Happy Birthday, Liz

Elizabeth II is a queen. George II thinks he's a king, as the post below on his nightmare presidency shows all too well.

Elizabeth Windsor turned 80 today and all but the most virulent monarchy bashers would have to agree that she has been an extraordinarily reassuring presence during her long reign and one of the most accomplished politicians of our time.

Jonathan Freedland notes in a thoughtfully Guardian commentary that Elizabeth could well be all that is keeping the British monarchy alive. He is emphatic that debate over whether it should continue (and he does not believe that it should) needs to take place now and not when the queen is in her dotage:

If genes are any guide - and when it comes to royalty, you would think that they would be - Elizabeth could well live and reign for another 20 years, overtaking even Victoria's 64-year record. But the way this system works, her successor will be anointed the second she dies: there will be no pause for a debate. If we want one, we have to have it now, so that we might reach a national consensus before the moment arises, not wait until it is too late. So let's wish the Queen a very happy birthday; let's hope she has many more to come and in good health; let's thank her for all she has done. But let's decide now that, when she goes, we bury this ludicrous institution with her.

While Freedland wants to kill the monarchy, The Economist reports that it's alive and very well, thank you, but maybe not for the reasons that you'd assume:

Compare the fortunes of the monarchy with those of another established institution with an ambient role, the Church of England, and it becomes clear that the royal family is doing rather well. . . . One reason is that the monarchy thrives on indifference, while the Church is hurt by it.

That might sound odd, given that evidence of interest in the royal family is everywhere . . . but this fascination does not run very deep. According to one poll, only 10% of people aged between 16 and 24 think the monarchy is important to their lives. But because the royal family is the monopoly provider of a something trivial, it hardly seems worth opposing. The Church, by contrast, offers a vital service to its 1.7m members—spiritual succour—and operates in a competitive confessional market where dissatisfied Christians can shop around. Indifference is thus a threat.

I don't get to vote on whether the monarchy should continue. Neither do Elizabeth's subjects, for that matter. But I must say that she has brought out the best in the British, a people with whom I have a thoroughly schizophrenic relationship.

Compare that to George II, who has brought out the worst.

The Worst President Ever?

Criticizing George Bush has become a lot like shooting fish in a barrel. While taking shots at him once seemed like good sport, it's a whole lot less fun these days because it's so easy.

You see, there simply is no question that he's making a run at being one of the worst presidents ever, if not the worst, and how entertaining can it be to pick on such a loser? As well as the decidedly un-fun reality that it will take years to undo the damage he has done -- if the damage can be undone at all.

My conservative friends (you both know who you are!) have run out of ways to defend a man that even fellow Republicans are abandoning in droves, so they fall back on that old reliable:

Historians will judge George Bush to have been a visionary who was the right man for the times.

For a while, I sort of bought into the first part of that notion.

The guy really did seem to come up with some big ideas like reforming Social Security and Medicare. But his Social Security plan was such quackery that you can't really praise someone for being forwarding looking when they're actually looking up their backside, while the Medicare plan imploded because (a la the disaster that followed the Katrina disaster) no one bothered to sweat the details. Then there was his initiative to spread democracy in the Middle East, which sounded pretty good until I realized that his modus operandus was to insist on American-style democracy (such as in Iraq) at point of gun and to piss on anything that was not swaddled in red, white and blue bunting.

Note further that Bush makes no pretense of proposing anything remotely visionary in the foreseeable future. Pathetically, his only goal is to try to keep Republican control of Congress, which is all you need to know about Karl Rove's transfer back into the Department of Bare Knuckle Politics earlier this week.

I never bought into the second part -- that Bush was the right man for the times.

Here is a man with a frat boy smirk who was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, sat out the Vietnam War because of his daddy's pull, never had to deal with failure because family and friends were always there to bail him out, forbids dissent like a certain defense secretary and runs from confrontation, doesn't have an intellectual cell in his brain, let alone an original thought, and with the conspicuous exception of bravely facing up to his drug and alcohol problems a few years ago has done nothing whatsoever to show that he is presidential timber.

Whew!

Now comes Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who writes in a Rolling Stone cover story that:

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

Wilentz notes from the jump that historians tend to be a lot more cautious than they're portrayed and do not leap to overarching conclusions like "worst ever" without considerable thought. Indeed, surveys of historians who consider themselves conservative or liberal have remarkably similar results, although as a group they're certainly more liberal than the general public.

Some highlights of the piece:

* Since the outset of reliable public-opinion polling in the 1940s, only Richard Nixon has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term. No president, including Harry Truman, has experienced such a steady decline as Bush has since his high point after 9/11.

Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

* Great presidents' reputations are built on their ability to guide the nation through great crises. Think George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, all of whom left the nation more secure.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities.

* No president has squandered the public's trust more than Bush, whose popularity ratings exeeded 90 percent after 9/11 and today are dipping into the low 30s with no reversal in sight.

The problems besetting Bush are . . . a crisis both in confidence and credibility. . . . More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

* The 20th century has been tough on wartime presidents, and Bush has lots in common with Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, who became bogged down in overseas conflicts (Korea and Vietnam) with no end in sight.

But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. . . . The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

* The decision to divert the struggle against Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, the favorite pre-existing target of Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld by pushing a doctrine of unprovoked war based on unproven threats has been a monumental catastrophe.

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. . . . The Bush White House seems incapable of [taking the long view] except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.

* No president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign promises. He came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative" with a more moderate domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party.

The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. . . . The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." . . . The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover.

