Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom

I don't actually like Christopher Hitchens. He's a smarmy, unctuous, arrogant obnoxious Englishman with a beautiful command of our language. The thing about him that I really don't like is that sometimes he's right. Via Slate. Worth a read.

To these contrasting hypotheses one might add another variable, this time on the other side of the ledger. Coalition forces in Iraq do not come roaring into towns and villages to tell the local people to stop producing or consuming oil products. Nor do they roam the country blowing up oil-wells or drills. Picture how the situation in Iraq might be different if they did. Now picture something that you do not have to imagine—a determined effort by the liberators of Afghanistan to force the country back into warlordism and anarchy. Every day, soldiers acting in our name are burning or spraying Afghanistan's only viable crop.

Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn't take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.

There is the further point that opium is good for us. Painkillers and anesthetics have to come from somewhere, and we have an arrangement with Turkey to grow and refine the stuff that we need. Why Turkey, an already over-indulged client state? Isn't it time to give the struggling Afghans a share of the business? We could simultaneously ensure a boost for Afghan agriculture, remove an essential commodity from terrorist and warlord control, and guarantee a steady supply of analgesics that would be free of impurities or additives.

In order to comprehend this point, there is no need to know much about Afghanistan. Do you know anyone who really believes in the "war on drugs" as it is supposedly waged in the United States? It is widely understood to be the main index of pointless and costly and unjust incarceration, a huge source of corruption in police departments, and a cause of crime in its own right as well as a source of tainted and "cut" narcotics. And that is before you even consider absurdities and cruelties like the denial of medical marijuana, or the diversion of personnel and resources from the war against more threatening gangsters. Our entire state policy, at home and abroad, is devoted not to stopping a trade that actually grows every year, but rather to ensuring that all its profitable means of production, distribution, and exchange remain the fiefdom of criminal elements. We consciously deny ourselves access to properly refined and labeled products and to the vast revenue that could accrue to the Treasury instead of to the mobsters here and overseas.

This demented legacy of the Nixon administration will have to be abandoned sooner or later, and I believe that the threatened sacrifice of Afghanistan to the dogma may be the "tipping point." There are numerous policy planners, prison officials, policemen, elected politicians, and scientific specialists, on the intelligent Right as well as the intelligent Left, who have concluded that decriminalization is an urgent necessity. It's hard to think of any other single reform that could make more difference in more areas. The idea offers a way out of the current sterile red state/blue state dichotomy. It ought to be the next big thing.

I think buying the opium from Afghan farmers is a priority right up there with buying up loose nukes. It's a better use of my tax money than financing Jesusland.

The Defense Secretary We Have

When I start posting shit from conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, in the WaPo, the handwriting is on the wall for Rumsfeld and, hopefully, the administration.

Actually, we have a pretty terrific Army. It's performed a lot better in this war than the secretary of defense has. President Bush has nonetheless decided to stick for now with the defense secretary we have, perhaps because he doesn't want to make a change until after the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. But surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term.

Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld. Begin with the rest of his answer to Spec. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard:

"Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe -- it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip."

So the Army is in charge. "They" are working at it. Rumsfeld? He happens to hang out in the same building: "I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. . . . And that is what the Army has been working on." Not "that is what we have been working on." Rather, "that is what the Army has been working on." The buck stops with the Army.

Perhaps Rumsfeld simply had a bad day. But then, what about his statement earlier last week, when asked about troop levels? "The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control." Really? Well, "the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted."

Leave aside the fact that the issue is not "the number of troops we had for the invasion" but rather the number of troops we have had for postwar stabilization. Leave aside the fact that Gen. Tommy Franks had projected that he would need a quarter-million troops on the ground for that task -- and that his civilian superiors had mistakenly promised him that tens of thousands of international troops would be available. Leave aside the fact that Rumsfeld has only grudgingly and belatedly been willing to adjust even a little bit to realities on the ground since April 2003. And leave aside the fact that if our generals have been under pressure not to request more troops in Iraq for fear of stretching the military too thin, this is a consequence of Rumsfeld's refusal to increase the size of the military after Sept. 11.

