It is with some trepidation that I return to blogging with flaccid writing muscles weak from disuse to take on the likes of Jeff Alworth. I should probably work my way back more slowly with posts on safer topics like the coming Rove indictment or the Miers nomination, and get the muscles back in shape. On the other hand, there's something to be said for just diving into the deepest water you can find when jumping off a cliff, and anyway, blogging is about saying the things you think need to be said and responding to whatever needs responding to, and a post Jeff wrote on Friday had me thinking all weekend until the words started tumbling out and I found that I was talking to myself. Out loud. A sure sign that blogging is required to vent the potential implosion. So here goes.

In a post called 'Democratic Party: Which Direction?', Jeff analyzes the current state of the party and then offers some thoughts about the direction it should go in. The analysis is spot-on, as usual--

The question about the direction the Democratic Party is timely. This weekend, the Oregon Dems (my home-state party) will gather to discuss the question (characterized as Winning the West). As if on cue, a group closely aligned with the Democratic Leadership Council yesterday released a report that offers a defense of the moderate position.

The problem, as I see it, is that both camps have approached strategy in reaction to the success of the GOP machine. The liberal base thinks it's adequate to brush off the old mid-century ideas (from our three-letter champions, FDR, JFK, and LBJ) and re-sell them to a duped population. Moderates think we can borrow the most popular planks from the GOP platform--those that don't make a mockery of our own platform--and repackage them as Democratic ideas.

--but his solutions, while better than usual, still manage to make the same basic mistake that everybody else's solutions make.

So we need to redifine politics again--not by reacting to the definitions set by the Republicans. There are two challenges confronting the country in the 21st Century, and both are new. The first is the collapse of the environment. Far from an abstract problem, as we've seen with Rita and Katrina, its effect can be to kill hundreds and sack an economy--all within a matter of days. The second is the threat of terrorism, which the GOP has been uniquely incompetent to address. There are other important issues as well--the economy central among them. Democratic views on the economy, however, have not substantially changed over the course of 50 years. The Party still depends on labor and will always side with the interests of the middle-class and poor over the wealthy and corporate. Whatever waffling we've seen is mostly political maneuvering. Social justice issues, likewise, are not up for discussion. We will never abandon a woman's right to choose nor equal rights nor civil liberties.

In addressing all of these issues, we must return to the language of equality and connectivity, but transform it to 21st Century realities. The environment and the war on terror are problems whose solutions can't be solved by cowboy politics. They cross regional and national boundaries, and they tie us together--through the air, water, and through our increasingly mobile society. We the Bush administration to thank for at least one thing: they've shown the cowboy politics frame--that we can shoot our way to peace and buy our way to climate stability--is an undeniable failure.

He may ultimately be right but he's still putting the cart before the horse by talking about 'issues'. He's also underestimating the debilitating effect of the DLC on the thinking of the party as a whole. Let's take the last first.

The Democratic party has at this point absorbed the idea that America has turned to the Right--which it has--and adapted its policies to suit. It believes it has to do that to get elected and getting elected is its first priority. That belief pretty much traps them in a reactive mode: they are following what they think people believe, not leading them. All that does is convince people now trained to believe it that the Dems are opportunists who will say whatever they think they have to say to get elected. More importantly, that's what it makes them.

The modern Dems don't just waffle, they follow trends and they vote the polls. The DLC makes policy and direction decisions based on polls. There are very few modern Democrats who have demonstrated a lick of immutable principle or marked a line they won't cross. They've continually violated core Left values with votes for the bankruptcy bill, tax 'reform', the war in Iraq, and annual budget bills that attack the poor, the environment, and labor and favor corporate interests over the public interest, to name a very few out of the many in the last five years. Those votes weren't forced on them. Nobody held a gun to their heads. They were perfectly willing to throw their traditional constiuencies to the wolves in the name of expedience. That make them precisely what conservatives label them: gutless cowards who will bend whichever way the wind blows.