* Almost every presidential administration has had to face charges of personal misbehavior and corruption. Several have had to defend themselves against charges of usurping of power, including Andrew Johnson, who was impeached, and Richard Nixon, who would have been had he not resigned.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. . . . The Bush administration . . . threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim.

Wilentz concludes by noting that no historian can predict the future with certainty with two and a half years left in Bush's presidency. Other presidents like Truman have left office in apparent disgrace only to rebound later in the view of historians.

But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

THE BOTTOM OF THE PRESIDENTIAL BARREL

Three presidents -- James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Warren G. Harding -- are routinely cited as being the worst presidents.

Why?

Buchanan because of his dithering when confronted with Southern secession in 1860. Johnson because he actively sided with former Confederates after the Civil War and undermined Reconstruction. Harding because of his incompetence and thoroughly corrupt administration.

Wilentz notes that younger historians also cast a vote for Nixon as the only American president forced to resign from office, but as much as I loathed Nixon in 1974 for what he had done to the office of president, his signal accomplishments have been a counterbalance. These include opening a dialogue with China and, although this is usually overlooked, helping jump-start the environmental movement by creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Devil's Dictionary X

Here's a 10th entry from Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary.”

If you missed my earlier posts, Bierce (1842-1914) was a brilliant but underappreciated American author and journalist who had a long and tumultuous releationship with press baron William Randolph Hearst, and was a misanthrope possibly without peer.

LAUGHTER

Noun. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals -- these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infection character of laughter is due to the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.

The George 'I'm the Decider' Bush Scorecard

Josh Marshall poses an interesting question over at Talking Points Memo:

Can you think of any policy decision or action President Bush has taken in his five-plus years in office that didn't enjoy its greatest popularity on day one and then become more or less consistently less popular over time?

Hmm, let's see. The War on Terror. Yup. War in Iraq. Yup. Tax cuts for the rich. Yup. Social Security "reform." Yup. No Child Left Behind education plan. Yup. Medicare prescription drug "reform." Yup. A constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. Yup.

Oh, wait! There is one action for which he has been praised since Day One: The national no-call telephone list. Yippee!

Conversely, has there been any Bush policy decision or action that was unpopular but has grown in popularity?

Nope.

What to make of this? That Bush, as more and more people are saying, may indeed go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever.

HOW LOW CAN HE GO?

Yikes! Bush has hit a new low with only a 33 percent approval rating in the latest Fox News Poll, which has typically tracked his approval numbers higher than most other public-opinion polls.

The reason: Shrinking support among Republicans.

Bush's slide in the Fox poll has been precipitous. He was at 47 percent this time last year, at 39 percent in mid-March and 36 percent two weeks ago.

SCOTUS and Flip-Flopping on States Rights

The Rehnquist-Roberts courts' flip-flopping on states' rights over the last few years is enough to give you whiplash.

What is states' rights?

States' rights is the concept that the states possess certain rights and political powers. These rights and powers are memorialized in the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and are usually used to defend a state law that the federal goverment wants to override or a perceived violation of the limits of federal authority.

Don't get me wrong, states' rights is an enormously complicated issue that practically brought the infant American republic to its knees, sundered it before and during the Civil War and has been debated endlessly before every Supreme Court since John Marshall, the third chief justice, argued that federal powers trumped state powers.

The whiplash is a result of the crass inconsistency of the Rehnquist court and now the Roberts court and reflects its politicization (something that righteous conservatives claim only liberal justices are responsible for) as it marches further to the right.

A notable recent flip in this perverse flip-flop dynamic was last year's California medical marijuana case. By a narrow margin, the high court ruled that federal drug law trumped California's right -- as approved by its voters in a referendum -- to allow a mere handful of its citizens the right to use marijuana to ease their suffering.

A notable flop came this week in an Arizona case pertaining to what a state needs to do to allow criminal defense lawyers for a crazy client to mount a defense. In this instance the justices left the clear impression that they doesn't want to limit the state's options by imposing a uniform definition of insanity -- as opposed to a uniform imposition of federal drug law on a bunch of hapless cancer victims in California.

Flip. Flop. See what I mean?

SCOTUSblog has more on the Arizona case here. Scroll down to a post headlined "Analysis: A focus on intent".

Iraq I: 'Assassinate the Dream, Kill the Future'

One of the extraordinary things about the blogosphere is its ability to bring people together. People like you and I and Mohammed.

I write these words with a lump in my throat having just read Mohammed's account of the assassination of his sister's husband, a young doctor who returned to Baghdad after the invasion to help rebuilt his country.

Writes Mohammed:

He was not affiliated with any political party or movement and spent all his time working at the hospital or studying at home and he was dreaming of building a medical center for his specialty to serve the poor who cannot afford going to expensive private clinics. We didn't know or anticipate that cruel times were waiting for a chance to assassinate the dream and kill the future.

It was the day he was celebrating the opening of a foundation that was going to offer essential services to the poor but the criminals were waiting for him to end his life with their evil bullets and to stab our family deep in the heart.

Grief and pain is killing me everyday as I hold my dear nephews, my sister is shocked beyond words while my parents are dead worried about the rest of us.
We are trying hard to close the wound, summon our patience and protect those still alive while we look forward to the future that we hope can bring peace for us.

The terrorists and criminals are targeting all elements of life and they target anyone who wants to do something good for this country. They think by assassinating one of us they could deter us from going forward but will never succeed, they can delay us for years but we will never go back and abandon our dream.

