Tuesday, October 26, 2004
[posted by jaed at 8:53 PM]Read This Now
This blog emerges from its months-long sloth to point to this, at Peeve Farm:
I don't think Kerry's going to win, but I'm bracing myself nonetheless. I'm bracing for condescending, patronizing head-patting from European acquaintances, which is a good deal worse than such acquaintances simply ignoring me out of disgust. I'm bracing for Michael Moore riding the wave of celebratory euphoria and becoming a political celebrity of unprecedented stature for someone from the filmmaking industry, rather like Oliver Stone winning a Senate seat, only with the added bonus of making our philosophical leaders look like the stereotypical fat, loud, obnoxious Americans we're already seen as. I'm bracing for Barbra Streisand, Janeane Garofalo, Arec Bardwin, Martin Sheen, MATT DAMON, Bruce Springsteen, and a thousand other actors and artists being filled with giddy joy and the sense that through the power of movies and songs and petulant theme concerts and appearances on The Daily Show they can change history, even if they haven't given a moment's thought to what they're fighting for except "change". I'm bracing for our troops (who support Bush by a margin of something like five to one) waking up in their barracks two weeks from now to find that the man who flew to visit them on Thanksgiving, who called them by name and saluted them and shook their hands until the tears streamed down their faces, has been kicked out of office by the American people in favor of someone whose promise to bring the troops home by any fixed date speaks more loudly and reassuringly to the enemy than to our soldiers or their families. I'm bracing for history books ten years from now to refer to the brief Bush II years as an unmitigated disaster during which the economy crashed, 9/11 occurred, and America embarked upon an inexplicable series of hideously unpopular foreign wars that were mercifully cut short before anyone could see any long-term results to prove what they were intended to achieve.Read the rest. Particularly the last line.
It won't be the end of the world, no. But it will suck.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
[posted by jaed at 2:36 AM]I am no longer surprised...
...by press reluctance to confront the depraved nature of the actions of the enemy. The NYT, however, may have just set a new low in this regard.
It was the headline that caught my eye: "Russian Official Says Beslan Rebels Were Addicts". Rebels. If this is indended to refer back to Chechnya, recall that at least some of the killers were Arab, not Chechen, and that all of them left Chechnya to attack outside its borders. Reading the story, I see that they are also described as "militants", "attackers", and "hostage-takers".
But the truly shocking thing for me was the description of their deed: the story tells us that they "seized a public school". It says nothing at all about what they did after they seized that public school. If you had never heard of the massacre at Beslan, and missed the single reference to "survivors" in the next-to-last paragraph, you might well think that the only people who were killed were the "rebels".
Can such a crime disappear down the memory hole in only a few weeks? At the New York Times, apparently it can.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
[posted by jaed at 1:05 PM]Quote of the day
It's a bit buried in the middle of an NYT op-ed by Tommy Franks, so let's pull it out:
The war on terrorism has a global focus. It cannot be divided into separate and unrelated wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. Both are part of the same effort to capture and kill terrorists before they are able to strike America again, potentially with weapons of mass destruction.This is so essential a concept, and a novel concept to so many people, that it deserves to be called out on its own. Bush and the rest of the adminstration should be finding a way to work this in, every time they give a press conference, appear on a talk show, or speak to a reporter.
