Tell them the truth and they think it's hell
"Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds:

GATEWAY PUNDIT LOOKS INTO THE BACKGROUND of a Rumsfeld heckler. This reminds me of Matt Welch's old project of googling antiwar people to discover how many (quite a few) had been apologists for Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal efforts. Why don't the Big Media do this kind of thing?

Glenn Greenwald has correctly criticized Reynolds' and "Gateway Pundit's" attacks on Ray McGovern. Far from "heckling" Rumsfeld at a speech in Atlanta, former CIA analyst McGovern merely accurately reminded Rumsfeld that he had claimed to know where Iraqi WMD were hidden (video clip at Crooks and Liars). And far from "looking into" his background, most of what I saw at "Gateway Pundit" was merely a list of McGovern's appearances at doubleplusungood events with wrongthink badfolk. And none of it was relevant to McGovern's completely correct and appropriate question of Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld made McGovern seem like some kind of deranged heckler by denying he'd said anything about knowing where the WMD were, but ABC transcripts bear out McGovern. It's interesting that Reynolds' memory seems to have failed him too.

The "old Matt Welch project" Reynolds refers to was to google signatories to a "free Slobodan" petition, pure and simple.* While the presence of Harold Pinter and Ramsay Clarke on the list was duly noted, there wasn't any "anti-war gotcha" angle to it. (For one thing, there wasn't much of any war to be "anti" about -- it was February 2002, the Taliban were gone and Iraq was still in the future.) Welch was motivated by dislike/loathing for Milosevic and his apologists, not to score points in the US culture/politics wars. Of course that didn't fit into Reynolds' and his allies' smear-the-messenger mentality, so the record was more or less unconsciously adjusted.

Thus, this 47 word Instapost may set some kind of record for continuous, concentrated misinformation; judging by this effort, whatever you read at Instapundit, your best bet is to assume the opposite is true.

And what's behind mistaken memories of happy anti-war witchhunts of yore, or screeching "heckler," "moonbat," or "nutjob" when someone dares to actually challenge a Rumsfeld or a Bush? Maybe they just help push that burning sensation of knowing you're wrong back where you can ignore it again for a while. I'm reminded of what Harry Truman supposedly said about his famous "give 'em hell" slogan:

I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and the Republicans thought it was hell.

Nowadays, of course, they'd say he "bombed."


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* The reason I know this ancient history is because I joined in the project, and researched one petition signer: Peter Gingold -- a Holocaust survivor who had sued the U.S. for failing to bomb Auschwitz, yet later condemned the U.S./NATO intervention in Kosovo.
UPDATE, 5/7: The Reynolds phenomenon of high-density wrongness has been codiscovered and named; see The Wrongness Singularity, by Sean Carroll. What's exciting to the scientific community is that Carroll uses different data than I do to arrive at the same conclusion!
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:49:00 AM -- |    

 
Oy vey, can't you see

O'zog, kenstu sehn, wen bagin licht dervacht,
Vos mir hoben bagrist in farnachtigen glihen?
Die shtreifen un shtern, durch shreklicher nacht,
Oif festung zich hoiben galant un zich tsein?
Yeder blitz fun rocket, yeder knal fun kanon,
Hot bawizen durch nacht: az mir halten die Fohn!
O, zog, tzi der "Star Spangled Banner" flatert in roim,
Ueber land fun die freie, fun brave die heim!

A certain recent loose version of the same:

Amanece —­ ¿lo véis a la luz de la aurora?
Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer;
sus estrellas, sus franjas flotaban ayer,
en el fiero combate, en señal de victoria.
Fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertad,
por la noche decían: «¡Se va defendiendo!»
¡Oh, decid! ¿Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada,
sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada?

While people may quibble about the quality of the translations, at least neither version has anything about "the land of the English-speaking, and the home of people scared of anything they can't understand."



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NOTE: title borrowed from comment by 'Shaq from Brookline' at Balkinization. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:28:00 PM -- |    

 
ROTFLMAO
You probably haven't read about this yet, unless you read Atrios or Crooks and Liars or some lame site like that: Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Turns out he is a pretty funny guy. Colbert on the press:

As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

On the president:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

On White House personnel changes:

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

On the generals:

See who we've got here tonight. General Moseley, Air Force Chief of Staff. General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They still support Rumsfeld. Right, you guys aren't retired yet, right? Right, they still support Rumsfeld.

Look, by the way, I've got a theory about how to handle these retired generals causing all this trouble: don't let them retire! Come on, we've got a stop-loss program; let's use it on these guys.

All quotes via transcript by daily Kos diarist Frederick. Partial video at Crooks and Liars. Ultimately via eRobin as usual. The most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. By God, that is US! I wanna sign up!


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UPDATE, 5/1: complete video and transcript at Empire Burlesque, via riggsveda. There's also a Thank you Steve Colbert site. Dan Froomkin, billmon, Jim Henley, Peter Daou and doubtless many hundreds more comment; Froomkin aside, the lack of MSM coverage is noticeable if not surprising.
UPDATE, 5/2: James Wolcott also discusses the monologue "that Elisabeth Bumiller seems to have slept through face-down in her entree" (link added). What fun we have. OTOH, the New York Times online site is now putting l'affaire Colbert at the top of the page with an Arts section article by Jacques Steinberg. OTOOH, it's mainly populated with "not that funny" quotes, but does inform us that Colbert was booked by AP's Mark Smith, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:25:00 AM -- |    

 
Darfur rally ... "in the shadow of Iraq"
I went, as advertised, although I had to return home more or less as things started up. So you'll find more complete descriptions elsewhere -- here for example: Washington Post, "Divisions Cast Aside in Cry for Darfur."