We have vowed to follow the steps of our true martyrs and we will raise the new generation to continue the march, these children of today are the hope and the future.

* * * * *

Mohammed writes at Iraq the Model, one of a growing number of Iraqi blogs. Do we know that he's giving us the straight scoop? No more than you know whether I am, so this blogging thing is substantially built on trust.

More important is that Mohammed and his fellow bloggers provide information that does not go through filters at the Voice of America, New York Times or the Oval Office. When some talking head jackass on Fox News is telling you that the big bad news media distorts the truth and everything is peachy in Baghdad, you know that certainly is not the case in Mohammed's neighborhood.

These bloggers also give me a much needed dose of humility.

As I write this under bright halogen desk lamps on a zippy computer while listening to the audiostream from a faraway jazz radio station, my biggest concern is having to ride over to a nearby medical lab to have some (routine) bloodwork done before I pedal off to my cushy university job. Mohammed doesn't even know if the electricity will stay on long enough or his dial-up Internet access will even work so that he can blog today, let alone who the next assassin's bullet is meant for.

Please support Mohammed and the other bloggers whom I have provided links to in the expanded section immediately under my profile atop Kiko's House. They include the marvelous River at Baghdad Burning and Zeyad at Healing Iraq, as well as Nancy, who is an Iraqi studying in the U.S. who blogs at Welcome to Beth-Nahrain.

Your suggestions for additional links are most welcome. And say a prayer for Mohammed and his family.

Iraq II: Saddam as Martyr?

Like Mohammed, Iraqi bloggers are by and large easy going sorts. Most do not wear their religions on their sleeves. Most do not belong to political parties. Most don't affiliate themselves with militias and wouldn't know what to do with a Kalashnikov. They all loathed Saddam Hussein and welcomed their American liberators.

And all are witness to the slow but steady devolution of a country they love into a state that is, in some respects, in worse shape than it was before the war.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

I reluctantly bought into the Bush administration mantra that Saddam Hussein needed to be taken out, but I anticipated that a longterm military occupation would be disastrous.

I did not know how right I would be.

* * * * *

Although there are only superficial similarities, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is in the habit of comparing the war in Iraq with World War II. I don't know about you, but as a student of history, this analogy evocation is so obscenely inappropriate that it makes me crazy.

Note that Rumsfeld never compares the post-war occupation of Iraq with, say, the post-war occupation of Japan, so allow me the honor.

The Bush administration spent 59 minutes on planning the Iraq war and one minute on the occupation. It made no effort to understand the complexity of Iraqi society. It disbanded the military and empowered the sectarian militias who are substantially responsible for the orgy of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere, including the assassination of innocents like Mohammed's brother in law. It promised infrastructure improvements ranging from reliable electrical service to public health clinics but hasn't delivered.

In short, the U.S. squandered a small but precious reservoir of goodwill by treating the Iraqi people like children who should be grateful for handouts from Uncle Sam.

The Roosevelt administration meticulously prepared for the occupation of Japan. It assigned teams of scholars and other experts to the task of understanding Japanese society. It finessed the extremely sensitive issue of whether the emperor should be tried as a war criminal. It promised and delivered on an extraordinary range of infrastructure improvements.

In short, the U.S. built on a small but precious reservoir of goodwill by treating the Japanese not as children, let alone a vanquished people, but as victims of a militaristic society that would become a thing of the past as they worked together to rebuild Japan.

* * * * *

Extraordinary as it seems, three-plus years into the occupation some Iraqis are actually saying that the bad old days under Saddam no longer seem so bad after all. It's not hard to see why.

Will the Bush administration's overweaning ignorance and arrogance result in something that Saddam himself never could accomplish on his own? Will the brutal former dictator became a martyr?

Shame on the FBI. Yet Again.

I have no love for Jack Anderson, the late great Washington investigative columnist, who would pretty much do anything to get a story. But the FBI's efforts to do pretty much anything, including prey on Anderson's widow, to get access to his sizeable stash of confidential files are outrageous. TPM Muckracker has more here.

MapQuest Demystified. Sort Of.

The New Yorker, of all places, has a (typically long) article on the history of automobile travel maps down through the decades from Rand McNally to MapQuest.

The piece is a good read and gooder than MapQuest, which in my experience can be maddenly unhelpful. How unhelpful? I've punched in requests for directions from Point A to Point B when I know full well the best routes (say from Kiko's House to the Jersey shore) and MapQuest has taken me so far out of my way as to be laughable.

Bonus Quote du Jour

The semantician in chief on when or whether Defense Secretary Rumsfeld will be joining Andrew Card and now Scott McClellan in the reality-based community:

I'm the decider.

Quote du Jour

Texas Monthly has this to say in a nifty article about to be former -- but not soon enough -- Rep. Tom DeLay:

DeLay understood almost everything about power in Washington except the insidious power of scandal. He had plenty of precedents to learn from; in his career, he had seen two Speakers brought down by ethics violations, Democrat Jim Wright, of Texas, and Republican Newt Gingrich, of Georgia, as well as his own handpicked successor to Gingrich, Bob Livingston, of Louisiana, who confessed to an extramarital affair and quit the House. Three lessons were to be drawn from the dethroning of Wright and Gingrich. The most obvious was that they were intense partisans whose political style -- Wright’s stretching of parliamentary rules to run roughshod over the opposition, Gingrich’s (and the entire Republican leadership’s, including DeLay’s) loathing of Bill Clinton -- made the minority party hate them and look for ways to bring them down. The second lesson was that if you’re going to make yourself a target, you’d better not give the opposition a reason to shoot -- and in today’s Washington, that reason is usually ethical transgressions. The third was that scandal, once contracted, is a virus with no known cure. The only safe course is to stay within the rules, but DeLay lived on the edge. He painted the target on his own back.

