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Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Not a blog, but a blog-related program activity

It appears that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and may not have had a weapons program, but was nonetheless engaged in “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” Or that he had seen people doing things that appeared, from a distance, to be related to weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.  Or that he had been apprised of the possibility of creating weapons-of-near-mass-quasi- destruction-related program activities.

I miss the days of moral clarity--

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
Dick Cheney
Speech to VFW National Convention
August 26, 2002
Simply stated.  As opposed, say, to “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.”
George W. Bush
State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003
Or as little as, um, zero tons.  We’re not sure.

“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.”
Colin Powell
Remarks to UN Security Council
February 5, 2003
Or we might have misheard him.  Hard to say-- he was in his bunker and his cell phone kept cutting out.

“We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons—the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”
George W. Bush
Radio Address
February 8, 2003
One of them, Laurie Mylroie, has also informed us that Saddam masterminded the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and may have been involved in the mysterious death of Bruce Lee twenty years earlier.

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
George W. Bush
Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003
Leave no doubt behind!

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.”
Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman
Washington Post, p. A27
March 23, 2003
And you can trust me, because, after all, I’m the guy who argued that you could survive a nuclear attack by covering yourself with dirt.

“We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
Donald Rumsfeld
ABC Interview
March 30, 2003
Also they may be up or down.  But right around here.  Did you look over there?  East, I mean.  No, a little further west, or south.  Right there.  No, colder.  Try south again.  Or north.

“Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find—and there will be plenty.”
Robert Kagan
Washington Post op-ed
April 9, 2003
Unless the administration is reduced to doubletalk about weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.  But that will never happen, I assure you.  If you look at my author’s photo, you’ll find that I have a steely glare.  That comes from looking reality in the face without blinking, my friend.

“I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it just now.”
Colin Powell
Remarks to Reporters
May 4, 2003
Secretary Powell then said, “hold on, the evidence is almost here-- I just have to put it in a box for you.  I’ll be right back.” Secretary Powell has not been seen since.

And though I shouldn’t have to add this:  yes, of course, I’m glad Saddam Hussein is in custody.  He’s a mass murderer and war criminal of exceptional viciousness and cruelty, even when matched with some of the twentieth century’s worst; I thought so when Rumsfeld shook hands with him twenty years ago, and I think so now.  But if only Bush and company hadn’t lied so sloppily and so egregiously for two solid years, alienating just about everyone who had come to our aid after September 11, we could have ousted Saddam with the help of the UN or NATO; we could have legitimately spread the burden of rebuilding Iraq among a host of allies, instead of insulting them on Monday, barring them from contracts on Tuesday, and then asking for their assistance on Wednesday; and we could have avoided embarrassing and undermining our intelligence agencies so thoroughly.  It doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Update: A tip of the hat to Eric Alterman, who was clearly thinking along the same lines yesterday, while I was teaching. . . .

Posted by Michael on 01/21 at 03:51 PM
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Tuesday, January 20, 2004

New essay out

From The Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation, an essay on Western Civ courses.  Not available online, though-- you’ll have to subscribe or keep an eye out for TCR in your local bookstore.  I’ll make a .pdf of it available in a few weeks.  But that reminds me that I still haven’t updated my essays page, which means, among other things, that last month’s essay (on trying to deal with a conservative student who often disrupted class) has disappeared from this site even though it generated so much commentary and metacommentary in the blogosphere.  For any of you who are already nostalgic for 2003, that essay is back-- and here it is.  A blast from the past.

Coming soon:  a very short essay of mine in a magazine where . . . hmm, let’s just say where neither you nor I would expect to see such a thing.

Posted by Michael on 01/20 at 08:22 AM
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Raymond Williams interlude

I’m spending the day prepping my graduate seminar (W 3:30-6:30), titled “What Was Cultural Studies?” --and I don’t have time for further commentary on Iowa or the upcoming State of the Union, but two things suddenly occurred to me while I was rereading the opening chapters of Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society.  One: there seem to be very few commentators on academe who have any idea that the field of “cultural studies” begins with analyses of the meanings of the term “culture” over the past two centuries.  It’s not just books about Madonna, people.  It’s an inquiry into the functions of the idea of culture in modernity, where “modernity” means, roughly, “the development of plural and secular forms of political organization together with the rise of industrial capitalism and its successors.” For Williams, the changes in the “structure of meanings” of words such as industry, democracy, class, art, and culture “bear witness to a general change in our characteristic ways of thinking about our common life: about our social, political, and economic institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education and the arts.”

