North Korea: the Worst Possible Outcome June 22, 2006
Posted by danjeffers in The World Outside the Beltway.add a comment
North Korea is threatening a test of a long-range missile capable of reaching the United States. Condi Rice is threatening to shoot it down. Aside from the sovereign/moral/political ramifications, this is just technically stupid. The possible outcome to the North Korean test are:
Missile Failure (Good for us, bad for them, fairly likely)
Missile success (Bad for us, Good for them, possible)
If you add in our attempt to shoot it down you eliminate the Good outcome of missile failure and add a bad and a worse outcome:
Intercept success (Bad for us/Bad for them, possible)
Intercept failure (Very, very bad for us/very good for them, possible)
Who is it that keeps describing Condi Rice as "brilliant?"
We Went Better Indecency! June 11, 2006
Posted by danjeffers in Culture and Subversion, Pithy Comments to get quoted in Express.add a comment
Congress, which seems chock full of indecency itself these days, has raised the fines for on-air "indecency" by a factor of ten. Now, since we can assume that somehow this increase in the cost of doing business will be passed on to the consumer, we should consider what we're getting for our money. The case which is the basis for all this flapping around was the quick, almost imperceptible baring of Janet Jackson's breast. If we're going to pay ten times as much, we should get ten times better flashing, from ten times more attractive women. And you shouldn't need Tivo to actually see what you're paying for, either.
Al-Zarqawi? Dead! June 8, 2006
Posted by danjeffers in The World Outside the Beltway.1 comment so far
Who doesn't think this is a good thing? I'm sure it won't be long before the Fringe Right (Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News) will claim that liberals are mourning Zarqawi. Possibly, they'll find some fringe-lefty who will say something stupid to back up their rantings, though they didn't bother finding anyone who really did drool over the Haditha massacre. Instead, they just said, over and over, that liberals were drooling over the massacre. No, we aren't drooling. Unlike any of the fringe right (Coulter, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Fox News) I actually did serve in the military. So did many, many liberals. We don't enjoy seeing people we identify with die. Or come back maimed for life. And we don't like seeing the service embarrassed and humiliated by out of control elements. We knew it would happen. We knew it was part of the cost of war, but we didn't and don't welcome any of it.
Zarqawi is/was an enemy to all, a murdering bastard of the lowest order. Now he's dead. Good riddance. Of course, he isn't Osama Bin Laden. Was not part of the 9/11 conspiracy. His dying is not a victory of the "war on terror" because his ascendancy was only as a result of the US invasion of Iraq.
More on Haditha June 6, 2006
Posted by danjeffers in The World Outside the Beltway.add a comment
The current news in Iraq is that, oddly, the killings at Haditha are not big news. Why? Probably because only in America do we believe we don't do that kind of thing. The religion of war in this country includes the premise that we somehow fight cleaner and more nobly. In fact, war brings out the worst in everyone and in any army there will be a few people worse than the rest. When control is lost, when leadership drifts away, the worst rise and atrocities happen. What makes this bad for us, though, is the long period of covering up or ignoring the problem. Every other killing in Iraq, no matter how justified or tied to military necessity, will be questioned. Can all this be blamed on Bush? Andrew Sullivan says yes, and he gives a pretty compelling argument:
From the moment George W. Bush exempted U.S. military forces from the Geneva Conventions if "military necessity" demanded it, he sent a message. From the moment George W. Bush refused to accept Donald Rumsfeld's repeated offers to resign after Abu Ghraib, he sent a message. From the moment, George W. Bush appended a signing statement to the McCain Amendment, arguing that as commander-in-chief, he was not subject to the ban on torture and abuse of military prisoners, the president sent a message.
Those messages – in a tense and dangerous war, where bad things will always happen – made a difficult situation one where abuse and war crimes were almost bound to take place. And command responsibility in the military goes upward. The president cannot fill the role of being commander-in-chief in order to declare "Mission Accomplished" and then choose not to fill the role when his troops commit war-crimes and torture and atrocities. In what George W. Bush himself calls a "responsibility society," he has ultimate responsibility for the forces he commands. And there is a direct and obvious line between his decisions to break decades' long adherence to the Geneva Conventions and the pandemic of torture, and now incidents of war crimes, that have plagued this war and stained the honor of this country.
To say this is not to be, as Glenn Reynolds argues, "pathetic and poisonous." It is to face the fact that this president has formally lowered the moral standards for American warfare – in writing, and by his actions. He was given a chance to stop this with the McCain Amendment, and he dodged it. He is now reaping the whirlwind. We all are – not the least the vast majority of great and honorable soldiers whose profession has been stained by a derelict defense secretary and a torture-condoning president. The troops deserve so much better. So does America.
It would suck if: June 25, 2006
Posted by danjeffers in Culture and Subversion, Pithy Comments to get quoted in Express.add a comment
Say you're a bit-time television producer. Perhaps not a celebrated artist. But, among the schlocky producers of schockly crap, you stand out. Then you die.
Knowing that celebrities die in threes, you might hope that your seat-mates would be peers in some way. It would really, really suck if the other two dead celebrities who are riding in your little tram-car to heaven are Patsy Ramsey and that guy who kept suing Anna Nicole Smith.