(Hat tip to Taegan Goddard and Political Wire.)

And the Pulitzer Prize for Hypocrisy Goes To . . .

As a career newspaper guy, I was ambivalent about the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism.

Mind you, I wouldn't have turned one down. Reporting projects that I edited over the years were nominated for Pulitzers five times and I thought one was good enough to win. An insider told me that it almost made the cut as a finalist, but was too different for the judges to fully grasp its significance.

Duh-uh.

As it was, my newspaper did win two Pulitzers during my tenure and our sister paper another 15, so I have felt the elation and sipped the champagne even if the toasts weren't for me and my reporters.

My ambivalence about the journalism Pulitzers is more fundamental: How they are judged and awarded too often has more to do with scratching the backs of the award judges than the merits of the nominees' work. Translation: A lot of good stuff never gets honored because the papers are out of this elitist back-scratching loop.

In any event, here are two rather different views of this year's Pulitzers for journalism. One is from my buddy Will Bunch at Attytood, who bemoans the dearth of awards for local reporting. The other is from Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher via Poynteronline, who asks:

Was it just a coincidence that five of the Washington Post's Pulitzer winners got together hours before official word of their victory was announced?

Of course not.

Here's another question: Why should anyone care?

Because, as noted above, the entire Pulitzer process is fraught with the kind of favoritism that many a prize winner has decried in their prize-winning stories. That is hypocritical.

PRIZEWORTHY

I have no idea whether the Pulitzers for arts and letters are similarly rigged, but I happily note that:

Two magnificent books that I would highly recommend were finalists -- Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Biography) and George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq" (General Non-Fiction). As I tell everyone who will listen, Packer's book is far and away the best on the war.

Thelonious Monk received a well-deserved, if well postumous Special Citation not for his exquisite keyboard playing, but for his equally equisite but overlooked jazz compositions.

The Gore Zeitgeist

Al Gore makes me crazy.

He is an eminently decent man in an era when our political waters are infested with sharks.

He cares deeply about our future at a time when too many politicians are concerned only about their next fundraiser.

But Al Gore blew his chance to be president in 2000 not because he got robbed in Florida and again in the U.S. Supreme Court, which is true, but because he ran a campaign so awful that this bitter outcome was all but inevitable. (In the interests of full disclosure, I reluctantly voted for Ralph Nader because I didn't think Gore had earned my vote. Neither did John Kerry earn my vote in 2004, but I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.)

Having gotten that off my chest, I reprint here excerpts from a beautifully thoughtful post by the Highway Scribe on Mr. Gore over at his HighwayScribery blog:

On the first Tuesday in November of 2000, the scribe was on the verge of his moment.

The scene was the Stonewall Democratic Club on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood and the moment was presaged by the announcement that Al Gore had just taken the State of Florida.

The room exploded because, well, that was really it, Gore was going to win. the scribe turned to hug someone and there was this Asian-American guy with spiked hair and an earring standing there, so he hugged him, good and hard.

Usually, and for most of us, presidential candidates hail from a distant world and formation, but in Al Gore the scribe saw a kindred spirit: an annoying liberal White Boy who wore his intellect on his sleeve. A verbal, over-informed know-it-all whose help the world clearly needed (but didn’t want).

The photo above is one of the scribe’s favorites from that campaign. It is the writer/vice president penning his own nomination acceptance speech, something highwayscribery believes should be a requirement of all public office holders.

We like like-minded people leading us, because they take us where we already want to go.

. . . Of course, the "moment" was not to be, but highwayscribery has never hidden its warmth for the former veep, and we are given to airing his occasional pronouncements as important.

Anyway, sometimes things are not meant to be, but for a good reason.

Here’s an article from the "Washington Post" about Gore’s current obsession, which was his past obsession too, and how he is serving others without having to fly around in a big plane with a fighter jet escort.

Titled, “A Campaign Gore Can’t Lose,” Richard Cohen’s column focuses on Prince Albert of the Tennessee Valley’s latest salvo in the global warming debate, a documentary film marketed as “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The particulars of the film, which in Cohen’s estimation is terribly frightening, won’t be gone into here. Suffice it to say, and borrowing from the columnist himself, our Earth is “in extremis” and Katrina is just the beginning of what will be happening to seaside cities and low-lying coastal regions in years to come.

But here’s the paragraph we like most, because it rings true and shows how time can clarify things and come around to know-it-all, self-styled intellectuals people get annoyed listening to:

“You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat [ahem] Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore – more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump – summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar – even the sentences are beyond him.”

And that’s very true, the deeper point being such was the country’s state of mind in 2000. Now we are someplace else collectively, which is why Al Bore is on the cover of “Vanity Fair” this month, and George W. Bush is on the sole of your shoe.

. . . Doing for his country and the world. Helping. That should be a new road to our presidency. Early in life, (not 18 months before) you start out helping the homeless guy around the corner with a meal now and then. You volunteer at the animal shelter. Then you organize a beach cleaning mission made up of your neighbors. And your circles or waves of mutual assistance move concentrically outward, catching on with others so that one effort, started earlier, merges with a different one started after, and so on until your use to the country is indisputable, measurable by something other than how much money you can raise for paid political spots.

