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A Heckuva Press Conference

Friday, October 26, 2007

Some days you just feel like phoning it in, and this is one of those days. On such days it’s nice to have something to write about that is so absurd, so monumentally outrageous, that it practically writes itself. I know, you’re probably saying that’s been the case since January 20, 2001, but some days are extra special.

Today, we hear once again about the folks at heckuva job FEMA. Not content with totally blackening their reputation during Katrina, they have decided to take the Administration’s penchant for press manipulation and manufactured news to new heights. Tuesday, FEMA deputy chief Harvey Johnson held a press conference. The Washington Post reports:

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the “commodities” being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters — in one case, he appears to say “Mike” and points to a reporter — and was asked an oddly in-house question about “what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration” signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.

As the Carpetbagger Report notes:

There were no tough questions, no skepticism, and nothing that strayed from the FEMA line. Just softball after softball. Why were the assembled reporters so pathetic?

Because they weren’t reporters at all. FEMA hosted a press conference with questions from FEMA staffers pretending to be reporters.

There is, of course, a perfectly good reason for this piece of fakery:

Asked about this, [deputy director of public affairs Mike] Widomski said: “We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute.”

But the staff did not make up the questions, he said, and Johnson did not know what was going to be asked. “We pulled questions from those we had been getting from reporters earlier in the day.” Despite the very short notice, “we were expecting the press to come,” he said, but they didn’t. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.

Well, there’s no reason not to top off a performance like that with a truly Bush league pack of transparent lies.

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He can’t define torture, and doesn’t know it when he sees it

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Several Senators are now saying their vote on Mukasey depends on whether he acknowledges that waterboarding is torture.

Isn’t it a bit late for that. If he admits it now, it’s only under pressure, so it’s completely meaningless. I don’t know anything about the man. Maybe he was honorable in his former life. But he’s now working for George Bush and the operative assumption should be that he is a liar and that he will say anything to get what he wants. So if it truly looks like he has to say waterboarding is torture, he’ll say it, and then after he’s confirmed he’ll forget he said it.

At this point, the only truly effective action the Democrats could take would be to turn the man down for being unable or unwilling to answer the question in the first place. No second chances. The next guy may be even worse, so turn him down too. If no one is ever confirmed we will be no worse off than if one were.

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Rock ‘N’ Roll

Thursday, October 25, 2007

A first here at CtBlue: a guest writer.

I mentioned last week that my family went to see Tom Stoppard’s new (to the U.S.) play, Rock ‘N’ Roll, which is actually still in previews here after a run in London. My brother in law, Eric von Dorster, went with us and we prevailed upon him (he has a graduate degree in theatre and he’s a Yale major in English) to write a review. I mean, why not? The play is extremely political, and so is this blog. Stoppard is a rock ‘n’ roll fan, and so is this blog. So, we hereby venture into dramatic criticism with a review of Stoppard’s play:

On October 20, I accompanied the famed blogger John Wirzbicki and his lovely wife Mary (recent developments in journalism require me to identify her at this point as my sister) to a preview of the New York production of Tom Stoppard’s latest play Rock ’n’ Roll at the Jacob Theatre. Directed by Trevor Nunn and starring noted British actors Brian Cox, Rufus Sewell and Sinead Cusack, the play follows the lives of the denizens of Prague and Cambridge, England, from 1968 to 1990, the period during which Czechoslovakia faced a Russian invasion and its consequences.

Stoppard notes in his introduction to the printed text of the play the parallels between Jan (the main character) and himself:

He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came to England directly as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.

The playwright had dealt with Czech events in earlier works like the television play Professional Foul and a curious comedy, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, that pairs a school-boy fifteen-minute production of Hamlet performed in Dogg’s language with an underground production of Macbeth acted out in a Prague living room and interrupted by a sinister government agent. The character of Cahoot was based on Czech playwright Pavel Kohut. In Rock ’n’ Roll Stoppard imagines what his life might have been like had he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Russian invasion.

Into the historical events Stoppard has woven a family drama of three generations and a meditation on the revolutionary power of rock and roll. The play opens in Cambridge in 1968, with sixteen-year-old flower child Esme listening to a mysterious piper (later identified as Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd fame) singing ‘Golden Hair’. In a clever bit of casting, the actress playing the part will later play her teenaged daughter and the actress playing her mother (the brilliant Sinead Cusack) plays first her mother Eleanor and then Esme as an adult.

