I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. -- George Carlin
Lots of obits to George Carlin today, of course. But this one by John Nichols at The Nation - George Carlin: American Radical is pretty good.
Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews. "There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species--and my culture in America specifically--have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power," he said. "And perhaps it's just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there's disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word 'cynic' has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. 'George, you're cynical.' Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?"
Always kind of did make me feel uncomfortable. Just doing his job.
FURTHERMORE:
And just for the sake of a mild rebuttal to the above video some might want to check out this story from yesterday's 60 Minutes on the disappearance of the west coast salmon - The Fuss over Fish, which I think both confirms and challenges what George has to say.
Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.
He is also a friend. But since his election to the Senate, he does not exactly call every day. On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through. In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President's power as commander-in-chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.
Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened carefully and offered a specific counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.
Speaking of Gitmo, it appears that the great McClatchy news organization (Truth to Power) have launched their Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series today - the result they say of an "eight month investigation".
ABOUT THIS SERIES
An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.
In today's article they write:
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
And:
How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:
After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.
The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.
American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.
Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court (Bush appointees and all) has stayed true by standing up for the principle of habeas corpus - thus proving that there is still one branch of the American federal government ready and willing to defend The Constitution by ruling 5 to 4 yesterday that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have constitutional right to challenge their continued detention in a federal (civilian) court - I, like a lot of people, like the National Post, like Eugene Robinson - am left to ponder whether or not this will truly mark the beginning of the end for that dreadful experiment and stain on the conscience and rule of law in the United States.
One immediate and obvious question is what does this mean for the current trial of alleged 9-11 'mastermind' Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)?. Mohammed's trial has already begun in a military tribunal at Guantanamo. And as I have written before (getting some things wrong, and some things right) if KSM's trial were shifted to a civilian court would that not necessitate that his charge be thrown out as it could now be proven that he was in fact tortured, and this was once actually against American and international law? However, I do believe there were provisions in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (which, incidentally, Obama voted against, and McCain voted for) the gave retroactive immunity for this kind of activity, which was surely one of the many motivations behind the Act in the first place. (And, notwithstanding the fact that KSM in his first "public appearance" in five years threw another wrench in the whole process and predictably went and actually confessed to the 9-11 attacks.)
All of this is far from settled and will certainly continue for some time, well into the next Administration. As the above NYT article states:
The decision, left some important questions unanswered. These include “the extent of the showing required of the government” at a habeas corpus hearing in order to justify a prisoner’s continued detention, as Justice Kennedy put it, as well as the handling of classified evidence and the degree of due process to which the detainees are entitled.
Months or years of continued litigation may lie ahead, unless the Bush administration, or the administration that follows it, reverses course and closes the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which now holds 270 detainees. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court here said the court’s judges would meet in the next few days with lawyers for both sides to decide “how we can approach our task most effectively and efficiently.”
There are some 200 habeas corpus petitions awaiting action in the District Court, including those filed by the 37 detainees whose appeals were before the Supreme Court in the case decided on Thursday, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195.
But my other question with all of this is always why is The United States still in Guantanamo Bay at all? When is somebody going to bring this before the Supreme Court? (Castro v. Gonzales ?) Its a question with an answer so obvious and assumed it hardly ever gets asked at all. But nonetheless, I'll ask it. Its still a good one for the ever reliable Wikipedia.
The United States controls the land on both sides of the southern part of Guantánamo Bay (Bahía de Guantánamo in Spanish) under a lease set up in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-American War. The lease was established in a 1903 agreement between the two governments, and its terms were modified in a 1934 treaty.[2][3] The current Cuban government considers the U.S. presence in Guantánamo to be an illegal occupation of the area, and argues that the Cuban-American Treaty, which established the lease in 1903, now violates article 52 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.[4][5] However, Article 4 of the same document states that the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties shall not be retroactively applied to any treaties made before it.[6] The U.S. also argues that its right to the base have been reaffirmed by Cuba since the original treaty.
So there you go. Always best to hang on to your colonial relics, I guess. You never know how useful they may be for your future imperialism.
The question keeps getting asked - Should Obama choose Hillary for his VP?
I think it would be a bad idea. Because they come as a team, and as the great Mary J. Blige once suggested that may amount to just a little too much drama. Though we find it hard not to admire the post Presidential William Jefferson Clinton for the breadth, commitment and ability of his Foundational ARV roll out - its safe to say that the man has probably lost some stature during this campaign.