. . . The highway scribe is probably kidding himself in this identification. After all, Gore was a senator’s son and went to Harvard. the scribe . . .didn’t go to Harvard. Gore has spent his life in public service; the highway scribe gorging his mind on imagined and stylized stories.

But what is a hero, save for someone you can only emulate and aspire to replicate in action?

Thinking the Unthinkable: Nuking Iran

This is the tricycle that Shinichi Tetsutanti was riding
when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima.
The 3-year-old died from severe burns.

Perhaps it's a generational thing. Perhaps it's the lousy quality of what passes for political discourse these days. But I'm beside myself and then some over the blasé manner in which the use of tactical nuclear weapons is being discussed as an option for bringing the renegade Irani regime to heel over its burgeoning nuclear program.

We're talking about nuclear weapons!

We're not talking about cruise missiles, Delta Force commandoes or some other conventional means.

We're talking about nuclear weapons!

According to the results of a simulated attack on the Esfahan nuclear facility in Iran using a tactical nuke in the form of a bunker busting Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP):

Some 3 million people would be killed by radiation within two weeks of the attack and 35 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India would be exposed to increased levels of cancer-causing radiation.

Never mind that funding for RNEPs was cut from the Pentagon budget last year, although the program may be continuing under another name. (*)

Never mind that the prevailing view is that the Bush administration's on again, off again bellicosity on Iran doesn't square with it's ability to deliver a knockout punch to the Irani program in any form, let alone start a second Mideast war and then have to deal with the, uh . . . diplomatic fallout.

We're talking about nuclear weapons!

Richard Cranium (I think) has this to say at The All Spin Zone:

[E]ven the consideration of using nuclear weapons in a preemptive manner is madness. Moreover, it telegraphs an inherent weakness in U.S. military strategy: the Bush administration's misguided adventure in Iraq has so weakened the U.S.'s ability to respond to a percieved Iranian threat, that conventional military options are limited.

There is one response that does need to be given every opportunity to work -- diplomacy -- but the Bush administration has proven to be even lousier at that than at making war, so we keep sliding down the slippery slope of armed intervention and that blasé mention of tactical nukes.

Has the nuclear brinksmanship of a Cold War that ended barely 20 years ago and the appalling carnage from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki some 60 years ago been forgotten? Apparently so.

* * * * *

I visited Hiroshima at the height of cherry blossom season in 1970 and was moved by its beauty and the friendliness of the people whom I met. I also ate the best oysters that I have ever tasted anywhere. They were being harvested from Hiroshima Bay and were safe to consume for the first time since the oyster beds had been contaminated as a result of the fallout from the 1945 conflagration.

My stops included the Hiroshima Peace Museum at ground zero, where I saw Shinichi Tetsutani's trike, among many other sobering artifacts from the bombing, and interviews with doctors at a sprawling hospital run by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission on the outskirts of town. The U.S.-funded commission was studying the long-term effects of the bombings, which 25 years later were still manifesting themself in the form of new cancers and birth defects.

I still believe that the Truman administration's decision to twice use atomic weapons was correct because it hastened the end of World War II and saved many more lives than it took. This rationalization and crude calculus notwithstanding, I came came away from my visit to Hiroshima convinced of two things:

All world leaders should be required to visit the Peace Museum before they take their oath of office.

What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki must never be repeated, and fulfilling that requirement might help asssure that.

We're talking about nuclear weapons!

(*) See this Union of Concerned Scientists essay for more about RNEPs. Note also that tactical weapons are not covered under nuclear nonproliferation treaties.

Teeing Off on Wetlands

In a development reminiscent of President Reagan's infamous contention that catsup should be considered a vegetable for the purposes of federal nutrition standards, Interior Secretary Gale Norton has announced that the devastating loss of America's wetlands has finally been checked because of unprecented gains.

However, she then had to admit that most of the gains were because golf course water hazards, farm impoundments and other artifically created ponds are now being considered wetlands.

Field and Stream magazine, for one, is not amused.

Update: A Jihadist Goes to Yale

Why do the administrations of elite American universities seem to have such a tough time facing the music when that intense media glare turns their way?

Duke University has utterly botched its response to an allegation that members of its lacrosse team raped a stripper at an off-campus team party in Durham, N.C., on March 13, thereby creating the impression that it didn't give a Blue Devil about a matter freighted with racial implications until the outcry surrounding it got so loud that it was forced to act.

Then there's Yale University, which has yet to address questions over its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, last fall in a non-degree program on the New Haven campus.

(That's Rahmtullah in the photo, apparently hard at work on a fundamentalist Islamic word processor, or something.)

This kerfuffle was bubbling beneath the national media radar until a New York Times Magazine cover story in February, and since then the unapologists in the Yale administration have been doing a pretty good job of running from a mess of their own making, which has included trying to supress public discussion of the controversy.

But the administration apparently has run out of wiggle room. As John Fund notes in a Wall Street Journal piece, Yale's Board of Governors may have to address the issue when it meets this week.

As I noted in a March 20 post, Rahmatullah told the Times that he started having serious doubts about the Taliban's harsh moral code all the way back in 1998, but acknowledged that he continued sucking at its insidious teat until fleeing Afghanistan for Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks out of fear of a U.S. bombing campaign.

But that's okay, because he now considers himself to be "the luckiest person in the world." Luckier certainly than the countless victims of the Taliban's lashings, rapes and executions.

