don't put it in."...

Squires suggested that women also keep things respectable at family events, like a kids' soccer game....

Night is prime time to bring out breasts, but Squires suggested women treat their cleavage as part of their outfit -- not a focal point.

"You can certainly be a bit more daring," she said. "This presumably is adult time, and cleavage is powerful. This is the time to use it. But they should be part of your whole look."

Okay, so night time is the "prime time." Clearly, there are other times. What are they? Hanging about cafés in the summertime? Catching a light lunch with a former President? We need to know.

Well, I dunno, Ann. You could ask your fellow wingnut namesake about flashing her tits in a little black dress at 7am, for starters. But no, it's much more rewarding to go back to the one most interesting (and by interesting I mean psychotic) thing she's ever done and reattack Jessica Valenti for wearing a demure, high-necked sweater. I mean, this is the same woman who went postal on Garance Franke-Ruta for even mentioning it. Always worth rewatching, since she's obviously insane. But I guess it's okay if it's her own little joke.

In the early days of our relationship, when I would instigate romance at an inconvenient time, Thers would tease me by quoting St. Paul and St. Jerome, and tell me that I was interfering with his contemplation of the Holy Spirit through my actions. That's what this is, medieval crap which belittles women. Fuck 'em.

The Dead Were on Display

The Foreign Policy Genius of GOP Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson, or, Give That Man a Wingnut Blog:

Let me ask you a hypothetical question. What do you think America would do if Canadian soldiers were firing dozens of missiles every day into Buffalo, N.Y.? What do you think our response would be if Mexican troops for two years had launched daily rocket attacks on San Diego — and bragged about it?

Thompson is of course talking about Israel/Palestine, making an analogy as familiar as it is wrong. Symmetrical warfare is just not asymmetrical warfare. You see "conservatives" making this comparison all the time, but it's silly. You can't subtract all the specific and intractable historical, cultural, and political problems that make the Israel/Palestine equation so incredibly difficult to solve and then say you've come up with a solution.

Or, you can, but you have to be very careful about how you'd describe the consequences of your rhetoric were it to become policy. Because if you did, you would end up saying some things you know would not be pleasant to contemplate. Observe how Thompson dances.

The Palestinian strategy is to purposely target and kill Israeli civilians. Then, when Israel goes after those launching the attacks, Palestinians claim to be the victims. If Palestinian civilians aren’t hurt in the Israeli attacks, they stage injuries and deaths.

Too often, they garner sympathy and support from a gullible or anti-Semitic media in the international community.

Israelis, themselves, are often incapable of facing the damage they inflict in self-defense. Knowing this, Islamic extremists are using their own populations as human shields.

Israelis, themselves, are often incapable of facing the damage they inflict in self-defense. Knowing this, Islamic extremists are using their own populations as human shields.

I’m beginning to wonder how much longer this vicious plot will work though. International sympathy for Palestinians has diminished as the same Islamofascist extremists have brought havoc to Madrid, Bali, Somalia, London and elsewhere. More importantly, Israelis themselves are suffering so badly, they may be on the verge of losing their sympathy for the people who have sworn to kill them.

Imagine what it would be like to live, knowing that a rocket could fall on you or your children at any minute. Half of those who live nearest to Gaza have fled their homes. Those remaining are traumatized by daily warning sirens and explosions.

It all sounds so simple the way Thompson presents it. The victimization, and so the empathy, here runs but one way. There is no mention much less acknowledgent of Palestinian "suffering." Israel is without guilt in the deaths of any Palestinian "civilians," and many of these deaths and injuries are anyway faked. Those who might question these assertions are the dupes of an anti-Semitic media, or else terrorist sympathizers. Hamas is the same as Al Qaeda, which is the same as the government of Iran: they are all Islamofascists together (never mind that Sunni/Shia thing, I suppose).

The irony is that Israel has the military might to easily win the war that is being waged against them today. They haven’t used that might, in the past, out of compassion for Palestinian civilians and because it could trigger a wider regional conflict.

