"Michael Cohen... famously said I'll take a bullet for Donald Trump. Well, now that he's looking at prison time, we'll see if he'll take a dick."

That's Bill Maher's homophobic rape joke, which I transcribed from the recording of last night's episode of "Real Time."

Here, you can watch it.

I cannot believe prison rape remains a stock comic subject. Quite aside from the general problem of casual joking about rape, the prison rape topic is not only very stale — I've heard these jokes for 50 years — but it shows enthusiasm for punishing human beings convicted of crimes in a manner that extends beyond the legal sentence. It's laughing at the torture of persons held in captivity. When I hear Maher tell that joke, I picture him standing alongside Lynndie England and Charles Graner, grinning toothily and giving the thumbs-up sign.

Eric Holder announces the end of "the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush."

The NYT reports:

The Justice Department did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation. But officials had previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners: Gul Rahman, suspected of being a militant, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit; and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.

Mr. Holder’s announcement might remove a possible target for Republicans during the presidential campaign. But the decision will disappoint liberals who supported President Obama when he ran in 2008 and denounced what he called torture and abuse of prisoners under his predecessor.

It's one thing to run for office, quite another to occupy it. You can criticize and express all manner of outrage from the sidelines, but when you are on the inside, it's different, and by cycling the Democratic Party into power, the American people got to learn something about what the Bush Administration did. Those who don't like Obama should see the value of what we learned.

"I replied to ads people had posted to the casual encounters section of craigslist."

"I asked if I could photograph them in visual representations of their ads. Some said yes." 

The link isn't NSFW, but what it links to definitely is.

The comment (at 2:21) — "Strange how many of the photographs are reminiscent of Abu Ghraib" — is written by me (under my Metafilter pseudonym, which predates this blog).

I think the photography project is quite brilliant, and I'm interested in how it made you feel, if you clicked through the photographs. How far did you click? How did your feelings progress? Why did you stop when you stopped?

The pepper-spray cop's "dissonantly casual body language in the context of violence brings to mind the photos from Abu Ghraib..."

"... Lynndie England smiling and giving the camera a thumbs-up in front of tortured prisoners. And, in a fit of macabre recursion, some of the casually pepper-spraying cop meme images reference those very photos from Abu Ghraib. Lynndie and [John] Pike, two 'bad apples' taking the fall for systemic problems with the institutions each represent."

Says Xeni Jardin in a Guardian piece that I found after I noticed (on my own) the similarity between the Pike and England iconic photographs. Jardin was thinking of the thumb's-up photo. I was thinking of the man-on-a-leash photo, which seems more apt because of the impassive expression, though, I must say, looking at England's face now, after seeing the pepper-spray cop, I'm seeing some human expression, a mournful look. Expression is relative. If we get used to completely dead faces, the subtlest tinge of humanity will pop.

(And here's the special Thanksgiving iteration of the pepper-spray meme.)

Obama opposes the release of more Abu Ghraib photo.

CNN reports:

"Last week, the president met with his legal team and told them that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the [Defense Department] photos because he believes their release would endanger our troops, and because he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court," [an Administration] official said....

The ACLU said the Pentagon had agreed to release a "substantial" number of photographs by May 28. Officials at the Pentagon have said the photographs are from more than 60 criminal investigations between 2001 and 2006 and show military personnel allegedly abusing detainees....

"We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on Al-Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib," [Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, wrote in a March 7th letter to the President.] ""Releasing these old photographs of detainee treatment now will provide new fodder to Al-Qaeda's propaganda and recruitment operations, undercut the progress you have made in our international relations, and endanger America's military and diplomatic personnel throughout the world."

Andrew McCarthy, writing on the Web site of the National Review, issued a harsh warning Tuesday: "American soldiers, American civilians, and other innocent people are going to die because Pres. Barack Obama wants to release photographs of prisoner abuse."

Barack Obama, the pragmatic moderate. I approve.

Sarah Palin: "Is it political? Is it sexism? What is it that drives someone to believe the worst and perpetuate the worst ... gossip and lies?"

Reflecting on the way she was treated by old and new media:



ADDED QUOTE: "The grizzly rises up in me, hearin' things like that." AND: I'm told she says "The mama grizzly rises up in me, hearin' things like that." I'll take your word for it, rather than listen again. I also see, from Gawker, that the filmmaker, the interviewer in the clip, is John Ziegler, who was the radio talk-show guy that David Foster Wallace wrote about in "Host." You can read the DFW. Excerpt:

