Thursday, December 30, 2004

Re: The Times and its Columnists

----- Original Message -----

From: hoybean@comcast.net
To: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: The Times and its Columnists

Dear Larry:

By far, the number one movie last week was a silly, inept, and worthless piece of film entitled, "Meet The Fockers." While part of the draw may be due to Barbra Streisand playing the mother Focker, the choice of movie goers says a lot about our contemporary culture. Dumb is in.

Harvey

-------------- Original message --------------

December 29, 2004
Re: Part I: The Times And Its Columnists.
Part II: Competence and Costs.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Two days before Christmas this blog criticized a Times columnist, William Safire, and specifically criticized a column he wrote on December 22d. The December 23d blog also took to task a December 22d news story in the Times entitled Fighting Is The Only Option, Americans Say.
On December 24th another Times columnist, the much ballyhooed Thomas Friedman, wrote a column saying that the Iraq insurgents are the face of pure evil, are murderers, are horrible fascists, and that we are fighting for freedom and democracy in Iraq. The much publicized Friedman then went on to say that we may lose in Iraq because of the "defiantly wrong way" that Rumsfeld has pursued the war, the tolerance for this of Bush, Cheney, right wing Republican and others, and other reasons too. Among the other reasons are that "most Europeans, having been made stupid by their own weakness, would rather see America fail in Iraq then [sic: than] lift a finger for free and fair elections there."

Well, Friedman is right about Rumsfeld’s incompetence, and the tolerance of this by (the equally or more inept) Bush, Cheney and company. And nobody in his right mind, however opposed he may be to the Bush family’s latest dynastic war, is going to let Friedman or anyone else get him in the position of claiming that the Iraqi insurgents are nice guys or democrats: Nobody is going to chant the equivalent of Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. But to say that the Europeans have been made stupid by their own weakness is really a bit much, is just a bit arrogant, isn’t it? Especially when it is the Europeans who seem to be gaining strength while America loses it (viz, in the financial realm, the dollar versus the Euro). The arrogant Friedman -- I have never heard anyone accuse him of not being arrogant -- seems to know all about The Lexus And The Olive Tree, but to be oblivious to the saga of The Dollar and The Euro and the underlying reasons for it.

Because of this writer’s views about Safire, the Times December 22d news story slanted towards the necessity of fighting on and on in Iraq, Friedman, and Friedman’s December 23rd crapola, this blogger was delighted to see that it took Times’ readers no time at all to lambaste these clowns, their clownish positions, and the Times’ clownish, slanted so-called "news story" of December 22d. By December 23d, several letters to the editor lambasting the news story and its ideas appeared in the Times. Since only a tiny percentage of letters are printed, who knows how many letters blasting the Times’ story may have been sent to the paper. By December 24th, letters blasting Safire and Friedman appeared in the Times. Again, who knows how many letters may have been sent to it?

So this writer is pleased that there are Times readers whose opinions of what these columnists write, and of some Times articles, is no higher than mine, at least in these instances. Of course, one might also say that the derelict recent columns are merely symptomatic of an underlying problem. Just as the Times once played down (and mainly ignored) what was happening to Jews in the Nazi death camps lest it be perceived as a "Jewish" newspaper, today the Times wants conservative representation on its op ed page in order to diminish criticism of it as supposedly being a liberal newspaper. Seeking this cover, the in-reality-not-very-liberal Times has employed columnists of dubious thought and judgment. Two of them, Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, appear to be guys who are always in motion traveling around the globe, which apparently enables them to pretend to know everything about everything. Not since the liberal Ralph Nader had hoards of p! eople writing books for him on every imaginable subject has one person claimed to know so much about so much as Friedman and Kristof each claim to know. Yet the views they express are often laughable or simply outrageous.

Of course, I suppose some people would claim that they are not conservatives. Well, if they truly are not conservatives, but rather are middle of the roaders or something, you could have fooled me, and Friedman’s December 23rd column did.
Wordsmith Safire has previously been commented on here. Then there is David Brooks. In one person’s judgment, about one column in five written by Brooks is brilliant. The rest are largely rubbish.

All of which raises the question of why can’t the august Times find conservative writers whose quality is such that even liberals like me feel a need to read them? There are people like Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury in this world, after all. There are people who are like Richard Posner but are not constrained by being judges. So it really should not be necessary for one to think that he needs to read The Times’ conservative columnists about as much as he needs to read the editorials and op ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

But now let me throw a bouquet to The Times. Its Bob Herbert is one of the best columnists in America today. He is right-on about so much. It’s not just that he is liberal (so that I am prejudicially prone to like him). There are lots of liberals who are not worth a damn as columnists, after all, who are not worth reading. It is, more importantly, that often he is poignant, he calls ’em as they are, and he is on the side of justice. One can see much or all this in his column of December 24th (which is set forth in its entirely as an attachment to this post). Let me quote here a few paragraphs.

This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago days [of Viet Nam]. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission.

It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
* * * * *
We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week.

The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.
These paragraphs are jam packed with savagely pertinent ideas. I wish to focus on two of them, although it almost feels as if isolating two of them inevitably will be an unhappy automatic down grading of the others, which certainly is not my intent.

One of the two ideas is that the political leaders of this country do not understand the human stakes sufficiently well, or else they would be "a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary, and ultimately unwinnable wars." In this view Herbert is coming fairly close to an idea that has been and will be continuously repeated here (since my own mind, unlike that of media people, tends to run to a continual focus on continuously relevant basic principles.) Our leaders don’t understand or care about the human cost because it is not they, their children, their friends and associates, or the children of their friends and associates who fight these wars on the ground and get killed. It is other people and other people’s children. So our leaders don’t give a damn about the deaths (except as the deaths affect them politically), and give a damn even less because they are not people of compassion or empathy. We would have fewer wars if the leaders had to reckon with the po! ssible deaths of their own kids in combat, if, that is, George the Second’s two playgirl daughters were at risk in Fallujah or Mosul, or Cheney’s daughter were, or members of Winnetka Don’s family were.

The other point is Herbert’s statement that our leaders are "astonishingly incompetent." That Herbert said this causes this blogger to raise yet again a question raised here before. Why is it that, apparently, only African American columnists in the major media will call it like it is, will say, that is, that these clowns in high office are clowns, are incompetent? The question has been asked here before, and there was no reply. I asked it in person of an African American gentleman who, after thinking about it, said he could imagine two possible reasons. One was that what the African American columnists were saying was in accord with what their (African American) constituents think. The other was that they knew that, if attacked for saying the truth, they could raise the defense of racism. Maybe one or both of these reasons are the cause of the willingness of African American columnists to point out that the emperor lacks clothes, that Bush and his colleague! s are incompetent. I don’t know. What I do know is that it is a moral disgrace that non-African American columnists in the major media refuse to say that Bush and company are incompetent. Yet, despite this moral disgrace, this moral delinquency, newspapers and columnists want us to believe they care about and print the truth? Gimme a break.
Part Two: Competence And Costs.

With regard to competence, let me raise again a point discussed in part here in the blog of December 23rd. Where will this Iraqi war end? How many American deaths will there be? To put it crudely and bitterly, how many American deaths will it take to dissuade Bush and his followers to forego this apparently doomed crusade that even supporters like Tom Friedman admit has been handled incompetently? As said on December 23rd, numbers like 10,000 American dead, or 20,000, or more once seemed as inconceivable in Nam as they do today in Iraq, but Johnson and McNamara and Bush and Nixon and Kissinger -- the Viet Nam criminals -- got sucked in and sucked in until the total was 59,000 American dead -- and three million Viet Namese. How many is it going to be in Iraq?

