Pep Rally

From the right side of the aisle, we've been hearing the cant of "support the war, support our President, dissent is treason" since this little war started. Now, this is more than just your basic "shut up and sit down" that you get when The Powers That Be don't want to hear something. The Administration is perfectly capable of simply ignoring views that they don't like without calling "treason". Consider oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They're gonna do it, and they don't care what anybody says.

Where is this coming from? Where do we get the idea that, not only is it treasonous to disagree with any little thing the Administration says, we all have to cheer as hard as we can to "support the troops"?

My high school had mediocre sports teams. Mediocre players, mediocre coaches, mediocre results. We won some, we lost some. But for those of us not actually on the teams, when we lost, it was always because we weren't cheering hard enough. "We need your support", said the posters, the rallies, the announcements on the PA system. Don't show up for the game? You're stabbing them in the back. Show up and they still lose? You didn't cheer hard enough. In short, you are responsible for the performance of the players on the field.

I should mention that this idea didn't extend to the players. They knew darn well why they won or lost. High school sports at this time and place were viciously competitive and the coaches weren't really up on the latest theories. Four hours a day of practice is not good for high school students.

So this "support the troops" business is no more or less than a high school pep rally. If we all chant slogans and jump up and down and cheer on cue, our team will win; otherwise, they will lose. It's our attitudes that matter; not theirs.

Now, on the basic level, this is just silly. Your friendly average soldier in Iraq doesn't care squat what I, or any other blogger, says. "Oh, no! Lightning says we shouldn't be in Iraq! I'm gonna walk in front of an RPG!". Not bloody likely.

But on a deeper level, this is profoundly disrespectful. The current U. S. military is a fine, very professional organization. "Professional" means doing your job. Saying that the troops would not do their jobs because not everybody agrees with the policies that put them there reduces them to the level of unprofessional crybabies.

But it's just fine for shifting the blame to somebody else. The disaster in Iraq is squarely the responsibility of Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and all their furry little Neoconservative friends. Not bloggers, marchers, or pundits who were all considerably more accurate than the Administration in foreseeing what would happen if we marched into Iraq.

From now on, any time anybody gives me the "support our troops" nonsense, I'm gonna demand to see them dance with pompoms. Or do a real cheer. Georgie Bush should be good at this; he was a cheerleader in college. Maybe this explains it ...

The Fruits of Abu Ghraib?

I'm as horrified as anybody else about the "abuse" reports and photos from Abu Gharib prison. Go take another look at those photos -- that's what a lost war looks like. What few remaining friends and allies we may have had in the area are gone.

But we may have seen another result. We bombed a house in the middle of the night and killed 40 people. We say they're terrorists; they say it was a wedding party.

So why would we attack a wedding? The obvious answer is bad intellegence. Bad intel can come from a number of places; people with grudges are the obvious source.

Another source is people forced to give information that they don't have, so they make it up. Torture.

Torture is great for extracting confessions. Under torture, anybody will confess to anything. But for extracting real information, it's less than useless. Even if you get the people who have the information, you have to decide if what you're getting is truthful or a carefully crafted cover story. After a bit of torture, the victim can't tell the difference. It requires real police work to figure out what is real and what is fantasy.

However, what happens if the person you're torturing doesn't have any information? Well, they'll make up some for you. Wouldn't surprise me if that's what we're seeing here. Now, from everything I've heard coming from Iraq, it doesn't seem like we're doing any "police work" at all. We round up a buncha guys and ask them who the Bad Guys are. Then we go round up those guys. Wouldn't stand up for five minures in an American court, but we don't have any American courts in Iraq to deal with. No Iraqi courts either; that's one of the sore points with the occupation.

Doesn't make it any easier that the military categorically refuses to consider the possibility that they might have made a mistake.

Passive

One thing that struck me about the Bush administration officials' testimony was their incredible passivity. In amongst the bureaucratic arse-covering was an underlying attitude of "So what? It's somebody else's problem". Condi Rice even whined that there wasn't an agency that pulls together intelligence information from the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA and all the other agencies that gather intelligence. There is one. It's the Office of the National Security Adviser. Her office.

Bush: "Al Queda in the US? The FBI is on it."