Two: every once in a while someone complains that literature professors like me are attending to contemporary politics instead of spending all our time studying literature.  I have no idea where these people get their bizarre notion that professors of literature have, by their choice of profession, signed over their other rights as citizens.  But perhaps it’s worth suggesting to a couple of these addled souls that their blinkered idea of “literature” owes much to one of the central paradoxes of Romanticism.  In Williams’ deservedly famous words:

“Than the poets from Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats there have been few generations of creative writers more deeply interested and more involved in study and criticism of the society of their day.  Yet a fact so evident, and so easily capable of confirmation, accords uneasily in our own time with that popular and general conception of the ‘romantic artist’ which, paradoxically, has been primarily derived from study of these same poets.  In this conception, the Poet, the Artist, is by nature indifferent to the crude worldliness and materialism of politics and social affairs; he is devoted, rather, to the more substantial spheres of natural beauty and personal feeling.  The elements of this paradox can be seen in the work of the Romantic poets themselves, but the supposed opposition between attention to natural beauty and attention to government, or between personal feeling and the nature of man in society, is on the whole a later development.  What were seen at the end of the nineteenth century as disparate interests, between which a man must choose and in the act of choice declare himself poet or sociologist, were, normally, at the beginning of the century, seen as interlocking interests: a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion about society, and an observation of natural beauty carried a necessary moral reference to the whole and unified life of man.  The subsequent dissociation of interests certainly prevents us from seeing the full significance of this remarkable period, but we must add also that the dissociation is itself in part a product of the nature of the Romantic attempt.  Meanwhile, as some sort of security against the vestiges of the dissociation, we may usefully remind ourselves that Wordsworth wrote political pamphlets, that Blake was a friend of Tom Paine and was tried for sedition, that Coleridge wrote political journalism and social philosophy, that Shelley, in addition to this, distributed pamphlets in the streets, that Southey was a constant political commentator, that Byron spoke on the frame-riots and died as a volunteer in a political war; and, further, as must surely be obvious from the poetry of all the men named, that these activities were neither marginal nor incidental, but were essentially related to a large part of the experience from which the poetry itself was made.”

Closing polemical lit-crit point.  Read next to Williams, Harold Bloom’s early work on the Romantics looks like the learned but whimsical work of a garrulous poetaster.  (This would be before Bloom decided that he was the contemporary incarnation of Falstaff-- even though he has no sense of humor whatsoever.)

Posted by Michael on 01/20 at 07:53 AM
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Sunday, January 18, 2004

Enjoy the holiday

Washington, D.C., January 19 (Pox News)—Sidestepping a two-year congressional battle, President Bush is planning to name former Confederate President Jefferson Davis to a federal appeals court, in a slap at filibustering Senate Democrats who have questioned the civil rights records of the President’s judicial nominees.

Bush will appoint Davis to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under authority granted him during periods when Congress is in recess. Such appointments, which need no Senate confirmation, are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.

Following by only a few days Bush’s controversial appointment of U.S. District Court judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit, the installation of Davis sends a signal to Democrats that the President is willing and ready to make the judiciary a key issue for voters in 2004. Pushing for Davis’s confirmation last year, Bush said, “He was a good, fair-minded man while he was alive, and the treatment he has recently received from a handful of senators is a disgrace. He has wide bipartisan support from those who know him best.” Senior White House officials added that Davis was a longtime Democrat, and that the President originally nominated him in an attempt to “change the tone” of partisan political debate in Washington.

Nevertheless, Senate Democrats and civil rights groups reacted with outrage to the announcement, noting that it is highly unusual for the President to appoint someone who was not only an elected official of the Confederate States of America, but who has been dead for 115 years as well.

“The president’s recess appointment of this long-dead secessionist and Confederate leader on the very day of the federal observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday is an insult to Dr. King, an insult to every African-American, and an insult to all Americans who share Dr. King’s great goals,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. “It serves only to emphasize again this administration’s shameful opposition to civil rights.”

Republicans in turn have accused Democrats of being biased against Bush’s states-rights nominees. They also have accused the Democrats of being biased against Southerners.

Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, fired back by saying that Kennedy’s reply “would be disgraceful if it were not so sad.” DeLay called the President’s critics “racists,” claiming that if Jefferson Davis had been black and an abolitionist, the “loony left would no doubt be calling for a holiday in his name instead of impugning the honor of one of the finest sons of the South.” Senate majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn, concurred in more measured language, saying in a prepared statement that “Davis served his country honorably and well, even if it wasn’t the United States but rather some other country that seceded from and then went to war against the United States.  In the spirit of Dr. King, I truly believe we need to come together as Americans and put these petty ‘who-fought-who’ quarrels behind us.  Former Confederate President Davis will help us do just that.  He is a good man and an excellent nominee.”

Jefferson Davis could not be reached for comment.

Ed.:  Won’t news junkies realize how much of this post is cribbed from actual wire reports on Pickering? MB:  Yep.  Amazing, isn’t it? 

Posted by Michael on 01/18 at 07:28 PM
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Your one-stop prognostication center

For the record, it’s early afternoon here-- just shy of 1:30.  Now, this is what will happen later today:

Eagles 20 Panthers 10
Colts 27 Patriots 23 (it won’t really be that close, but at least the Colts will have to punt at some point in the game, for the first time in the postseason)

And this is what will happen tomorrow:

Kerry 26 Gephardt 22 Dean 22 Edwards 19 Colts 5 Kucinich 4 Sharpton 2

These predictions do not reflect my desires.  They are simply what will happen.  And yes, I’ll leave these up for a few days even if I find them terribly embarrassing.

