I haven’t said much about the Fitzgerald Plame investigation because I don’t want to count my chickens before they’re frog-marched out of their offices … but Jane Hamsher, Reddhedd and the rest of the gang over at firedoglake have a lot of excellent posts on the subject — not just up to date info about what’s going on, but also why it matters.
They’re well worth bookmarking.
I saw an interesting piece of information over on dKos today, regarding Iraq war veterans who come home & run for Congress:
Democrats have five or six of those already on the line. Republicans, by the way, have zero.
Very interesting. I wonder why?
Apparently the BBC is doing a series on President Bush and the Middle East. From their press release:
[Palestinian Foreign Minister] Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq
Per the WaPo:
Roy Moore, who became a hero to the religious right after being ousted as Alabama’s chief justice for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, announced Monday that he is running for governor in 2006.
I’m sure the candidate debates will be hysterical.
Avedon Carol kindly responded in the Comments to yesterday’s post citing Jon Stewart about why so many Americans are so uninvolved with politics. Her thoughts:
There’s also the part where in an oppressive state, keeping your head down is the only protection you might have. Such a state will go after its enemies. If your first allegiance is to your family or to your own survival, the last thing you want to do is draw the government’s attention to you by criticizing them.
Seems to me that this POV is part of the disconnect between many left-leaning bloggers and that vast swathe of America that gets them so riled up. If you buy into that point of view, you’d have to be a person who believes that America is today a neo-Fascist state with such tight command and control over our daily lives that the average citizen rightfully fears the repercussions should s/he speak out against the state. I seriously doubt that mindset pervades Middle America today. Hell, even I don’t believe it.
Yes, I’m aware of Gitmo and situations like Jose Padilla’s, and the super-secret monitoring devices the NSA has that can read all our emails, and the provisions of the Patriot Act, and I am concerned about the state of civil liberties in America today. And who knows? It might even be possible that somebody in a back room in Washington DC is putting me on an “Enemies of the State” list because I’ve expressed my opposition to the war in Iraq.
But it seems to me that a left-leaning blogger like me is much more likely to run into trouble in the workplace because of my blog than any other possible outcome. I don’t see anything going on in America today that makes me feel that my own physical security is in any way at risk by the state for my point of view.
There’s a passage in the William Gibson novel “Pattern Recognition” that bears repeating here:
Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained…. he wouldn
Really nice profile of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart over in the Guardian today. Here’s a snippet:
If the parties and the media serve the country so badly, why do Americans put up with it? “Because for the majority of Americans life is pretty tolerable,” says Stewart. “It’s very hard to organise reasonable people with moderate views. Reasonable people with moderate views don’t usually light their torches and head out to town with pitchforks shouting, Be reasonable. Shit has to get really bad before people stand up and take notice.”
There’s a lot of folks on dKos and other left-leaning blogs who don’t understand why most of America seems unwilling or unable to get angry the way they are angry. They tend to write those people off as “sheeple” — too stupid or too cowed to take action. Stewart sees another aspect. I tend to agree with him.