John Ziegler, who is a talk-radio host of unflagging industry, broad general knowledge, mordant wit, and extreme conviction, makes a particular specialty of media criticism. One object of his disgust and contempt in the churn so far has been the U.S. networks' spineless, patronizing decision not to air the Berg videotape and thus to deny Americans "a true and accurate view of the barbarity, the utter depravity, of these people." Even more outrageous, to Mr. Z., is the mainstream media's lack of outrage about Berg's taped murder versus all that same media's hand-wringing and invective over the recent photos of alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he views as a clear indication of the deluded, blame-America-first mentality of the U.S. press. It is an associated contrast between Americans' mortified response to the Abu Ghraib photos and reports of the Arab world's phlegmatic reaction to the Berg video that leads to his churn's climax, which is that we are plainly, unambiguously better than the Arab world... Depending on one's politics, sensitivities, and tastes in argumentation, it is not hard to think of objections to John Ziegler's climactic claim, or at least of some urgent requests for clarification. Like: Exactly what and whom does "the Arab world" refer to? And why are a few editorials and man-on-the-street interviews sufficient to represent the attitude and character of a whole diverse region? And why is al-Jazeera's showing of the Berg video so awful if Mr. Z. has just castigated the U.S. networks for not showing it? Plus, of course, what is "better" supposed to mean here? More moral? More diffident about our immorality? Is it not, in our own history, pretty easy to name some Berg-level atrocities committed by U.S. nationals, or agencies, or even governments, and approved by much of our populace? Or perhaps this: Leaving aside whether John Ziegler's assertions are true or coherent, is it even remotely helpful or productive to make huge, sweeping claims about some other region's/culture's inferiority to us? What possible effect can such remarks have except to incite hatred? Aren't they sort of irresponsible?

2 documentaries seen in the last 24 hours: "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" and "Standard Operating Procedure."

I would not have chosen to watch these 2 films so close together, even though they are thematically related enough to belong as a double feature, but I happened to watch the first one on HBO On Demand last night, and the second one is something I'd been meaning to see and learned would be gone after today.

"Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired." This is Marina Zenovich's nicely put together documentary about Roman Polanski's immense legal problem. Watching this was a very weird experience, because it's quite apparent that child rape was just not taken very seriously back in the 1970s. I was ready to cut Polanski a lot of slack because he survived the Holocaust and his wife and unborn son were slaughtered by the Manson family, but he has admitted to drugging a 13-year-old and having sexual intercourse with her. And he never really seemed to think he did much of anything wrong — as if he shouldn't have had to serve any prison time.

Much is made of the "media circus" surrounding the legal proceedings. We see footage of lots of guys with cameras crowding around trying to photograph him when he's trying to get in and out of the courtroom. (I thought: Big deal. Quit complaining.) And the main target of contempt is the judge, who's dead now and not able to respond to the charge that he sought the spotlight, played to the cameras, and abused his power. But there are interviews with the victim and the prosecutor (as well as the defense attorney), and neither of them is calling for Polanski's blood.

So it's a rather subtle inquiry into the legal process — and into the soul of a man who did something evil but is also a great artist and suffered beyond comprehension in his life. The vintage footage of him with the spectacularly beautiful Sharon Tate and crazed with pain after her death is heartrending. And the clips from "Chinatown," "Rosemary's Baby," and other films are very cleverly used to illustrate aspects of Polanski's legal struggles.

"Standard Operating Procedure." This is the Errol Morris documentary about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I adore Errol Morris and have watched some of his documentaries multiple times, but this is not Morris at his best. The movie forces you to stare for many long minutes at giant talking heads, a technique used brilliantly in some of his very best movies: "Mr. Death," "Fog of War," and (one of my favorite movies of all time) "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control." The difference with "Standard Operating Procedure" is that the individuals are not at all fascinating people. They are dull and empty — with revoltingly flat affect.

But they have a story to tell. That is, they are witnesses. But they have been convicted of crimes, so they have the motive to lie, slant, and self-justify. It's like a close up on the direct examination of witnesses at trial — and no cross-examination! I wanted cross-examination. I had the impression that Morris wanted us to see that they were made to take the fall after the infamous photographs became public, but I found them repellent and unbelievable.

There is a lot of good material about how photographs tell an incomplete story. (And you see many, many uncensored Abu Ghraib photographs.) So perhaps Morris also meant to say: And the eyewitnesses also tell an incomplete story. Too damned bad if you are unsatisfied, because, like a photographer framing a shot, the government blocked our view of the whole story.

Morris teaches his lesson, and the viewer is subjected to a truly ugly ordeal. (There are occasional touches of beauty in the short, vivid recreations.) But if you were circumspect enough to attend this movie in the first place, you will probably feel that you have no right to complain about it, given the suffering depicted in the movie. That may be why the movie is leaving town — leaving Madison, Wisconsin — after a short run and why I was one of only 3 people in the audience.

"They're watching us and laughing... to them we are pussies. It's like they look at us and they're like, 'Oh, look at those wimpy little pussies.'"

Fabio talks politics. Thats what he says about Abu Ghraib. On Iraq:

"Those people, they hate us no matter what," he says. "And you know, we started the fight, so let's finish it. You can't just walk away with your back to them, because they gonna stab you."

But don't get excited, Republicans. He's for Hillary:

"She's so smart," he says. "And with her, you're getting two with one. You know I love women, because I owe my success to women. To me, it will be the biggest reward. I would love for the first time to have a woman president."

And with Hillary in charge, he says, the Iraqi insurgents better watch out. "When a woman gets pissed off at you," he says, "she's going to get you, you know?"

(Link via Memeorandum.)

"Clearly, the worst day was Abu Ghraib..."

"... seeing what went on there and feeling so deeply sorry that that happened." -- Donald Rumsfeld, leaving office.