Government and peoples historically have a way of not understanding that war will and does do this to the contenders. Everyone on both sides thought the Civil war would be a short and glorious romp in some fields. None of the leaders or peoples of Europe foresaw ten million dead in World War I. The German leaders and people did not foresee what would happen to them in World War II. Nobody on our side foresaw 59,000 dead in Nam. George Bush the Second, whose only war service consists mainly of dodging combat and then not even going to meetings, has given no sign of understanding any of this. Neither have his friends, Dick Cheney (who says he had better things to do than fight in Nam), Winnetka Don Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom has ever heard a shot fired in anger but all of whom have -- or had -- grandiose ideas of world domination (like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and other ultimate losers). So as I have asked before, where will it end? How many American deaths will there have to be? How many Iraqi deaths?

You know, when corporations plan a major new project, they consider the expected costs as well as the expected benefits. Perhaps George the Second doesn’t know this, because his only experience in business was as a serial failure. But surely Dick and Don know it, since they led major corporations (albeit the only reasons they were picked for this was because they are politicians). Early on in this mess, Larry Lindsey and Eric Shensiki estimated that the costs of the Iraq adventure would be something like $200 billion in money and at least 200,000 men for pacification. For making these estimates, which now look quite low, they were fired. Our leaders did not want the public to consider that this might be the cost of this latest War of the Bushes, lest the public and Congress find these costs of adventure unacceptable and the adventure itself to therefore be undesirable. (Is it purely an accident, or mere bad luck, that our three major wars since Nam have all come under the! Bushes -- hence the "Wars of the Bushes" -- whereas people like Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton had the good sense not to get involved in major wars or to cut our losses and get out real quick before situations became major wars (e.g., in Beirut and Somalia)? Why do I not think that the Wars of the Bushes are mere bad luck or sheer accident?)

Even if the estimates of Lindsey and Shensiki were low, however, the question I have is how did they arrive at those estimates? One would assume that, especially in a culture as possessed by business methodologies as ours, there must be methods of estimating the costs of a war in money and lives under alternative scenarios of what could occur. One presumes that under one scenario, the cost in Americans dead might be 200. Under another it might be 2,000. Under a third, 20,000. If the Pentagon does not have such alternative scenarios of what could happen, and does not have them despite all of its powerful Cray-type computers and America’s worship of business methods, then something is really wrong, then incompetence is as rampant in our military leadership as in our political leadership.

So what are the alternative scenarios, and why isn’t anyone in the thoughtless traditional media asking this question? In forming their views of what course we should pursue, legislators and citizens need this kind of information as much as some business, even if run by incompetents like Dick and Don, needs information on the projected costs and expected benefits of a project. Can the traditional media not see this rather obvious point? Can the politicians in Congress not see it? One wonders, after all, what would be the reactions of people whom The Times’ slanted article of December 22nd quoted for the proposition that now that we are in Iraq we must carry on, if they were to learn that under one, perhaps likely, scenario the expected final total of American dead (which now stands at about 1,350 would be 10,000 if we continue to try to defeat an insurgency in Iraq. Would these people still say we have no option but to carry on? What! if the expected total under a plausible scenario were 15,000 American dead? As I’ve said before, and as bears continuous reiteration because it is so basic an idea, such numbers once seemed inconceivable in Nam, yet they were far surpassed there.

Of course, if alternative scenarios exist, George the Second, George the Ultra Secretive, no more wants them made public than Johnson wanted Congress and every day Americans to know the scope and costs of intended efforts in Nam. And for the same reason: knowing the truth, or at least what the possibilities were, legislators and citizens might recoil, might say forget it. They might say we want no part of this and, to boot, we don’t believe your bovine defecation about what and how much is at stake. But that George the Second is afraid of this is no reason -- is no reason -- why legislators, the press, and citizens should not be asking the question of what are the scenarios? What are the expected costs in deaths and serious wounds under alternative scenarios? What are the expected benefits? Why do you expect those benefits given reactions of other countries to date? These questions have not been asked to date. The traditional media, like so many others, has,! as always, been both dumb and asleep at the switch even though assessments of possible costs is, as they say, as American as apple pie.

You know, I have been in the academic world for 28 of the 38 years since 1966. For much of that period schools of journalism and schools of education, as a by and large proposition, as a generality, were regarded, and for all I know may still be regarded, as taking the weakest students, the students who could not have made it in economics, philosophy, science, English literature, history or, after undergraduate school, in law. One can’t help wondering whether we are paying the price for this in today’s media and in K-12 education. One also can’t help wondering whether the situation today isn’t even worse than it otherwise would be because the rise of television -- which almost all journalists seem to aspire to in one way or another -- has led to the rise of often brainless face men -- good looking men and women, without much gear upstairs, who can read fluently off a teleprompter.*


*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

December 24, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Families Pay the Price
By BOB HERBERT

It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.
Back in the 1960's, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the Army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.

Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister, Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan. I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might have had.
You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time. But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or a new friend I had met in the Army, had been killed in Vietnam. Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief, I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back to life.

This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission.

It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.

Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly 900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.
The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when he grew up. "I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."
Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children. This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the U.S.

We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week.
The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.
Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their families and loved ones.

One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.

Re: Fw: The Times and its Columnists

----- Original Message -----

From: IHBerk@aol.com
To: velvel@mslaw.edu
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 11:58 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: The Times and its Columnists

Larry:

I liked very much your piece on Times columnists, and forwarded it to Bob Herbert. As for your being, in Mr. Falk's phrase, in the "free-think tradition of New England," I take exception. Shouldn't it be in your case "the free-thinking tradition of the Midwest"?

All the best,

Ira

Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib

December 30, 2004
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

The enclosed article is extremely germane to points that have been made on this blog.


December 30, 2004

The New York Times
EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

The most obvious victims of the brutal treatment of prisoners at American military jails are the men, women and children who have been humiliated, sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and even killed. But, as in all wars, the Bush administration's assault on the Geneva Conventions has caused collateral damage - in this case, to the legal offices of the executive branch and the military.

To get around the inconvenience of the Geneva Conventions, the administration twisted the roles of the legal counsels of the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department beyond recognition. Once charged with giving unvarnished advice about whether political policies remained within the law, the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.

This upheaval has been particularly vivid at the Pentagon, where the usual balance between civilian and military authority has been stood on its head. The American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers' attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. The civilian bosses are supposed to provide coolheaded restraint.

Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out of control.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the initial list of interrogation methods for Guantánamo Bay in late 2002 - methods that clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture statutes - there were no protests from the legal counsels for the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the president, the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the civilian secretaries of the armed services. That's not surprising, because some of those very officials were instrumental in devising the Strangelovian logic that lay behind Mr. Rumsfeld's order. Their legal briefs dutifully argued that the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions when he chose, that he could even sanction torture and that torture could be redefined so narrowly that it could seem legal.

It took an internal protest by uniformed lawyers from the Navy to force the Pentagon to review the Guantánamo rules and restrict them a bit. But the military lawyers' concerns were largely shoved aside by a team of civilian lawyers, led by Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel. The group reaffirmed the notion that Mr. Bush could choose when to apply the Geneva Conventions.

That principle was originally aimed at the supposed members of Al Qaeda held at Guantánamo Bay, but it was quickly exported to Iraq and led, inexorably, to the horrors at Abu Ghraib and other recently disclosed crimes by American soldiers against Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.

If it had not been for a group of uniformed lawyers, the nation might never have learned of the torture and detention memos. In May 2003, soon after Ms. Walker's group produced its rationalization for prisoner abuse, a half-dozen military lawyers went to Scott Horton, who was chairman of the human rights committee of the City Bar Association in New York.

That led to a bar report on the administration's policies, a report that was published around the same time the Abu Ghraib atrocities came into public view. Those lawyers had to do their duty anonymously to avoid having their careers savaged. Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who signed the memo on torturing prisoners, Jay Bybee, was elevated by Mr. Bush to the federal bench.

This month, several former high-ranking military lawyers came out publicly against the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. They noted that it was Mr. Gonzales who had supervised the legal assault on the Geneva Conventions.

Jeh Johnson, a New York lawyer who was general counsel for the secretary of the Air Force under President Clinton, calls this shift "a revolution."

