What to make of the following, reported in Salon by Michelle Goldberg:
[Camp] Vandenberg is about 50 miles north Santa Barbara, Calif. In a few days, activists will start converging on a nearby four-acre plot of land that Bud Boothe, a World War II veteran, donated to the Military Globalization Project. They’re going to camp there and train to breach the base’s security and possibly vandalize some of its equipment. Lumsdaine, the Military Globalization Project coordinator, is a 48-year-old who has been arrested at Vandenberg twice. He describes the base as “the electronic nerve center of the global-surveillance-targeting, weapons-guidance, and military-command satellites that will largely direct the war.” The base is 99,000 square acres, with a perimeter running through rugged, wooded terrain. “If people are committed and determined and in halfway decent physical shape, it is possible to get in, because it’s enormous and much of the land is still fairly wild,” he says. Within the base, Lumsdaine says, are “major off-limits security zones,” that, when breached, “set off a series of responses in their own security procedures which require disruption and partial shut down of regular activities,” which means the base can’t operate at full capacity.
This is not legitimate dissent. It isn’t free speech. It isn’t even wishing victory for Saddam. It’s an attempt actually to impede the successful conduct of this war, to fight for the enemy by attacking a U.S. military base. No, these people don’t represent most anti-war types. But they exist and they’re planning sabotage. It didn’t take long, did it?
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed ; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.” – Winston Churchill, “The Gathering Storm.”
STATS WATCH: “Why does no one have the courage to say loudly and unequivocally that 50 million people around the world are going to die in a matter of days or months or at the most a few years unless they are treated immediately with the life-saving drugs that are now available? I have arrived at this figure after conversations with many experts.” – Larry Kramer, in the New York Times today. He must be speed-dialing poor David Shipley again. The margin of error in that statistic is so enormous it’s meaningless. “Experts” have told Kramer that 50 million people could die in the next few days? Or is that years? Er. something like that. Score one for fact-checkers. Kramer probably wrote that 50 million people would die in the next few minutes, and got bargained down. The point is not that we shouldn’t be concerned about the world-wide AIDS crisis. It is that hyperbole like this – Kramer’s specialty – doesn’t help the cause. It harms it.
The Dish 