That balance of power is about to change, though. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, the very existence of this tiny nation of Israel will be threatened. The Iranian regime has left little doubt that it intends to see Israel “wiped off the map.” Hamas is using the same language, not coincidentally, and has announced it will begin launching missiles into Israel from the West Bank too.

If the world doesn’t act to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it must be prepared for the consequences of Israel defending itself.

There is "no doubt" that "Islamofascists" in Iran would launch a nuclear Holocaust as soon as they gain nuclear weapons. They are impervious to the logic of "mutual assured destruction" (never mind the  dispute over the "wipe Israel off the map" phrase) because they are religious fanatics pledged to destroy Israel, and one supposes, by extension everyone else in the world.

So that's the setup. Let's grant everything Thompson says is true (which I don't). What then would be his policy prescriptions? Well, logically, they should be these:

1. Israel should ruthlessly reoccupy Gaza, imposing strict martial law, and in the process dispense with its sentimental regard for civilian life and limb. Doing so only plays into the Islamofascists' hands.

2. The United States government should support such an attack and should denounce anyone else in the world who raises an objection as misinformed or anti-Semitic.

3. As soon as Iran announces it has nuclear weapons, or even before, or even now, Israel should attack Iran with all the weapons it possesses, including its own nukes. It should not concern itself in doing so with any risk to civilian life or limb, as that would play into the hands of the fanatical Islamofascists.

4. The United States should itself preemptively bomb Iran, and should not preclude using the use of nuclear weapons. We should not concern ourselves in doing so with any risk to civilian life or limb, as that would play into the hands of the fanatical Islamofascists.

These points would seem to follow from Thompson's premises. But I may be wrong. So why doesn't he just come out and say what he thinks should be done?

Is it because (1) what he's saying is a grotesque oversimplification of an incredibly divisive and complex issue? (2) Acting on these assumptions would run the very serious risk of not working and making  matters infinitely worse?   (3) Lots of admittedly innocent people would die or suffer horribly? (4) He doesn't want to come across as a total lunatic to most Americans but needs to play to a conservative base that is completely fucking out to lunch?

Yes, I know. "This has been another edition of..."

But we really can't afford another administration determined to pretend that there are simple answers to everything, especially simple answers that involve using nuclear weapons.

The World Is Oblivious So Far

Noted dickhead Rich Lowry has Big News about end of The Summer of the Surge: 

Was talking to an influential Republican strategist who thinks if Iraq looks the way it does now in September, Bush will lose about 25 Senate Republicans on a bill with some sort of timetable for withdrawal.

1. Iraq will look the way it looks now in September.

2. Senate Republicans are (a) chronic wankers who (b) lack balls, a most unfortunate combination. Something truly miraculous would need to occur in September for Lowry's pal's prediction to come true.

3. Something like, say, Senate Democrats (a) giving up wanking and (b) growing a pair.

Feh.

Excited Words Are Drooling Forth

Hang on! Stop the presses! Stop the blogs! Big news! Big fat honking big freakin' news!

Norman Podhoretz has written something in the Wall Street Journal opinion section that actually makes sense:

the military campaign in Iraq cannot be understood

Whoa! AMAZING! ASTOUNDING! Norman Podhoretz said something rational. Un-believable.

Wow.

(*whistles in nonchalant fashion*)

Ah, no, sorry, just messing with you. No, he's still completely demented. The article is actually entitled, and I shit you not, "The Case for Bombing Iran: I Hope and Pray President Bush Will Do It." I myself am unfamiliar with the "Bombing Prayer," but am given to understand that it has pride of place in the Wingnut Liturgy. Here's the whole quote:

Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.

What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right.

Well, me, I call this new war GAMBLOR! Or, "Betsy." 

There's really no point in engaging with this sort of stuff, except to simply point at it and back away slowly, making soothing noises at the lunatic.