"One view of the law and government," Mr. Johnson said, "is that good things can actually come out of the legal system and that there is broad benefit in the rule of law. The other is a more cynical approach that says that lawyers are simply an instrument of policy - get me a legal opinion that permits me to do X. Sometimes a lawyer has to say, 'You just can't do this.'

"Normally, the civilian policy makers would have asked the military lawyers to draft the rules for a military prison in wartime. The lawyers for the service secretaries are supposed to focus on issues like contracts, environmental impact statements and base closings. They're not supposed to meddle in rules of engagement or military justice.

But the civilian policy makers knew that the military lawyers would never sanction tossing the Geneva Conventions aside in the war against terrorists. Military lawyers, Mr. Johnson said, "tend to see things through the prism of how it will affect their people if one gets captured or prosecuted."

Some Senate Democrats have said they plan to question Mr. Gonzales about this mess during his Senate confirmation hearings. But given the feckless state of Congressional oversight on this issue, there's not a lot of hope in that news.

Meanwhile, the relationship between the civilian and the military lawyers has gotten so bad that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, pushed through legislation that elevated the military services' top lawyers to a three-star general's rank. That at least put them on a more equal footing with the civilian lawyers.

Re: The Times and its Columnists

----- Original Message -----

From: "Richard Falk"
To: "Dean Lawrence R. Velvel"
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: The Times and its Columnists

Dear Larry:

I am responding to your blog if that is what it is posted as a blog on December 29. I have co-authored a book with Howard Friel, published a few weeks ago by Verson, with the title THE RECORD OF THE PAPER: HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES MISREPRESENTS U.S. FOREIGN POLICY. It covers some of the same ground as your message, but more comprehensively, and with a focus on the systematic exclusion of arguments relating to the international law aspects of foreign policy debates. It does not exclude international law, what it excludes is the critics, while featuring the legal apologists. I am quite sure you would find the book broadly congenial to what you are conveying. The coverage is historical, going back to Vietnam, and collateral, including Nicaragua.

Let me take the opportunity to praise you for this revival of the great free thinking tradition of New England, which is indispensable for sustaining the democratic spirit, especially in times of crisis. This revival is especially needed these days as the media combines with a passive citizenry to establish political setting of submission, which emboldens our reigning pre-fascist
elite. It is only Iraqi resistance that is creating an obstacle to this American slide toward global fascism. Let me also take the opportunity to wish you private joy and a lessening of public gloom in the year ahead.

