Category: Politics

I was on the phone with my grandmother a little while ago. She’s almost 80 but active as ever and is a dedicated Democrat, and we spent a lot of time talking about current events. I started reading through my blogroll after I got off the phone with her. Lots being said about the resigning New Jersey Governor, which I don’t have much to say about right now, and then this little gem (hat tip – Sisyphus Shrugged) got me angry:

“The days when the chief Israeli puppeteer comes to the United States and meets with the puppet in the White House and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets, should be replaced,” Nader said earlier this summer.

Source here.

The belief that Jews are secretly the puppet masters of international events and finance goes directly back to the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“.

Certainly American-Israeli relations and the whole godawful mess in Israel is something that everyone is entitled to have an opinion on. But to express your opinion using inflamatory language that suggests Jews secretly run the world is not fine.

Yet one more reason why Ralph Nader ought to go back to writing consumer protection guides.

It’s a frequent criticism of President Bush that he’s stupid, and this latest quote below is certainly a stupid thing to say. But I don’t think it’s actual lack of intelligence that’s the problem. Rather, I think the problem is that he lives in a world completely cut off from the reality 99% of the rest of us live in.

Bush on taxing the rich:

[Bush said that] high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because “the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.”

In BushWorld, any tax increase that Congress could come up with will have loopholes that their well-paid accountants will figure out how to exploit, so it’s a waste of time even trying to increase taxes. They’ll just offshore their corporation, or rewrite their compensation package, or shuffle the web of trusts, or something like that.

In short, in BushWorld, they can’t conceive of a tax package that cannot be dodged or evaded. The rules are for suckers.

It would be nice if people in BushWorld took their obligations as seriously as they do their privileges, but that, I suppose, would be asking too much.

This Modern World has a nice item about the upcoming “National Preparedness Month”, scheduled to be kicked off by Tom Ridge on September 9th.

Per TMW:

Why September 9th? That’s awfully late, if it’s supposed to be the entire month. My guess, thinking like Karl Rove: this year’s 9/11 anniversary falls on a Saturday, so an announcement on the date or even Friday would only get a burst of free media on a weekend. But by timing it for the 6 pm news on Thursday, it’ll reach the Friday papers, and thus be fully-injected into all of the emotion-laden anniversary coverage, plus the Sunday morning talk shows.

The idea, obviously, is to throw a large amount of focus, possibly for weeks on end, on the only issue on which Bush outpolls Kerry. And of course this will come on the heels of the GOP convention. So where the Democrats’ post-convention media got blitzed with terror warnings based on years-old intelligence, the Republicans’ afterglow might well be favorably extended.

Indeed. But here’s the real point of the whole thing (emphasis original):

It’s three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.

And yes, let’s ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?

In this case, the 2000 year old classic, Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”. In Chapter 13 Sun Tzu discusses spies:

There are five kinds of spies used: Local spies, internal spies, double spies, dead spies, and living spies.

When all five are used, and no one knows their Way, it is called the divine organization, and is the ruler’s treasure.

This Administration, however, seeems to have created a 6th kind of spy – the spy that you burn to try to gain internal political benefit.

U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources say.

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

And this isn’t the first time – need I mention Valerie Plame?

Another lesson this administration should have learned about spies before invading Iraq but did not can also be found in Sun Tzu (emplhasis added) –

Only the wisest ruler can use spies; only the most benevolent and upright general can use spies, and only the most alert and observant person can get the truth using spies.

It is subtle, subtle!

I finally read Ron Reagan’s piece in Esquire on why not to vote for Bush. It’s a nice piece of writing, very lyrical in its outrage – RR definitely has gifts in that regard. But one small quibble I wanted to call out. Reagan says towards the end

I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration.

If honesty is at the core of what Reagan does not like about Bush, then he needs to be honest about this too. The fact is, no matter how well-written his article, it’s being published in Esquire and not some obscure blog because Ron Reagan is the son of a two-term US President. He should acknowledge that point.

Reading around this morning, it seems the Kerry speech was well received just about everywhere (except for the Whiskey Bar and Matt Yglesias). It certainly was at the bar in downtown SF where I watched it with about 60 other SFers at a Kerry fundraiser.

Kerry’s opening line, “I’m John Kerry, reporting for duty” was a risk but I think it went over well. In fact, Kerry did about the best job he possibly could have done last night. Not that I needed convincing who to vote for, but I did walk away with a shift in my feelings about Kerry. Before the speech, I was voting for Kerry because I had to. Now I actually want to vote for the man.

O, and per Kos, may Saxby Chambliss rot in hell for what he did to Max Cleland. He gave a great introduction speech and I hope we see more of Cleland in a Kerry administration.