Moreover, the effect of the DLC's propaganda over the past two decades or so, along with their support for candidates with similar mindsets, means that the modern Dermocratic Party is shot through with right-leaning corporate 'centrists' who actually believe the Pub agenda is correct but think it 'goes too far too fast'. Even if they learn to talk 'the language of equality and connectivity', they won't act on it because it goes against their core beliefs and the core beliefs of their corporate sponsors. This--'The Party still depends on labor and will always side with the interests of the middle-class and poor over the wealthy and corporate'--is, unfortunately, mythology. It isn't true. Time and again the DLC-dominated Dems have done exactly that: sided with the wealthy and the corporate over the middle-class and the poor. There is no sign that they are going to abandon that policy of betrayal anytime soon. And personally, I wouldn't be willing to bet that they wouldn't at some point abandon the rest of your issues as well if those, too, offended their corporate backers.

Face it, Jeff: the DLC has had almost 20 years to make the Democratic party lazy and scared, a shadow clone of the Pubs, and it has succeeded. The Democratic party isn't pretending to be the Republican-Lite party. it is the Republican-Lite party. That's how it sees itself and that's who gets promoted in it, Dean notwithstanding. They'll do less damage than the radcons if they take over, but the party's direction will not fundamentally change.

As for the first proposition--the cart before the horse--it's undeniably true that the radicals on the Right have brow-beat the American electorate into believing a bunch of hooey about how Social Darwinism is some form of tough-love and that corporate interests are their interests, too. Before we can get them to even listen to rhetoric about 'inclusion' and 'equality' and 'connectivity', we're going to have to explain what the terms mean and then convince them all over again that those are laudable goals worth fighting for. The radical Pubs have put us in the position of having to first educate the population to the idea that 'freedom' means more than being allowed to make more money than your neighbor, that 'equality' is about more than quotas, that 'the public interest' isn't code for 'ripping off the taxpayer', that 'liberty' is more than an obligation to defend greed, and that 'security' is more than protecting yourself by using your neighbor as a shield.

That's a long-term effort that's going to require courage and being willing to lose to make your point. The modern Democratic party is flat not up to it. In fact, it's not even interested in it. Any discussion like this is wasted if it's pegged to a party that won't listen much less act.

I've been pretty sick the last couple of weeks and haven't been up to blogging--or much of anything else except sleeping. I'm feeling a little better now but while I still can't take on a substantial post, I've been reading a bit and ran into some things I wanted to pass on.

* Mustang Bobby, who has a theatrical background, watched the Emperor's press conference and has some thoughts about how he looked.

He seemed bored, frustrated, and he repeated his lines as if he was tired of saying them over and over again. He appeared to be defensive without being provoked, even handling the part about showing compassion for the poor and the destitute as if it was somehow a tough thing for him to own up to acknowledging that there was a problem. More than once I thought of one of Bob Newhart's old routines, even down to the stammer and the REM.

* Juan Cole takes on the Plame Affair and minces no words.

The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department official, had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. Everyone should remember that when former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill decided to come out with a tell-all memoir about being in the Bush cabinet for a year, he proclaimed, "I'm old, I'm rich, and there is nothing they can do to me" (or words to that effect). Then all of a sudden the Bush administration was finding signs of classified documents in O'Neill's book, implicitly threatening him with spending the rest of his life in jail for having revealed government secrets. O'Neill feebly protested that he had not had access to classified documents. But all of a sudden he disappeared from the airwaves. He had discovered that there were, too, things that could be done to him. He must have been astonished that the Bushes of Kennebunkport would behave like Vladimir Putin. Everyone always underestimates the malevolence of the Bushes of Connecticut.

* Rob from realtique went back to New Orleans a couple of days ago to try to rescue some animals belonging to friends. His description of what they found is as spare, tight, and enlightening as anything Hemingway ever wrote.

We drove down Carrollton, in Mid-City, searching for a house not far from the initial 17th St. levee breach. The sister of the man who lived in the house had called me while we were driving to New Orleans, asking us to rescue her brother's cats. He'd been injured in the storm and, she said, needed something to live for. Along the way, we ran into a couple of official animal rescue volunteers in a white van. We gave them the address of a 9th ward Yorkshire Terrier on our list, the pet of a nursing-home resident, who was sure her dog was dead. They gave us air-filter masks and agreed to check on the dog.