All the best,

Richard Falk



Quoting "Dean Lawrence R. Velvel" :
> December 29, 2004
>
> Re: Part I: The Times And Its Columnists.
>
> Part II: Competence and Costs.
>
> From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
>
> VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com
>
> Dear Colleagues:
>
> Two days before Christmas this blog criticized a Times columnist,
> William Safire, and specifically criticized a column he wrote on
> December 22d. The December 23d blog also took to task a December 22d
> news story in the Times entitled Fighting Is The Only Option,
> Americans Say.
>
> On December 24th another Times columnist, the much ballyhooed Thomas
> Friedman, wrote a column saying that the Iraq insurgents are the face
> of pure evil, are murderers, are horrible fascists, and that we are
> fighting for freedom and democracy in Iraq. The much publicized
> Friedman then went on to say that we may lose in Iraq because of the
> "defiantly wrong way" that Rumsfeld has pursued the war, the
> tolerance for this of Bush, Cheney, right wing Republican and others,
> and other reasons too. Among the other reasons are that "most
> Europeans, having been made stupid by their own weakness, would
> rather see America fail in Iraq then [sic: than] lift a finger for
> free and fair elections there."
>
> Well, Friedman is right about Rumsfeld's incompetence, and the
> tolerance of this by (the equally or more inept) Bush, Cheney and
> company. And nobody in his right mind, however opposed he may be to
> the Bush family's latest dynastic war, is going to let Friedman or
> anyone else get him in the position of claiming that the Iraqi
> insurgents are nice guys or democrats: Nobody is going to chant the
> equivalent of Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. But to say that the Europeans have
> been made stupid by their own weakness is really a bit much, is just
> a bit arrogant, isn't it? Especially when it is the Europeans who
> seem to be gaining strength while America loses it (viz, in the
> financial realm, the dollar versus the Euro). The arrogant Friedman
> -- I have never heard anyone accuse him of not being arrogant --
> seems to know all about The Lexus And The Olive Tree, but to be
> oblivious to the saga of The Dollar and The Euro and the underlying
> reasons for it.
>
> Because of this writer's views about Safire, the Times December 22d
> news story slanted towards the necessity of fighting on and on in
> Iraq, Friedman, and Friedman's December 23rd crapola, this blogger
> was delighted to see that it took Times' readers no time at all to
> lambaste these clowns, their clownish positions, and the Times'
> clownish, slanted so-called "news story" of December 22d. By December
> 23d, several letters to the editor lambasting the news story and its
> ideas appeared in the Times. Since only a tiny percentage of letters
> are printed, who knows how many letters blasting the Times' story may
> have been sent to the paper. By December 24th, letters blasting
> Safire and Friedman appeared in the Times. Again, who knows how many
> letters may have been sent to it?
>
> So this writer is pleased that there are Times readers whose opinions
> of what these columnists write, and of some Times articles, is no
> higher than mine, at least in these instances. Of course, one might
> also say that the derelict recent columns are merely symptomatic of
> an underlying problem. Just as the Times once played down (and mainly
> ignored) what was happening to Jews in the Nazi death camps lest it
> be perceived as a "Jewish" newspaper, today the Times wants
> conservative representation on its op ed page in order to diminish
> criticism of it as supposedly being a liberal newspaper. Seeking this
> cover, the in-reality-not-very-liberal Times has employed columnists
> of dubious thought and judgment. Two of them, Friedman and Nicholas
> Kristof, appear to be guys who are always in motion traveling around
> the globe, which apparently enables them to pretend to know
> everything about everything. Not since the liberal Ralph Nader had
> hoards of people writing books for him on every imaginable subject
> has one person claimed to know so much about so much as Friedman and
> Kristof each claim to know. Yet the views they express are often
> laughable or simply outrageous.
>
> Of course, I suppose some people would claim that they are not
> conservatives. Well, if they truly are not conservatives, but rather
> are middle of the roaders or something, you could have fooled me, and
> Friedman's December 23rd column did.
>
> Wordsmith Safire has previously been commented on here. Then there is
> David Brooks. In one person's judgment, about one column in five
> written by Brooks is brilliant. The rest are largely rubbish.
>
> All of which raises the question of why can't the august Times find
> conservative writers whose quality is such that even liberals like me
> feel a need to read them? There are people like Thomas Sowell and
> Glenn Loury in this world, after all. There are people who are like
> Richard Posner but are not constrained by being judges. So it really
> should not be necessary for one to think that he needs to read The
> Times' conservative columnists about as much as he needs to read the
> editorials and op ed page of The Wall Street Journal.
>
> But now let me throw a bouquet to The Times. Its Bob Herbert is one
> of the best columnists in America today. He is right-on about so
> much. It's not just that he is liberal (so that I am prejudicially
> prone to like him). There are lots of liberals who are not worth a
> damn as columnists, after all, who are not worth reading. It is, more
> importantly, that often he is poignant, he calls 'em as they are, and
> he is on the side of justice. One can see much or all this in his
> column of December 24th (which is set forth in its entirely as an
> attachment to this post). Let me quote here a few paragraphs.
>
>
>
> This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago
> days [of Viet Nam]. Once again American troops sent on a fool's
> errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or
> left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be
> the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace
> of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or
> unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate
> equipment or even a clearly defined mission.
>
>
> It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the
> men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a
> hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch
> everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human
> stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this
> country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch
> foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
>
> * * * * *
>
> We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The
> president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of
> democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and
> destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he
> said this week.
>
>
>
> The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the
> Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside
> a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of
> democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor
> the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if
> through binoculars, from Jordan.
>
> These paragraphs are jam packed with savagely pertinent ideas. I wish
> to focus on two of them, although it almost feels as if isolating two
> of them inevitably will be an unhappy automatic down grading of the
> others, which certainly is not my intent.
>
> One of the two ideas is that the political leaders of this country do
> not understand the human stakes sufficiently well, or else they would
> be "a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary, and
> ultimately unwinnable wars." In this view Herbert is coming fairly
> close to an idea that has been and will be continuously repeated here
> (since my own mind, unlike that of media people, tends to run to a
> continual focus on continuously relevant basic principles.) Our
> leaders don't understand or care about the human cost because it is
> not they, their children, their friends and associates, or the
> children of their friends and associates who fight these wars on the
> ground and get killed. It is other people and other people's
> children. So our leaders don't give a damn about the deaths (except
> as the deaths affect them politically), and give a damn even less
> because they are not people of compassion or empathy. We would have
> fewer wars if the leaders had to reckon with the possible deaths of
> their own kids in combat, if, that is, George the Second's two
> playgirl daughters were at risk in Fallujah or Mosul, or Cheney's
> daughter were, or members of Winnetka Don's family were.
>
> The other point is Herbert's statement that our leaders are
> "astonishingly incompetent." That Herbert said this causes this
> blogger to raise yet again a question raised here before. Why is it
> that, apparently, only African American columnists in the major media
> will call it like it is, will say, that is, that these clowns in high
> office are clowns, are incompetent? The question has been asked here
> before, and there was no reply. I asked it in person of an African
> American gentleman who, after thinking about it, said he could
> imagine two possible reasons. One was that what the African American
> columnists were saying was in accord with what their (African
> American) constituents think. The other was that they knew that, if
> attacked for saying the truth, they could raise the defense of
> racism. Maybe one or both of these reasons are the cause of the
> willingness of African American columnists to point out that the
> emperor lacks clothes, that Bush and his colleagues are incompetent.
> I don't know. What I do know is that it is a moral disgrace that
> non-African American columnists in the major media refuse to say that
> Bush and company are incompetent. Yet, despite this moral disgrace,
> this moral delinquency, newspapers and columnists want us to believe
> they care about and print the truth? Gimme a break.
>
> Part Two: Competence And Costs.
>
> With regard to competence, let me raise again a point discussed in
> part here in the blog of December 23rd. Where will this Iraqi war
> end? How many American deaths will there be? To put it crudely and
> bitterly, how many American deaths will it take to dissuade Bush and
> his followers to forego this apparently doomed crusade that even
> supporters like Tom Friedman admit has been handled incompetently? As
> said on December 23rd, numbers like 10,000 American dead, or 20,000,
> or more once seemed as inconceivable in Nam as they do today in Iraq,
> but Johnson and McNamara and Bush and Nixon and Kissinger -- the Viet
> Nam criminals -- got sucked in and sucked in until the total was
> 59,000 American dead -- and three million Viet Namese. How many is it
> going to be in Iraq?
>
> Government and peoples historically have a way of not understanding
> that war will and does do this to the contenders. Everyone on both
> sides thought the Civil war would be a short and glorious romp in
> some fields. None of the leaders or peoples of Europe foresaw ten
> million dead in World War I. The German leaders and people did not
> foresee what would happen to them in World War II. Nobody on our side
> foresaw 59,000 dead in Nam. George Bush the Second, whose only war
> service consists mainly of dodging combat and then not even going to
> meetings, has given no sign of understanding any of this. Neither
> have his friends, Dick Cheney (who says he had better things to do
> than fight in Nam), Winnetka Don Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, none of
> whom has ever heard a shot fired in anger but all of whom have -- or
> had -- grandiose ideas of world domination (like Napoleon, Hitler,
> Stalin and other ultimate losers). So as I have asked before, where
> will it end. How many American deaths will there have to be. How many
> Iraqi deaths?
>
> You know, when corporations plan a major new project, they consider
> the expected costs as well as the expected benefits. Perhaps George
> the Second doesn't know this, because his only experience in business
> was as a serial failure. But surely Dick and Don know it, since they
> led major corporations (albeit the only reasons they were picked for
> this was because they are politicians). Early on in this mess, Larry
> Lindsey and Eric Shensiki estimated that the costs of the Iraq
> adventure would be something like $200 billion in money and at least
> 200,000 men for pacification. For making these estimates, which now
> look quite low, they were fired. Our leaders did not want the public
> to consider that this might be the cost of this latest War of the
> Bushes, lest the public and Congress find these costs of adventure
> unacceptable and the adventure itself to therefore be undesirable.
> (Is it purely an accident, or mere bad luck, that our three major
> wars since Nam have all come under the Bushes -- hence the "Wars of
> the Bushes" -- whereas people like Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton
> had the good sense not to get involved in major wars or to cut our
> losses and get out real quick before situations became major wars
> (e.g., in Beirut and Somalia)? Why do I not think that the Wars of
> the Bushes are mere bad luck or sheer accident?)
>
> Even if the estimates of Lindsey and Shensiki were low, however, the
> question I have is how did they arrive at those estimates? One would
> assume that, especially in a culture as possessed by business
> methodologies as ours, there must be methods of estimating the costs
> of a war in money and lives under alternative scenarios of what could
> occur. One presumes that under one scenario, the cost in Americans
> dead might be 200. Under another it might be 2,000. Under a third,
> 20,000. If the Pentagon does not have such alternative scenarios of
> what could happen, and does not have them despite all of its powerful
> Cray-type computers and America's worship of business methods, then
> something is really wrong, then incompetence is as rampant in our
> military leadership as in our political leadership.
>
> So what are the alternative scenarios, and why isn't anyone in the
> thoughtless traditional media asking this question? In forming their
> views of what course we should pursue, legislators and citizens need
> this kind of information as much as some business, even if run by
> incompetents like Dick and Don, needs information on the projected
> costs and expected benefits of a project. Can the traditional media
> not see this rather obvious point? Can the politicians in Congress
> not see it? One wonders, after all, what would be the reactions of
> people whom The Times' slanted article of December 22nd quoted for
> the proposition that now that we are in Iraq we must carry on, if
> they were to learn that under one, perhaps likely, scenario the
> expected final total of American dead (which now stands at about
> 1,350 would be 10,000 if we continue to try to defeat an insurgency
> in Iraq. Would these people still say we have no option but to carry
> on? What if the expected total under a plausible scenario were 15,000
> American dead? As I've said before, and as bears continuous
> reiteration because it is so basic an idea, such numbers once seemed
> inconceivable in Nam, yet they were far surpassed there.
>
> Of course, if alternative scenarios exist, George the Second, George
> the Ultra Secretive, no more wants them made public than Johnson
> wanted Congress and every day Americans to know the scope and costs
> of intended efforts in Nam. And for the same reason: knowing the
> truth, or at least what the possibilities were, legislators and
> citizens might recoil, might say forget it. They might say we want no
> part of this and, to boot, we don't believe your bovine defecation
> about what and how much is at stake. But that George the Second is
> afraid of this is no reason -- is no reason -- why legislators, the
> press, and citizens should not be asking the question of what are the
> scenarios? What are the expected costs in deaths and serious wounds
> under alternative scenarios? What are the expected benefits? Why do
> you expect those benefits given reactions of other countries to date?
> These questions have not been asked to date. The traditional media,
> like so many others, has, as always, been both dumb and asleep at the
> switch even though assessments of possible costs is, as they say, as
> American as apple pie.
>
> You know, I have been in the academic world for 28 of the 38 years
> since 1966. For much of that period schools of journalism and schools
> of education, as a by and large proposition, as a generality, were
> regarded, and for all I know may still be regarded, as taking the
> weakest students, the students who could not have made it in
> economics, philosophy, science, English literature, history or, after
> undergraduate school, in law. One can't help wondering whether we are
> paying the price for this in today's media and in K-12 education. One
> also can't help wondering whether the situation today isn't even
> worse than it otherwise would be because the rise of television --
> which almost all journalists seem to aspire to in one way or another
> -- has led to the rise of often brainless face men -- good looking
> men and women, without much gear upstairs, who can read fluently off
> a teleprompter.*
>
> *This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R.
> Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your
> response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on
> the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.
>
>
>
> December 24, 2004
>
> OP-ED COLUMNIST
>
> Families Pay the Price
>
> By BOB HERBERT
>
>
>
> It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's nothing
> you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has been
> assigned to a second tour in Iraq.
>
> Back in the 1960's, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the
> Army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was
> assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.
>
> Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward to
> mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister,
> Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which
> led some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan.
> I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might
> have had.
>
> You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the
> time. But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in
> the inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend
> of mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or a new
> friend I had met in the Army, had been killed in Vietnam. Just like
> that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
>
> I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me in
> those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was
> somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief, I
> would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person would
> still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire to
> reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back to
> life.
>
> This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago
> days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming
> home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or
> paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops
> are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by
> astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling
> to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even
> a clearly defined mission.
>
> It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the
> men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a
> hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch
> everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human
> stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this
> country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch
> foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
>
> Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News Service
> have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly 900
> American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More than 40
> fathers died without seeing their babies.
>
> The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old
> named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush in
> March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when he
> grew up. "I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."
>
> Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children.
> This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the U.S.
>
> We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The
> president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of
> democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and
> destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he
> said this week.
>
> The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the
> Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside
> a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of
> democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor
> the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if
> through binoculars, from Jordan.
>
> Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country,
> and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to
> do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the
> streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and
> sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were
> killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their
> families and loved ones.
>
> One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his
> current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our
> troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or
> whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Part I: The Times And Its Columnists. Part II: Competence and Costs