Partisan squabbling "affects our warriors, who are frustrated by the country's lack of cohesion and the depiction of their war."

Writes Owen West, founder of Vets for Freedom, in a NYT op-ed:

Both Republicans and Democrats agree we cannot lose Iraq. The general insurgency in Iraq imperils our national interest and the hardcore insurgents are our mortal enemies. Talking of troop reductions is to lose sight of the goal.

Second, America's conscience is one of its greatest strengths. But self-flagellation, especially in the early stages of a war against an enemy whose worldview is uncompromising, is absolutely hazardous. Three years gone and Iraq's most famous soldiers are Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, a victim and a criminal, respectively. Abu Ghraib remains the most famous battle of the war.

Soldiers are sick of apologizing for a sliver of malcontents who are not at all representative of the new breed. But they are also sick of being pitied. Our warriors are the hunters, not the hunted, and we should celebrate them as we did in the past, for while our tastes have changed, warfare — and the need to cultivate national guardians — has not. As Kipling wrote, "The strength of the pack is the wolf."

Finally, today's debates are not high-spirited so much as mean-spirited. To allow polarizing forces to dominate the argument by insinuating false motives on one side or a lack of patriotism on the other is to obscure long-term security decisions that have to be made now.

West calls this "common ground," but I can't help feeling that a lot of Democrats -- and others -- will refuse to stand here.

Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man in the hood.

The NYT has an article about Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man underneath the black hood in the photograph that came to symbolize the abuses of Abu Ghraib:

Under the government of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Qaissi was a mukhtar, in effect a neighborhood mayor, a role typically given to members of the ruling Baath Party and closely tied to its nebulous security services. After the fall of the government, he managed a parking lot belonging to a mosque in Baghdad.

He was arrested in October 2003, he said, because he loudly complained to the military, human rights organizations and the news media about soldiers' dumping garbage on a local soccer field. But some of his comments suggest that he is at least sympathetic toward insurgents who fight American soldiers.

"Resistance is an international right," he said.

Weeks after complaining about the garbage, he said, he was surrounded by Humvees, hooded, tied up and carted to a nearby base before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. Then the questioning began.

"They blamed me for attacking U.S. forces," he said, "but I said I was handicapped; how could I fire a rifle?" he said, pointing to his hand. "Then he asked me, 'Where is Osama bin Laden?' And I answered, 'Afghanistan.' "

How did he know? "Because I heard it on TV," he replied.

He said it soon became evident that the goal was to coax him to divulge names of people who might be connected to attacks on American forces. His hand, then bandaged, was often the focus of threats and inducements, he said, with interrogators offering to fix it or to squash it at different times. After successive interrogations, he said he was finally given a firm warning: "If you don't speak, next time, we'll send you to a place where even dogs don't live."...

Despite the cruelty he witnessed, Mr. Qaissi said he harbored no animosity toward America or Americans. "I forgive the people who did these things to us," he said. "But I want their help in preventing these sorts of atrocities from continuing."

UPDATE: The NYT notes questions raised by Salon about whether Qaissi really was the man in the hood.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The NYT admits that Qaissi was not the man in the hood in the famous photograph.

"More wicked than your average blogger"?

A squib about Al Franken's new book in the NYT Book Review:

"The Truth (With Jokes)," by Al Franken, [is] a gloomier, more astringent book than his "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)," which came out in 2003. Franken's new one has dark circles under its eyes. "The Truth (With Jokes)" went to press before Katrina and the indictment of Lewis Libby, so it already feels mildly dated; and regular readers of political blogs, which have multiplied exponentially since Franken's last book, may feel a lot of the material here (on John Kerry and his "Swift Boat" attackers, Abu Ghraib, Fox News) has already been hashed to death. But Franken is more wicked than your average blogger.

"More wicked than your average blogger"? What kind of a standard is that? Isn't the average blogger a rather amiable person, telling stories about the kids, the job, hobbies, sports, and TV? Or does "blogger," as used in the NYT, not actually refer to the tens of millions of bloggers on the planet, but to the set of American political bloggers? That might establish some standard of wickedness so that being more wicked than average would mean something, seeing as there are some real bastards at the front end of that bell curve.

But how wicked is Al Franken? The example the Times offered up as proof wasn't pithy enough for me to want to keep in the block quote. The NYT is really trying to sell us on a book that snarks on the current news in a world where most of the writers who satirize current politics react within minutes after news hits the web. Even later the same day, the story seems stale. If you've waited a day to crack your joke, you're better off finding the next thing to snark about. How can you possibly compete on the long time line of a book?

There are at least two good reason for books like this to exist, however.

1. You go to the bookstore. You see the bookcover. You feel: this expresses something. You buy it and voila: this expresses something about me.

2. Look at the damned calendar. It's a Christmas present! For that political friend or family member of yours. Oh, Josh will like this. He's a political junkie.

The graceful Condoleezza.

