When you've been arrogant from the beginning, you'll be arrogant to the end. No one should be surprised at this. Shocked again, for the gazillionth time these past 7 years, but not surprised.
Sorry about the pun in the title there, people of Aspen (many of whom were doing a sotto voce boo while Rove spun). Obviously no reflection intended on you--just on KR.
It's working; we're being heard at last. Isn't it an amazing coincidence that these GOP Senators are coming back to Washington with a fresh mindset about Iraq?
No, it's not a coincidence at all. These politicians have spent a week at home, hearing it from you—the disgusted, angry, despairing citizens of this nation—and they're finally seeing where their bread is buttered. Keep it up, people: just think how you'll feel when those kids start coming home, alive and whole, because you put the pressure on the pols to make it so. Every call you make, every email you send, every time you make a pest of yourself to the powerful, you're bringing us a little closer to a life-saving tipping point. Once again, keep it up.
Now I know I promised the opening of our Harry Potter week today, and now I will break my promise. Perhaps you're thinking, "this blog should be knocked off the web." Well, come back this time next month and you'll see that some wishes do come true.
First, though, Terry sent me the following over the weekend, and it deserves a hearing in its natural Monday slot. My worthy blogging partner does like to inspire debate—you can inscribe your ripostes to the comments. I'll simply say that those guys Clinton pardoned didn't start any wars, decloak any CIA agents, or cook the books on any intel. Yet I will agree with Terry when he argues that not merely is the Libby pardon an aberration of justice, it does not even meet Shakespeare's famous definition of mercy. Mr. McKenna:
Mercy and justice: they live parallel lives. Wherever one is, the other cannot be far behind. In my college days, I remember a Jewish professor telling us (in a history class at Cooper Union) that Christians go overboard with mercy, that Jews were much better balanced and so favored justice. Not being too familiar with Jewish law, I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t – but also still think of mercy as the central gift from Jesus’ ministry.
Shakespeare said this:
The quality of mercy is not strained, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: It is twice blessed: It blesses him that gives and him that takes... Mercy... is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God Himself. And earthly power doth then show likest God's when mercy seasons justice.
Imagine a world, for just a moment, in which journalists actually do their jobs. Imagine a nation where not 70% or 60% or 40%, but 0% of Americans ever believed that Saddam and Osama were partners in conspiracy making nuclear weapons in a cave; imagine a world where the carnage in Darfur trumps Anna Nicole's rotting corpse and Paris' prison; where Coulter is a skeletal nobody on the Internet on a site made in Netscape Composer 4, whose monthly visitors would all fit comfortably into a toilet stall. Imagine a media whose guiding principle is the search for truth; whose primary instruments are questions and energy; whose representatives are defined by their willingness to search the past and the dark corners of power, and not stop until truth emerges, naked and blinking under the light of journalistic effort.
This week, I found evidence of three such seekers. There are more of them out there, working every day. You'll rarely see them on TV, and you'll have to go to the inner sections of the newspaper or the less-trafficked corners of the Internet to find them. But they are out there. To find them, you just have to be like them and dig a little.
Bob Herbert is probably the most responsible, grittiest journalist in New York City. He's an op-ed writer, fer Chrissake, and he does more shoe-leather investigative journalism in a week than the combination of the rest of the mainstream media does in a year. This week, he effectively exposed the rankest, foulest corruption imaginable within the NYC Police Dept., and presented the story and his evidence. Then he challenged Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly to get busy and fix the department's rotten members, and take the shields off the racists and perverts in the NYPD.
Ladies and gentlemen, you can scour every newsroom in the country and you won't find a journalist more worthy of the name than Bob Herbert. If you don't subscribe to Times Select yet, he's worth the annual $50 all by himself.
Eric Alterman is a different kind of journalist. He's a blogger with an academic pedigree and a talent for research and writing that has made his four books all bestsellers. He's researching another one now, and found this old speech from George McGovern—he recommends that you replace the word "Vietnam" with "Iraq," and the number 50,000 with 3,500 and you'll get the idea of how important it is for us to read this now:
Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land -- young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.
There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.
And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.
So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: "A contentious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."
Finally, there's the man in that video, Keith Olbermann, who on national television called for the resignations of Bush and Cheney. How does this guy keep his job, you ask? Olbermann's show is one of the top-rated newscasts on cable; he keeps fat advertising dollars flowing into MSNBC's bank account, that's how. But he manages that by actually doing his job, which is to scratch the surface of power with a razor-honed pickaxe. Olbermann knows that if you truly, as the old saying goes, comfort the afflicted with an unbending search for truth, then the comfortable who may be afflicted by that search will pay anyway.
The scene is Prospect Lake, Brooklyn, NY; the music is from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (Quicktime movie, 2:09, 1.3MB, click to view)
Here's a must-read on the Libby denouement, with some historical perspective, from Eric Alterman.
We'll feature Al Gore's new book again in the Friday space today. But first, a glance at the near future here as we prepare to sail back to the Land of Unwanted Blogs:
There was then, there is now, and there would always have been, regardless of what President Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it worse. We are less safe because of his policy. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us than any leader of our country in all the years of our existence as a nation.
Part of the explanation for the increased difficulty in gaining cooperation in fighting terrorism is Bush's attitude of contempt for any person, institution, or nation that disagrees with him. He has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every U.S. town and city to a greater danger of attack because of his arrogance and willfulness, in particular his insistence on stirring up a hornets' nest in Iraq. Compounding the problem, he has regularly insulted the religion, the culture, and the tradition of people in other countries throughout the Muslim world.
He has also pursued policies that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, all of it done in our name. President Bush has said repeatedly that the war in Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. It was not, of course, the central front, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists.
The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's failed policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan have made the world a far more dangerous place. (pp. 181 - 182).