December 29, 2004

Re: Part I: The Times And Its Columnists.
Part II: Competence and Costs.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Two days before Christmas this blog criticized a Times columnist, William Safire, and specifically criticized a column he wrote on December 22d. The December 23d blog also took to task a December 22d news story in the Times entitled Fighting Is The Only Option, Americans Say.
On December 24th another Times columnist, the much ballyhooed Thomas Friedman, wrote a column saying that the Iraq insurgents are the face of pure evil, are murderers, are horrible fascists, and that we are fighting for freedom and democracy in Iraq. The much publicized Friedman then went on to say that we may lose in Iraq because of the "defiantly wrong way" that Rumsfeld has pursued the war, the tolerance for this of Bush, Cheney, right wing Republican and others, and other reasons too. Among the other reasons are that "most Europeans, having been made stupid by their own weakness, would rather see America fail in Iraq then [sic: than] lift a finger for free and fair elections there."

Well, Friedman is right about Rumsfeld’s incompetence, and the tolerance of this by (the equally or more inept) Bush, Cheney and company. And nobody in his right mind, however opposed he may be to the Bush family’s latest dynastic war, is going to let Friedman or anyone else get him in the position of claiming that the Iraqi insurgents are nice guys or democrats: Nobody is going to chant the equivalent of Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. But to say that the Europeans have been made stupid by their own weakness is really a bit much, is just a bit arrogant, isn’t it? Especially when it is the Europeans who seem to be gaining strength while America loses it (viz, in the financial realm, the dollar versus the Euro). The arrogant Friedman -- I have never heard anyone accuse him of not being arrogant -- seems to know all about The Lexus And The Olive Tree, but to be oblivious to the saga of The Dollar and The Euro and the underlying reasons for it.

Because of this writer’s views about Safire, the Times December 22d news story slanted towards the necessity of fighting on and on in Iraq, Friedman, and Friedman’s December 23rd crapola, this blogger was delighted to see that it took Times’ readers no time at all to lambaste these clowns, their clownish positions, and the Times’ clownish, slanted so-called "news story" of December 22d. By December 23d, several letters to the editor lambasting the news story and its ideas appeared in the Times. Since only a tiny percentage of letters are printed, who knows how many letters blasting the Times’ story may have been sent to the paper. By December 24th, letters blasting Safire and Friedman appeared in the Times. Again, who knows how many letters may have been sent to it?

So this writer is pleased that there are Times readers whose opinions of what these columnists write, and of some Times articles, is no higher than mine, at least in these instances. Of course, one might also say that the derelict recent columns are merely symptomatic of an underlying problem. Just as the Times once played down (and mainly ignored) what was happening to Jews in the Nazi death camps lest it be perceived as a "Jewish" newspaper, today the Times wants conservative representation on its op ed page in order to diminish criticism of it as supposedly being a liberal newspaper. Seeking this cover, the in-reality-not-very-liberal Times has employed columnists of dubious thought and judgment. Two of them, Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, appear to be guys who are always in motion traveling around the globe, which apparently enables them to pretend to know everything about everything. Not since the liberal Ralph Nader had hoards of people writing books for him on every imaginable subject has one person claimed to know so much about so much as Friedman and Kristof each claim to know. Yet the views they express are often laughable or simply outrageous. Of course, I suppose some people would claim that they are not conservatives. Well, if they truly are not conservatives, but rather are middle of the roaders or something, you could have fooled me, and Friedman’s December 23rd column did.

Wordsmith Safire has previously been commented on here. Then there is David Brooks. In one person’s judgment, about one column in five written by Brooks is brilliant. The rest are largely rubbish. All of which raises the question of why can’t the august Times find conservative writers whose quality is such that even liberals like me feel a need to read them? There are people like Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury in this world, after all. There are people who are like Richard Posner but are not constrained by being judges. So it really should not be necessary for one to think that he needs to read The Times’ conservative columnists about as much as he needs to read the editorials and op ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

But now let me throw a bouquet to The Times. Its Bob Herbert is one of the best columnists in America today. He is right-on about so much. It’s not just that he is liberal (so that I am prejudicially prone to like him). There are lots of liberals who are not worth a damn as columnists, after all, who are not worth reading. It is, more importantly, that often he is poignant, he calls ’em as they are, and he is on the side of justice. One can see much or all this in his column of December 24th (which is set forth in its entirely as an attachment to this post). Let me quote here a few paragraphs.

This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago days [of Viet Nam]. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission. It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.
* * * * *
We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week. The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.

These paragraphs are jam packed with savagely pertinent ideas. I wish to focus on two of them, although it almost feels as if isolating two of them inevitably will be an unhappy automatic down grading of the others, which certainly is not my intent. One of the two ideas is that the political leaders of this country do not understand the human stakes sufficiently well, or else they would be "a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary, and ultimately unwinnable wars." In this view Herbert is coming fairly close to an idea that has been and will be continuously repeated here (since my own mind, unlike that of media people, tends to run to a continual focus on continuously relevant basic principles.) Our leaders don’t understand or care about the human cost because it is not they, their children, their friends and associates, or the children of their friends and associates who fight these wars on the ground and get killed. It is other people and other people’s children. So our leaders don’t give a damn about the deaths (except as the deaths affect them politically), and give a damn even less because they are not people of compassion or empathy. We would have fewer wars if the leaders had to reckon with the possible deaths of their own kids in combat, if, that is, George the Second’s two playgirl daughters were at risk in Fallujah or Mosul, or Cheney’s daughters were, or members of Winnetka Don’s family were.

The other point is Herbert’s statement that our leaders are "astonishingly incompetent." That Herbert said this causes this blogger to raise yet again a question raised here before. Why is it that, apparently, only African American columnists in the major media will call it like it is, will say, that is, that these clowns in high office are clowns, are incompetent? The question has been asked here before, and there was no reply. I asked it in person of an African American gentleman who, after thinking about it, said he could imagine two possible reasons. One was that what the African American columnists were saying was in accord with what their (African American) constituents think. The other was that they knew that, if attacked for saying the truth, they could raise the defense of racism. Maybe one or both of these reasons are the cause of the willingness of African American columnists to point out that the emperor lacks clothes, that Bush and his colleagues are incompetent. I don’t know. What I do know is that it is a moral disgrace that non-African American columnists in the major media refuse to say that Bush and company are incompetent. Yet, despite this moral disgrace, this moral delinquency, newspapers and columnists want us to believe they care about and print the truth? Gimme a break.

