Friday, April 4, 2008
Gritty American Rock
There is something very primal about Gina Villalobos's music. It is an earthy American music with a gloomy, driving beat and lyrics that speak with the raw emotion of the contemporary American experience. No politics here, just a cry from the heart.
Speech Making
It is a pleasure to listen to a well crafted speech given with an elegant delivery. Here's Barak Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia:
Here's Barak Obama's concession speech in the New Hampshire primary:
But I find a speech delivered with song and Hollywood celebrities even more seductive. Here's Will.I.Am's take on the New Hampshire speech. I think you will agree that it gets to the gist of the speech and delivers it in a more urgent driving and melodious manner:
Let's hear it for political leaders who can speak intelligently and earn their keep by delivering a well-crafted speech!
Here's Barak Obama's concession speech in the New Hampshire primary:
But I find a speech delivered with song and Hollywood celebrities even more seductive. Here's Will.I.Am's take on the New Hampshire speech. I think you will agree that it gets to the gist of the speech and delivers it in a more urgent driving and melodious manner:
Let's hear it for political leaders who can speak intelligently and earn their keep by delivering a well-crafted speech!
Truthiness
It is good to see American politicians throw aside "Truth" for the more flattering "truthiness". And, in this wonderful digital age, we can now uncover YouTube verities to back up the truthiness tales. Here is video that verifies Hillary Clinton's harrowing tales of being under sniper attack on a visit to Bosnia:
The Next Mini-Me Bush?
I love it when leaders stumble on their script, it shows a genuineness that is missing in those robotic perfect performances, the Reagan-esque performances, that are delivered with finesse and emotion. Having enjoyed President Bush which his malapropisms and mangled syntax, it is refreshing to know that the US has the chance to elect a Mini-Me president, John McCain, with the same impediments and foibles.
Does this mean that we can expect the same demented political strategies, the same "benign neglict" approach to economic issues, and the most important, the same Gilded Age political reign that the US has enjoyed in the 21st century?
Does this mean that we can expect the same demented political strategies, the same "benign neglict" approach to economic issues, and the most important, the same Gilded Age political reign that the US has enjoyed in the 21st century?
Hillary Kneecapping Obama?
James Fallows has an interesting blog entry about his impressions of Hillary as a presidential candidate in comparison to her husband, Bill:
I don't recall Bill Clinton knee-capping his Democratic opponents in the 1992 campaign by saying that the Republican opponent, incumbent President George H.W. Bush, was better qualified for office than they were. This of course was Hillary Clinton's charge against Obama a week or so ago.
And this...
And I do not recall Bill Clinton saying anything as flatly insulting to the intelligence as Hillary Clinton's statement about the Michigan primary during her interview yesterday with Steve Inskeep on NPR's Morning Edition.
I don't recall Bill Clinton knee-capping his Democratic opponents in the 1992 campaign by saying that the Republican opponent, incumbent President George H.W. Bush, was better qualified for office than they were. This of course was Hillary Clinton's charge against Obama a week or so ago.
And this...
And I do not recall Bill Clinton saying anything as flatly insulting to the intelligence as Hillary Clinton's statement about the Michigan primary during her interview yesterday with Steve Inskeep on NPR's Morning Edition.
Flatly false from Bill Clinton? Sure: "I did not have..." But flatly insulting to the intelligence, in the fashion of an old press briefing by Scott McClellan when defending Scooter Libby or Alberto Gonzales? No. And that is what Hillary Clinton did yesterday -- to the plain incredulity of the normally calm-sounding Inskeep, who kept asking things like, "But how could the primary have been 'fair' if Barack Obama's name was not on the ballot?"
Bush's Megalomania
It has been pointed out many times that you can't have a war against a concept. You war against an entity: a person, an organization, a political state. But the US has taken on a war against a concept. Sometimes presented as "evil" and sometimes as "terrorism". As many have pointed out you can't win a war against a concept. Here is an article by Mark Danner that exposes the ugly details of Bush's War on Terrorism:
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
Astonishing words from a world leader — declaring that he would “rid the world of evil.” Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the sweep of the President’s ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that “the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism — premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.”
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.”
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism.