After driving down a few streets covered in a dingy film, past innumerable abandoned cars detoxing from the flood waters they'd bathed in, we found the house. The water line almost reached the top of the first floor. An old car in the back of the driveway looked like someone dumped their trash on it. We made our way through an obstacle course of absurd litter on the outside stairs--the sort of stuff that would be on a porch, hinting at all the stuff that the waters had moved from one home to another.

The door was locked. Breathing through an air-filter mask (without it, the air smelled like sewerage), I tried to pry open the door with the crowbar. Several frustrating minutes later, I switched to the axe. But it's a stubborn door and the wood on the other side of the frame is strong. Kicking helped a bit, especially when I accidentally hit the panes of glass in the middle. They shattered on the other side and we crawled through.

* Ron Bryneart looks at HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson's certainty that "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

Along with his responsibilities at H.U.D., Alphonso Jackson is one of the top officials charged with rebuilding New Orleans after the devastation incurred by Hurricane Katrina.

But Jackson plays another role for the Bush Administration: civil rights offender.

* Mark Schmitt on the Miers nomination:

The reaction from the right to the Miers nomination should be a reminder of just why the Rove strategy of playing to the hard-right base is such a dangerous and unwise political choice: There's no turning back from it. It's like a Ponzi scheme, you have to continually borrow new money/enthusiasm to pay off the old, and you can never turn back. You can never decide to turn your Ponzi scheme into an ordinary business, because you're in too deep. And that's exactly what's happening on the right: they have been continually promised that the big payoff would come with a Supreme Court nominee to replace O'Connor, and instead they get a giant, "Trust me, it'll work out," at just the moment when "trust me" won't work anymore.

And like any Ponzi scheme, when it collapses, the collapse is total, and absolute.

* xymphora goes after the largely-ignored Scooter Libby.

Scooter Libby sports the name of a child and has the relatively innocuous title of Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, but he is really the second most powerful man in the United States, and thus the second most powerful man in the world (I don't count the Alcoholic-in-Chief). He is the architect of the web of lies which led to the attack on Iraq...

Adam, who lives in Austin, warns that Miers isn't the 'centrist' she's projected to be.

Others have pointed this out, too. To fatalistically accept Harriet Miers as "the best we can get" is foolish. She's hard-core Texas Mafia, she's been an associate and reliable Go-To-Gal for Bush since his run for governor of Texas in 1994. Bush nominated her for one reason, and one reason only: he knows she'll deliver. What she'll deliver hasn't yet been specified, but she knows where her bread is buttered, and she's gonna dance with the one what brung her. Like Roberts, like Rice, like Gonzales, like every goddamn single other appointee, Bush and Rove know exactly what they're going to get. They don't care about actual skill or talent (if they did, why John Bolton for UN Ambassador? Why is Rummy still at Defense?) - they want compliance.

And that's what they'll get, because you've got people like Harry Reid doing everything but spooging on Miers. Don't take her at her "word" that she doesn't have an agenda. The Dems' performance on Roberts was pathetic enough - I've seen tougher questioning on Oprah, fer chrissakes.

* Lindsay Beyerstein thinks DeLay is going to jail, maybe for a long time.

Tom DeLay's fancy lawyer Dick Deguerin appears to have made a colossal tactical blunder.

DeLay probably had a deal with the prosecutor to plead guilty to the relatively minor charge of conspiracy (maximum sentence, 2 years). Then Dick Deguerin tried to fight the charge that DeLay was supposed to plead guilty to. Hours later DeLay was indicted on two much more serious charges, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering (maximum sentence, life and 20 years, respectively).

Finally, Michael Berube raids Google's 'Future Search' function and discovers what Miers will do since we have no idea what she's done because she hasn't, well, done anything.