Part Two: Competence And Costs.

With regard to competence, let me raise again a point discussed in part here in the blog of December 23rd. Where will this Iraqi war end? How many American deaths will there be? To put it crudely and bitterly, how many American deaths will it take to dissuade Bush and his followers to forego this apparently doomed crusade that even supporters like Tom Friedman admit has been handled incompetently? As said on December 23rd, numbers like 10,000 American dead, or 20,000, or more once seemed as inconceivable in Nam as they do today in Iraq, but Johnson and McNamara and Bush and Nixon and Kissinger -- the Viet Nam criminals -- got sucked in and sucked in until the total was 59,000 American dead -- and three million Viet Namese. How many is it going to be in Iraq?

Government and peoples historically have a way of not understanding that war will and does do this to the contenders. Everyone on both sides thought the Civil War would be a short and glorious romp in some fields. None of the leaders or peoples of Europe foresaw ten million dead in World War I. The German leaders and people did not foresee what would happen to them in World War II. Nobody on our side foresaw 59,000 dead in Nam. George Bush the Second, whose only war service consists mainly of dodging combat and then not even going to meetings, has given no sign of understanding any of this. Neither have his friends, Dick Cheney (who says he had better things to do than fight in Nam), Winnetka Don Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom has ever heard a shot fired in anger but all of whom have -- or had -- grandiose ideas of world domination (like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and other ultimate losers). So as I have asked before, where will it end? How many American deaths will there have to be? How many Iraqi deaths?

You know, when corporations plan a major new project, they consider the expected costs as well as the expected benefits. Perhaps George the Second doesn’t know this, because his only experience in business was as a serial failure. But surely Dick and Don know it, since they led major corporations (albeit the only reasons they were picked for this was because they are politicians). Early on in this mess, Larry Lindsey and Eric Shensiki estimated that the costs of the Iraq adventure would be something like $200 billion in money and at least 200,000 men for pacification. For making these estimates, which now look quite low, they were fired. Our leaders did not want the public to consider that this might be the cost of this latest War of the Bushes, lest the public and Congress find these costs of adventure unacceptable and the adventure itself to therefore be undesirable. (Is it purely an accident, or mere bad luck, that our three major wars since Nam have all come under the Bushes -- hence the "Wars of the Bushes" -- whereas people like Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton had the good sense not to get involved in major wars or to cut our losses and get out real quick before situations became major wars (e.g., in Beirut and Somalia)? Why do I not think that the Wars of the Bushes are mere bad luck or sheer accident?)

Even if the estimates of Lindsey and Shensiki were low, however, the question I have is how did they arrive at those estimates? One would assume that, especially in a culture as possessed by business methodologies as ours, there must be methods of estimating the costs of a war in money and lives under alternative scenarios of what could occur. One presumes that under one scenario, the cost in Americans dead might be 200. Under another it might be 2,000. Under a third, 20,000. If the Pentagon does not have such alternative scenarios of what could happen, and does not have them despite all of its powerful Cray-type computers and America’s worship of business methods, then something is really wrong, then incompetence is as rampant in our military leadership as in our political leadership.

So what are the alternative scenarios, and why isn’t anyone in the thoughtless traditional media asking this question? In forming their views of what course we should pursue, legislators and citizens need this kind of information as much as some business, even if run by incompetents like Dick and Don, needs information on the projected costs and expected benefits of a project. Can the traditional media not see this rather obvious point? Can the politicians in Congress not see it? One wonders, after all, what would be the reactions of people whom The Times’ slanted article of December 22nd quoted for the proposition that now that we are in Iraq we must carry on, if they were to learn that under one, perhaps likely, scenario the expected final total of American dead (which now stands at about 1,350) would be 10,000 if we continue to try to defeat an insurgency in Iraq. Would these people still say we have no option but to carry on? What if the expected total under a plausible scenario were 15,000 American dead? As I’ve said before, and as bears continuous reiteration because it is so basic an idea, such numbers once seemed inconceivable in Nam, yet they were far surpassed there.

Of course, if alternative scenarios exist, George the Second, George the Ultra Secretive, no more wants them made public than Johnson wanted Congress and every day Americans to know the scope and costs of intended efforts in Nam. And for the same reason: knowing the truth, or at least what the possibilities were, legislators and citizens might recoil, might say forget it. They might say we want no part of this and, to boot, we don’t believe your bovine defecation about what and how much is at stake. But that George the Second is afraid of this is no reason -- is no reason -- why legislators, the press, and citizens should not be asking the question of what are the scenarios? What are the expected costs in deaths and serious wounds under alternative scenarios? What are the expected benefits? Why do you expect those benefits given reactions of other countries to date? These questions have not been asked to date. The traditional media, like so many others, has, as always, been both dumb and asleep at the switch even though assessments of possible costs is, as they say, as American as apple pie.

You know, I have been in the academic world for 28 of the 38 years since 1966. For much of that period schools of journalism and schools of education, as a by and large proposition, as a generality, were regarded, and for all I know may still be regarded, as taking the weakest students, the students who could not have made it in economics, philosophy, science, English literature, history or, after undergraduate school, in law. One can’t help wondering whether we are paying the price for this in today’s media and in K-12 education. One also can’t help wondering whether the situation today isn’t even worse than it otherwise would be because the rise of television -- which almost all journalists seem to aspire to in one way or another -- has led to the rise of often brainless face men -- good looking men and women, without much gear upstairs, who can read fluently off a teleprompter.*


*This posting represents the personal views of Lawrence R. Velvel. If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.


December 24, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Families Pay the Price
By BOB HERBERT

It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.

Back in the 1960's, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the Army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion. Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister, Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan. I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might have had.

You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time. But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or a new friend I had met in the Army, had been killed in Vietnam. Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.
I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief, I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back to life.

This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission.

It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.

Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly 900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies. The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when he grew up. "I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die." Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children. This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the U.S.

We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week.
The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.
Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their families and loved ones.

One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.







Thursday, December 23, 2004

Re: The Three Horsemen and The Three Stooges

----- Original Message -----

From: hoybean@comcast.net
To: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: The Three Horsemen and The Three Stooges

Hi Larry:

There is so much to write about on this subject. However, I'll just make a single point. I have noticed that since the election, the language in regard to the Iraq fiasco is changing. Both some Bush supporters, and even the Bush administration, is lowering the bar -- the objective has now become an election, no matter how legitimate and incomplete, and the recognition of problems, is now due to the lack of will of certain factions of the Iraq culture. I've even heard some senators and congressmen refer to the situation as the president's war (sounds like Nam, eh?). Mark my words, in another year, everything will be the fault of the Iraq people, we will have declared a victory based on some progress, and the criminals who got rich from this effort will still bath in their self-rightous indignation over supporting our troops. On this wonderful note, have a great 2005. Harvey&nbs! p;


-------------- Original message --------------

December 22, 2004
Re: The Three Horsemen And The Three Stooges.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

A major goal of this blog, as readers know, is to discuss three prevalent phenomena which, individually and collectively, are playing hob with America. The three phenomena are lack of concern for truth (including the widespread secrecy and nondisclosure which deliberately hide truth from us), incompetence, and failure to have any concern for others. Change these all-encompassing three horsemen, and the improvement in the country would be dramatic. At least that’s one person’s idea.

Holding this view, this author thought to write a post detailing examples of these phenomena from the news and opinion columns of a single day’s newspapers, in this case the papers of Tuesday, December 21st. In a way, of course, noting some of the dishonesty, incompetence and secrecy contained in the news and opinion columns in one day’s newspaper is cheap and easy pickings, since so much in every day’s newspapers is comprised of these things. Yet, it also seems true, at least to one person, that it is not often recognized that the same three phenomena are the common root of so much that otherwise seems disparate. Perhaps if one were to constantly show the common root, people would begin to wise up as to what is fundamentally wrong in this country. So let’s cursorily list just some of the examples of the three horsemen in Tuesday’s papers.