In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week, after a fashion: "I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that's fine." Except he fails to take responsibility.

These soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have.

First, I start agreeing sometimes with Pat Buchanan and now this. I think I need counseling.

What we're dealing with

The Christo-Fascist mindset. Read my post below. Now, this morning, I run across this post from the farmer containing an excerpt from a fish . . . er, woman named Wanda, who is obviously concerned about 'family values'. These are the good, God-fearing people who follow Jesus' word:

Christians Are Taking Back America
by: wanda_for_decent_values (47/F/Des Moines, IA) 12/13/04 10:29 pm
Msg: 792 of 4454
5 recommendations

And we are THROUGH kowtowing to muslims, atheists, homosexuals and anti-American "artists" living on our tax dollars!

By the end of President George W Bush's 2nd term:

1) Iraq will be well on the way to being a peaceful Christian country. Once Iraq has gone Christian, the Gospel of Jesus will spread throughout the Middle East. The region will be at peace and millions of Arab souls will be saved through the grace of Jesus Christ.

2) Bush will have appointed at least two USSC Justices and the baby slaughterhouses will finally be closed down forever.

3) Gays will be put back in the closet for good. The sodomy and decency laws will be reinstated and their disgusting disease spreading activities will be outlawed again. Maybe we can’t get rid of them, but we can get them out our children’s view.

4) School vouchers will allow parents to send their kids to decent Christian schools instead of the NEA-infested cesspools that exist now.

5) Worthless liberal social welfare programs will be dismantled and replaced by Christian faith-based government funded programs. People will finally get REAL help through Jesus Christ.

6) Filthy shows like Howard Stern, Jerry Springer and Will & Grace will be off the air and replaced with decent Christian family programming. Families will once again be able to turn on the radio or television and not be embarrassed to listen or watch together.

7) The abominable scourge of Internet pornography will end with the expansion and ENFORCEMENT of the Online Decency Act. Pornographers who expose the public to this sickening material will be behind bars where they belong.

You can be with us or against us, but you had BETTER believe one thing:

Christians are DONE sitting at the back of the bus.

Yup, that's our little Wanda. I wonder how much 'sitting in the back of the bus' she's actually been forced to endure. I wonder if she realizes it's our (the muslims, atheists, homosexuals and anti-American "artists") taxes who are supporting the Jesus freaks.

I'd like to ask the Frau Kommissar if Jesus was a Nazi or Hitler was a disciple? I'd also like to ask her when they're gonna start taking gays, and anyone else who doesn't agree with her ideology, to the camps. I mean, isn't that what Jesus wants? Ol' Wanda and her ilk are a serious waste of my good air.

"Fifteen years ago I had nothing save my faith and my will. Today the Movement is Germany, today this Movement has won the German nation and formed the Reich. Would that have been possible without the blessing of the Almighty? Or do they who ruined Germany wish to maintain that they have had God's blessing? What we are we are, not against but with the will of Providence. And so long as we are loyal, honest, and ready to fight, so long as we believe in our great work and do not capitulate, we shall also in the future have the blessing of Providence." (Adolf Hitler, Rosenheim, Aug. 11, 1935)

The defense rests.

Update: 05:58:

And I just realized what Rove is using as a how-to manual. Mein Kampf.

Nazis . . . again . . . and again . . .

From Jesus Politics via Blondie:

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith." (The German Churches Under Hitler, p.241)

I know I bitch and bitch about this. I won't even link to all my posts about the Bush Reich. But if you had any doubts about where this country's headed, these quotes from Der Führer should seal it for ya.

"Without pledging ourselves to any particular Confession [Protestantism or Catholicism], we have restored to faith its prerequisites because we were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." (Berlin, Oct. 24, 1933)

Yes, Martha, it can happen here.

Is this a joke or what?

Al Kamen in WaPo:

[. . .]

