Derek Scruggs

I remember reading this funny Point/Counterpoint in the Onion right before the Iraq War. The funny part is not the paragraph below, which is the setup for the joke. However, it’s amazing how accurate this joke turned out to be.

This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher. It will not end the threat of weapons of mass destruction; it will make possible their further proliferation. And it will not lay the groundwork for the flourishing of democracy throughout the Mideast; it will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence.

 If you click through to see the Counterpoint response, you’ll see the joke. If only I’d paid more attention. I was a reluctant supporter of the war. Shame on me for believing Bush’s arguments, which basically amounted to that Counterpoint. Sigh…

Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska who was previously most well known for the “bridge to nowhere”, enlightens supporters of Net Neutrality on how those Internet thingies really work:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn’t going to go through the Internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the Internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that Internet and what happens to your own personal Internet?

I just the other day got, an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

“…an Internet was sent by my staff…” WTF!?

Can you believe this idiot said this, and that now it’s part of in the Congressional Record? Can you believe this idiot got elected in the first place?

More at Wired.

I haven’t followed the whole Dubai port thing enough to have an opinion, but it’s striking that some Republicans see this as part of a pattern of abuse from the White House.

“This was a sound business decision,” said a senior Republican operative of the Dubai deal, “and an absolutely inept political decision. But this is what happens when you’ve spent five and a half years telling your Republican friends to go screw themselves.”

(Emphasis added.) Source: New York Daily News via Andrew Sullivan

Even right-wing whackos like Michelle Malkin are raising a stink. Though yesterday Rush Limbaugh accused opponents of it of racism:

Isn’t it ironic that we have this dumb, Texas rube, frat boy defending tolerance and the rights of minorities, and we have the Democratic Party and the nuanced elitist, smarter than everyone else in the room liberals acting on blind racism and profiling?

(Emphasis added.) Read the whole thing here. I guess Malkin is now a liberal.

…so of course it must be the fault of the Jews. I can understand (but not agree with) the American flag, but why drag Israel into this? Sigh…

The Samarra Shrine, before and after. Imagine a similar attack on, say, Notre Dame or St. Peter’s Basilica

Update: TIME has a good photo essay here.

I’ve heard several informed reporters comment that a low-level civil war has been under way in Iraq for quite sometime. Today’s apocalyptic attack by Sunnis against Shiites looks like Iraq’s version of the attack on Ft. Sumter, though bloodier.

Even Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, long a voice of restraint in the face of violence against his Shiite followers, hinted that the attack on the shrine required a militant response.

“The Iraqi government now is supported more than ever, and if its security apparatuses are not able to offer the required security, then the faithful must be able to do it, with the help of God,” according to a statement released by Sistani’s office in Najaf.

I just came across this site courtesy of Brad Feld: Save Google Free China

Let me state at the outset that I am disappointed that Google is censoring results in China. However, I don’t believe they have a choice. If you set up shop in a foreign country, you have to follow their laws. Period. The only option is for Google not to set up in China. Some argue that they shouldn’t be there at all. Here’s my take on why China’s citizens are ultimately better off with Google there.

I believe that a democratic revolution in China will not be because of people yearning for abstract concepts like democracy and freedom. Rather, it will be driven by kitchen-table issues such as the environment (safe drinking water), workplace safety (China loses a tremendous number of people in mining accidents every year) and property rights (the government is quick to condemn old neighborhoods in favor of developers).

Contrary to the image of China as an authoritarian place with no free speech, there are already thousands of protests every year, usually around these issues.

Because of this, I think the value Google brings to China is not pictures of Tianenman Square crackdown, but rather information about, say, PCBs, or how workplace safety is managed in the West. Or even better, tips for organizing a protest. These real-world issues are not censored in China to the same extent that politically explosive (embarrassing, face-breaking) things like Tianenmen Square are.

Many things are openly discussed. For example, everyone there agrees that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were disasters, and they’re free to say so on web sites, in print and on TV.

Don’t get me wrong: China is far from a model of liberty and democracy. But it’s better today than it was 10 years ago, and the Internet (along with western investment) has helped create that reality. I would bet all kinds of money that will be saying the same thing 10 years from now, and Google will have played an important role, much more so than if they stay out.

A former CIA officer joins the chorus of former officials claiming the Bush administration “cherry picked” intelligence.

What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades…

…The Bush administration’s use of intelligence on Iraq did not just blur this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.

Here’s the most damning part:

As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community’s assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war.

It’s easy:

Now, in order to be considered a “liberal,” only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a “liberal,” regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more “liberal” one is. Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.

“Liberal” IMO is actually pretty tame. “Traitor” and “America hater” are hurled around a lot too. The full explanation is here. It wasn’t too long ago that Bob Barr was an A player on the fundraising circuit because of his role in impeaching Clinton. Now in many conservatives’ eyes he’s just another whiny ACLU type. Meanwhile, Anne Coulter feels comfortable enough at CPAC to rant about ragheads.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Sometimes I have to remind myself that there is a war going on. It’s easy for me, a high-tech yuppie living in a beautiful place with a view of the mountains out my office window – and no close friends in the military – to just see the war as a series of duelling straw-man arguments between the right and the left. (It helps that I don’t watch TV, so I never see the images of combat.)

Not only are young men and women dying (and killing others) on my behalf, they’re forced to endure memories like this for the rest of their lives:

He won’t talk about the weeks that followed. He only mentions moments, like still frames from a film. The day his column barely survived an ambush, escaping through a broken door as bullets struck near their feet. The morning he woke up to discover that a cat had taken up residence in the open chest cavity of an Iraqi body nearby, consuming it from within.

Whether you oppose or support the war in Iraq, I’m sure none of us want to see this: “People don’t want to know the Marlboro Man has PTSD.”