Update, midnight: Well, I didn’t have to wait a few days, did I?  It, um, it appears that my picks for the Super Bowl simply couldn’t have been, er, any worse.  I completely forgot to factor in the statistic that teams who play in domes and go on the road to snowy northeastern stadiums and proceed to throw four interceptions, three to the same guy, in conference championship games have a cumulative winning percentage of .000.  As for the Eagles vs. the Visitors, I now owe Nick five bucks.  But Nick’s not the only one who took me today.  According to Google ("conference championship” + “chimpanzees” + “predictions"), I was beaten by 83.3 percent of all primates who were hooked up to laptops and asked to predict the NFC and AFC championship games on their blogs. 

On to Iowa!

Iowa update, midnight January 19: My prediction, I believe, was Kerry 26 Gephardt 22 Dean 22 Edwards 18 Colts 5 Kucinich 4 Sharpton 2

Actual Iowa results:  Kerry 38 Edwards 32 Dean 18 Gephardt 11 Kucinich 1.

So yes, I had Kerry winning, but that’s a little like saying I was right about the Colts needing to punt in Foxboro.  And OK, I was only four points off on Dean’s total, too.  But otherwise, I’m as stunned as anyone.  I thought Gephardt would be around for another two weeks; I thought Edwards’ late run was being oversold; I thought the Colts would show some more offense.

It appears that my man Dean will have to win convincingly in New Hampshire, and now I’m not at all sure he will (though, to repeat the mantra, I’d also be reasonably happy with Clark or Kerry, and I will have to think again about this Edwards).  Also: what does this mean for Clark?  Nothing good, I imagine.  And will Lieberman have the good sense to follow Gephardt’s lead, and bow out after he tanks in New Hampshire?

Posted by Michael on 01/18 at 07:11 AM
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Saturday, January 17, 2004

And now for that endorsement

It has become increasingly clear to serious observers of American politics that the Democratic Party will have no hope of renewal if it nominates a Democrat for president in 2004. And the clearest, bravest alternative is Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman.

To have any prospect of winning back the hearts and minds of the professional political class in Washington, Maryland, and northern Virginia, the Democrats must make a final, decisive break with the demotic populism and so-called “grass-roots” organizing that has long entranced those among the party’s liberals who make a specialty of self-righteous delusion.  That means, among other things:

-- the Democratic nominee must have a strong record of creating innovative forms of corporate accounting that allow stock options to be treated dynamically, rather than being classed under the hidebound and antiquated heading of “expenses.” Only Lieberman has this kind of record, for only Lieberman has had the courage to break with paleoliberal tradition and allow companies such as Enron and WorldCom to reimagine the corporation so as to unlock shareholder value.  Yes, it is true that a few bad apples walked off with tens of millions of dollars while ordinary people lost their life’s savings.  But alone among the Democratic contenders, Lieberman knows that this is no time to play class warfare with the nation’s future.  Indeed, where Lieberman diverges most from his competitors on domestic policy is in his willingness to challenge entrenched party interest groups, the better to court the other party’s entrenched interest groups.

-- the Democratic nominee must be able to continue the important work of the Project for the New American Century even after the Bush administration has passed the torch.  When others chose obstructionism, appeasement, and demagoguery, only Senator Lieberman had the mettle to declare that there was “not one inch” of difference between himself and President Bush on Iraq-- and there is the hope that a President Lieberman, likewise, would have the exceptional vision necessary to see Ariel Sharon as a man of peace.  The tradition Lieberman represents is an honorable one, of supporting democracy or something more or less like it in some ways by whatever means are closest to hand, without hamstringing the moral authority of the United States with pettifogging questions about whether Iraq had “weapons” or a “weapons program.”

-- the Democratic nominee must be able to bond with Dick Cheney over the latter’s substantial success with Halliburton.  Lieberman’s honest and forthright debate with Cheney in October 2000 gave every indication that his admiration for the Cheneys goes well beyond his merely tactical alliance with Lynne Cheney in the fight to restore values to American culture.

-- finally, last but not least, the Democratic nominee must demonstrate a willingness to cite a wide array of sources, including the work of cyberjournalist Matt Drudge, in order to attack his Democratic rivals on Iraq.  Senator Lieberman’s recent criticism of Wesley Clark demonstrates that he has the intestinal fortitude to cross party lines and make new friends, just as it shows that he has the determination necessary to endure the scorn of Old Democrats calling his reliance on Drudge “opportunistic,” “misguided,” or “completely out to lunch.”

I further suggest that because Senator Lieberman looks and sounds so much like the unctuous, lugubrious Senator Palpatine in Star Wars, that we grant him emergency powers to marshal a Grand Army of the Republic, secure in the knowledge that he will lay aside those powers once the immediate crisis has passed.

And I have to admit that I wrote this endorsement with help.  All the italicized passages above were taken from The New Republic’s endorsement of Lieberman earlier this month.

Posted by Michael on 01/17 at 06:42 AM
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