Month: January 2009

Bush today:

"Do you remember what it was like right after September the 11th around here? People were saying, ‘How come they didn’t see it, how come they didn’t connect the dots?’ Do you remember what the environment was like in Washington? I do. When people were hauled up in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, how come you didn’t know this, that, or the other? And then we start putting policy in place — legal policy in place to connect the dots, and all of a sudden people were saying, ‘How come you’re connecting the dots?’ "

Translation: we were so frightened of another 9/11 and we had so little idea of what was out there that I decided to torture anyone we captured and ordered my flunkies to write memos saying it was legal.

Abu Ghraib was a "huge disappointment" because it revealed exactly what they had authorized: Gestapo and Communist Chinese torture techniques that were never originally designed to get intelligence, but to provide false confessions to buttress police states. We do not yet know how much damage Bush and Cheney did to reliable intelligence-gathering; but we do know that even after Abu Ghraib, Bush and Cheney insisted on maintaining Abu Ghraib methods, and insisted they could be used on American citizens in the US if need be.

Item One.

The life of a speed reader:

I studied voice and piano fairly seriously during my elementary and high school days, and as such, I became very attuned to rhythm and cadence and voice. So what happens when I read is that I can "hear" the narrative and dialogue in my head, but what’s odd is that I’m both aware of the book at, say, an LP rate (33 1/3 revolutions per minute) but in my head it translates to roughly a 78.

I’ve tried to slow this down, but realized that my natural reading rhythm is freakishly fast when an author friend asked me to go through the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book for continuity errors. I sat in the La-Z-Boy at my parents’ house with a pencil, went through page by page making notes but also enjoying the book, and had the whole task done in about 3-4 hours. This was a 350-page manuscript too, so roughly 80,000 words. Take away the pencil and the editor’s hat and the reading speed would probably be close to 90 minutes. What also seems to happen is that I read a page not necessarily word by word, but by capturing pages in sequence in my head. The words and phrases appear diagonally, like I’m absorbing the text all in one gulp, and then I move on to the next sequence I can absorb by paragraph or page. It’s like I’m reading from a whole-language standpoint instead of phonics — that’s the only way I can figure out how to explain it.

(Hat tip: Megan)

Manzi:

I’d worry a lot less about trying to distill the “essence of conservatism” or whatever than just trying to identify the problems of the day, and figuring out practical solutions to them. Obviously, I’ve packed a lot into the assumptions of what we define as a problem, how we decide what makes a good solution, and so on. This isn’t an argument that we don’t need political philosophy, but rather an argument about the primary methodology for developing, or perhaps more properly, specifying, one in our current situation. It strikes me that the most effective way for conservatives to apply a conservative worldview and develop the next manifestation of conservative ideology right now is, ironically, not to be self-consciously ideological, but rather to attempt to be pragmatic., i.e., empirical and practical.

Which is to say: conservatism isn’t really an ideology or even a philosophy. It’s a philosophical view of practical life – and its paradoxical position is that those who actually live that life are better judges of what to do than those who think about it in the abstract.

Which is to say I will not give up thinking philosophically about these things; but that Jim is right that real conservatives will largely ignore me.

Joshua Allen Harris’ inflatable bag sculptures. If I were walking merrily down the street, they’d scare the living crap out of me:

Appleyard picks a nit.

Gibbs says unequivocally that Obama will repeal DADT. The Military Times conducted a survey two weeks ago where ten percent of soldiers claimed they won’t re-enlist if the ban on openly gay personnel is lifted. Joe tells everyone to calm down:

Even if the Military Times survey were to prove accurate (which I seriously doubt), the latest Department of Defense numbers from November indicate that all military branches are presently meeting or exceeding their recruitment and retention goals. With the economy the way it is, expect those numbers to balloon.

But this side-issue is burying the lede. We have a clear-cut commitment from the president-elect that gay servicemembers will no longer have to serve in fear of being outed, hounded, fired or persecuted. This is a huge step forward – because it is not about policing private individuals for prejudice, but about the government itself not discriminating irrationally against its own citizens. I’ve long wondered where the government gets off telling other people not to discriminate in employment when it does the same thing itself.

Change you can ask questions about.

Bob Owens defends Joe The Plumber:

I don’t know if he can craft a coherent sentence or conduct an revealing interview. And perhaps he’ll be an absolute disaster as a journalist, even as he’s created a PR explosion for PJTV.

Owens is surely right to express a healthy skepticism toward journalists who create some kind of priestly, professional caste for themselves and believe amateurs should be deterred. As an early passionate believer in citizen-journalism, I couldn’t agree more with him. But what that really means is that we shouldn’t pre-judge the work of amateurs. No one can condescend to Totten or Yon, for example, because their work speaks for itself and earned them their reputation. But that only reveals how farcical the JTP pick is. All that Wurzelbacher has earned is instant fame as a campaign tool. Owens concedes he has no way to judge his journalistic skills and sent him to the region on a whim and for p.r. And Wurzelbacher has already given his own view of what war-journalism should be about: propaganda for the government you support.

The whole thing is somewhere between a farce and a disgrace. It’s also, in its way, a slap in the face to accomplished reporters like Yon and Totten who are actually interested in reaching the truth and have complicated views of the world. But in a party that gave us Palin instead of Pawlenty, why are we surprised to have Wurzelbacher big-footing Totten?