Condoleezza Rice did a nice job of responding to protesters:

[A]bout five minutes into the secretary's 30-minute speech [at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco], three audience members donned black hooded robes and stood with their arms outstretched, referencing the infamous photos of detainees abused by U.S. military police at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Chanting "Stop the torture, stop the killing, U.S. out of Iraq," they were quickly ushered out by a police SWAT team, as the audience cheered and applauded.

"It's a wonderful thing that people are able to speak their minds in our democracy," Rice responded. "In Baghdad, Kabul and soon in Beirut, they, too, will be able to speak their minds."

From then on, it was smooth sailing for the secretary of state...

I happened to catch that on C-Span last night, and there was never an instant where she looked confused, worried, rattled, or angry. The protesters' noise interrupted a sentence, she waited a short moment for a break in the noise, then delivered her perfect line.

Those who think Rice isn't ready to run for President: take this incident into account.

UPDATE: There's some interesting back and forth in the comments, with one person saying Rice is not a good candidate because she's never run for elective office before and she's unmarried. I participate in the comments and say, among other things, that if polling shows people prefer a married candidate, maybe we could see a nice White House wedding.

Too much moral clarity?

In today's NYT, Roger Cohen writes about the Bush Administration's embrace of Natan Sharansky's book "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.":

Here is Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, explaining last month what will guide her policy: "The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls 'the town square test': if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won their freedom."

The idea of the town-square test appears on Page 40 of Mr. Sharansky's book. By this point, he has developed the arguments that are repeated in various guises through the remaining 263 pages. These may be summarized as follows: Freedom is attainable for every person on earth. It is the best guarantee of global security, because democratic societies are nonbelligerent. Totalitarian or, as he puts it, fear societies are dangerous because they always seek external enemies as a means of self-preservation.

To act on the above requires "moral clarity." This phrase is repeated with bludgeoning insistence. By moral clarity, Mr. Sharansky means the courage to bring down autocracy wherever it may exist, including the Middle East. "We must recapture moral clarity," he writes, "by recognizing that the great divide between the world of fear and the world of freedom is far more important than the divisions within the free world."

Cohen calls the book too "simplistic," too "pat."

The danger now is that the beauty of his argument may become a form of blindness. He uses America's abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison mainly to laud the response of a free society to such an outrage: investigation, public debate, judgment and punishment.

But Mr. Sharansky might also have taken Abu Ghraib as an illustration of what can happen when a society becomes too certain of its mission, too giddy with its might, too negligent of constitutional safeguards of liberty and too blind to the humanity of people from another culture. Moral clarity in the name of freedom is one thing. But the slogan of freedom masquerading as moral clarity is quite another.

Cohen is right to raise these concerns. It's important to have values, but you also must constantly pay attention to what you are actually doing. Ideologues are dangerous, even if some ideology is important in the practical work of making the world a better place. Real moral clarity involves clearly seeing the effects you are having and not falling blindly in love with your own ideas.

"The Opposite Direction."

Faisal al-Kasim talks about his Al Jazeera talk show, "The Opposite Direction," in the November issue of The Atlantic.

His goal? "To change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way."

Al-Kasim's first show, he says, "dissected" the Gulf Cooperation Council (the league of oil-rich monarchies and emirates that are responsible for some of the most closed regimes in the Middle East) "like a corpse," and since then The Opposite Direction has addressed an array of previously unmentionable questions in the Arab world, in terms ranging from the contrarian to the outlandish. Is Arab unity an unattainable myth? When was life better, under colonial or Arab rule? ("Eighty-six percent of our viewers who called in said they'd rather be re-colonized," al-Kasim told me. "The Algerians would welcome Chirac, if he decided to return.") Was King Hassan II of Morocco an agent of the Mossad? Should polygamy have a place in the modern Arab world?

On one show, viewers were asked "Are Arab regimes refraining from condemning the abuse in Abu Ghraib because they're committing far worse atrocities in their own prisons?" 84% of the viewers said yes. A guest on that show, Khaled Chouket, director of the Center for the Support of Democracy in the Arab World, spoke of:

"standard daily practices" in all Arab prisons, which he depicted as "man-made hells" where prisoners hang by their ankles and are skinned alive; where savage dogs "rip chunks of living flesh from inmates' bodies"; where torturers tear out their subjects' fingernails and hair, administer electric shocks, hack off body parts, deprive prisoners of food and sleep, and submerge them in dungeons filled with icy water.

Terrific article.

How Kerry lost me.

I started this blog in mid-January, and I've devoted a lot of words since then to analyzing the presidential campaign. I've said many times that I'm not going to pick my candidate until October. Yet I find myself expressing an increasing amount of hostility to Kerry, so I thought I'd go back and trace the arc of my antagonism through my various posts.

Here's my first statement about Kerry and the Iraq war, made on April 9th. (It was Good Friday--scroll up [actually, click here] to see the man preaching from a cross.)

I think it makes a lot of sense, after the primary season, to ignore the Presidential campaign as much as possible. There's no reason for a moderate like me, who might end up voting for either candidate, to follow the campaigns right now. For one thing, it's not fair to Kerry, because I find him a boring speaker and I'm really going to get tired of him if I pay any attention to him. For another thing, I can't think about him seriously until I know what he plans to do in Iraq, and he hasn't said what he will do. (Will, meaning, in the future. How the past might have been different is not going to determine my vote. And don't try my patience by telling me that I can infer what he will do in the future from what he asserts he would have done in the past.) He has no motivation to take a position on Iraq until closer to the election: why should he pin himself down when events are in flux?