Failing upward? President Bush announced yesterday he'll be awarding the presidential Medal of Freedom to the Tres Amigos of Iraq: former CIA chief George J. "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who gave him bad information; retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who didn't have enough troops for the postwar occupation; and former Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer, who complained about the troop levels too late.

[. . .]

Three miserable failures get one of this nation's highest honors? WTF? Am I missing something? This administration leads the league in fuckuppedness.

Wolcott

On Bernie Blowhard:

[. . .]

. . .I could see how this tough-guy shtick--which obviously wasn't entirely shtick, but a tough streak that had been refined into an urban lawman persona--would impress fake swaggarts like, well, George Bush, who likes to play dress-up as a range hand and fighter pilot to show what a Hungry man entree he is.

[. . .]

Go read.

I love the farmer 2

I know I've said it before, but he's (I think he's a he) fantastic, with an acerbic wit (or half-wit) that's right up my alley.

[. . .]

Also, I believe, given my obvious expertise, that I'd make a good religious figure. In fact I'm thinking of becoming one sometime after the new year. It's a lucrative and lively trade and clearly in demand. I'm thinking of something in apocalyptic end time prophecy sales, management, and dispensational accounting. Possibly publishing. On the other hand it might just be fun to buy me a used camper van and a catering tent and hit the road as the Pastor Animus Poole; The Bawl and Jump Hellfire Hotdog!

Why the hell not? Hey, it's become increasingly evident to me that American Christianity is sinking rapidly to the bottom of the genotypical pond. Sinking like a sack of sash weights. Not to mention drowning aesthetically. Retreating back to some kind of fundamental primordial infantile playpen where it will ultimately, in the end, lay gurgling like an imbecile, batting stupidly at whatever colorful blowmolded plastic gee-gaw is dangled before it's worshipful eyes. Religion as teething ring, rattle, and inflatable "terror-eyes yellow balloon."

[. . .]

Entire post.

Raisins to Balls

(CBS/AP) New Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Monday his party will launch investigative hearings next year in response to what he said was the reluctance of Republicans to look into problems in the Bush administration.

[. . .]

Wish Tom Daschle had some. We might not be in this mess right now. Maybe it's a good thing he lost.

Link via the American Street.

No storybook ending

This one's good. In toto. Via Working For Change.

Cynthia Tucker - Universal Press Syndicate

12.13.04 - Never underestimate the power of myth. It can solder broken resolve, fuel astounding acts of courage and overwhelm evidence and reason.

That's why the U.S. military struggles so hard to create myths to shore up support for its dubious enterprise in Iraq. Jessica Lynch -- young and blond -- seemed to come straight from central casting to play the part of courageous heroine. Only later did we learn that she never fired a shot. Never mind. The myth served its purpose.

So has the Bush administration's convoluted explanation for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It doesn't hang together logically; its internal contradictions are too great, its fabrications too obvious. Nevertheless, the fanciful tale of a heroic and just America tracking down and killing the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 -- or, even if they didn't, who would strike us if they had a chance -- served well enough to get President Bush re-elected.

It has also served to keep rank-and-file soldiers and their families back home squarely behind the president. Few soldiers or their families have publicly expressed doubts about the Iraqi mission, despite clear evidence of a con job -- from pre-war assurances they would be greeted as liberators to a post-invasion back-door draft that will keep many overseas past their tours.

That could be changing, however. Even compelling myths can wear thin when bleak reality eats away at them every day. That reality reared up several days ago in a so-called "town hall meeting" Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held with soldiers in Kuwait. The troops peppered Rumsfeld with pointed questions about inadequate equipment and extensions of duty.

Painful reality hits hard, too, when families see horribly maimed young men and women who will never recover anything resembling a normal life. While the numbers of war dead have been faithfully reported -- even as the Bush administration has deflected attention from them -- the number of casualties, closing in on 10,000, has gone little noticed.

They have been shuttled quietly away to military hospitals for additional treatment and rehabilitation, though it is difficult to imagine that some will ever be able go home. The New England Journal of Medicine reports on one airman who survived even though he lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face. "How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question," the article noted.

