There is no show but Sideshow
Avedon Carol on Matt Bai's "New World Economy" attempt to revive the attack on Social Security:

Asserting that we need modern remedies for modern times must sound very nice over the fourth or fifth beer, but before Mr. Bai tells us that we must reinvent the wheel, perhaps he ought to explain what was wrong with the round one, and why a square one would do the job better.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:56:00 PM -- |    

 
There is no blog but Fafblog
Fafnir reporting from the war on Christmas:

'I hear they got Rudolph today,' says me.

And that's not even the best part. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:24:00 PM -- |    

 
Let's not screw this up, too
It's a little late, but I wanted to take up an element of Charles Krauthammer's The Truth about Torture, the subtitle of which ("It's time to be honest about doing terrible things") telegraphs the falsely pragmatic, "pieties"-dispatching direction the piece takes.

Krauthammer's essay has been, if not agreed with, at least respectfully received by Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kinsley, and others. Sullivan and Kinsley do creditable jobs of dispatching the "ticking time bomb" and -- what was it again -- the "slower-fuse high-level terrorist" justifications for Krauthammer's Rules of Torture, and I won't belabor their arguments here; they're worth reading, but my point lies elsewhere.

Having suggested -- against all evidence -- that a kind of innate American noblesse oblige protects detainees in American military prisons, Krauthammer concedes we are "duly disgraced" when we fail to meet that expectation. But then he continues:

The norm, however, is how the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo have been treated. We give them three meals a day, superior medical care, and provision to pray five times a day. Our scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Korans, which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo ever became an issue. That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.
(emphasis added)

Etcetera. "The document that inspires their barbarism." As far as I'm concerned, that verges on "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" territory -- the wholesale slander of an entire religion. Not worse, but close is how painfully stupid the sentiment is at this late date in the post 9/11 era -- both in principle and practically.

At the level of crude comparative theology, Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarqawi no doubt have their "Qu'ran's greatest hits," just as that nutbag who travels around harassing soldier funerals with anti-gay diatribes no doubt has his favorite passages in the Bible. Even as a wicked secular humanist, I would not conclude either is a document inspiring barbarism, because the texts obviously do no such thing -- indeed, rather the opposite -- for millions of others. It makes only a little less sense to argue Webster's Dictionary or its Arabic equivalent inspire barbaric talk and action ('after all, those words came from somewhere.')

But I think there's also a practical error hidden in Krauthammer's silly tough talk, one illustrated by the recent riots in France and Australia -- and their absence in this country (knock on wood, so far). In his recent New Republic article "Why haven't American Muslims turned to terrorism?", Spencer Ackerman has argued that the answer is that "the United States has successfully created the model for a Western Muslim identity." Rather than being hostile to Islamic religiosity per se, American liberalism and religious pluralism potentially gives Islamic believers the same freedom to believe and live as they please that other believers have enjoyed. The message that the West is hostile to Islam "doesn't appear compelling to American Muslims":

...And that's largely because U.S. freedom, even after September 11, is the freedom to be inviting to Islam. For American Muslims, the opportunity for a publicly visible--and, more importantly, normative--expression of religion removes a tremendous source of frustration that exists in both European and Middle Eastern countries.

Far from being an enemy within, inspired to barbarism by their creed, American Muslims are a potential strategic asset in our country's and our culture's struggle to blunt Islamist extremism elsewhere: "if the United States is looking for a way to win the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide, it ought to first look at what it has accomplished at home." As one Muslim youth activist puts it,

"The battlefield is identity, and the players are young people," he says. "When I first tell people about the Interfaith Youth Core, people say, 'Aw, what a sweet organization.' But there's another guy running a youth organization, and his name is Osama bin Laden."

The Bush administration is busy squandering that asset with its customary profligacy. Most of the attention in the warrantless NSA surveillance scandal is rightly on the sheer vandalism Bush and his henchmen (and women) are practicing on the constitutional system they're sworn to protect. But there's a practical cost to the war on terror(ists) as well -- if you accept that there's a political dimension to that war.