Ashcroft: "Terrorism isn't a priority. The FBI has plenty of resources"

Rice: "No definite information. Come back when you have names, addresses, and dates."

Moeller: “Wha ... did somebody say something?

Now, this is interesting. Bush is famous as a “big picture”, hands off leader. One of the “kiss and tell” books from a former cabinet member (O'Neill?) described cabinet meetings with Bush. Basically, they were real-life Dilbert cartoons, as Bush displayed no interest in matters being discussed and threw questions back at the questioners. This is alpha-male business stuff -- from the “how to intimidate underlings” class at Harvard Business School.

Now, to make this work, those underlings have to be real go-getters that will take the initiative, find out things on their own, and do the right thing. They do all the work and the Boss looks smart and gets the credit. Unfortunately, these are not traits that we associate with the Bush administration, outside of Rumsfeld and Cheney.

It's sure not what we're seeing from the testimony on the 9/11 commission.

The Parable of the Tree

I have this fantasy. I'm walking in the woods, a good half day's hike from Civilization (empty beer cans) when I hear feeble cries for help. Following them, I find another hiker with his legs pinned under a fallen tree. He begs me for help - there's no way he will ever make it out on his own, and the chance of someone else coming by is nil.

Now, in what is jokingly called the Real World, I would do my darndest to get him out and damn the consequences. I know just how quickly things can go bad when you're out of cellphone range - in the boonies, everybody helps each other out of necessity. I'm not a political liberal, at least the way it's normally defined - I just grew up in a very rural environment, where the nearest help can be hours away, even the best of circumstances.

But that's not the fantasy. In it, I recognize the philosophy of the trapped hiker and can react accordingly:

Fundie

"In the name of God, help me!"

"But you're there because God wants you there", I reply. "Would you go against the Will of God?"

"Get me out or you'll burn in Hell"

"Why? Do you believe that God is the master of the world?"

"Well, yes …"

"Do you believe that God alone determines the time and means of our deaths?"

"Yes, but …"

"Do you believe that if God hadn't wanted that tree to fall, it wouldn't have?"

"Yes …"

"Then that tree fell on you because God wanted it to."

"Uhh …"

"Then if I pry it off of you, I'd be going against the Will of God."

"But …"

I kneel down, safely out of reach. "Pray with me. Dear God, we pray that you receive the soul of … what was your name"?

Conservative

"Help me"

"Why?"

"Just get this tree off of me, goddammit!"

"Why? What did you do to get yourself into this mess?"

"Nothing! Now help me or you'll be sorry!"

"*I* should be sorry? You're the one who has screwed up and gotten himself into this mess. If I help you, you'll just keep wanting more and more help. Why should I pay for your stupidity?"

"It wasn't stupidity, it was an accident!"

"Yeah, right. It's always an accident or somebody else's fault or maybe an Evil Conspiracy. If you don't take responsibility for your own actions, you'll end up just another welfare moocher."

"It'd be criminal to leave me here!"

"Oh? I'll mention that to the Mayor and the Chief of Police at our Wednesday night poker game. They'll get a chuckle out of it. Getting panhandled by a whiny welfare case in the middle of the woods."

"I'm not a welfare case!"

"Excuse me? Who's demanding that I drop everything and help get him out of his own mess? If you had anything at all on the ball, you'd never have gotten into this mess.."

I turn to go. "Don't leave me!"

"Why not? You got yourself into it, get yourself out of it."

Libertarian

"Help me!"

"How much?"

"What do you mean, how much? Just get this tree off of me!"

"I'd have to invest significant effort in moving that tree. I expect compensation."

"I'll give you anything you want!"

"OK, let's say, $100,000."

"What! That's highway robbery!"

"No, just an attempt at finding a market price."

"I can't pay it! I'd have to sell my house!"

"And your house is worth more to you that getting rid of that tree?"

"It's outrageous!"

"So get another bid. It's a free market; anybody could move that tree. If you can get a better offer, take it."

"I've been here for two days! You're the first person to come along in that time."

"Do we have an agreement? Freely agreed to?"

"I'll die of I don't agree."

"So? You've got the money, you can have anybody you want move the tree"

"But there isn't anybody else"

"Bye"

Liberal

"Help me"

"Good grief, this is terrible! You must be in tremendous pain."