And the journal article did not address another large category of casualties: the emotionally shattered young men and women who found the horrors of war more overwhelming than they expected. Many will struggle with psychic scars for the rest of their lives.

These burdens are borne by a relatively small sliver of the American population -- the working class. Enlisted men and women tend to come from households earning between $32,000 and $33,500, according to a 1999 Defense Department study. (The median American household income is $43,300.) The poorest of the poor don't go; neither do the affluent.

It is odd enough that so many working-class Americans have been seduced by Bush's claims that he's a regular guy looking out for their interests, when, in fact, his policies overwhelmingly benefit well-off families and wealthy corporations. It is downright weird that so many of them have been taken in by his story of a just war when their sons and daughters, husbands and wives -- not the scions of the wealthy -- are the ones paying the ultimate price for it.

This contradiction simply cannot hold much longer, and perhaps it won't have to. Bush may be planning to use the cover of January elections in Iraq to declare victory and leave -- whether the country is stable or not.

But if large numbers of U.S. troops are ordered to stay in Iraq for another four years, as Rumsfeld recently suggested, you can expect to see signs that the hard truth is puncturing the romantic myth of a just war easily won. Those doing the grieving and dying are unlikely to go on willingly playing their part in the fantasy.


(c) 2004, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Gee, Why Don't WE Have One Of Those?

Go see Non Sequitur, Dec. 13, '04.

Tonight's the Night

From MSNBC News. The Geminid meteor showers are supposed to peak tonight. If your skies are clear and you don't have too much light pollution in your east-northeast sky, tear yourself away from your keyboard (or take it outside with you and blog in the dark) and go look. Click on the link for details. Happy viewing and 'ooh-ing and ah-ing'.

Red and Blue Crossover Horse Divers: Bagels Topped With Squirrel Parts?

I get this free in my e-mail every week. Sometimes it's just so-so, but this one's pretty good. From Dave Barry of The Miami Herald.

I thought that, in today's column, I would heal the nation.

The nation suffered a wound during the recent presidential election as a result of the rift between the red states -- defined as ''states where `foreign cuisine' pretty much means Pizza Hut'' -- and the blue states, defined as ``states that believe they are smarter than the red states, despite the fact that it takes the average blue-state resident 15 minutes to order a single cup of coffee.''

Some blue-state residents are so upset about the election that they're talking about moving to Canada, which is technically a foreign nation. In my view, this would be a mistake: Canada is not the paradise it is often made out to be.

FACT: Every year, 43 percent of all Canadians -- a total of eight Canadians -- are eaten by polar bears.

Besides, running away is never the answer, unless you are a teenage boy who has just blown up a mailbox. As Americans, we need to stay here in America and work things out, because regardless of what color or hue of state we live in, we are all, deep down inside our undershorts, Americans. And as Americans, we must ask ourselves: Are we really so different? Must we stereotype those who disagree with us? Do we truly believe that ALL red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that ALL blue-state residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts?

Well, now that you mention it...

And so today I am calling upon both sides in the red-blue rift to reach out. Maybe we could have a cultural-exchange program between red and blue states. For example, a delegation from Texas could go to California and show the Californians how to do some traditional Texas thing such as castrate a bull using only your teeth, and then the Californians could show the Texans how to rearrange their football stadiums in accordance with the principles of feng shui (for openers, both goalposts should be at the west end of the field). Or maybe New York and Kentucky could have a college-style ''mixer,'' featuring special ''crossover'' hors d'oeuvres such as bagels topped with squirrel parts.

I'm just thinking out loud here. (I don't mean that figuratively: The neighbors are complaining.) But I truly believe that, if the red states and blue states made a sincere effort to get to know each other, they'd discover that, beneath their surface differences, there are a lot of deep underlying differences.

But that doesn't mean we have nothing in common. We must always remember that, as Americans, we all have a common enemy -- an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.

He gets down to it sometimes.

And you think I'm crazy?