Six days later, I got irked at him for the first time, for saying "You're not listening" to a man who wanted to know what his position on Iraq was. Back then, Kerry was saying things like "We shouldn't only be tough, we have to be smart. And there's a smarter way to accomplish this mission than this president is pursuing." My question was: "If you still don't know what he would do differently from Bush, do you deserve to be snapped at for 'not listening'?" I've linked back to this old post of mine a number of times, because I never forgot that he got testy and accused a man of not listening, when in fact Kerry had never expressed himself clearly about what he would do in Iraq. I had been willing to wait a long time for a clear answer, yet here he was criticizing us for not having heard his answer yet. All I had heard was "smarter way," which just seemed like a placekeeper for a plan to be submitted later.

On April 19th, Kerry appeared on "Meet the Press," and Tim Russert asked Kerry exactly the question I wanted an answer to: What would you do differently from Bush in Iraq?

Kerry's "response" is to launch into an anecdote with no apparent connection to the question (about a Vietnam vet--of all things) and gradually work his way toward something that will seem to be an answer. The strategy is to put the "answer" as far from the question as possible, in the hope that you'll forget the question and accept the proffered "answer" as an answer (or just hope that he'll stop talking already). Does Kerry ever answer the question about the future of Iraq? He always substitutes assertions about mistakes in the past. The most I'm hearing about the future is that Kerry will pursue all the same goals, but in a "smarter way." I'll just do it better. Trust me! Why? Because Bush hasn't been good enough.

On April 28th, I complained about a Kerry appearance on "Hardball." I'm irritated by meandering non-answers and robotic repetition of lines from his stump speech. I offered Kerry a deal:

It's on and on about the medals and ribbons. This is incredibly irritating. I agree with Kerry that it's pointless to quibble about whatever it was he threw away when he was an young man with an issue to fight for. But let's make a deal then: stop using Vietnam as an argument for why you should be President. The whole issue is a waste of time. I'm willing to accept that both Bush and Kerry are good people with good character. Now, get on with it! Give me some substance!

After the first commercial break, Kerry is smiling--with teeth showing oddly. Someone told him to smile, so he's taking stage directions. Oh, I'm so hopelessly tired of Kerry.

And that was back in April! Little did I know then that he would keep robotically delivering clips from the stump speech and would make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign! Looking back, I can see that the "Meet the Press" and "Hardball" interviews were crucial in turning me against him. Notably, Kerry thereafter steered clear of serious interviews.

May 1st was an important day, when Kerry responded to the news of Abu Ghraib. I complimented him and expressed a hope:

Kerry may choose to do something more with this issue later, but [his comments today show] complete forbearance from opportunism. I want Kerry to demonstrate that he would never allow his political ambition to override the interest in the successful completion of our efforts in Iraq, and I have worried that he would pursue the strategy of uniting Bush and the war in the public's mind, creating a single entity (BushWar), and then use every opportunity to find fault with something done in the war to attack BushWar. What a disaster that would be.

Perhaps Kerry's statement only represents the astute political understanding that he needs to avoid appearing not to support our soldiers--especially important for him because of his Vietnam era statements--but I hope there is something more to this restraint, that there is a real commitment to the success of the mission. He is in a tough position here. Should he criticize Bush for not acting swiftly and harshly against the accused soldiers? For now he's chosen to refer to gathering the facts and providing "appropriate" process to the accused soldiers and preserving the rule of law. That may be too tame, part of his characteristic dullness, but it may be the surface of what is a competent commitment to the success of the war effort.

Nine days later, I wrote about Abu Ghraib again:

If Bush doesn't find a way to do something comprehensive, he deserves to be replaced. Whatever deficiencies Kerry may have--and I have not been a Kerry supporter--I would like to see him moved into the Presidency to make clear statement of the thing that Bush himself keeps going around saying: this is not what Americans are.

This was the point of my strongest support for Kerry.

On May 29th, I was pretty sympathetic to Kerry and defended him against attacks that he took too many positions:

One can easily portray Kerry as a man who takes so many different positions in such a confounding mix that no one--no one with any real potential to actually vote for him--ever gets too upset. Yet, obviously, Kerry has a careful balancing act to perform, and he seems sensible about trying to hold on to the middle. For the antiwar side, he seems to be offering only a feeling that he's going to wind things down more quickly and effectively than Bush, but Bush is trying to reach the same goals Kerry is stating. (This is why I'm not deciding between the two candidates until October: I'll see what Bush has actually done between now and then.) Kerry is urging ... that we get away from "partisan politics" and "just think common sense about our country, about what it should be doing." I don't argue with that. It's hard for him to get specific about what he would do, since he wouldn't be starting to do anything until over eight months from now. How can he use common sense to figure out what should be done that far in the future when things are changing every day so far out of his control? That's the downside of not being an ideologue.