It’s all right there on the Future Internets: her famous declaration in early 2006 that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided . . . and that a woman’s reproductive rights should be predicated on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment instead! Pro-life groups were especially outraged when Justice Miers closed her opinion with a sentence that many legal analysts interpreted as a repudiation of the American religious right: “Psyched you all out, didn’t I?” Justice Miers then followed this decision with a stunning series of rereadings of Fourteenth Amendment case law, reaching all the way back to the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which first established the principle that corporations are “persons” under the Constitution. “No way are corporations persons,” wrote Miers in June 2006, deftly undoing 120 years of precedent and restoring to the Fourteenth Amendment its original function of extending the scope of U.S. law to actual living people (particularly freed slaves). “Check out Section Three of the Amendment if you don’t believe me,” Miers wrote, in the famously colloquial style that won her legions of admirers and epigones throughout the legal profession. “There’s no question that ‘person’ means ‘a guy’ or ‘a woman,’ not ‘a commercial entity.’ How could Acme Corp. or Amalgamated Products Inc. serve in Congress or as an elector, or be a state legislator, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, et cetera et cetera et cetera? It doesn’t make any damn sense.”

As for me, I'll be back to posting by next week, though with stuff like this to read, you probably won't notice.

If there was any doubt left that the extremists nutbags are running the Publican party, this should erase it.

A political dustup over congressional efforts to name a Berkeley post office for a longtime councilwoman and left-wing activist intensified Wednesday when Republican leaders accused Maudelle Shirek's supporters of being soft on communism.

"Cardoza votes for naming U.S. post office after reputed communist,'' blared the headline of a release sent out late Wednesday afternoon by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The attack was aimed at Rep. Dennis Cardoza of Atwater (Merced County), Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Garden Grove (Orange County) and 43 other Democrats in districts that could be in competition in the 2006 elections.

"I think when people know that Dennis Cardoza voted to name a post office after a communist who is also in favor of cop killers, they'll be shocked, even in San Francisco,'' said Carl Forti, a committee spokesman.

Cardoza and Sanchez were among 181 Democrats who voted for Rep. Barbara Lee's effort to name Berkeley's main post office after the 94-year-old Shirek, who spent 20 years on the Berkeley City Council and decades as a union organizer, anti-war protester and senior activist.

With the support of the entire California congressional delegation, Democrats and Republicans alike, Lee put the measure before the House on Tuesday for what she expected to be pro forma approval as is done for most requests to name post offices across the country.

But when Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, stood up and demanded a roll call vote, Lee's GOP support evaporated and the House voted 215-190 against Lee's measure. King accused Shirek of supporting the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer and, in an interview, of having "an affiliation with the Communist Party" for her support of Berkeley's Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library.

In a lengthy telephone call to Lee, King said that he "would not want children to go by the post office and see that woman as a mentor and leader," Lee said Wednesday.

"How can an Iowa member of Congress say who a California city should honor?" the still-angry Lee asked. "This was outrageous.''

Being outrageous is nothing new for King, who is known as the conservative's conservative in the most heavily Republican district in western Iowa.

King, 56, lives just outside Kiron, Iowa, population 269. He spent six years in the state Senate and ran his own construction company before being elected to Congress in 2002. He was re-elected last year with 62 percent of the vote in a district that is more than 93 percent white.

Earlier this year, he called for blocking off the Mexican border with a 2,000-mile chain-link fence, topped with razor wire. He wants to see the income tax replaced by a national sales tax. One of his bills would require the federal government to conduct its business in English, while another would bar union organizers from seeking work at nonunion businesses and trying to organize them.

He has called for Congress "to assert its rightful constitutional authority over the courts'' so that they respect the law and the Constitution and described the alleged torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as "what amounts to hazing."

While in the Iowa Legislature, he sued Gov. Tom Vilsack to block efforts to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in state government and led the fight to make English the state's official language. King tried unsuccessfully to pass what he called a "God and Country" bill that would have made schools recognize the United States "has derived its strength from biblical values and the forces and philosophies of free enterprise capitalism and Western civilization."