Esme’s father is Max (played with authority by Brian Cox) a British communist who sees the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as commendable. Supporting a noble theory he condones flaws in the resulting practice. He argues with his young Czech protégé Jan (played with great energy by Rufus Sewell), who decides to return to Prague to confront the Russian challenge, ending the heated discussion with, “Then fuck off back to Prague. Sorry about the tanks.” Max’s wife is Eleanor, a scholar of classical Greek whose lessons on Sappho throughout the play oppose Max’s rational point of view with untamed passion. She is recovering from a masectomy and in a scene later in the play rages against what she sees as her body’s betrayal.

After an abrupt blackout pierced with the Rolling Stones’ ‘It’s All Over Now’, the scene shifts to Prague, where Jan is being interrogated by a sinister government agent. The music that plays throughout the performance – a dozen or more rock classics from the period – is not just used to give life to the production. Jan soon becomes involved with the plight of a rock band from Prague called the Plastic People of the Universe, whose arrest led toprotests that precipitated the fall of the Russian-backed government. Ignoring ideology, the Plastic People just wanted to play their Zappa-inspired free-form music, sport long hair and live a liberated lifestyle. Brought back throughout the play is the life of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, who left the band following a battle with mental illness and went to live in Cambridge.

Stoppard weaves together these tales of politics, family crises and rock and roll seamlessly, showing how our daily lives are composed of such various concerns. We come to love the crusty ideologue Max and his idealistic pupil Jan, to worry about Eleanor’s medical condition and her daughter’s dilemma as offspring of intellectuals. By the final scene, at a Rolling Stones concert in Prague in 1990, as we watch Jan and Esme in the crowd, we too have experienced the roller coaster of events that have shaped their lives.

I should add, though, that for some in the audience a bitter taste lingered, the result of watching history roll by inexorably, both global and personal. Stoppard has given us a true picture of life, bittersweet life in which the joys and tragedies are both ever-present.

Eric von Dorster

I should add here that though Eric went to Yale, he actually did learn something there, as opposed to a certain President of the United States whose name shall go unspoken but who shall be an eternal blot on Yale and, for that matter, on this state which must bear the onus of being his birthplace. (Sorry, these insults to the Shrub are totally irrelevant to this piece and beneath even me. However, I can’t help myself and I’m leaving them in.)

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If you want respect from Democrats, become a Republican

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Does anything show the spinelessness and political stupidity of the Democrats more than the telecom immunity bill? This has almost nothing to do with helping the telecoms, though it will surely do that. Bush doesn’t care about anyone but his own crime organization. Other criminals normally have to take care of themselves. No, Bush wants to put a lid on the discovery process in the civil suits against the telecoms, because his own criminality, and that of his administration will be revealed yet again. Why he even cares at this point is an open question. National security has nothing to do with it, of course. Witness the many times they’ve revealed classified information to get even a momentary political advantage.

While Bush is just being Bush, the Democrats continue to be Democrats. Bravo to Chris Dodd for showing some real leadership on this issue, but what’s with Harry Reid refusing to honor Chris’ hold on the bill? I guess if you want any respect from Harry Reid, you have to be a Republican. Unless I’m missing something, Harry is going to make Chris do what he has never forced the Republicans to do-actually engage in a full bore filibuster.

It would take a Shakespeare to properly express the outrage that this latest example of Democratic cowardice provokes. Then again, even Will, if he were alive today, might find that words fail him.

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Coup coming in Ecuador

Thursday, October 25, 2007

This situation will bear watching :

Ecuador’s leftist President Rafael Correa said Washington must let him open a military base in Miami if the U.S.wants to keep using an air base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.Correa has refused to renew Washington’s lease on the Manta air base, set to expire in 2009. U.S. officials say it is vital for counter-narcotics surveillance operations on Pacific drug-running routes.

There are three likely outcomes here, provided Correa doesn’t change his mind. In increasing order of likelihood they are:

1. The U.S. will comply with international law and its own word (embodied in a contract) and leave Ecuador when the lease is up.

