Link Banana

This rerun is a great reason to love The Onion.

This picture may be the most awkward to ever feature an American president.

The much awaited and debated decision was finally made, but because this is still the George W. Bush administration, no action will be permitted to actually protect the animals.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

The whole world seems to be expect massive and sweeping change when a new president takes office in 2009. The Economist, which has a large special report elaborating the point, doubts that’s what will happen.

There are several ways in which the next president can indeed act fast to restore America’s world standing. But the list is short. The mere fact of not being Bush will bring a dividend of goodwill. On top of this, he or she should send out an early message that on some issues the change of guard will mean a change of heart. An America that closed Guantánamo, imposed a clear ban on any sort of torture (by the CIA as well as the army) and shut the CIA’s secret prisons could once again claim to lead the free world by example and not just by military power. A new president should also say more forthrightly than Mr Bush ever dared that America means to co-operate in the fight against global warming, and will consider joining the International Criminal Court. Mr Bush’s cavalier rejection of the Kyoto protocol, and his hostility to the ICC, did much to antagonise the world even before the war in Iraq.

All these would be welcome changes of substance and symbolism. But even this short list will throw up difficulties. Closing Guantánamo may require America to try the suspected terrorists it can build a case against but let the others go free—free, if nobody else takes them, on American soil. And although it is easy for a president to promise international co-operation on climate change, it is hard to make Congress enact laws that trample on vested interests, threaten to hamper growth or price Americans out of their huge cars. The Senate would not have ratified Kyoto even if Mr Bush had asked it to.

Proving myself right, I’ve again been ignoring Iraq news. Slate’s Fred Kaplan has some valuable details about the mess that’s engulfed Basra.

The fighting in Basra, which has spread to parts of Baghdad, is not a clash between good and evil or between a legitimate government and an outlaw insurgency. Rather, as Anthony Cordesman, military analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes, it is “a power struggle” between rival “Shiite party mafias” for control of the oil-rich south and other Shiite sections of the country.

Both sides in this struggle are essentially militias. Both sides have ties to Iran. And as for protecting “the Iraqi people,” the side backed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (and by U.S. air power) has, ironically, less support—at least in many Shiite areas, including Basra—than the side that he (and we) are attacking.

Also of note, Kaplan’s piece about what victory will really mean in Iraq.

Maybe I’m the only one who enjoys discussions about demographics and voting patterns, but I thought this was interesting:

America’s suburbs used to be bastions of Republicanism. No longer. Robert Lang of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, examined the voting behaviour of metropolitan counties and found that close-in suburbs now reliably vote for Democrats. That should be expected: as they become more urban, their residents care more about public transport, schools and other government-sponsored activities—and they attract more city types, often of a liberal bent, from the urban centres.

So emerging suburbs and exurbs, the farthest-out among them, are the new political battleground. George Bush poured resources into this urban fringe in 2004, says Mr Lang, running up larger margins there than when he lost the popular vote in 2000. The result was Mr Bush’s more impressive re-election.

David Bromwich’s piece in the New York Review of Books feels like the extension of the argument made by Ed Ruggerio about My Lai. His — decidedly anti-Bush — conclusion:

Yet nothing so much as language supplies our memory of things that came before today; and, to an astounding degree, the Bush and Cheney administration has succeeded in persuading the most powerful and (at one time) the best-informed country in the world that history began on September 12, 2001. The effect has been to tranquilize our self-doubts and externalize all the evils we dare to think of. In this sense, the changes of usage and the corruptions of sense that have followed the global war on terrorism are inseparable from the destructive acts of that war.

A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart said that he no longer found it possible to hate the president. I agreed then, and I still agree after seeing this. An explanation and more is at The Lede. As it describes the video:

The video is grainy, and Mr. Bush isn’t visible on most of it. But the lyrics, which poke fun at some of the most controversial moments in the Bush administration — the prosecution of vice presidential aide Scooter Libby, the collapse of his nomination of Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, to the Supreme Court — are almost entirely clear, over the laughter.

The New Republic does the unexpected: asks what white supremacists think of Obama’s success and possible succession to the Oval Office. The answer: not much of interest, although there’s some fun speculation:

But there may be one more factor at work: hatred overload. It’s a testament of sorts to Hillary Clinton that, by virtue of her cartoonish image as a leftist man-hating shrew, she manages to arouse more vitriol among white supremacists than a black man. Meanwhile, white racists absolutely despise John McCain for his support of George W. Bush’s immigration reform plan, which they view as a dire threat to America’s European-based culture. “I don’t think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain,” explains Duke. “In fact,” he added, “we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights.”

… Who knows, maybe David Duke can form the oddest MySpace group of all time: Klansmen for Obama. Now that would be post-racial.

(via Slate)

Nicholas Kristof’s latest column is worth perusing. He makes a rather cogent argument for both the repudiation of torture and swift justice for all detainees at Guantanamo.