---

"The whole world is to the left of Steve King,'' said James Hutter, a political science professor at Iowa State University and secretary of the state Democratic Party. "But being conservative is expected in his district.''

It was the support King received that bothered Lee most, however.

"He's on the fringe,'' she said. "But it was interesting to see how even the (Republican) moderates bowed to him and all but nine voted with him.''

What moderates?

DeLay speaks--

"This morning, in an act of blatant political partisanship, a rogue district attorney in Travis County, Texas, named Ronnie Earle charged me with one count of criminal conspiracy, a reckless charge wholly unsupported by the facts."

--as he whips his hand out of the cookie jar.

McCarthy was a 'hero for America'.

Washington -- House Republicans rejected an effort Tuesday to name a post office in Berkeley after longtime Berkeley Councilwoman Maudelle Shirek after a conservative lawmaker questioned whether the 94-year-old activist represents American values.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, has been trying for more than two years to name the city's main post office on Allston Way for Shirek, a civil rights leader and peace activist who served on the Berkeley City Council for 20 years.

But House Republicans have sought to block the effort, mostly through a whisper campaign about her reported past ties to communist leaders and left-wing causes. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, objected Tuesday to Lee's proposal and rallied Republicans to defeat the measure in an unusual roll call vote.

Lee, who said Shirek helped inspire her to run for elected office, was furious after the House defeated her measure on a mostly party line vote of 215 to 190. The measure needed two-thirds support for passage.

"Maudelle Shirek is a woman whose leadership, service and commitment to our community are a testament to what is great about our nation, and she deserves to be honored," Lee said.

"That a Republican from Iowa could launch a campaign to deny naming a local post office after this 94-year-old civil rights leader, who until recently was the oldest and one of the longest-serving elected officials in California, is just shameful."

The decisions to name post offices and federal courthouses are so routine in Congress that they typically are approved by a voice vote that signals unanimous consent. But Lee's bid to name the post office in Berkeley for Shirek has been controversial from the start.

In March, a group of California Republicans blocked Lee's measure by refusing to co-sponsor it. The House Government Reform Committee generally will not move a bill to rename a federal building unless all the state's members agree to the request.

Since then, Lee managed to win over some California Republicans and persuaded the office of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, to put her bill on the suspension calendar -- which meant it was noncontroversial and likely to be approved.

But on Tuesday, King, a second-term House member from western Iowa, surprised Democrats by objecting to the proposal and demanding a roll call vote, saying Shirek's past "sets her apart from, I will say, the most consistent of American values." King, however, specified only her support for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer.

In an interview with the Associated Press, King said Shirek had an "affiliation with the Communist Party" because she was involved with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley.

The library's Web site says it was named for Karl Niebyl, a San Jose State professor of economics who escaped Nazi Germany and donated his collection after his death, and Roscoe Proctor, a teacher and African American activist. The research library provides information on "progressive alternatives" and says its stated mission is to "support emerging struggles for racial and gender equality, and for Socialism.''

Lee, in a statement after the vote, blasted King, saying his "campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated 'concern' is better suited to the era of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover than today's House of Representatives."

To which King responded: "I think that if Barbara Lee would read the history of Joe McCarthy, she would realize that he was a hero for America."

Shirek has had a sometimes controversial political career, marked by her devotion to progressive causes.

How dare she?

As horrific as the Emperor's response to Katrina was, and as much criticism as I've read of it, I think the single most depressing thing I've read in the last two weeks was in the WaPo today:

Most of all, White House aides want to reestablish Bush's swagger -- the projection of competence and confidence in the White House that has carried the administration through tough times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush likes to say his job is to make tough decisions and leave the hand-wringing for historians and pundits. He almost never entertains public doubt, which is part of the White House design to build a more powerful presidency. The term "strong leader" appears in at least 98 speeches he has given during his White House years, according to a database search, and was the subtext of his 2004 campaign strategy. He favors provocative language, declaring that he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and taunting Iraqi insurgents to "bring 'em on."