Ironically, on this day I was dealing with nasty commenters on my blog (right before I turned off the comments function), who couldn't stop telling me what a louse I was for not condemning the war.

In June, two things happened that I wrote a little about: Reagan died and received a lavish funeral, and "Fahrenheit 911" came out and was loved and hated. I watched a bit of the funeral and avoided the movie. Various people used the occasions to stoke extreme partisan feeling. I felt my usual aversion to all of that. On July 1st, I complained about "ugly political imagery."

On July 31, I was very impressed by a Christopher Hitchens article that attacked Kerry for criticizing the war in Iraq for using money that we could be spending on our own people at home. Like Hitchens, I found that argument repugnant. Kerry further alienated me by repeating that argument many times.

Right after the convention, in early August, I questioned the assumption that Kerry is especially smart and call him "a cipher who went to Vietnam":

[M]y questions about Kerry's intelligence do not arise solely from my inference that he had a poor academic record and low standardized test scores. My questions are also based on his exasperatingly convoluted and unclear manner of speaking. This has been excused as a propensity for "nuance" and "complexity," but could also be caused by a lack of mental capacity. It could also be willful evasion. I'd really like to know. ... I've been listening to him talk for a long, long time, and I'm not impressed at all. And I'm sure not impressed by the mere fact of someone managing to hold a Senate seat for a long time!

I realize people who truly despise Bush don't care about any of this. The fact is Kerry's the candidate, so there's nothing more to say. Unite behind him, whoever he is. It's too late now. And please don't say anything bad about him. Shhhh! But that doesn't work for people, like myself, who don't despise Bush. I am actually trying to assess Kerry! Where is the material? It certainly wasn't presented in the convention last week, and Kerry's speeches and interviews are not exactly brimming with information. I've been looking for an answer to what he plans to do in Iraq for a long time ... and I still can't figure him out. It seems to me we're being asked to make a cipher President. A cipher who went to Vietnam. And isn't Bush. Is that enough? If you hate Bush, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" It isn't enough for me.

Next came the Republican Convention, which I watched much more closely than the Democratic Convention. I had TiVo'd the C-Span coverage of all nights of both conventions, but the Democratic Convention bored me and the Republican Convention gripped me. The speakers that made a real impression on me were: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Ron Silver. These men all spoke well and with conviction. I listened to every word they said. I will admit to feeling deeply struck by Silver's line: "The President is doing exactly the right thing." Silver was open about being a liberal on the social issues--as I am--but passionate and clear that national security trumps other matters. I agree! I even enjoyed Zell Miller's old-style preacher speech.

How did Kerry try to claw his way back into the running after the convention? He was getting a lot of conflicting advice and being told to fight harder and attack. This post, written on September 5th, was pretty sympathetic to Kerry:

Of course, Kerry does seem to be on the path to defeat right now, so his supporters can't help panicking and find it hard not to yammer a lot of (conflicting) advice at him. But I think his best chance lies in continuing to be the lumbering, dull but solid and grown-up guy that he is, so that when election day finally comes and the excitement-seeking is over, people will look at him and say--perhaps: Yes, he's a frightful bore, but put him in the office and he'll probably earnestly work hard and make a decent share of good-enough judgments, which is all we really ever hope for anyway.

I could still have accepted Kerry at this point. But Kerry decided to go for the hard Howard Dean-style criticism of "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." In these last few weeks, he has battered us with negativity about the war, but still without offering any realistic positive solutions that are different from Bush's, and raising worries that he will simply give up on Iraq. And then he disrespected Prime Minister Allawi when the man was in the country and speaking to Congress. Yesterday, I wrote of Kerry's treatment of Allawi as his final, fatal mistake. I meant only to say that he had sealed his fate with voters for that, but, realistically, thinking about it today, I have to say he sealed his fate with me personally. Rereading this post, I see that the hope about Kerry I expressed on May 1st is completely lost.

UPDATE, MONDAY EVENING: After devoting much of Sunday to tracing the arc of my antagonism, it was nice to get so many visitors today. Thanks to Instapundit for starting the traffic, to Allahpundit for the cool quip ("[A]fter several months of looking at the menu, Ann Althouse decides she's not in the mood for Waffles."), and to lots of other people who linked and emailed.

Edwards ... and those terrible trial lawyers.

Yesterday, I set my all-time record for least posting: a single line. I wonder why the big announcement of Kerry's VP pick did not inspire me to write? Edwards was a choice I expected and approve of. We talked about it a lot in my house as we watched a different news channels last night. Most of my comments were about what a great speaker Edwards is compared to everyone else we've been hearing: Kerry, Bush, and Cheney. Both Kerry and Bush require some patience to listen to. The return of Edwards was quite a relief, a bit like the recent reexperiencing of the speaking skills of Reagan and Clinton. People on TV keep commenting on how good Edwards looks. More important is how well he speaks. Heard in my house: "He's the Great Communicator."