Dr. John Caulfield thought it had to be a mistake when the Army asked him to return to active duty. After all, he's 70 years old and had already retired - twice. He left the Army in 1980 and private practice two years ago.

"My first reaction was disbelief," Caulfield said. "It never occurred to me that they would call a 70-year-old."

In fact, he was so sure it was an error that he ignored the postcards and telephone messages asking if he would be willing to volunteer for active duty to "backfill" somewhere on the East Coast, Europe or Hawaii. That would be OK, he thought. It would release active duty oral surgeons from those areas to go to combat zones in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But then the orders came for him to go to Afghanistan.

[. . .]

Story.

Careful, Gord, your old ass is on a list too somewhere. I'll meet ya in Baghdad, my friend.

Put your $$$ where your vote is

BuyBlue.org is a site dedicated to helping us to:

...carefully consider where they spend their money in order to avoid "dump(ing) millions of dollars into the conservative warchest." The attractive website, done up in all kinds of blues, is a grassroots effort to help depressed Democrats recognize their hidden source of power -- and to do so in the Buying Season.

Check out BuyBlue's current campaign.

Hard to do, but worth some effort, I think. Via AlterNet.

Too Controversial For New York?

From the NYTimes:

Artwork in an exhibition that drew thousands to the Chelsea Market for its opening last week was abruptly taken down over the weekend after the market's managers complained about a portrait of President Bush fashioned from tiny images of chimpanzees, according to the show's curator.

I thought the artist captured his essence. Maybe some animal-rights outfit objected to the pornographic, demeaning use of the chimps in the portrayal of a lower life form.

Inventing a Crisis

I missed this opinion by Paul Krugman on the proposed Social Security Privatization the other day. Better late than never though, huh? Go read the first part. Here's the last part, with my added emphases.

....Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity - it's just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis - you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

There's no honest way anyone can hold both these positions, but very little about the privatizers' position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success.

For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.

Lies, swindles, and wanting to steal our money. That's what this whole administration is built on.

update 3:45pm OWT

Mrs.G saw this and said, "They can't foreclose on the widows and orphans if they have money to pay the mortgage." Smart gal.

Iraq, Ballots and Pistachios

Thomas Friedman of the NYTimes opines on why more European and Arab countries aren't offering to send troops to help secure the upcoming Iraqi election. He knows a lot about the Middle East and is always worth a read.

If only we could call the Iraqi election, "A Seminar on the European Defense Initiative: Why NATO Is passé and E.D.I. Is the Future"; then we could get thousands of Europeans to take part. If only we could call the Iraqi elections, "A Seminar on George Bush and Genghis Khan: Why Bush Is Worse"; then the Arab League would send so many people, we'd be turning them away. We'd be talking pay-per-view on Al Jazeera.

So let the record show that when Iraq finally decided to hold a free and fair election, all the bad guys decided to come and "vote" and all the good guys sat on the fence, dangling their legs, eating pistachios.

I think the Europeans want to see what happens with these elections before committing themselves and the Arab leaders don't want to see the beginning of the end of hundreds of years of oppressive regimes. Both should take their eyes off their shoes and look up. They might see some interesting graffiti on the wall.

Unless they are secretly hoping Iraq (and thus the U.S.) fails so they can be smug and smile and say, "I told you so" to the Great George W. Satan.

But What's He Gonna Do On The Twelfth Day...

I don't need to say anything about this except go read it.

The 12 Days of Rummying
By MAUREEN DOWD

The last "journalist"

You have to put the word in quotes now, because true journalists (as opposed to talking heads) just got a bit rarer. Ol' Bill Moyers is retiring.

[. . .]

It hasn't been so much a habit for Moyers as a truth-telling mission during his three decades as a TV journalist. But come next week, he will sign off from "Now," the weekly PBS newsmagazine he began in 2002, as, at age 70, he retires from television.

"I'm going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time: how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee," says Moyers. "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people." [my emphasis]

[. . .]

Sorry to see him go.

Programming note

Howard Dean will be on with Russert on MTP this morning.