The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Mr. Hajj.

Slate’s provided a way to make last night’s State of the Union interesting, and placed it within a historical context. Though I can’t vouch for the accuracy of their process, it does create interesting results. Through a “natural-language analysis” they’ve found the speeches fall into four distinct phases.

Monday night, a fourth and final Bush emerged, Crawdad tells us: “Legacy Bush.” New and year topped the list, along with leader, Congress, and agreement. Iraq(i) was also influential.

“As is common in most State of the Unions, Bush framed his thoughts in a nationalistic manner, using the words America(n), nation, good, people, and world very significantly,” Dooley tells Slate. “We note that Bush believes his legacy is still very much tied to Iraq and the Iraqi people.

You can also skip straight to their table of all of Bush’s addresses.

As we eagerly anticipate President Bush’s final State of the Union (right?), Jacob Weisberg takes an interesting look at whatever happened to “compassionate conservatism.”

To this day, Mr. Bush’s compassionate conservatism has never vanished completely. Some of Mr. Bush’s signature programs, like his initiative to provide AIDS drugs to Africans, have had meaningful effects. But others haven’t lived up to their rhetorical promise. What about that special training for defense lawyers in capital cases (pledged in his 2005 State of the Union address)? The initiative to encourage mentoring for at-risk children (2006)? The grants to extend health insurance coverage (2007)? Such gestures tended to linger in the air only as long as it took Mr. Bush to make them.

I admit, I’m morbidly fascinated by the life that has been taken on by the psuedo-intellectual name calling of Jonah Goldberg and his latest book Liberal Fascism. The latest one to address it is Slate’s Timothy Noah.

Modern liberalism, he argues, is linked to Nazism because both contain a cult of the organic (Hitler was a vegetarian) and both embrace sexual freedom (Himmler ordered his men “to father as many children as possible without marrying” in order to achieve the Aryan ideal). Eventually, Goldberg backs himself into asserting, in effect, that any government that does more than prevent abortions and provide for the common defense is inherently fascist. Granted, he gives a wide berth to the common defense. In a token criticism of President George W. Bush, Goldberg cites as evidence of fascist influence not the de facto suspension of habeas corpus and refusal to follow the Geneva Conventions, which go unmentioned, but rather Bush’s extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs.

After an appearance on The A Daily Show made him look silly to more people than will probably ever read his book, Liberal Fascism, Mr. Goldberg strikes back in a Los Angeles Times column.

Largely left on the cutting-room floor were some important points that might have made my book seem a bit more nuanced. When he railed about conservatives and gay marriage, I pointed out that in my book, I’m sympathetic to it. When he took shots at Republicans, I noted that I criticize the likes of President Bush and Pat Buchanan for being “right-wing progressives.”

In Vanity Fair, James Walcott has an decisive — which is not to say accurate — analysis of the myriad books about George W. Bush. Reading them primarily as insights into the author’s view of the man, Walcott makes absolutely clear he’s no fan of the president and his leadership methods. He goes all the way to make the unsubstantiated-but-interesting claim that Bush meant to create chaos and to appear out-of-touch and foolish.

But are we deceiving ourselves by projecting our values onto a blank screen? So much of the burgeoning Bush literature, both nonfiction and fiction, is built on the premise that the Bush-Cheney autarchy is a disastrous failure that can be diagnosed as a hulking case of hubris coupled with a righteous dose of blowback. … But perhaps we’re the ones living in Bizarro World, not the Bushies. Maybe from their vantage point inside the mother ship nearly everything’s worked out as intended, if not exactly as planned, and those in the highest circles have no more reason to examine their consciences or re-trace their steps than the perpetrators of a successful heist. For years, a few voices on the radical edges of the blogosphere have contended that sowing chaos in the Middle East, privatizing war to enrich their corporate sponsors, and letting things slide to hell at home were what the lords of misrule wanted—that the bungling and incompetence of the war and Katrina weren’t bugs, but features. After all, the post-Katrina diaspora has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans with the election of Bobby Jindal to the Louisiana governorship, his victory made possible in part by the dispersement of black voters displaced by the floods.

(via Slate)

Three interesting editorials were in the NY Times yesterday.

• America’s favorite anthropologist/geographer, Jared Diamond, wrote “What’s Your Consumption Factor?”
• Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton wrote a stinging rebuke of the CIA’s noncompliance during their work on the 9/11 commission, which led (perhaps forced) the Justice Department to open an investigation.
• And the Ed Board wrote this nice paragraph in a rebuke of Bush’s economic record.

Hoping for the best is facile if not paired with preparation for the worst. Perhaps more than anything, a lack of preparation makes it hard to believe Mr. Bush’s assurances that all will be well. The administration has operated in a state of economic denial for years: conducting wars while cutting taxes, piling up debt, neglecting to regulate the financial sector even as it went on a lending binge, and ignoring the pain that was sure to come when consumers, bankers and investors sobered up.