He projects this in nonverbal ways as well, the arms-swinging gait of his walk, the glint in his glare, the college boy grin that flashes even in sober moments. Some advisers consider this supreme self-confidence a secret to Bush's success enacting his first-term agenda and winning reelection in a tough political climate. It reinforced Bush's image as a decisive leader, which was an important attribute in an election colored by the threat of terrorism, and helped calm congressional Republicans who disagreed with some of the president's ideas but were won over by the force of his style.

The confidence was contagious, with White House officials and Republicans in Congress as certain as the president himself in what Bush was doing. But over the course of six months, a growing number of Republicans inside and out of the White House have noticed an administration less sure-footed and slower to react to the political environment surrounding them.
(emphasis added)

Jim VandeHei is one of the WaPo reporters in Karl's pocket and can be counted on to give any Bush action the best possible spin. The rest of the article is a paean to how 'sensitive' he's suddenly become, how he's 'listening' to people, how badly he now wants to 'work with' people. You can translate that as 'Look! He's learned his lesson!' and that's about as true as the fable that a leopard can change his spots.

But the passage quoted above struck me as being true, even if accidentally. This new 'tone' in the administration isn't about a chastened Bush who's having second thoughts about the way he's bullied the nation and the rest of the world for five years, it's about repairing his image so he can go back to what he does best, what is in fact the only thing he does well: swagger and bully. There isn't so much as a hint in this piece that the administration is falling apart because it has always been an illusion, a PR construction of pretty pictures hiding a rot of incompetence and corporate cronyism. That it has been nothing but swagger and posturing and arrogant rhetoric with nothing to back them up from its first day in office. That Katrina wasn't some sort of aberration for an otherwise competent leader but Toto ripping the curtain down to reveal the Mighty and Powerful Oz for the snake oil salesman he really is.

But that's not what's depressing. I didn't expect when I started reading it that VandeHei was going to acknowledge that we've been 'governed' by a political and ideological Road Show for five years, a theatrical sham with no more reality in it than your average Bugs Bunny cartoon. What's depressing is that he may be right when he says it's the Emperor's swagger that sold us on him, and that we reacted to it not with approbation or at least with suspicion but with approval and even gratitude.

Is that how far we've sunk? Has the American citizenry been so cowed, so dumbed-down that they can't remember lessons they learned on the playground? That bullies are always hot air and big mouths? That swagger is always covering up fears and failures? That arrogance is the sign of somebody who thinks they're better than everyone else and the regular rules don't apply to them? Aren't those lessons we learned in grade school, for gawd's-sake?

People who have managed to maintain their sanity during all this have been asking for years how it's possible that an administration of liars and thieves have gotten away with fooling so many of us for so long. Is the secret that simple? Have we become that simple? Have we become a people who no longer distrust bullies but admire them? Have we become bullies ourselves, rushing to support one of our own?

It would explain a great deal if that's what's happened to us.

I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. It's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades. We shall never end wars by blaming them on ministers and generals or war-mongering imperialists or any of the other banal bogies. It' the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. It's the rest of us who make heroes of the dead and shrines out of those battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.

--Paddy Chayefsky

This afternoon they told me Eddie was dead. He was killed in Iraq. An explosion.

I worked with Eddie for a couple of years before he decided to enlist and fight in the war. He had a wife and a son so young when Eddie left that he won't remember him. His father will be a picture on the wall or over the mantlepiece, a stranger with the same face as his father. He'll grow up thinking his father was a hero. Maybe he was, though I doubt it. Most likely he was just a grunt doing a dangerous job and his luck ran out, his number was up, whatever they say these days to express the freakish randomness of death in a war. At some point, the little boy will grow up. At some point, he may want to be like his father. A war will come along, maybe for oil, maybe for nothing, and he will go.

Eddie was a good kid. A little naive, perhaps, but a good kid. He was smart and kind. I never saw him lose his temper though I'm sure he must have, and I never saw him treat anyone with anything but courtesy. He never made fun of anyone because they had less than he did or were funny-looking or dumb. I liked him. He was one of the most Christian people I have ever known and I don't even know if he was one. He was tolerant and appreciative of differences. He found the variations of humanity amusing or interesting or instructive or sad.