2. Correa will be killed.

3. There will be a coup. (see, e.g., Allende’s Chile).

Actually, the latter two have a pretty much equal probability.

Correa is doing us a favor by kicking us out of his country. We aren’t doing the world any favors by having bases all over the world, and we aren’t doing ourselves any either. We are stretched too thin and we don’t have the money anymore. At some point, Britain recognized that the jig was up and withdrew from Empire voluntarily, after having its ass kicked in a few places to drive the lesson home. We don’t seem to be learning. My guess is that Correa won’t be in power by the time that lease expires, and the poor Ecuadorians will be stuck with a right wing government for several years.

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Back from the Shadows, yet again

Thursday, October 25, 2007

If you have tried to access this site in the last two days you were probably unsuccessful. This may have raised hopes in your breast that I would no longer be inflicting my ravings on an already beleaguered world.

Alas, I must dash your hopes. The problem was not with me, but with the server, which was down for almost two days. I was assured early yesterday morning that service would be restored sometime around 7:00 AM on Wednesday, but in fact it was not restored until the small hours of the morning on Thursday.

I know this comes as a disappointment to some, but I’m back.

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I never lost faith-well, hardly ever

Monday, October 22, 2007

Now that the Red Sox have won the pennant, I just want to say that despite what I may have said in the past, which might have led some to believe the contrary, I never for a moment lost faith in them. I may have said I expected them to fold, I may even have said it was a certainty, but that was only a smokescreen to hide the supreme confidence that I actually felt. After all, certain things are expected of us Red Sox fans, a sense of impending doom being first among them. It would have been churlish of me to disappoint my readers, particularly the Yankee fans among them, had I not acted true to type.

As to the coming Series. I am, as always, supremely confident that the Red Sox will win. After all, have the ever let me down before?

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Bush’s Imperial Ambitions-there from the start

Monday, October 22, 2007

Atrios notes that this article in the American Prospect by John Judis represents a breakthrough of sorts-a recognition by a beltway media type that Bush’s foreign policy is essentially imperialistic. It’s well worth a read, since it summarizes well the arguments for that characterization and the reasons why imperialism is a failed strategy in foreign relations in this day and age. It does not, unfortunately, deal with the damage imperialism does to republicanism. The two are essentially incompatible. Ask any ancient Roman or Athenian.

While the article is worth reading it has its flaws. This brought me up short:

When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, however, his foreign policy echoed not only that of neo-isolationist Republicans like former Majority Leader Dick Armey, but also that of America’s foreign policy before we decided in 1898 that we had to get involved in the struggle for empire. That was an America that not only scorned empire but was oblivious to much of the outside world. Bush disdained international organizations. He withdrew the United States from the Kyoto climate treaty and whatever other international agreements had yet to be ratified. He was a unilateralist, but he was reluctant to use America’s singular power to affect the governments of other countries. His highest defense priority was the erection of an anti-missile system, the purpose of which was not only to make the United States impregnable from foreign attack, but also to reduce the reliance of the U.S. on other countries for its security.

All that changed after September 11. Bush retained his unilateralism, but he now wedded it to an aggressive strategy for dealing with America’s enemies.

In developing a response to September 11, Bush fell under the influence of neo-conservatives in his administration and in Washington policy circles. These neo-conservatives believed that the United States should use its superior military power to intimidate and overthrow the regimes of “rogue states” like Iraq that challenged American hegemony. (One typical slogan was “rogue state rollback.”) The neocons didn’t favor colonialism, but believed that by exerting its power the United States could produce regimes that did its bidding. After September 11, they spoke openly of creating a new American empire. “People are now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire,'” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer exulted.

This comes dangerously close to believing what Bush said, rather than what he did. None of the actions described in the first paragraph is incompatible with imperial ambitions. Why, for instance, participate in international treaties when you would prefer to impose your own solution (or non-solution, in the case of climate change). The idea that Bush lacked imperial ambitions prior to 9/11 rests on a few faulty premises. First, that the Bush who campaigned as a person who favored dealing with other nations with a proper amount of “humility” (Remember that? It seems incredible, doesn’t it.) was telling the truth about his intentions, and that his actions in the few months prior to 9/11 were illustrative of his ultimate objectives. (When I refer to Bush in this article I mean the Bush organization, not merely the sometime puppet we have all grown to loathe).