1. There was discussion in a column of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s previously disclosed purchase of precious stringed instruments for $18 million. The essence of the discussion is that, although the orchestra apparently lucked out and got a good deal anyway (although this is not yet absolutely certain, I gather), its Board of Trustees failed to get pertinent crucial information from management, which gave it "scant details." Such Board and management failures were said to be symptomatic of non profits, as shown by prior scandals at the United Way and the Red Cross. The bottom line? Two horsemen: incompetence and, on the part of management, dishonesty through nondisclosure.

2. There was disclosure of memos detailing more torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo. The torture included putting lighted cigarettes in prisoners’ ears, beating and choking them, and leaving them chained in fetal (and I guess other) positions for 18 to 24 hours (or more) while they urinated and defecated on themselves. The memos disclosing this further showed that torture was known to many high Washington officials, and were further refutation of prior government bovine defecation saying torture was the rogue misconduct of a few low level types.
The bottom line in terms of the three horsemen: once again secrecy had been used to hide horrible misconduct.

3. During a security drill at the Oak Ridge facility that stores our highly enriched uranium -- the kind, one gathers, that we don’t want Iran to have lest it make atomic bombs -- a team of guards went looking for another group of guards in order to shoot them. This occurred because of a massive screw up in a security drill, a screw up which caused the "killer guards" to think the others were actual invaders, not a mock invasion group. It was further revealed that there have been other major security screw ups at the Oak Ridge plant. And this at a plant where, it was written, "A suicidal terrorist who gained access to the uranium here might be able to assemble it in a few minutes into a nuclear explosive, and detonate it on the spot, experts say." (Emphases added.) Bottom line? Gross incompetence.

4. There was discussion of the fact that a major immigrant-registration program created by the Department of Justice after 9/11, a program which apparently registered scores of thousands of people, resulted in catching exactly no terrorists. (Some officials claim it resulted in the arrest of six people linked to terrorism, but this is challenged by such as the September 11th Commission, and it seems to be admitted that no registrants were charged with crimes relating to terrorism.) But while catching no terrorists, the registration program alienated immigrants who otherwise might have been helpful to us in catching terrorists, alienated other countries, and now has to be defended, in regard to terrorists, by various 2004 equivalents of the bootless 1960s "battle cry" of McNamara and his ilk during Viet Nam: "We’re making it harder for them." Bottom line: Incompetence.

5. Apparently because of "territorial" claims, i.e., claims to power and fiefdoms, Congress refuses to restructure itself in a manner that would enable it to effectively oversee the intelligence community. Instead it wishes to continue the long existing structure of fiefdoms which is described as "dysfunctional." This is thought to threaten our security. Bottom line? Incompetence and a form of not caring about others, in this case not caring about the security of our citizens.

6. There was discussion, sparked by the Vioxx and Celebrex fiascos, of how it is that dangerous drugs have gotten onto the market. This comes down to such things as the weakness of the FDA, panels of the FDA being "larded with scientists tied to private companies," FDA reliance on pharmaceutical companies to finance FDA activities, company financing of continuing medical education courses, and companies themselves, not the FDA, are the primary monitor of the post-approval safety of their own drugs. Bottom line: Incompetence, lack of truth, and not caring about others.

7. George Bush announced that Winnetka Don Rumsfeld (alias The Humvee Kid), who had letters of condolences to the families of his slain troops signed with a mechanical device instead of signing them himself, has done a fine job and is filled with anguish over the casualties and grief caused by the war. Need more be said before one gets the point here? Bottom line? Lying, incompetence, and no concern for others.

That is just some of one day’s news, just some of the stories that have as a common root our daily American fare of lack of truth, lack of competence, and lack of concern for others. But I cannot resist mentioning one more "story" so to speak. This week’s Time has a spread that it calls The Best Pictures Of The Year. One two page picture is of Bush at his ranch in Texas with Cheney on his right (the viewer’s left) and Rumsfeld on his left (the viewer’s right). The picture is called Three Amigos. One wonders: why isn’t it given its more appropriate name, The Three Stooges? Or maybe Curly, Moe and Larry. Or, to indicate their deeply perceptive natures, maybe even "Curly, Moe and Larry, At Texas Ranch, Claim That They Are In Middle Of Rocky Mountains." Or maybe Curly, Moe and Larry Puzzled By Disappearance Of Shemp.*

*If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

Reminiscent of Nam. And By The Way, How Many American Dead Will There Finally Be?

December 23, 2004

Re: Reminiscent of Nam. And By The Way, How Many American Dead Will There Finally Be?
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

Two days ago about 20 Americans were killed and another 70 or so wounded in a single episode in Mosul, Iraq. To those of us old enough to remember, these American casualty figures from a single event sound more like Viet Nam than like the Bush family’s dynastic wars against the Husseins. They also serve to illustrate why anyone who would stand on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declare major combat operations over is a fool-in-chief.

They also illustrate another point which, as far as I know, has been completely ignored by opinion columnists (with one exception, discussed later), and has been ignored in the news columns too except for those news columns in which newspapers felt obliged to report new disclosures about the war. That is to say, the disaster in Mosul brings to mind that Saddam Hussein completely outsmarted George Bush the Second by laying plans for a guerrilla war, not a "regular" war, and taking steps to implement the plans for a guerrilla war, before the conventional American ground invasion ever started. The media doesn’t like to mention this fact -- just as it doesn’t like to mention the planning that apparently is going on for a draft (about which I’ll say more in a later blog) -- because it makes Bush and his fellow incompetent stooges look as foolish as they are.

As said, I know of one exception to the mainstream media columnists’ refusal to discuss that Saddam outsmarted George II in this dynastic war by having his conventional army melt away, rather than be killed, so that its members could then fight a guerrilla war with weapons placed in advance in caches all over the country. Yesterday, Wednesday, December 22nd, William Safire, one of The Times heavy complement of conservative columnists, said it in his opening paragraph. He wrote: "I now admit to having expected the war in Iraq to be won in a matter of months, not years. Saddam’s plan to disperse his forces and conduct a murderous insurgency, abetted by his terrorist allies, was a surprise." Of course, Safire’s opening paragraph was preparation for a column strongly supporting the war, a column that was in part prediction likely to fail, in part hope likely to be forlorn, and, withal, largely crapola. As a practitioner of the art, maybe Safire, who likes to write about words in The Sunday Times, can one day give us the etymology of crapola.

Additionally, in one of its purported news columns yesterday, The Times itself slanted its reporting in a way as reminiscent of Viet Nam as the casualty figures in Mosul reported in another news column. I speak of its reporting in the story entitled Fighting On Is The Only Option, Americans Say. Persons "on the street" were quoted for the proposition that regardless of whether it was a mistake to get into the Iraqi war in the first place, now that we are there we have to proceed. Those who disagree were in effect accused of being traitors. Some other views that were slightly "more nuanced" in the current jargon were also reported, but The Times, with all its self vaunted reportorial resources, seemed unable to find anyone who said "We should get the hell out of there." The closest it came was one woman who, in a fit of paradox, firmly believes we should have fought in Iraq, but thinks we should get out after the election in January.

The Times’ shabby performance reminded me of Nam, when people used to say, "Well, maybe we shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place, but now that we’re there we have to stick it out." So saying, the American dead rose from 5,000 to 10,000, to 30,000, to 40,000, to 50,000 to 59,000 before we finally got the hell out, as we should have no later than 1965 or 1966. One wonders what final totals of dead the same kind of thinking will lead to in Iraq. Will there be 2,000 Americans dead? 5,000? 10,000? 30,000? 40,000? More? These kinds of totals seem inconceivable. But once they were inconceivable in regard to Viet Nam.