How has this "war" gone for the US? Why is "victory" so far away? How did Bin Laden achieve his successes? Danner makes this point:
A small coven of America’s enemies, using the strategy of provocation so familiar in guerrilla warfare, had launched in spectacular fashion on that bright September morning a plan to use the superpower’s strength against itself. To use a different metaphor, they were trying to make good on Archimedes’ celebrated boast: having found the perfect lever and place to stand, they proposed to move the Earth. To an extent I am sure even they did not anticipate, in their choice of opponent — an evangelical, redemptive regime scornful of history and determined to remake the fallen world — lay the seeds of their success.
As for the details of what "successes" this "war" by the US has wrought. Here is the simple picture drawn by Danner:
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.
And what has been achieved by the US in Iraq?
That the Iraq War is “fueling the spread of the jidahist movement,” as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of intelligence reporting from the war’s beginning; indeed, from before it began. “[T]he Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating support for the global jihadist movement” — this point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a “chronicle of a war foretold” (to borrow from Garcia Marquez). In fact, that NIE cites the “Iraq jihad” as the second of four factors “fueling the jihadist movement,” along with “entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness”; “the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations”; and “pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims.”
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
Astonishing words from a world leader — declaring that he would “rid the world of evil.” Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the sweep of the President’s ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that “the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism — premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.”
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.”
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism.
How has this "war" gone for the US? Why is "victory" so far away? How did Bin Laden achieve his successes? Danner makes this point:
A small coven of America’s enemies, using the strategy of provocation so familiar in guerrilla warfare, had launched in spectacular fashion on that bright September morning a plan to use the superpower’s strength against itself. To use a different metaphor, they were trying to make good on Archimedes’ celebrated boast: having found the perfect lever and place to stand, they proposed to move the Earth. To an extent I am sure even they did not anticipate, in their choice of opponent — an evangelical, redemptive regime scornful of history and determined to remake the fallen world — lay the seeds of their success.
As for the details of what "successes" this "war" by the US has wrought. Here is the simple picture drawn by Danner:
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.
And what has been achieved by the US in Iraq?
That the Iraq War is “fueling the spread of the jidahist movement,” as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of intelligence reporting from the war’s beginning; indeed, from before it began. “[T]he Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating support for the global jihadist movement” — this point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a “chronicle of a war foretold” (to borrow from Garcia Marquez). In fact, that NIE cites the “Iraq jihad” as the second of four factors “fueling the jihadist movement,” along with “entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness”; “the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations”; and “pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims.”
Dirty Politics
Here is an interesting article by Joe Conason on the dirty politics in the Obama-Clinton contest. This slugfest is getting nastier:
But Hillary Clinton's campaign crossed a symbolic boundary this week when its operatives sent around clips from the notoriously Clinton-hating extreme-right press to denigrate Barack Obama and his advisors. ... Whatever McPeak's offenses, however, the Clinton campaign went too far in responding. When it starts circulating material from the same ultra-right rags that have routinely accused the Clintons of felonies and treason, its behavior reeks of cynicism. Shall we all start reading World Net Daily for news and guidance? If so, we could learn the "real story behind the Clinton body count," how Hillary plans to "snatch wages" from uninsured workers, the latest developments in "Hollywood mogul" Peter Paul's fraud lawsuit against Bill Clinton, and hot new charges by both former impeachment counsel David Schippers and former White House employee Kathleen Willey that the Clintons burglarized their homes. That latter story appeared in World Net Daily a few weeks ago under the permanent slug "All the Ex-President's Scandals."
But Hillary Clinton's campaign crossed a symbolic boundary this week when its operatives sent around clips from the notoriously Clinton-hating extreme-right press to denigrate Barack Obama and his advisors. ... Whatever McPeak's offenses, however, the Clinton campaign went too far in responding. When it starts circulating material from the same ultra-right rags that have routinely accused the Clintons of felonies and treason, its behavior reeks of cynicism. Shall we all start reading World Net Daily for news and guidance? If so, we could learn the "real story behind the Clinton body count," how Hillary plans to "snatch wages" from uninsured workers, the latest developments in "Hollywood mogul" Peter Paul's fraud lawsuit against Bill Clinton, and hot new charges by both former impeachment counsel David Schippers and former White House employee Kathleen Willey that the Clintons burglarized their homes. That latter story appeared in World Net Daily a few weeks ago under the permanent slug "All the Ex-President's Scandals."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