Based on news accounts and Attorney General Gonzales' press briefing, Marty Lederman notes that the illegal NSA surveillance guidelines only required that one of the parties involved in the intercept be "part of an organization or group that is supportive of al Qaeda." Many of the leads developed in the resulting "expanding chain" likely involved American Muslims, given that domestic surveillance is involved. For that community, much depends on how expansive the definition of "supportive" was. But it seems unlikely the Bush administration suddenly became conservative and cautious at this stage, having already thrown the the rule of law to the wind.

If so, civil liberties and due process were ignored in favor of suspicion by association. Meanwhile, luminaries like Krauthammer -- to say nothing of the cruder ilk inhabiting the Internet -- cast aspersions, make lazy assumptions, and generally do all they can to create diverging interests and enmity where none existed before.

We've thrown our reputation in the Muslim world into the wastebasket for the near future with Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. With a little bad luck and plenty of 'hard work' from our leadership, we can do the same with our fellow Muslim citizens. Let's roll up our sleeves like Bush likes to do -- and keep that from happening.


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EDITS, 12/21: "obviously" replaces longer phrase saying same thing, "that other believers" replaces "as other religious sects," "Attorney General" and "emphasis added" added, long sentence ending "The Bush administration" paragraph split in two. The rest is obviously so darned good it shouldn't be changed any further. :)
UPDATE, 12/23: David Kaplan, of U.S. News & World Report, 12/22, "EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants":In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned.
The article concludes: No dirty bombs or nuclear devices have ever been found - and that includes the post-9/11 program. "There were a lot of false positives, and one or two were alarming," says one source. "But in the end we found nothing." posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:19:00 AM -- |    

 
Trojan Horse Laugh
Sci-fi theme week continues with the title of a story from the 50s (I think), about a joke so good and so contagious it swept the planet, incapacitating economies and nations in its wake. While the words below clearly haven't done that, they're at least candidates for the Trojan horse laugh selective memetic breeding program:

James Wolcott, on payola for the CATO and Institute for Policy Innovation experts who then "...twirl their credentials like titty-tassles." The title is also good: "They're making the rest of us whores look bad!"
Laura Rozen, on the Deep West: "...Wyoming and Idaho, Cheney's Anbar province." Recycled because... because I can.
Fafblog, on the expiration of Patriot Act library snooping provisions: "Mwa-hahaha, you're too late!" says the terrorist mastermind escapin into the periodicals. "Now nothing can stop me from researching the history of your hometown's spicy marmalade festival!"
"He's in the microfiche," says the crusty ol librarian. "We'll never catch im now!"
Spartakus, on some listserv, widely distributed since then: Merry Christmas is the new "f**k you".

That reminds me: don't forget to drop by the Poor Man Institute and vote early and often for Wingnut Wanker of the Year, winner of the coveted Palme d'Hair. Merry Christmas Happy Holidays to almost everyone -- but a heartfelt "Merry Christmas" backatcha to Bill O'Reilly et al. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:50:00 PM -- |    

 
Aw, shoot
It's an odd thing to think you somehow know someone from watching him pretend to be someone else on TV, but that's how I felt about John Spencer, the actor who played Leo McGarry on "The West Wing." He died suddenly last week, and reading this item in the New York Times makes me feel I had about the right impression: a man toughened by life and marked by troubles with alcoholism (as in the series), who dealt with those troubles to become -- or remain -- an accomplished, respected, and well-liked man. He'll be missed. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:36:00 PM -- |    

 
Democracy Snow Crash
One of the most widely quoted science fiction paragraphs in recent times comes from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:

When it gets down to it--we're talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else ...*

Now it looks like the economic snow crash comes with a democracy and civil liberties snow crash as well: Iraqis get to vote for the regime that tortures them, while Americans get to vote -- maybe -- for the regime allowed to make up rules letting it illegally spy on them or hold them without charge for years.

Gloryosky! Democracy on the march -- a regressive march to a declining mean. It's something a Pakistani bricklayer might welcome, but Americans shouldn't, unless of course they're too busy shopping. At Wal-Mart. Because they have to.


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* Music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery. For now.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |