Milblogger Teflon Don found one in a coffee shop in Ramadi:
Every night, the Green Beans becomes a refuge of sorts – a place about what Iraq isn’t. That worn and dirty deck is a place to sit around and talk about home, play some chess, draw in sketchbooks, or write poetry. In between cups of tea and chai and Indonesian clove cigarettes, there’s good natured flirting with the baristas – lovely young ladies from Kyrgyzstan.
I noted the effect here. A commenter on Kevin Drum’s blog points out the emerging problem for tired pols:
A couple of months ago I was walking through Best Buy and saw HDTV for the first time (I threw out my TV in 2001, don’t want it in my house). It’s pretty stunning. But it may tell us more truth about our public figures’lousy skin, thinning hair, malign twitches, lip-curling lies, and pale flab than we ever wanted to know. It’s pretty clear that America is not interested in whether the guy they voted for is a lyin’ piece of pond scum. Someone will doubtless market a "softening" device for those huge, revealing screens and two bits that someone is a Republican.
Hillary should do an emergency consult with Tim Gunn.
Yes, Jim, the guy is more than a little out of it:
Is this how he’s been all along? To start with, he doesn’t know anything. To be more precise: not a single sentence that he utters suggests any familiarity with what people have been saying and arguing — about terrorism, Iraq, the situation of the military, security trade-offs, etc — for the last few years.
Alas, that’s not a problem in today’s hyper-ideological GOP.
Greenwald laments:
This is how it goes endlessly with people like Hiatt: (1) If X does not happen, there is no justification for staying; (2) X has not happened; (3) we must stay. That is why nothing they say has any meaning. Staying in Iraq is always the only real goal. Everything else is just pretext and blather to continue to do that.
They’re those melodies you can’t get out of your head:
Q: Now I have "Stars and Stripes Forever" stuck in my head. Explain that to me.
Levitin: Scientists call songs that get stuck in your head "earworms," after the German Ohrwurm. We don’t know a lot about how or why they happen – it’s hard to get funding to study this type of thing – but we know a little. Like, it tends not to be a whole song that gets stuck in your head, just 15-20 seconds of one, and it tends to be a simple song that even non-singers can hum without effort.
Q: Is there a cure?
Levitin: Some people get earworms so bad that it interferes with their ability to sleep or work. For those people, antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs can help. They relax the circuits. Then again, some people become musicians because they have earworms. Neil Young told me that he started writing songs because he couldn’t get rid of the tunes in his head.
This should get sales of Zoloft soaring:
David Cameron’s re-branding of the British Tories continues – with much opposition.
A reader writes:
Your comment about Bush trying to frame the Iraq war as a simple battle between "Good" and "Evil" reminds me of my one 9/11 joke. I know it’s wrong, insensitive, and politically incorrect to have a 9/11 joke, but since I don’t have a TV show to lose (and it speaks to your point), here it is.
On 9/11 my youngest son was 5 years old. The attack was mentioned in his school, and he saw some of the story on TV when my wife and I were watching. Being curious, he asked why people would do such a thing. We always try to be as honest as we can with our children, while keeping in mind their intellectual and developmental limits. So we told him that there were some bad people who don’t like America and they did this bad thing because they wanted to hurt us. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity at the time, but I felt very conflicted with what I had said. I didn’t like that I’d resorted to overly general categories like bad people or that I felt I had to completely skip over some of the rationale for anti-American sentiment, even though I believe some of it is justified. I just wondered if I had done him a disservice by glossing over it so superficially. But then a couple days later, Bush finally addressed the nation on the attack. And his speech was filled with overgeneralizations about the "evil doers", their acts of evil and how we would track them down and good would prevail over evil. Suddenly I felt better about what I had said to my 5 year old because I realized that Bush’s parents had obviously explained it to him the same way.
I’m not as isolated as I once was among conservatives on Iraq:
One felt at the end of the week that Iraq will continue as a long and ongoing story, that it is unlikely that we will find a perfect moment to leave, that it will always be too soon, the situation too delicate. It will always seem a place perched on a precipice over a canyon.
One sensed too that Iraq will in fact be issue No. 1 to be faced by the next president, whoever he or she is. That individual, in January 2009, will likely be faced by mischief makers of all stripes throughout the capital, with a question that is an artificial construct. "Did he see the mission through?" Or "Did he lose Iraq?" The latter would be most unjust, because we never had Iraq. We haven’t found it, in spite of our best efforts, because the people of Iraq never found it. And it was their nation to find. This seemed clearer than ever this week, which was part of the reason for the sighing.
Will Saletan gets it right:
Sure, we’re fonder of old ways than you are. That’s in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. If you studied the rest of us in real life, you’d find that while we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do, so in terms of complexity, ambiguity, and critical thinking, it’s probably a wash.
Also, our standard of "information" is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they’ve served us and society pretty well. It’s just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.
Iraq was one occasion when many conservatives got it wrong – because, in retrospect, we weren’t conservative enough. And that’s the case I make in "The Conservative Soul."
An iPhone parable. I like the iTouch myself.