There wasn't much he was afraid of. We have more than our share of bullies and nasty drunks and psychopaths where I work. They rarely bothered him and when they did he would sigh, sit down, and wait them out. I've known a couple of those guys to work themselves into a lather of violence trying to provoke someone. They'd try with him but for some reason they just couldn't do it. He was too calm, too confident, too something. They always gave up and left before the frothing started. Maybe he was just lucky.

When I tried to talk him out of going, he was patient and he listened. I tried to tell him that the war was a fraud, a swindle cooked up by some overeager chickenhawks with dreams of glory and empire but I might as well have been talking to the fork truck he was sitting on. His country had called and he was going to answer it and that was that.

I don't know if he had dreams of glory of his own, visions of throwing himself on a mine to save his platoon or bursting into a house full of armed gunmen and taking them all out like Audie Murphy or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but how could a kid raised in America not have those dreams? I've had them myself and I know better. We grow up with them, pamper them, nurse them into full-blown fantasies.

Is that why he went? I don't know. If it was, then I am as responsible as Bush for his death.

I have been trying all night to come to some kind of terms with it. I was first angry with him for going, then angry with myself for not doing more to stop him. Then I was furious with the cloth-eared, arrogant bastards who sent him there to die for god knows what--oil, peace in the Middle East, a 'footprint', democracy, Abu Ghraib, the PATRIOT Act, the defense of Christianity--even they don't know. They sent him because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Or maybe they sent him because war is our highest achievement, the only time we feel virtuous and self-sacrificing. Maybe they sent him because they like feeling virtuous and self-sacrificing even though the virtue isn't theirs and the sacrifices are made by others.

Finally I remembered what Chayefsky had said: it wasn't the president or his Cabinet or his generals who killed Eddie. It was us. All of us. We let them do it, hell we encouraged them to do it. We told them to do it. Something in us wanted to hear the drums again, wanted to see the parades again, wanted to feel the throb of guns and the beating of our hearts when the flag unfurled. We could have seen past the lies easily enough if we had wanted to, but we didn't want to. We wanted revenge and the taste of blood so badly that we didn't care whose it was.

Let's face it: the lies the president and his people told were as thin as frog-hair and about as convincing as a 6-year-old's insistence that he did NOT eat that candy bar, only he forgot to wash his face and there were dark stains all around his mouth. If we didn't know they were lies it could only be because we didn't want to know. The lies were obvious and childish, easy to see through if we'd been willing to look. But we weren't.

And now the blood we're tasting isn't the blood of our enemies but the blood of our own sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. It's our blood in our mouths. We sacrificed--are sacrificing--them for the sake of war memorials and medals we will pass on to the next generation, but worst of all for false honor and the illusion of virtue.

During the Viet Nam war I felt the same helplessness I'm feeling now, the same sense of awful waste, of fine words put to a gutter purpose. If we trusted our leaders and our leaders lied to us, the fault is ours. We listened to what we wanted to hear, we believed because we wanted to believe. We let them con us, and Eddie--all the Eddies--are dead because of our pride.

I don't know if this makes any sense. I'm angry and hurt and blasted away inside like a crater. Eddie is dead and I killed him as sure as if I put that explosive on the road myself. I don't know how to handle that. I don't know how I can ever handle it, accept it, live with it. I will, somehow, but right now I don't know how.

Eddie was a good kid, nothing special but a good kid. He didn't deserve to die for nothing.

Chrissy recently unveiled in Slate the newest conservative meme concerning Iraq. Ready?

'Stop whining because it's a mess. Of course it's a mess, that's why we invaded--to clean up the mess.'

Direct quote:

The messed-up-ness of the country is part of the original justification for taking action, as I attempted to say before April 2003. Unless perhaps you think that we should have intervened in some other country that was not near terminally ruined and not on the verge of civil war and of intervention from outside neighbors.

So there.