I asked then and will ask again:

Is having second thoughts about one of the vilest political regimes in modern times sufficient reason to give a key operative for a terrorist group who once met with Osama bin Laden a U.S. visa and then admitting him to one of the most prestigious universities anywhere? No. In fact, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

The Kiko's House Book Club

Will the fourth meeting of the Kiko’s House Book Club come to order. Thank you.

We have for your perusing pleasure today five books recommended by visitors to Kiko’s House and Yours Truly. The books marked with an asterisk (*) are available in paperback.

The books at our first meeting tended toward the spiritual. They ranged from the earthy to the feminine at our second meeting, while the selections at the third were very much a mixed lot. This go round includes one long and one very long novel and three books with geopolitical themes, two of them pertaining to the Indian subcontinent.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy
By Francis Fukuyama (Yale University Press, 2006)

Probably no recent book about politics has ignited so much controversy as Fukuyama's sayonara to neoconservatism. He traces the history of the neocon movement from the 1940s to the present and argues that the Bush administration's application of neocon principles, notably in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, has been disastrous.

Fukuyama says that he remains committed to the promotion of democracy, but not through the Bush administration's policies, which he believes have relied too much on force. He perfers what he calls "soft power," less coercive means from foreign aid and election monitoring to the kind of civil affairs expertise so lacking in post-invasion Iraq.

A Dance To The Music Of Time (*)
By Anthony Powell (Mandarin, 1997)

These 12 novels were published over a period of more than 20 years. Clive James says in the jacket blurb that this super novel " . . . is going to become the greatest modern novel since "Ulysses," and he may well be right. (Mind you, he's an Australian, so . . .)

The protagonist is Nicholas Jenkins, whose life and relationships we follow from his schooldays before World War I until well after world War II. The extraordinary thing is that in all 3,000 pages, almost nothing happens. We do not attend dramatic events affecting the thousands of characters; we hear what happened in the conversations which Jenkins has with other people. Jenkins' outstanding character trait is his detachment. He never gets excited, never criticises, always observes. He is almost bloodless, yet his viewpoint and analysis bring life to the people of these books, especially Kenneth Widmerpool who comes to a sticky end -- and we're glad.

A truly amazing work, hard to understand at first if you're other than British, but it gets better as it goes on.

Daniel Martin (*)
By John Fowles (Jonathan Cape, 1977)

This arguably is the greatest of the late British writers' five acclaimed novels. (The others are "The Collector," "The French Lieutenant's Woman," "The Magus" and "The Aristos.") In some respects, Daniel Martin mirrors Fowles' own life, which we follow through shifting points of view from childhood into middle age as an ex-pat Brit, philanderer and successful Hollywood screenwriter. Fowles has said in so many words that "Daniel Martin" was a way to get back at the Hollywood establishment for mutilating the screen version of "The Magus," for which he wrote the screenplay. "The Magus" was so bad that it was withdrawn shortly after release and except for extremely rare bootleg versions is impossible to find today.

Fowles tends toward the self absorbed in "Daniel Martin," but his mastery of language is on full display. Only the most erudite will be able to avoid repeated trips to the OED. The first chapter is stunning for its beauty and the surprise that Fowles springs on the reader at the end. Go back and reread it when you've finished the book.

Freedom at Midnight: The Epic Drama of India's Struggle for Independence (*)
By Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Simon & Schuster, 1975)

Thirty years on, "Freedom and Midnight" takes on new relevance as the Iraqi people struggle to build a viable democracy with a cast of characters not unlike those involved in the closing months of India's stormy transition from British colony to independent nation in 1947.

The authors draw rich portraits of Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who was determined to end the Raj and appointed Louis Mountbatten, a member of the royal family, to be the last viceroy of India, as well as the two extraordinary Indian revolutionaries, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (*)
By Ben Macintyre (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

This fascinating little book recounts the story of Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker who sailed to Calcutta on a merchant ship in 1822 to erase the memory of a fiancée who jilted him and married another man. Harlan eventually ended up in Afghanistan with the dream of carving out a kingdom for himself.

Amazingly, Harlan sort of succeeded, albeit temporarily, by becoming a confidant of Afghan warlords and a player in the "Great Game" between Russia and Britain. Macintyre draws heavily on Harlan's beautifully written but unpublished journals, which include accounts of his introduction of Western medicines and doctoring. Incidentally, while Quakers eschew violence, Harlan never let that get in the way of pursuing his goals in a fierce backwater that was dominated then -- as today -- by superpowers. By the way, he made it home without a crown on his head, but very much alive.

HOW THE KIKO'S HOUSE BOOK CLUB WORKS

Whenever you read a good book or may have read one in the past that you'd recommend to your fellow visitors, e-mail me at kikokimba@gmail.com

Include in the body of the e-mail the book's title, author and type (fiction, nonfiction, bio, advice, etc.) and a few words about why you enjoyed and would recommend it. I'll post your recommendations at the next Book Club meeting.