The first premise fails because it ignores the first law of Bush. Whenever Bush says anything that sounds the least bit responsible, he is lying. This is almost a law of nature. More importantly, though, Judis ignores the fact that Dick Cheney, the biggest, meanest neo-con of them all was pulling Bush’s strings from the very start, and that from day one, long before Osama handed him the rope he would hang himself with, Bush was determined to attack Iraq. We know this from Paul O’Neil and others. His objectives were imperialistic from the start, he simply did not yet have the political capital to implement them. 9/11 didn’t change Bush, it liberated him.

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Yet another strained baseball metaphor

Sunday, October 21, 2007

The New York Times asks: Are the Red Sox Ready to Become the New Yankees?“. In a bit of sports writing that sounds, in places, like those articles we see so often in which Republicans like David Brooks give “well meant” advice to Democrats, William Rhoden of the Times warns of the dangers to the Red Sox should they supplant the Yankees as the perennial champs in the AL:

The best way for Boston to vanquish the Yankees is to become more like the Yankees. For the first time in a long time, the Red Sox are in position to make the transformation. Boston can become the new New York.

The door is open for the Red Sox, with a rich baseball tradition and a high payroll, to replace the Yankees as the team the nation loves to hate. The question is whether the Red Sox, after years of being the object of sympathy and even pity, can adjust to being despised.

With the Yankees’ empire in decline, the implications for Boston are significant and perhaps terrifying. The Red Sox could sign Alex Rodriguez, and he and pitcher Josh Beckett could be anchors of a Boston dynasty.

…

Look around. The pursuit of winning has tempted some of us to break rules, tear moral fiber, take performance-enhancing drugs and jettison a manager who failed to lead his team past the first playoff round for three consecutive years.

I would ask Boston fans whether they really want to see their team do this. Do they want a franchise whose ethos is that winning titles is the only thing?

We Red Sox fans appreciate the concern New York is showing for the corrosive effect that winning may have on our characters, a concern that appears to have been wholly lacking for their own characters lo these many years. We never knew they were suffering so much through all those winning seasons.

Still, there is a kernel of truth in what the Times has to say. All these years the Red Sox have tried hard, played hard, and played fair only to find that in the end the guy with the most money wins. This lesson, reinforced through many dark years, has sunk in well enough that we here in New England have extended it from the world of sports to the world of…well-the world. It is no surprise to us, for instance, that the unqualified George Bush, the candidate of the monied interests, has twice managed to steal the presidency despite the best but often bumbling efforts of the Red Sox of our political system- the Democrats. As in baseball, so in life-money rules.

But we New Englanders have refused to accept this harsh reality. As the Democrats turned into perennial also-rans, they, like the Red Sox, became ever more popular here in New England. Now, with ultimate success staring both the team and the party straight in the face; with their hated rivals at least temporarily on the ropes, both the Red Sox and the Democrats face similar challenges: Can they stay winners yet remain true to the inner loser in their souls? Or does winning, like power, always corrupt?

Unfortunately, recent events don’t bode well for the Democrats. They appear to await only a Democratic president to become almost as corrupt as the pinstriped Republicans and lobbyists they supplanted. As for the Red Sox I still have faith. As I write this they are about to start game seven of the playoff series with Cleveland. By all measures, the odds should be with them. Yet is there a soul in New England that has that arrogant confidence that was the hallmark of Satan’s team for so many years? No, we hold our breaths, expect the worst and pray for the best. It will take more than one pennant to quell the inner loser in our breasts, for we dwell in the real world, not that fantasy beltway world in which the past is never forgotten and the future is never anticipated.

By the way, I must say here that if Cleveland triumphs tonight, I shall root for them to beat the team from Colorado. I always favor the AL team, except, of course, when that team is from New York.

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Off to NY

Friday, October 19, 2007

We’ve got a busy weekend ahead, so most likely I won’t be inflicting anything on the net for a while.

Tomorrow we’re going to the Big Apple to see a preview of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘N’ Roll and Sunday we’re going to a Courtney Fund Raiser in Essex.

I am still disappointed with Joe over the MoveOn vote, but I’m hoping that a few days breathing air outside the beltway will bring him back to reality.

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