Month: August 2008

Beijing, China, 4.30 pm.

Greenwald keeps digging:

The FBI’s total failure to point to a shred of evidence placing Ivins in New Jersey on either of the two days the anthrax letters were sent is a very conspicuous deficiency in its case.

Madonna will be fifty in a few days’ time, helping me with my own 45 year stagger. Never looked better – on a magazine cover.

US President George W. Bush plays beach volleyball with US beach volleyball player Misty May Treanor during a visit to the US team at Beijing’s Chaoyang Park Beach on August 9, 2008. By Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images. An even classier pic can be seen here.

That’s how this administration has described all those detained in Guantanamo Bay. Some are. Many, many are not. And it’s one thing to shepherd mistakes and innocents hors de combat; it’s another thing to strip, abuse, humiliate and torture them as well. Jeffrey Rosen reviews My Guantanamo Diary today:

Other Afghan detainees who languished for years at Guantánamo before being freed include a goatherd who was turned over to the Americans by his cousin after they quarreled and two poetry-writing members of the Pakistani opposition, who were turned in by their political rivals and repeatedly questioned at Guantánamo about a joke they had told involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky…

Her gut-wrenching first-person accounts of detainee abuse by American soldiers at the Bagram Air Base are consistent with the findings of a recent report by the inspector general of the Justice Department on detainee interrogations in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. F.B.I. officials observed detainees being subjected to sexual humiliation, body cavity searches and other indignities similar to the abuses that Khan reports…

It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation.

Welcome, Jeff, to the club. The  more you find out, the angrier you’ll become.

Neal Gabler on the Obama-McCain race.

Physicists call it the LHC for Large Hadron Collider. It’s about to be turned on. One physics-blogger (yes, of course they exist) runs through the various chances of new discoveries.

From a great survey of how artists work. John Cage:

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, “This end is more important than the other.” After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

Recently, when David Tudor returned from Europe, he brought me a German pencil of modern make. It can carry any size of lead. Pressure on a shaft at the end of the holder frees the lead so that it can be retracted or extended or removed and another put in its place. A sharpener comes with the pencil. The sharpener offers not one but several possibilities. That is, one may choose the kind of point he wishes.

There is no eraser.

Steve Waldman notices something:

Saying that Republicans are taking Obama’s comments out of context doesn’t come close to capturing this. What Obama probably meant is pretty much the opposite of what they’re implying he meant.

I realize that I’d lost the outrage at this kind of thing, and had come to expect it.

Here’s why all this matters.

A critical part of what’s gone wrong these past few years has been the tendency of a war president to bully opponents, distort their meaning, use base emotional appeals when we need far more rational discussion about how to counter a very complex, terrifying Islamist threat. The kind of campaigns Rove ran in 2002, 2004 and 2006 made all this far harder. It reduced important debates about priorities in the war, detention and interrogation policies, the wisdom of long-term enmeshment in the Middle East, the difficulties of securing loose nukes, the excruciatingly difficult calls on which allies to trust and how – into dumb-ass contests about who is the biggest bad-ass, who is a treasonous wimp and which opponent most belongs in a French hair salon.

The American public wants to move on from this. That’s why Obama emerged; and that’s why McCain emerged. Both had actually bucked some of the extremes in their own parties. And the central question in this election, to my mind, is: who will repudiate the Rove-Cheney inheritance most powerfully. If McCain emerges in this campaign as a man who is prepared to be coopted and programmed by the worst aspects of the Rove-Cheney era, then why should anyone believe he will be different from Bush in critical respects once he gets elected?

The campaigns are telling us something. So far in the general, on tactics alone, McCain is running for Bush’s third term.