I'd guess that by the 2pm official start time there were around 10,000 people assembled in the first major quadrant of the mall -- that is, I could imagine making a 100*100 square of people from the numbers I saw. Some spilled across the street to the next uninterrupted square of lawn and walkways, with streams more making their way to the rally site from the direction of the Washington Monument and elsewhere. So I'd guess the rally hit maybe 20,000 by the time headliners like Barak Obama and George Clooney spoke. Jewish groups, college groups, and some NAACP were the main organizations I noticed.

I heard the first speaker, whose name I couldn't catch, but who was introduced as a Holocaust survivor. He said many of the things you'd expect but also brought up Iranian president Ahmadinejad -- not surprisingly, given the public short shrift he's given what the speaker had survived, but still pretty much off-topic less than half a minute into his talk. I don't want to make too much of one slightly jarring digression, but it illustrated how impossible it is to keep a demonstration or rally focused like a laser beam on the topic at hand, whether those teddible teddible people with puppets and Palestinian shawls and naughty words show up or not.

One of the good slogans of the day was "Instead of mourning a genocide, stop one." In fact, it's on one of the t-shirts I bought to support the organizers and the cause of not just letting the victims in Darfur die and rot unremembered.

Still, people like Lawrence Kaplan are within their rights to ask just how we plan to stop this one. Writing for the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the New Republic as "Crisis Intervention"), Kaplan writes that "[j]ust as the shadow of Somalia loomed over policymakers a decade ago, generating excuses for inaction in Bosnia and Rwanda, the trauma of Iraq may now doom the rescue of Darfur."

I'll restate and then concede Kaplan's point that the case for unilateral U.S. military action in Darfur is stronger than that for, say, removing Iraq's fictional WMD. But are "savedarfurians" living in a fantasy world, as Kaplan implies?

The savedarfur.org requests of President Bush are, as Kaplan states, that the U.S., NATO and the international community should "provide immediate help to the African Union peacekeeping mission," and should "push the UN Security Council to authorize a UN peacekeeping force for Darfur" (Darfur Talking Points, Word document). Kaplan argues that reflexive reliance on the U.N. or the African Union on the one hand, and reflexive rejection of U.S. military solutions on the other amount to advocating ineffectual, unrealistic measures that will achieve precisely nothing for the victims of Darfur.

To which I mainly say, we'll never know until we've tried, and we need to try and retry the "non unilateral U.S. military" ideas before accepting Kaplan's judgment that "one thing and one thing alone: American power" will save Darfur. When Bosnia and Kosovo became consensus military action issues, it was too late for far too many -- but at least it was soon enough for the rest. (To that extent, the rallies today were in the wrong continent -- it's apparently more in Europe and Asia than in the U.S. where concern for Darfur victims needs to be kindled.)*

In his haste to paint savedarfur.org types as starry-eyed dreamers, Kaplan overlooks the rest of the savedarfur.org talking points. Specific Congressional bills and amendments** are cited that see to little details like, oh, feeding refugees and increasing assistance to current peacekeeping efforts. More importantly, Kaplan seems to ignore important specifics of Darfur crisis itself -- just as not everything is Munich, 1936, so not everything is Bosnia, 1994 either. It may be that "outsourcing" the Darfur problem -- if outsourcing is the right word for subsidizing Africa's own efforts to halt genocide on its own soil -- will suffice; by contrast, no one but NATO and the US had both the will and the regional brief to intervene to stop genocide in the Balkans.

If anyone is "in a bind of their own devising" it's Kaplan, not the "progressive voices" he claims are being naive and/or hypocritical. After all, were U.S. armed forces not stretched to the breaking point by what proved to be an unnecessary Iraq debacle, the prospects for a U.S.-led intervention in Darfur would be greater than they are (i.e., they would not be zero).

Kaplan can rant and rail, but outside his cubicle, the main alternatives for Darfur are not "maybe barely enough help soon" or "Shock and awe with Lawrence Kaplan and the 82d Airborne." They are "maybe barely enough help soon" or "maybe not even that." Luckily, the people at savedarfur.org aren't letting Kaplan's kind of "perfect" be the enemy of the good they're trying to do.


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* Moreover, there's various kinds of military action; not everything has to be "boots on the ground" and "no fly zones." I've read suggestions that something as simple as jamming communications could materially disrupt Sudanese/Janjaweed operations.
** Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (H.R. 3127 / S. 1462), and amendments to the FY 2006 H.R. 4939 funding bill allocating $173 million in aid to the African Union peacekeeping force and establishing a U.S. special envoy for the crisis.

UPDATE, 5/1: Red Hot Cuppa Politics responds, in part, "Bush has done every single thing regarding Darfur over the past year that folks have been howling that he didn't do with Iraq, with the predictable non-results. Thousands continue to be hacked, burned, shot, starved and raped." If at first you don't succeed, try again, and try harder; I don't think Darfur has been a front-burner issue yet for President Bush. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:05:00 AM -- |