PREVIOUS KIKO'S HOUSE BOOK CLUB SELECTIONS

The Assassin’s Gate: American In Iraq By George Packer (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005)

Candide: Or Optimism By Voltaire (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2005)

The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror By Nathan Sharansky with Ron Dermer (Public Affairs, 2004)

Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir By Danielle Trussoni (Henry Holt, 2006)

The Fall of Lucifer (Chronicles of Brothers) By Wendy Alec (Realms, 2005)

The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, The Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves By Andrew Levy (Random House, 2005)

Grand Days By Frank Moorhouse (Picador, 1994)

I Am Charlotte Simons By Tom Wolff (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004)

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing 'The Second World War' By David Reynolds (Random House: 2005)

In the Company of the Courtesan By Sarah Dunant (Random House, 2006)

The Life of Pi: A Novel By Yann Martel (Canongate, 2001)

Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality By Richard Slotkin (Henry Holt and Co., 2005)

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel By Arthur Golden (Vintage, 1997)

The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds By Gretchen Edgren (Taschen, 2006)

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth By Alan Cutler (Dutton, 2003)

The Second World War By Winston Churchill (Houghton Mifflin, 1948-53)

What Is Life Worth? The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 By Kenneth R. Feinberg (Public Affairs, 2005)

Iraq I: A Tale of Two Defense Secretaries

LBJ and Defense Secretary McNamara shortly before his 1968 ouster.

The war in Iraq has defied most Vietnam analogies, and while there are similarities between the two conflicts, there are more differences.

But there is one appropriate comparison that is smacking us right in the kisser these days: The management styles of the secretaries of defense in both wars.

Robert McNamara, like Donald Rumsfeld, was a micromanager whose inflexible views were stamped all over the U.S.'s disastrous Vietnam war policy. While McNamara did not have to face the unprecedented public criticism of retired generals as has Rumsfeld, his field commanders resented his hand's-on style and believed that he was fettering their effectiveness on the battlefield.

President Johnson, no fool but his own, understood this and eased out McNamara in 1968 after seven years in the job. (He had been JFK's first and only defense secretary.) LBJ replaced McNamara with Clark Clifford, who knew that the war could not be won in any traditional sense and had become a political nightmare.

It was Clifford who began the long and painful process of disengaging the U.S. from Vietnam. A "mere" 18,000 Americans had died when McNamara was sent packing; 37,000 more were to perish before the war officially ended in 1975.

Even President Bush, who does not have a fraction of LBJ's smarts, must understand that the generals have put him in a no-win situation.

To keep Rumsfeld is to risk further criticism from the retired brass -- and it is sure to come, while the usual "if you criticize us you're unpatriotic" pushback used against war dissenters getslittle traction here. But no matter how it is prettied up, easing Rumsfeld out would be an acknowledgement that his war policy -- which is to say the administration's -- has been a fiasco, and this White House just isn't very good at acknowledging failure.

THE McNAMARA CATHARSIS

Rumsfeld may yet have a change of heart, but it is difficult to imagine that he will have the decency to admit in retirement what McNamara did -- that he was wrong.

In an extraordinary turn of events, McNamara did just that in 1996 with his bestselling book, "In Retrospect : The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam."

"In Retrospect" was a stinging indictment of American policy in Vietnam -- which is to say McNamara's own policy. The memoir showed him to be a deeply humbled man who believed at the time that he was doing the right thing but understood in hindsight that his judgement had been terribly wrong.

I was asked to review the book and found myself intellectually and emotionally torn.

While I recognized and praised McNamara's decency and noted his secret efforts to find a way out of Vietnam, I could not forgive him a nightmare that had sundered my generation and taken the lives of good friends, several of whom succumbed to their physical and emotional wounds only in recent years.

As awkward as it was, I ended up praising the book but not the man.

Perhaps I am too hard on Rumseld, but my loathing of him is visceral and has deep roots. I cannot imagine him summoning the courage to admit, as did McNamara, that he was wrong.

Iraq II: The 'New" Liberation of Baghdad

The U.S. military is planning a second "liberation" of lawless Baghdad once a new Iraqi government is installed, according to The Times of London.

The Times says that pacifying the capital with the help of the Iraq Army is seen as being essential to establishing the authority of a new government, without which significant withdrawals of U.S. troops cannot take place.

Reporter Sarah Baxter writes that:

Strategic and tactical plans are being laid by U.S. commanders in Iraq and at the U.S. army base in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under Lieutenant-General David Petraeus. He is regarded as an innovative officer and was formerly responsible for training Iraqi troops.

The battle for Baghdad is expected to entail a “carrot-and-stick” approach, offering the beleaguered population protection from sectarian violence in exchange for rooting out insurgent groups and Al-Qaeda.

Sources close to the Pentagon said Iraqi forces would take the lead, supported by American air power, special operations, intelligence, embedded officers and back-up troops.

The logic of such an endeavor fails me. Baghdad is lawless only in the sense the different areas are controlled by different sectarian militias. In Sadir City, a vast slum of 2 million people, virtually all services are provided by Shiite mosques and their militias because the occupation has been such a failure.

This failure is because of two fundamental and interlocking mistakes made by the U.S. early on:

The Iraqi Army was completely disbanded and sectarian militias were encouraged. This vested all armed power outside the U.S. military in sectarian hands. That this formula has been a recipe for disaster -- if not outright civil war -- is not surprising, only that it took so long to happen.

So the very Iraqis who were dissed by the U.S. in the early days of the occupation are now going to embrace its troops to save them from the very people who are providing them a modicum of protection?

Sounds like a bloody recipe for further disaster to me.

Iraq III: Beware of False Analogies

David Brooks was way off his game last week in "The Past Meets the Future," an op-ed column (mercifully hiding behind the New York Times' subscription firewall) that argued the war in Iraq should be compared to such stirring human endeavors as Moses' journey to the Promised Land and the American civil rights movement because it will lead, as did those earlier discords, to an ultimately noble end.