The Times’ shabby performance in its slanted article on sticking it out also reminded me of an episode which, I seem to remember, involved a Marine Corps hero, General David Shoup, a former Marine Corps Commandant who was against or turned against the war in Nam. If memory serves, Shoup was being questioned in Congress about his views on the Viet Nam War. One legislator who was questioning him either held, or for purpose of argument deliberately reflected, the view that, now that we were in Nam, it was impossible to withdraw. That legislator asked the General something like, "But General Shoup, how would you withdraw our men?" The question was intended to show that no withdrawal was possible without creating chaos in-country. Not playing this conservative, right wing game, General Shoup’s unexpected answer to the question of "How would you withdraw our men?" was, "By ship and by plane." All this, as I say, is if memory serves correctly, but I think it does.

Well, General Shoup put his finger on exactly how our troops are one day going to be withdrawn from Iraq too. The only question, of course, is when the fool-in-chief is going to order this to occur. Will we have it be when we have 1,500 dead? 2,000? 5,000? 10,000? 20,000? Remember, some of these numbers were once inconceivable in Nam. Bush himself, of course, has possibly created an anti-withdrawal, the-killing-must-go-on monster in public opinion, as The Times’ shoddy article illustrates, although withdrawal will occur someday nonetheless.
There is another relevant point here: If George Bush and his lesser fools had sense (which by definition fools don’t), they would recognize that what you have in Iraq are three separate groups who each want to rule themselves and not be ruled by one of the other two groups. Recognizing this, a sensible American Executive would announce that Iraq will henceforth be three countries, not one, and would turn over the basically Kurd-occupied part of Iraq to the Kurds, the Sunni-occupied part to the Sunnis, and the Shiite-occupied part to the Shiites. Then the Executive would bring our troops home. Dividing Iraq into its three national components has occasionally been discussed in the media. But the people in the Executive seem never to have considered this sensible idea, although the truth is that events on the ground begin to look as if they may force this rather obvious idea on people. There will be a certain irony in it if it occurs, will there not? For in Nam, where the war began with two countries (at least in our eyes), the obvious solution -- the millennia true one for which our enemies were fighting -- was one country. While in Iraq, where the war began with one (relatively recently created) country, the obvious solution is three countries.*

*If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The Three Horsemen And The Three Stooges

December 22, 2004

Re: The Three Horsemen And The Three Stooges.
From: Dean Lawrence R. Velvel
VelvelOnNationalAffairs.blogspot.com

Dear Colleagues:

A major goal of this blog, as readers know, is to discuss three prevalent phenomena which, individually and collectively, are playing hob with America. The three phenomena are lack of concern for truth (including the widespread secrecy and nondisclosure which deliberately hide truth from us), incompetence, and failure to have any concern for others. Change these all-encompassing three horsemen, and the improvement in the country would be dramatic. At least that’s one person’s idea.

Holding this view, this author thought to write a post detailing examples of these phenomena from the news and opinion columns of a single day’s newspapers, in this case the papers of Tuesday, December 21st. In a way, of course, noting some of the dishonesty, incompetence and secrecy contained in the news and opinion columns in one day’s newspaper is cheap and easy pickings, since so much in every day’s newspapers is comprised of these things. Yet, it also seems true, at least to one person, that it is not often recognized that the same three phenomena are the common root of so much that otherwise seems disparate. Perhaps if one were to constantly show the common root, people would begin to wise up as to what is fundamentally wrong in this country. So let’s cursorily list just some of the examples of the three horsemen in Tuesday’s papers.

1. There was discussion in a column of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s previously disclosed purchase of precious stringed instruments for $18 million. The essence of the discussion is that, although the orchestra apparently lucked out and got a good deal anyway (although this is not yet absolutely certain, I gather), its Board of Trustees failed to get pertinent crucial information from management, which gave it "scant details." Such Board and management failures were said to be symptomatic of non profits, as shown by prior scandals at the United Way and the Red Cross. The bottom line? Two horsemen: incompetence and, on the part of management, dishonesty through nondisclosure.

2. There was disclosure of memos detailing more torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo. The torture included putting lighted cigarettes in prisoners’ ears, beating and choking them, and leaving them chained in fetal (and I guess other) positions for 18 to 24 hours (or more) while they urinated and defecated on themselves. The memos disclosing this further showed that torture was known to many high Washington officials, and were further refutation of prior government bovine defecation saying torture was the rogue misconduct of a few low level types.
The bottom line in terms of the three horsemen: once again secrecy had been used to hide horrible misconduct.

3. During a security drill at the Oak Ridge facility that stores our highly enriched uranium -- the kind, one gathers, that we don’t want Iran to have lest it make atomic bombs -- a team of guards went looking for another group of guards in order to shoot them. This occurred because of a massive screw up in a security drill, a screw up which caused the "killer guards" to think the others were actual invaders, not a mock invasion group. It was further revealed that there have been other major security screw ups at the Oak Ridge plant. And this at a plant where, it was written, "A suicidal terrorist who gained access to the uranium here might be able to assemble it in a few minutes into a nuclear explosive, and detonate it on the spot, experts say." (Emphases added.) Bottom line? Gross incompetence.

4. There was discussion of the fact that a major immigrant-registration program created by the Department of Justice after 9/11, a program which apparently registered scores of thousands of people, resulted in catching exactly no terrorists. (Some officials claim it resulted in the arrest of six people linked to terrorism, but this is challenged by such as the September 11th Commission, and it seems to be admitted that no registrants were charged with crimes relating to terrorism.) But while catching no terrorists, the registration program alienated immigrants who otherwise might have been helpful to us in catching terrorists, alienated other countries, and now has to be defended, in regard to terrorists, by various 2004 equivalents of the bootless 1960s "battle cry" of McNamara and his ilk during Viet Nam: "We’re making it harder for them." Bottom line: Incompetence.

5. Apparently because of "territorial" claims, i.e., claims to power and fiefdoms, Congress refuses to restructure itself in a manner that would enable it to effectively oversee the intelligence community. Instead it wishes to continue the long existing structure of fiefdoms which is described as "dysfunctional." This is thought to threaten our security. Bottom line? Incompetence and a form of not caring about others, in this case not caring about the security of our citizens.

6. There was discussion, sparked by the Vioxx and Celebrex fiascos, of how it is that dangerous drugs have gotten onto the market. This comes down to such things as the weakness of the FDA, panels of the FDA being "larded with scientists tied to private companies," FDA reliance on pharmaceutical companies to finance FDA activities, company financing of continuing medical education courses, and companies themselves, not the FDA, are the primary monitor of the post-approval safety of their own drugs. Bottom line: Incompetence, lack of truth, and not caring about others.

7. George Bush announced that Winnetka Don Rumsfeld (alias The Humvee Kid), who had letters of condolences to the families of his slain troops signed with a mechanical device instead of signing them himself, has done a fine job and is filled with anguish over the casualties and grief caused by the war. Need more be said before one gets the point here? Bottom line? Lying, incompetence, and no concern for others.

That is just some of one day’s news, just some of the stories that have as a common root our daily American fare of lack of truth, lack of competence, and lack of concern for others. But I cannot resist mentioning one more "story" so to speak. This week’s Time has a spread that it calls The Best Pictures Of The Year. One two-page picture is of Bush at his ranch in Texas with Cheney on his right (the viewer’s left) and Rumsfeld on his left (the viewer’s right). The picture is called Three Amigos. One wonders: why isn’t it given its more appropriate name, The Three Stooges? Or maybe Curly, Moe and Larry. Or, to indicate their deeply perceptive natures, maybe even "Curly, Moe and Larry, At Texas Ranch, Claim That They Are In Middle Of Rocky Mountains." Or maybe Curly, Moe and Larry Puzzled By Disappearance Of Shemp.*

*If you wish to respond to this email/blog, please email your response to me at velvel@mslaw.edu. Your response may be posted on the blog if you have no objection; please tell me if you do object.