Revolution 2.Oh Dear

Well, shit. I spend a month mourning a death in the family and all hell breaks loose around the world. That'll teach me to take a break.

Count me among the jaundiced observers of everything from the protests in Madison to the civil war in Libya.

 As someone who makes her living from creating and deploying large scale web-based collaboration sites and always thinking of new ways to incorporate differing communications modes into those sites, I'm distinctly unimpressed by the breathless rah-rah promotion of "social network" tools as some kind of key to a new kind of revolution. If you can Tweet it, they can track it.

Like, duh.

Slowly Returning

Life slowly returns to normal.

I've been watching a lot of stuff from Netflix - on demand and DVDs - as I've been wading through my  emotional detritus these last two months. I cam across a very interesting British detective series I recommend to anyone. It's called Life on Mars and has two very short (by US standards) seasons of eight episodes each. The basic premise is a contemporary police detective, Sam Tyler, is involved in a car accident. He wakes up in 1973, still a police detective in the same city. Much psychopathy ensues. The first season deals with a specific problem from Sam's past (which is the series' present) while the second season tries to provide a satisfactory explanation of what the hell is happening. It is a brilliant bit of story telling.

Recovery Strategy for Very Serious People

So, it seems that David Broder has put into words what is on the Collectively Wise Mind of the Very Serious People in DC and it has put people into a bit of a tizzy. Links below:

• Blake Hounshell (Foreign Policy) - Has David Broder lost his mind?
• Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research) - David Broder Calls for War With Iran to Boost the Economy
• Brad DeLong - There Should Be Resignations in Protest and on Principle from the Washington Post Today...
• Mark Thoma (Economist's View) - "David Broder Calls for War With Iran to Boost the Economy"
• George Washington (Via Naked Capitalism) -  Washington Post Idiocy: Calls for War With Iran to Save America's Economy
• The Shrill One -Wag The Dean

Of all of them, Krugman has the most fun (and gets to the heart of the matter most quickly) with Broder's post.  I am a bit amazed at the seriousness of the responses, especially by the economists, who try to demonstrate the idiocy and denounce the suggestion. Paul's ironic, almost laconic, reply cuts to the chase: This is a pronouncement by one of the Very Serious People, and so must be taken more seriously than the silly scribbles of shrill economists or their equivalents in other intellectual fields. This is the High Priest of Bi-Partisanship who has spoken, and Bob Somerby's Incomparable Archives give us a decade of equally gobsmackingly dumb statements that have governed the course of the nation.

To Paraphrase Howard Baker

What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?

A) Less than Bush and Cheney, who made contempt for the rule of law the centerpiece of their administration.

B) Long after Bush and Cheney went forward with their plans to make torture the new normal.

Yeah, I'm pissed at the cowards in Congress, too, and with the lack of backbone in the Democratic leadership. I'm pissed about both of those situations today and not just on the topic of torture.

The trouble is that the hoopla over Pelosi is doing the Republican's dirty work for them by implying that she has some responsibility for the policy of torture, rather than her true responsibility, which was reviewing, comprehending, and opposing such policy.

The crime lies first and foremost with the people responsible for authorizing the use of torture. Once they have been made to answer for their original crimes against humanity and the nation, then we can get around to the pissant Congress critters who may or may not have been informed fully and unequivocally about the use of torture.

And on the question of who knew what ands when, Alegre links to an NPR article on Sen. Bob Graham where he flatly rejects the CIA's claim to have informed Speaker Pelosi on waterboarding:

Graham says the CIA was initially reticent when he told the agency what he had found in his notes.

"They said, 'We will check and call back,'" Graham recalled. "When they finally did a few days later, they indicated that I was correct. Their information was in error. There was no briefing on the first three of four dates."

Graham says the agency offered no explanation regarding how it came up with the other dates.

The Sept. 27, 2002, briefing occurred about three weeks after the briefing in which the CIA says it told Pelosi about the use of waterboarding, a technique also described as simulated drowning. Graham, like Pelosi, says waterboarding was not mentioned during his briefing.

"There was no discussion of waterboarding, other excessive techniques or that they had applied these against any particular detainees," he says.

Pelosi has charged that she was misled by the CIA. Graham puts it another way.

"Nothing that I can recall being said surprised me or has subsequently proven to be incorrect," he says. "It was a matter of omission, not commission."

Graham says he is not surprised at the CIA's claims, noting that within a week of its Sept. 27 briefing, the agency presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee its National Intelligence Estimate of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was later shown to be flawed.

"I'm not impressed with the credibility of the CIA as it was being led in 2002," Graham says. "I think it had become an agency that instead of following the admonition to speak truth to power, it was trying to speak what it thought power wanted to hear."

Pelosi's claim of being misled at the time may not be formally correct, but the CIA has now been caught in an outright lie about what meetings it held and what topics it covered.

The proper paraphrase of Howard Baker is:

What did the Bush/Cheney administration order done and what steps have they taken to cover up their crimes?

Anglachel

PS - Sarah on Corrente is also channeling Howard Baker - Defending Nancy Pelosi

Focus of Attention

Hillary will be Secretary of State.

Something I find fascinating about that article is the URL. The name of the file is "01clinton.html". The article is about the "security" (note - not foreign policy) team that Obama has assembled, yet it is filed under Hillary's name. This makes me think about a few things.

The chattering class and their avid readers in Whole Foods Nation are still more obsessed with their internal demons than with the fate of the nation. Stanley Fish's article on calumny aimed at the Clintons is as relevant today as when it was first published, and this is a danger to liberal politics. The fault line within the Democratic Party remains.

Next, the Neocons have succeeded in getting international relations and foreign policy intrepreted as police actions. It's not a policy team, it's a security team. The parts of the article not drooling over the presumed battle against the evil Clintons plays up the toughness and hawkishness of the new team, with emphasis on terrorism rather than the true international danger, which is the world wide collapse of economies.

The problematic emphasis on the Bush-style use of terrorism (The bad guys are gunna git you if you don't give us what we want) that so many of the Very Serious People want to promulgate, as though the problem with Bush/Cheney was the mode of execution and not the foreign and domestic policy objectives, focuses on the guys caught on video camera in train stations and hotel lobbies, the viscerally menacing Other, all too like the raging shooters at schools and malls. This terrorism is photogenic, adapts well to endless video loops on CNN, and allows the talking heads to hyperventilate.

What we don't see is the struggle for power in Pakistan, where the military continues to defy the civilian government, and where decades old US-USSR cold war operations continue to generate blowback. The Vale of Kashmir may be the single most dangerous flashpoint on the planet at the moment. We have an incoming president who has repeatedly voiced critical and belligerant opinions about Pakistan. We now have a Secretary of State who has connections to the (note relative term) more democratic elements in the country. And this is just one of the foreign policy challenges facing the new administration.

It may send WKJM into apoplexy, but the worst job in the world has been put into very good hands.

Anglachel

Ahem

Trudeau:
Haven't been hearing too much about this particular topic recently, have we?

After all the screaming about how The Precious was going to resolve Bush's War and bring the troops home and give us Peace In Our Time, which that evil war mongering Hitlery would never do, I haven't been hearing very much about these plans.

Maybe it's a little harder to be anti-war outside of the rarified environment of the University of Chicago? Maybe he never meant a word of it in the first place, but knew it was a great way to get the guilty Blogger Boyz to sign on, helping them atone for their original war support?

Maybe it was just a campaign tactic?

Ahem, can we have an answer to how The Precious is going to end our occupation of Iraq? That means everyone home ASAP, right? Right? How hard can it be for the guy everyone told me had all the answers?

When is The Precious bringing Ray home?

Anglachel