This silliness prompted John Duffy of Notre Dame, Indiana, to respond in a letter to the editor that:

The problem with those analogies should be obvious. Neither Moses nor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began their campaigns by lying about the reasons for the journey. Nor did they suppress information, bully dissenters or surround themselves with yes men who were never held accountable for mistakes, no matter how disastrous.

Maybe this explains why Moses and Dr. King approached their Promised Lands, and why our current leadership has gone so far astray.

A Vagina Monologue

I owe visitors to Kiko's House an apology. As the journalist who in 1995 broke the story that the late Nicole Brown Simpson's breasts had been surgically enhanced (it was a slow day at the O.J. trial) , I have failed to note the latest craze in cosmetic surgery -- vaginal enhancement.

Call me slow. Call me long distance. Call me anything you want. But you coulda knocked me over with a feather after I learned that not only was V.E. hotter than triple mocca lattes, but actress Jennifer Ansiton -- my poster girl for ruining good looks by using way too much plastic -- gets her V. waxed in a new movie and may have had V.E. herself!

Because this is a family blog, I'll spare you the details of V.E. and send folks who have a note from their parents to a New York Times Magazine story on the subject.

As for Anniston, I take you to a phrase-turning dynamo by the name of Ross Douthat, who expresses my sentinments better than I could over at The American Scene:

The trailer for "The Break-Up," the new Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston vehicle, includes a remarkable scene. The couple has split up but still lives in the same apartment, and the Aniston character is looking for ways to make the Vaughn character pay more attention to her. "Go see Mischka, my personal waxer at the spa," a friend tells her, and "ask her for the Telly Savalas." And the next thing you know Aniston is parading naked through the apartment, showing off her waxed . . . well, you know, to Vaughn's goggling eyes.

Now obviously there's no rigorous moral case to be made against "the Telly Savalas," any more than there's a moral case against women shaving their legs or armpits, or men shaving their beards. Cultural standards change all the time. Still, I think we're crossing a pretty significant threshold with the waxing phenomenon, which is now so mainstream that it shows up in approved-for-all-audiences movie trailers. As with breast implants, it's another instance of modern women taking their sexual cues from pornography, and from the male fantasy of what Tom Wolfe calls "a boy with breasts," but which might be more accurately described as a prepubescent girl with breasts. Jennifer Aniston isn't a bad icon for this shift: When she started out on "Friends" she was fetchingly adorable, with curves and baby fat to spare. Fifteen years later, she's exercised, smoked and plastic surgerized herself into a weird, porn-like parody of a beautiful women - skinny, over-tanned, and all angles except for her still-pneumatic breasts. The waxing is just a small part of the pantomime, a final insult to the "natural" body she gave up on long ago.

So this is where we are today - so jaded about nudity and sexuality, and so caught up in sexual competition, that we aren't just vain and/or insecure about our bodies generally, but about how alluring our reproductive organs look. Men "manscape" to make their endowments more impressive; women line up for vaginal plastic surgery. A beautiful woman wandering naked through an apartment isn't anything special; she needs to be waxed to turn her boyfriend's head. Call it self-improvement, call it decadence . . . it's enough to make me nostalgic for the Hippies.

The GOP: Onward Christian Soldiers

Any hope that the religious right is losing its iron grip on the Republican Party is illusory.

CNN reports that the Republican-dominated Congress, which has been notable for its utter lack of accomplishment, will be taking action on social issues important to religious conservatives between now and the November elections in an effort to shore up that vitally important part of the GOP's base. These include an anti-gay marriage and flag-burning constitutional amendments and new limits on abortion.

But will coddling conservatives, a formula that worked in 2004, work in 2006? There's evidence that it might not.

Gays are better organized than two years ago. Conservatives are vulnerable on stem cell research, which they oppose but most Americans approve of. Immigration is a touchy subject. While many conservatives support harsh penalties for illegal immigrants and their employers, they risk alienating the very Hispanics who recently have been drawn to the GOP. Many conservative groups are angry over runaway deficit spending. And some believe that they have been used by President Bush when it has suited his political needs and say his support for their causes has been lukewarm at best.

On the other hand, and as Bob Dole famously remarked, "Where's the outrage?"

The electorate seems remarkably disengaged considering the failure in Iraq, an economic recovery that has bypassed the middle class and poor, and a host of other problems. This is a recipe tailor made for a religious right wing that is never disengaged.

A Change of Heart on Nuclear Power

When Patrick Moore founded Greenpeace 30 years ago, he says that he believed "nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust," but today it may just be the energy source that can save the planet.

He explains his change of heart in a Washington Post op-ed piece.

Just In Time For Your Spring Wardrobe

This and other in-your-face merchandise can be ordered through Tennessee Guerrilla Women.

Holiday Greetings From Kiko's House

Today and tommorow are days of rest at Kiko's House and the perfect opportunity to post a kitty picture. (Sorry, but no bunnies were available.) That's your Faithful Correspondent with Kiko, the wonderful kitty for whom this blog is named.

Science Saturday I: The Tall and Short of It

Am I the only one who thinks that there are some pretty weird scientific studies going on out there?

Apparently not, because the Washington Post this week cited a Scottish study in that context that found taller women are more ambitious career-wise and less inclined to start a family.

The study was launched as a follow-up to a previous study that concluded taller women had fewer children because they had a harder time finding mates. The new study would appear to disprove that theory. Instead, the new study's authors suggest, taller women are likely to have more testosterone, which gives them more male-like traits such as being assertive, competitive and ambitious.

The Scotsman has the details here.