Because the big problem with Pod's thesis is that it is confused and makes no sense. In "WWIII," there was an "other side" comprised of, um, people. In "World War IV," or, remember, "GAMBLOR" or "Betsy," the "other side" is an ill-defined ideology capable of encompassing such diverse individuals as Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and, well, whoever. All it has to offer as far as policy recommendations is "exterminate all the brutes."

It's spoilt warmed over 19th century imperialism only without the attempt at internal coherence or the stab at aesthetic grandeur.

The Closer You Are, the Quicker it Hits You

by Molly Ivors

I'd like to say just a few more words as an addendum to Jennifer's excellent posts, at Pax Americana and at WIMN's Voices.

Women, to a great extent, are judged not by themselves or their own work, but by the quality of their personal relationships. Cindy Sheehan's authority came, not from her own words, but from her position as a grieving mother. She was no political genius: what she had was that careworn face, those sad, sad eyes, like the subjects of the photographs of Dorothea Lange: a wordless, sublime ache, a void left by the loss of everything worth living for. There is nothing more empty, more heartbreaking, than a mother grieving a child. It is a potent force, and unless you're Ann Coulter, one of the most moving things one can ever encounter.

Grief is exhausting. Thinking about your dead, trying to figure out what you could have done differently, what they could have done differently, what we all could have done differently, to make the grief go away, the loss go away, is also exhausting. Sometimes, the answer is "nothing." Sometimes it isn't. Cindy Sheehan thought it wasn't, and threw herself heart and soul into  a movement designed to prevent her void from becoming someone else's.

The most offensive response to her grief, of course, were the execrable words of Kristinn "Spare Consonants" Taylor, the Freepi queen,  who thought that Sheehan's anger was "used" by the Left in an attempt to discredit President Bush and the war. This being a rather politer blog than those upon which I usually post, I won't state as clearly as I ordinarily would what I think of Taylor's "oh, I'm so glad the poor dear has moved to another stage of acceptance" coming from that corner, in which Sheehan was repeatedly referred to by some of the most offensive names available. They are evil, pure and simple (and they have archives, so you can put yourself through it if you wish to do so).

My point is that when Sheehan came forward as a public face, in 2005, that kind of raw emotion, her loss, was the most potent weapon we had available to us as anti-war activists, and we embraced her accordingly. She was doing something to fill the void left by her son's death, and she was an essential, a potent symbol, of the cost of the war on real lives.

Our opposition, however, must be based on broader principles than the grief of one mother. I realized how far we had moved this spring, when Mary and Kevin Tillman testified before Congress about the cover-up and propaganda campaign surrounding the death of Patrick Tillman. It struck me then that Sheehan seemed to be demanding a personal justice she was never going to get from the sociopath inhabiting the White House, who has been content to watch others die for his ideology for going on 40 years. But the Tillmans went at it somewhat differently, collecting information and reports from all over in order to expose the "fraud... deliberate and calculated lies" which followed hard upon Patrick's death.

Cindy Sheehan's grief was a marketing nightmare for the Administration; the Tillmans testimony revealed just how much depended on that marketing, what they were to do to make it stick. It's the beginning of looking at the marketing of war in general, how our press, in Bill Moyers' words, got it "so wrong." In order to end the drumbeat of bellicose fervor, to start thinking rationally about how we got in and how we can get out, that's the conversation we should be having. (Because, you know, if they hadn't painted themselves into a rhetorical corner with the leaving = losing meme, we might be out already.) My point is that this has become much larger than one person's grief, no matter how profound.

And so I wish Cindy Sheehan peace, not Kristinn Taylor's "suck it up" peace, but the peace of knowing that she did an incredible amount to change the conversation in this country and made it possible for us to move to another level of critique. Thank you.

(crossposted at Pax Americana)

I'd Much Rather Back the Simple Girl

So it's Memorial Day, when we honor American veterans.

And that is a Good Thing.

But I still think the constant refrain of commonly expressed sentiments such as these, from the President, are unsound.

"Those who have died in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts fought for freedoms, which come at great cost and will survive only as long as there are Americans willing to defend the nation against determined enemies, he said."