"Yes. Get it off."

"I'm sorry, all I have is aspirin and a little bit of water." I give him one of my aspirins and a tiny drink of water.

"At least give me some more water."

"Now, now, be grateful for what you get. Here, let me make you more comfortable." I move some branches around. "Is that better."

"No, it's not better. The tree is still there. Get it off of me!"

"I can't do that without checking. There are regulations about such things, you know."

"Regulations be damned! Move the tree."

"Sorry. We have to follow procedures here. When I get back, I'll tell the rangers you're here."

---

For those who want explanations, all of these philosophies make nice-sounding speeches, but all have their own ways of avoiding doing anything that's actually helpful.

• For fundies, anything good is the result of their own virtue; anything bad is the Will of God. Of course, they reserve the right to determine what is the Will of God and what is random chance. "Christian charity" for fundies seems to be a null term, or so narrowly defined as to be useless.
• For Conservatives, all anybody really needs is a good sermon. If somebody's life is screwed up, obviously, they didn't get enough sermons; there's no help for them now. There is also always the threat of Calling In The Authorities on people that disagree with them. Conservatives simply see no need to "help" anybody, ever.
• Libertarians attempt to take The Market, which is an artificial system enforced by governments, and elevate it to the level of Natural Law. In any case, The Market is a statistical system; it breaks down when the number of players is small or the power asymmetries are large. "Altruism" is a null term; everything is economics.
• Liberals have all kinds of compassion for people in trouble, but have a striking inability to deal with the root cause of the problems. They're great at palliatives, as long as they don't require any real sacrifice. They're also great ones for referring things to Higher Authority.

Cartoons? Of course. But it's good to think about when somebody says "I'd like to help, but …"

Opening Salvo

I, and a lot of other people, have been yelling for a while about our shiny new computerized, touchscreen voting machines, and how they're totally unauditable and un-recountable. The vote is what the machine says it is. Period.

No problem, say the people pushing the machines. They've all been tested and certified. Uhh, by who? To what standards? What's really in there? Sorry, proprietary information.

Well, Diebold, for one, is getting their feet held to the fire. Their little security breach doesn't give anybody a warm fuzzy feeling; the Powers that Be in places like Maryland look to me like they're frantically covering their tails, after giving Diebold a boatload of tax money. I can't believe that the code that escaped was production code. Nobody uses Microsoft Access for anything more important than a Christmas card list

Well, anyway, this brings us to last Tuesday. Election Day in a number of places, including Fairfax County, Virginia. As well as having the slowest vote count on record, there were a number of severe irregularities. It seems that a bunch of machines malfunctioned, were taken offsite, repaired, and returned, in a gross violation of procedure. The woman who lost has gotten an injunction sealing the machines until they can be checked over Fat lot of good it'll do her.

Even more ominous, some voters noted that the machines seemed to reject votes for one particular candidate.

... it seemed to subtract a vote for Thompson in about "one out of a hundred tries"

... and she lost by less than 1% of the vote.

Oops.

Big oops. This time, something may actually get done. Both of the defeated candidates are Republicans ....

Now, I work professionally with systems like this. It would be perfectly straightforward to design a system where the hardware and software were available for inspection, with random audits to make sure that the checked software is actually in the machines and the hardware corresponds to the prints. Add in any amount of NSA-grade crypto. You can have any amount of testing before election day. And I could still make the results come out any way I want to.

The WaPo reference is from VerifiedVoting.org. They are the group that seems to be doing a lot of the nitty-gritty organizing in fighting these monsters.

Overdue

All the usual excuses. New job. Outrage overload. No time.

In any case, no updates.

One thing that is worth noting, however, is the new kid on the block in Baghdad. Riverbend is an acquaintance of Salam Pax. Pax has gotten a lot less active in the blogosphere, with his column in the Guardian and his book.

Riverbend is a lot sharper and more critical of the Americans than Salam ever was. Salam spoke very carefully, and tried very hard not to offend American sensibilities. Riverbend is less restrained, especially in her descriptions of how Americans, whether through ignorance or design, are stepping all over Iraqi cultural sensibilities.