I don't usually do this but some blogospheric events are special and this is one of them.

Jeff Alworth of the late and much lamented Notes on the Atrocities shut it down and quit blogging over a year ago--at least, he quit running a daily blog of his own. He posted from time-to-time on Blue Oregon about local stuff (that's where he lives), and for the last few months has been a regular poster at one of the 3 or 4 best group blogs on the net, The American Street.

Well, now he's back blogging again in his own space and the gloves, so to speak, are off.

The election has shifted things. In 2005, life is more apocalyptic than ever. But somehow the hope has drained from the liberal troops. Before the election, documenting the transgressions of the GOP carried the hope that these truths, laid out before the sun, would turn people against the transgressors. But now, I am far more resigned to the darkness. The transgressions are so many, the hole we've dug so deep, that to keep mentioning them is like filming an execution. Sure, these things are happening, but do we have to watch them?

In the next few days, I'm going to write a series of posts on "Democratic Values"--those core beliefs we hold (or did once, anyway) that are only guide we have for rediscovering the light. The Dems, who seem genetically predisposed toward inaction, may well never find their way back to these values (never mind this blog), but it will be a nice break from documenting the apocalypse.

Amen.

If you're not familiar with Jeff, you should be. His writing is always incisive, thoughtful, and perceptive. The blog is called (for reasons known only to Jeff) Low on the Hog--a reference I admit I don't get. But never mind. The important thing is that he's back and that has to be worth a Huzzah! or two. Or three. Bloggers of his caliber don't grow on every bush, you know.

Alright, so neither EWF nor Trenches made his blogroll. He probably doesn't know they exist. We're big enough--almost--to accept that without mentioning it, look beyond the obvious snub, and recommend him anyway. He is, though we hate like hell to admit it, that good. You'll be kicking yourself if you don't make Hog a regular read.

As eerie as the similarities between Iraq and Viet Nam are already, it was positively spooky to read this morning that the Army has begun to repeat what may be Gen William Westmoreland's biggest mistake: gauging its success by body-count.

BAGHDAD -- Using enemy body counts as a benchmark, the U.S. military claimed gains against Abu Musab Zarqawi's foreign-led fighters last week even as they mounted their deadliest attacks on Iraq's capital.

But by many standards, including increasingly high death tolls in insurgent strikes, Zarqawi's group, al Qaeda in Iraq, could claim to be the side that's gaining after 2 1/2 years of war. August was the third-deadliest month of the war for U.S. troops.

Zarqawi's guerrillas this spring and summer showed themselves to be capable of mounting waves of suicide bombings and car bombings that could kill scores at a time and paralyze the Iraqi capital. Insurgents have also launched dozens of attacks every day in other parts of Iraq and laid open claim this summer to cities and towns in the critical far west, despite hit-and-run offensives by U.S. forces.

Last week, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, declared "great successes" against insurgents. But Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, where Lynch briefed reporters, was under stepped-up security screening and U.S. guard for fear of suicide bombings. Insurgents for three days running last week managed to lob mortar rounds into the Green Zone, the heart of the U.S. and Iraqi administration.

Lynch spoke at the close of a two-day onslaught of bombings and shootings that killed nearly 190 people, the bloodiest days in Baghdad since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The numbers game is an extremely dangerous approach to take in figuring success and failure. Not only does it lend itself to falsification as commanders compete with each other for prestige and promotions but even if the count is accurate, it's a lousy measure of enemy strength. If you kill 5 every day but the enemy adds 10 you don't know about, you very quickly start thinking you're making progress when in fact you're losing ground fast.

We know that. We learned it almost 40 years ago when the Army insisted its body-count proved the VC were on the ropes, the reason the Tet Offensive took them completely by surprise. The body-count had convinced them the VC were so weak that a large offensive was impossible. Yet here we are, making yet another mistake by repeating yet again one of the mistakes we've already made, just the latest in a long line.

What is this? Is it impossible for us to learn from our mistakes? Are we ignoring the lessons of the past or blindly determined to prove they weren't mistakes? What's going on here?