This is doxa, not truth.

And it is dangerous doxa at that, since the incessant assertion that the American military is by its nature always involved in the business of protecting  American "freedoms" against external threats exerts what Bourdieu calls a "censorship" effect. It discourages any sort of rational discussion of the role the military plays now, and ought to play in the future, in American society and abroad.

To state that the US military is not necessarily or even remotely the primary, best, or even appropriate mechanism of guaranteeing American liberties, much less spreading them around the globe, is to utter a kind of secular blasphemy, despite the fact that such statements as the one above from Bush are, quite obviously, at best extremely reductive and at worst mendacious bullshit. This is because of the thoroughly mystified concept of "freedom" or "freedoms" inherent in orthodox patriotic discourse.

Um... and shit. The point is that nobody ever gets specific about exactly what "freedoms" are at stake when it comes to the role of the American military viz Teh Enemy. This is because nobody "official" really wants to talk about the actual reasons the military gets sent halfway around the fucking world to blow shit up and get shot at. It's much easier, even compulsory, to simply talk the pretty talk.

Fuck that shit.

I mean, let's look at the words and then at the facts: "Those who have died in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts fought for freedoms, which come at great cost."

What, no mention of the Merkin Revolution? Pity, since apart from perhaps WWII that's the only one out of this list where the doxa might have anything to do with reality. And even there, if we are going to define "freedom" as the right of the individual to make certain choices as opposed to others in terms of how they will live their lives (I'm even granting here a 21st-century internetty libertarian notion of agency, which I ordinarily sneer at as an absurd fairytale -- see, I can play nice!), unless we concede that modern Britons live under the Tony Blair-ian jackboot... well, it's a bit of a wash. Britain had already developed strong notions of individual rights; indeed, that's why the Revolution was possible in the first place. So if the Colonies had never gone hat in hand to France, why, even today you'd probably still have the legal right to bulk-email penis enlargement spam to a multitude of strangers.

Because as soon as we begin to consider the case of specific as opposed to rhetorical "freedoms," it is clear that no external "enemy" has ever posed nearly as much of a threat to them as have home-grown political and cultural interests. Let's take "freedom of speech," and run down Bush's list: did American troops in these wars really fight and maybe die to preserve the right of US citizens to freedom of speech?

Civil War: Granting that Northern troops really fought to end slavery, well, it did do the slaves some good in this area. Slaves did not have freedom of speech. But it is only sporting to note that the Confederate troops also very much fought to "preserve freedoms," as they saw them. I should dearly love to ask Our Leader some pointed questions in this regard: are the War of Northern Aggression dead included in his salutations on this sacred day? Why or why not? Beyond that, the amount of freedom of speech subsequently granted to former slaves and their descendants has been unquestionably greater in theory than in practice. But let's be charitable: GRADE: B+

WWI: The Espionage Act. Needed because the Kaiser was a-coming. I don't think so. GRADE: F.

WWII: The Good War. Nazi domination of the American Heartland would have sucked. But it was never likely. This may sound harsh, and is not remotely an argument against the Righteousness of the cause, but if the US had stayed out of WWII it would not have materially diminished the amount of freedom of speech enjoyed by Americans. On the other hand I liked Band of Brothers because it had the Office Space dude in it. GRADE: B

KOREA: What the fuck did this have to do with the capacity of Americans to speak their minds? GRADE: N/A

VIETNAM: See Korea, only much more of a fuckup. GRADE: N/A

Not a great transcript. The best that can be said for the role of the American military in protecting  American freedom of speech is that it exists and is big enough to deter any malevolent foreigners from invading us and depriving us of our God-given right to beat off to hot & cold-running digital porn. The military does not need to be as large as it is to accomplish this, though, and certainly if "preserve American freedom of speech" were the genuine as opposed to the rhetorical mission of the armed services, soldiers and sailors would nowadays face a wholly negligible risk of getting their tits blown off.