And then - almost as if sent by the mythic karma police themselves - right at the end of this grueling fifteen month campaign comes the now infamous Todd Purdum Vanity Fair article The Comeback Id.
Ouch.
Favourite passage - on the final breakup with Monica Lewinsky:
In the White House, on the day of his last sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton told her that he was worried that a foreign embassy might be listening in on their calls, and that if she were ever questioned, she should say they were just friends. Then he looked into her eyes and sang, “Try a Little Tenderness,” a song that goes: “She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress.”
And as if that's not enough comes word today that Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers are finally hooking up together for a brand new on-line venture - Two Chicks Chatting.
So, you know, you can just feel it all revving back up again. And Obama is going to have enough to worry about. Not to mention the world. So, you know, just lets just take a breath and think about this.
And in the mean time - just for you Hillary, our most recent GHN weekly musical guest:
"When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.
“Buckley spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs,” I wrote in my faux-biography. “By the time he had learned to talk, he had finished three volumes: ‘The World Before Buckley,’ which traced the history of the world prior to his conception; ‘The Seeds of Utopia,’ which outlined his effect on world events during the nine months of his gestation; and ‘The Glorious Dawn,’ which described the profound ramifications of his birth on the social order.”
The piece went on in this way. I noted that his ability to turn water into wine added to his popularity at prep school. I described his college memoirs: “God and Me at Yale,” “God and Me at Home” and “God and Me at the Movies.” I recounted that after college he had founded two magazines, one called The National Buckley and the other called The Buckley Review, which merged to form The Buckley Buckley.
I wrote that his hobbies included extended bouts of name-dropping and going into rooms to make everyone else feel inferior.
Buckley came to the University of Chicago, delivered a lecture and said: “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”
That was the big break of my professional life. A few years later, I went to National Review and joined the hundreds of others who have been Buckley protégés.".
"In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as a voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order,” with a $100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 from outside donors. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”
It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying that Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.".
Buckley was the original pop star of the American New Right. The intellectual godfather of all this media savvy think tank conservatism that has come to dominate so much of American media, politics and political life and thought these days, and as such there is no denying that he is and was a seminal figure. But one couldn't help but be curious about Buckley in his golden years as he watched this child he had so charismatically nurtured since the mid 1950's lose it's way following the collapse of The Soviet Union and balloon into its present form - this severely damaged, lost, defensive and bloated incoherence that has contributed so much towards pushing The United States over the cliff and into the meat-grinder that is contemporary Iraq, a nine trillion dollar debt, historically low approval ratings for the current Republican President as well as as a prison population that has now topped more than one in every hundred Americans for the first time ever.
As The Colbert Report hilariously illustrated last night - the arc of early Firing Line to present day Bill O'Reilly.
"A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley – two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party – begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking – "I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on the right, too," he rants –and Buckley says to the chair, " Just take the mike, there's no other way." He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.
Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who travelled through a long phase of left-liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims: "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.
Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the National Review in 1955 – when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction – and he has always been sceptical of appeals to "the people," preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world view that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.
"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning." The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward". His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.
I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Buckley is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review's 50th birthday, President Bush described today's American conservatives as "Bill's children". I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, "The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That's pretty well gone."
FURTHERMORE:
Classic Buckley vs. Chomsky on "American Terror", Post War Greece and Viet Nam from Firing Line 1969:
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the mujahedeen bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All praise is due to Allah.
"So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah is willing and nothing is too great for Allah."
But why listen to that guy? He's only supposedly Public Enemy Number One.
I plan to write more about McCain and the Military and particularly "the Surge" in the future, but for now you may want to take together these two bits of digital goodness and see how it digests:
Just last week, on Feb. 8, 18 "defense"-related contracts were announced totaling $326,664,244. That makes 58 publicly-reported defense contracts for the week, totaling $1,584,635,220. Last month, there were 223 publicly-reported defense contracts, totaling $19,625,989,716. While the civilian economy is shrinking, the military sector is expanding – and, if either of the eventual major party candidates have their way, the military expenditures will balloon. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are pledged to an even bigger U.S. military. It's good for business, if your business is war or war-related, and it's good for votes – especially the votes, active support, and political contributions of the growing group of Americans whose livelihoods, and claim to some sort of social status, depend on the continuation of our foreign policy of perpetual war.
And then there is this video which I found today via Matthew Yglesius:
The joke of which will only truly make sense if you have seen this wildly popular will.i.am video supporting Barack Obama.