Some of it seems like it's right out of Robert McNamara's "how to create terrorists" handbook, developed by much hard work in Vietnam. River, the word you're looking for is "defoliation"

Anyway, go read.

Bottom Line

So Iraq is going to cost us $87 billion. Well, if that's what it's gonna cost, we're stuck with it. We broke it, we bought it. We've had no luck getting the "Coalition of the Willing" to help us out, and asking the UN for help is just silly.

Now, how do we present this? The Government and the Press just hit us with the number, but it doesn't mean anything. The Democrats had this problem in 2000 and 2002. They'd say that Bush's tax cuts would go mostly to the top 1%, but nobody knew what they meant. So people making less than $40,000/year thought they were in that magic 1%. If anybody phrased it as "making over $300,000/year", I missed it.

So what's $87 billion? Wampum has a nice tabulation of what $87 billion is in terms of other Government programs:

In fact, the budgets of the departments of Energy ($19.8 billion), State ($11.0 billion), Interior ($10.4 billion) and Justice ($22.2 billion) combined ($63.4 billion) will probably come in less this year than operations in Iraq.

As Ev Dirkson put it, "Pretty soon you're talking real money".

Friendly Hints

Iraqi advice for Americans suffering from power blackouts. Hey, who should know more?

Maybe there are followers of Saddam Hussein who are sabotaging their power stations. That's what happens here.

Bandwagon

What the heck. Bandwagons are fun. At least for now, I've added the "Fair and Balanced" subhead to the blog title.

Seems that Leftie humorist Al Franken is coming out with a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Problem is, Fox News claims a trademark on the phrase "Fair & Balanced", so they're suing Franken and his publisher. This is, of course, ridiculous. So somebody in the Blogosphere (Neil Pollack?) decided that August 15 should be "Fair and Balanced Day". Political blogs of all stripes are sprouting the phrase in question. So I'm jumping on too, in my inimitable day-late-and-dollar-short fashion.

Fox News should really know better. Lies promptly went to number 1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, even though the book won't be out for a month. General consensus is that Franken is going to hand Fox News their arse on a plate. Reasons:

• Fox News's trademark is "Fair & Balanced". Franken's title uses "Fair and Balanced". Little things like this matter with trademarks.
• You can't copyright book titles. I dunno about trademarks here.
• It's a parody. There's lots of latitude for parody.

The Blogosphere's resident law professors Balkin, Reynolds, and Volokh all say that this is a crock. Should tell ya something -- they're not exactly left wingers, but law and sense trump politics for honest people.

I'm sure we can look forward to Franken's book being every bit as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.

What's with it with Franken and titles, anyway? The only title I've seen that's worse than Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, also by Franken. Al, playground taunts like these went out in the sixth grade. Titles like this aren't funny and just make you look like a jerk.

Conservative vs. Conservative

John Derbyshire over at National Review mentions the case of some Mexican immigrants who were burned out of their house by some people who don't like Mexicans very much.

Derbyshire's point is that the reporting of the incident never mentions whether the victims are legal or illegal immigrants. To him, this is a vital point -- sort of whether they should be considered human or not. I give Derbyshore credit -- he comes across as a normal, compassionate human who feels that he has to shoehorn his normal feelings into an ideological mold. There's far too much of that going on nowadays, and has been simce I got interested in politics in the 1960s.

The "illegal immigrant" business points up an interesting conflict among the various flavors of conservative. On one hand, the "classic" conservatives say "keep the immigrants out". California's Proposition 187 (which says basically "no state services for illegal immigrants") is a "classic" position. However, we also now have the "cheap labor conservatives", who just love illegal immigrants. Illegals work cheap and don't dare complain.

It's also a conflict of ideology vs pragmatism. Check who does most of the housekeeping, childcare, and lawn care. When it comes to getting their own lawn mowed, an amazing number of people jump into the "cheap labor" camp. Our immigration laws are a horrible mess and the enforcement is a disaster (made worse by shipping everything over to the "Department of Homeland Security") Nothing is going to get done until some of those "cheap labor conservatives" (some of whom consider themselves to be quite liberal!) get busted for employing illegals for child or lawn care.

(Link via TBOGG)