So, no, neither I nor anyone else owes anything significant to any member of the US armed forces when it comes to my exercise of free speech -- not historically, and not in the present.

The simple fact of the matter is that the US is not at any genuine risk of invasion by a foreign enemy. To the extent that we have foreign enemies nowadays, they are pretty pissant next to the Soviet Union. And while the military surely has a role in dealing with the threat posed by stateless terrorists, that role is wildly overstated and misunderstood.

Nuclear weapons largely made large standing armies obsolete: that's why the Cold War was cold. Such armies are still obsolete. It's no knock on the soldiers in Iraq now to say that they are being asked to do something they were never trained for, couldn't possibly have been trained for (you! the 19 year old from North Carolina! Go be a cop in Fallujah! WTF?) and cannot possibly accomplish. Humpty-Dumpty, you know. They're a 19th century tool in a 21st century global political context. "Stupid" does not begin to cover it.

But back to the point.

The cold truth is that not a single one of the Americans who have fought and died in Iraq have done anything at all to protect the "freedoms" of a single American citizen. And the colder truth is that without a profound rethinking of the whole point of the American military in this new century, it will be far less a guarantor of our democracy than a permanent temptation available to those inclined to seize it for illiberal ends.

I'll Join Your Canary Court

Posted today at FDL, pinch hitting for watertiger. Check it out. If you like.

The Enstupiding

With reference to this, well, what he said.

But on the specific issue of: IF WE LEAVE IRAQ WE'LL EMBOLDEN TEH TERRORISTS!

Well, at the moment, we've pretty thoroughly convinced the terrorists that we're absolute morons. So the question should be, will de-enstupiding ourselves embolden the terrorists?

Maybe. Honestly, though, they seem pretty fucking emboldened already, if you wanna know the truth.

I Never Asked for the Truth But You Owe That to Me

Atrios wonders why almost three quarters of the American populace thinks we're all passengers in the Brown Submarine, swirling 'round the Vortex of Porcelain Doom:

I'm fascinated by this 72% wrong track number. I'd like to understand it more. I'm not sure I have sense of the basic reasons why so many people think things are going to hell. We can all come up with various possibilities, and there won't be one single answer, but I still think there's probably a coherent narrative to be teased out. I'm just not sure what it is.

No, there's no one answer, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that 9/11 didn't change anything.

9/11 really was a trauma. Most Americans wanted to regroup from that trauma and find a renewed sense of national purpose, a new sense of unity; nothing seemed quite as petty and small as American politics as usual -- which after the Clinton impeachment nonsense, had seemed to have become particularly squalid.

But the Bushites and wingnuts were and are incapable, grotesquely so, of comprehending this desire for transcendence of ordinary politics in anything except the rawest political terms: 9/11 was for them a tremendous... political opportunity, no more, whatever their rhetoric. And they seized it, and wrung every last drop of electoral opportunity out of it that they possibly could.

And then Iraq turned from Mission Accomplished to Apocalypse Now.

Many, many Americans really did trust in Bush after 9/11. That trust, that belief, was horribly misplaced. But they didn't see it then, because they didn't want to.

Now, they see it.

Bush betrayed the trust of the American people in a deep, powerful way. He squandered their faith. And he won't be forgiven for it.

Me, I always thought he was a useless little fucker. But still, the "I told you so" tastes pretty damn sour.

I've Bored You, Crying My Life Away

Lost amid the general irritation with the Administration Appeasement Bill yesterday was this little nugget -- to my mind the most nauseating bit of the whole sordid affair:

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio choked back tears as he stirred memories of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to take them on? When are we going to defeat them?” he asked.

Fuck you. What else is there to say about that? Fuck you, you fake whiny demagogue, crying on cue about 9/11. Bathetic political theater played for stagey tears by invoking real tragedy, real corpses -- like a panto played in an abattoir. That's your modern GOP.

Video from Think Progress. 

We need Marlon Brando to smack him upside the head and yell "You can act like a man!"