The other subject relating to Edwards that keeps coming up is the fact that that he was a--gasp!--trial lawyer. Are the news media getting enough play out of this? Attempts to stir up general anxiety about that fact alone are getting old already. Anyone who wants to raise this as a problem had best do it behind Edwards' back, because if he's around to respond, he will respond brilliantly. An attempt to drag Edwards (and Kerry) down by slurring lawyers is likely to end up improving the image of the whole legal profession. And after the events at Abu Ghraib and the Supreme Court's push-back against the most extreme assertions of unchecked power by the Bush administration, a return to law seems like a good theme.

UPDATE: A lawyer responds:

I disagree with your contention that Edward's profession is not a liability. Its significant that you call him a trial lawyer. Actually, he's a personal injury lawyer. The difference [is] the difference between pro-choice and anti-life, rain forest v. jungle, homeless v. vagrant, and many other formulations. A trial lawyer doesn't sound so bad - after all, Perry Mason was a trial lawyer! A Plaintiffs Personal Injury lawyer, as Dave Barry can tell you, is a shark.

Count on the GOP, if they're smart, to use his proper title. Count on them to solicit a lot of Doctors to oppose Edwards. Count on them to tell the truth, that we've never heard of a PI lawyer who didn't claim to " fight for little girls who were horribly mistreated." ( It's always a little girl.) Count on them to tell the Republic what percentage of consumer items goes towards lawsuit insurance. It won't be that hard.

Is "trial lawyer" a euphemism that the other side will gain ground by declining to use? I don't think there is a "proper title" here or that ordinary people are going to become excited if they are told that he calls himself a "trial lawyer" but really he's a personal injury lawyer. It's just not that alarming. It even sounds nice--personal. Now, "shark" is alarming, but it's hardly a "proper title." My point is that even if being a personal injury lawyer is something of a negative for some people, the issue is easily overplayed, beyond its significance to ordinary voters, and Edwards has a comeback that is so appealing and powerful that those who try to make headway are giving him an opportunity to display his skills and to make lawyers seem noble. Last night, C-Span re-ran a 2001 interview in which Edwards was asked about being a trial lawyer and his response was so perfect, so measured and balanced as he justified the role of the personal injury lawyer in particular cases with respect to truly culpable defendants. He is extremely well-prepared to respond to the kinds of arguments you cite. I'm not saying these arguments shouldn't be raised in some well-thought-out and substantial form, but the bare fact that he's a trial lawyer/personal injury lawyer is not good enough.

By the way, where did this idea that "rain forest" is a euphemism for "jungle" come from? I've heard that before, but it is just wrong. A rain forest is not a jungle.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Bainbridge is surely right that there are plenty of people whose support for Bush will be reinforced now that there's a trial lawyer on the Democratic ticket. And maybe some voters who could tip one way or the other could be influenced to tip away from Kerry because of some issues that have to do with trial lawyers. But I don't think the swing voters are going to be tipped by the mere label "trial lawyer," which is already overplayed. Something more substantive is needed, but Edwards is very good at dealing with these issues in a balanced way that would probably not strike moderates as anti-business.

Old bumper sticker fulfilled, but Al Gore isn't.

Surely, you've seen this famous lefty bumper sticker:



Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers, even though they were denied the tools in the numbers they needed for their mission. But what a disgrace that their families had to hold bake sales to buy discarded Kevlar vests, so the soldiers can stuff them into the floorboards and sides of the Humvees that they have to ride around in without any armor. Bake sales for body armor! What kind of policy is that?

Note: Try finding the transcript of the Gore speech on the web! It's not on the Moveon.org website anymore. The Washington Post article about the speech shows what is supposed to be a link to the transcript of the speech, but the link just takes you to an empty Moveon.org page. I transcribed the quote above from my TiVoed C-Span coverage.The Moveon.org home page has a link to a transcript of a Gore speech, but if you click on it, it turns out to be a speech from February 5, 2004 (which I printed and read, assuming it was this week's speech--no speech date appears on the home page). There's also a link to a January speech by Gore on the home page. Moveon.org sponsored the Wednesday's speech, and in the words of the Washington Post, it was "the highest-profile appearance by Gore since he endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination." I tried my best to find a link to the transcript before taking the trouble to transcribe it myself. I realize links go dead, and unintentional snafus occur. Send me the link if you have it. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to have been deliberately eradicated. I feel compelled to conclude that it's been roundly judged a complete embarrassment.

UPDATE: Now that I've watched the entire speech, let me say that I think much of the coverage of it has been unfair. Drudge and others acted as if he freaked out. I haven't gone over the speech and checked the accuracy of all of the statements, but it is simply untrue that he appeared crazy in some way. There were perhaps two points when he resorted to yelling, but he was shouting over a loud ovation in the auditorium. His voice, as heard over the television, is not ideally modulated, but it was probably adapted to the acoustics in the room as he heard his own voice. He gets a little Jimmy Stewart-y in places. He wipes his brow a few times with a big towel, which looked funny, but clearly the room was too hot, and he was sweating. Most of what he said sounded rational to me: it is important to take the Abu Ghraib abuses very seriously. There's some political posturing in calling for various resignations, but there was nothing irrational about that. People who found the most ridiculous freeze frame or replayed an isolated clip treated him very unfairly. I will say that the NYU crowd was not as serious as the subject matter required. They did not just applaud, they laughed, sometimes inappropriately. The audience seemed so excited about laughing at Bush, that it lost touch with the subject matter being discussed. I think one could see that Gore did not approve of this response. Maybe my perceptions are skewed: I thought he did well in the first debate with Bush in 2000 and was surprised at the way he was ridiculed in the press. Maybe I have I higher tolerance for Gore attitudes than most people, but I really can't see why he's being shredded for this week's speech.

FURTHER UPDATE: A reader figured out a way to get to the transcript:

Take a gander at this:

http://www.moveon.org/pac/gore-rumsfeld.html

I found this by looking for "rumsfeld" in the URL of a MoveOn webpage (it's the last result when you do that search)...

That's a strange way to find it, so it doesn't dispell the impression that they are trying to get rid of it.

ADDED SATURDAY MORNING: The difference between the URL the reader found and the one in the Washington Post link is that that latter has "-transcript" after "rumsfeld." Also, and more importantly, the Moveon.org home page now has the Wednesday speech featured at the top of its home page with a good link. But none of that was there last night when I wrote this post. It can't be that they are just slow putting up material on their website, because the Post had a link that went dead. You'd think if the Post website was linking you, you wouldn't let the URL go dead, and then later use a different URL. Especially a group like Moveon.org which specializes in being a website and sponsored this important speech. I see that they are now trying to sell a DVD of the speech. And the new URL has a lot of Quicktime clips from parts of the speech. Maybe last night when I couldn't find the transcript, they were shifting over to this really elaborate new page. Clearly, they aren't trying to scuttle the material, which I suspected last night. The presentation of key clips is a good way to counter the unfair clipping that Gore's critics were doing. I approve!

Those moral-superiority feminists and the leverage they provide.

Barbara Ehrenreich addresses the topic that it seems everyone will need to talk about forever: the assumptions of feminism and the reality of women in the military. She writes in the LA Times (link via A&L Daily):

Even those people we might have thought were impervious to shame, like the secretary of Defense, admit that the photos of abuse in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison turned their stomachs.

The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

The stomach/heart contrast may have some (slight) literary merit, but it is quite wrong to portray the nonfeminist photograph viewers as affected only in their stomachs. Many people who were not focusing on the question of women at all felt great pain in the loftier organ. Even if they didn’t think “how could women do this?” they surely thought “how could Americans do this?” “This is not America” has been the key idea expressed by members of the Bush administration.

Ehrenreich writes that “A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib,” but it is quite clear from her article that she never subscribed to this kind of feminism--“a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice.” She ties this naïve feminism to the pursuit of equality, as if those who think the basic goal of feminism is equality also believe that women are morally superior to men. She assumes those who favor equality do so because they want to reform institutions and believe women, in their superiorty, will bring reform by their magical presence. It would be naive to think that, but in fact, most people who favor the equality version of feminism (in other words, most Americans), favor it as a matter of simple fairness to the individual. We believe it’s wrong to discriminate based on sex! Thinking she has swept equality feminism aside--Abu Ghraib destroyed it!--Ehrenreich fancies herself in a position to replace it with the feminism that is entirely subsumed into an ambitious political agenda. [ADDED ON REREADING: This agenda is, in Ehrenreich's words "the struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance."]

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no — not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: "If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low." It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

This is not a new version of feminism—as the existence of an old saying shows—but the same expropriation of the power of feminism in the service of political goals that are not very appealing at all to the many people who easily support equality feminism and can easily continue to do so despite the role of women at Abu Ghraib. Women are individuals, capable of good and evil, who deserve to be treated fairly as individuals. There is nothing naive about that at all. It strikes me as quite a bit more naive to think that Abu Ghraib is going to excite women about your "infiltrating" and "subverting" project.

UPDATE: Ehrenreich's position is similar to one discussed here earlier, by Debra Dickerson.

"The military isn’t feminized enough and that includes the females."

Here's a piece from Debra Dickerson from Washington Monthly about the role of women in the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. We should be seeing many meditations on this subject in the coming days (and years). Those who have liked to think that the world would be more civil if only women had a bigger role to play in public affairs will need to theorize or retheorize. One gambit, whenever women participate in anything that is other than what you were hoping women would do if given power, is to say that somehow these particular women don't really count as real women. Dickerson has personal experience behind her theory:

I spent the first few years of my 12 in the Air Force trying my damndest to be one of the boys. I started smoking, drank like an idiot, cursed like a sailor, always wore fatigues and combat boots, didn’t carry a purse. Even wore a man’s watch. Once, when they took me to a club (in 1981 South Korea) which hosted live sex shows, I refused to punk out and leave until after the first ‘act.’ Longest half hour of my life but I was too bought into my macho new environment, the environment which was oh so much more empowering than the misogynist ghetto I was fleeing from, to back off from any of it. I told myself that keeping up with the men, whatever they were doing, was feminist.

After a few years, though, I rebelled, if only in my personal comportment, and determined to be both female and a GI. ...

Still, I'm pretty skeptical of this idea that when women do the things you've associated with men, it's because those women were still in thrall to men. It's really a twist on the retro notion that the real women are the good women.