By Hanlon, on August 15th, 2006 at 07:32 PM
![]() So there’s this fella named Michael Gerson, and he used to be Bush’s advisor. He wrote a big article chatting about 9/11 and the Middle East. Right off the bat alarms go off in my head.
Warned by my deputy about the first attack, I headed by car toward the White House, neared the Pentagon and saw a plane in abnormally low descent—so low I could see the windows.
Not to get into the theories, but when you’ve got a former CIA analyst saying a plane almost certainly didn’t hit the Pentagon, I’d say that’s likely. So more than anything, this guy is just trying to elicit sympathy by saying he personally saw the plane that hit the Pentagon. A minor quibble, but it sets the stage for what amounts to five pages of Bush talking points.
Really it goes down the line and takes care of everything. These are the birth pangs of a new Middle East, the United States has the capability of battling terrorists before they get to us. He even makes sure to start talking about Iran.
A nuclear Iran would mean a nuclear Middle East, as traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey feel pressured to join the club, giving every regional conflict nuclear overtones. A nuclear Iran would also give terrorist groups something they have previously lacked and desperately want: a great-power sponsor. Over time, this is the surest way to put catastrophic technology into the hands of a murderous few. All options have dangers and drawbacks. But inaction might bring the harshest verdict of history: they knew much, and they did nothing.
This guy doesn’t work for Bush any more, yet he seems to be doing little more than firing off Bush’s propaganda. We have to do something about Iran or the WHOLE WORLD is going to blow up and kill everyone! He even brings up Lamont.
In a liberal backlash that has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Ned Lamont, in his primary victory over Sen. Joe Lieberman, summed up the case this way: “We are going to get our troops out of Iraq … we’re going to start investing in our own country again.” Lamontism—the elevation of flinching to a foreign policy—is McGovernism, and a long way from “bear any burden, pay any price.”
There’s the “you’re exhausted, it’s understandable” patronizing bullshit. We aren’t tired of it. Being tired of it implies that we were gung-ho in agreement at first and over time we just didn’t have the strength to keep supporting. No, we were against it from the beginning, and now it’s getting ridiculous.
The GOP policy is one of idealism, that whatever noble causes we fight for will win simply by virtue of being a good idea. Granted, they don’t involve going after Egypt or Saudi Arabia where the ACUAL terrorists come from, but hey. Bush’s policy runs on the concept of “it’s the thought that counts”.
[tags]bush, 9/11, iraq, iran, terrorism, war[/tags]
![]() So there’s this fella named Michael Gerson, and he used to be Bush’s advisor. He wrote a big article chatting about 9/11 and the Middle East. Right off the bat alarms go off in my head.
Warned by my deputy about the first attack, I headed by car toward the White House, neared the Pentagon and saw a plane in abnormally low descent—so low I could see the windows.
Not to get into the theories, but when you’ve got a former CIA analyst saying a plane almost certainly didn’t hit the Pentagon, I’d say that’s likely. So more than anything, this guy is just trying to elicit sympathy by saying he personally saw the plane that hit the Pentagon. A minor quibble, but it sets the stage for what amounts to five pages of Bush talking points.
Really it goes down the line and takes care of everything. These are the birth pangs of a new Middle East, the United States has the capability of battling terrorists before they get to us. He even makes sure to start talking about Iran.
A nuclear Iran would mean a nuclear Middle East, as traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey feel pressured to join the club, giving every regional conflict nuclear overtones. A nuclear Iran would also give terrorist groups something they have previously lacked and desperately want: a great-power sponsor. Over time, this is the surest way to put catastrophic technology into the hands of a murderous few. All options have dangers and drawbacks. But inaction might bring the harshest verdict of history: they knew much, and they did nothing.
This guy doesn’t work for Bush any more, yet he seems to be doing little more than firing off Bush’s propaganda. We have to do something about Iran or the WHOLE WORLD is going to blow up and kill everyone! He even brings up Lamont.
In a liberal backlash that has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Ned Lamont, in his primary victory over Sen. Joe Lieberman, summed up the case this way: “We are going to get our troops out of Iraq … we’re going to start investing in our own country again.” Lamontism—the elevation of flinching to a foreign policy—is McGovernism, and a long way from “bear any burden, pay any price.”
There’s the “you’re exhausted, it’s understandable” patronizing bullshit. We aren’t tired of it. Being tired of it implies that we were gung-ho in agreement at first and over time we just didn’t have the strength to keep supporting. No, we were against it from the beginning, and now it’s getting ridiculous.
The GOP policy is one of idealism, that whatever noble causes we fight for will win simply by virtue of being a good idea. Granted, they don’t involve going after Egypt or Saudi Arabia where the ACUAL terrorists come from, but hey. Bush’s policy runs on the concept of “it’s the thought that counts”.
[tags]bush, 9/11, iraq, iran, terrorism, war[/tags]
By Hanlon, on August 15th, 2006 at 04:58 PM
![]() I knew this had gone on too long, but I’d not seen a countdown clock quite like this before. Using the day the US declared war on Germany as the starting point and VE day for the end, you can see how long the Iraq War compares.
The result is that at 9:30 tonight, we will have officially been at war with Iraq longer than we were at war with Germany. I was going to be meeting a few friends at ye old pub at 9 for an ale or two, I’ll be sure to lift up my glass in a salute to a job well done.
[tags]iraq, war, world war 2[/tags]
By Hanlon, on August 15th, 2006 at 03:42 AM
![]() Okay, got this one via the WaPo through AMERICAblog, but check this out. Bush is apparently annoyed with being portrayed as an idiot, so he supposedly did some reading while at his ranch. The book?
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer’s 1946 novel [The Stranger]– in English.
That’s right, Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”. Now, this is Bush’s 10 day vacation that ended yesterday. What came out last Friday, the day Bush went on vacation? Why Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (excellent movie by the way). If you haven’t seen it, here’s a bit of trivia:
At one point during the film, Jean Girard is seen reading the French existentialist novel The Stranger by Albert Camus as he races.
Dang, how about that! If you’ve seen the movie, obviously it’s the French version L’Étranger. Awesome coincidence. Bush just so happened to be reading the same novel that was featured in that book. I’m sure he didn’t just watch the movie and then claim he read it because it sounded smart. Then there’s this from the main article.
The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world.
Yes, because obviously Bush writes his own speeches and that was ad-libbed. The man just quotes Camus and other famous novelists at random. It’s not like this is a guy who couldn’t even figure out “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”. This is an intellectual heavyweight.
Man, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel with this guy.
UPDATE: Speaking of that quote, it looks like Bush muffed it up anyway, he missed Camus’s context in the “long-distance” quote from the book “The Fall”.
The quote, “freedom is a long distance race,” was ripped from its context, a context that establishes beyond a doubt that Camus’s words were not meant straightforwardly, but as a spoof of the thought of his former good friend, Jean-Paul Sartre.
…
Camus’s character, while sounding resolute and tireless about pursuing freedom, making it seem daunting and thankless, but the mark of a true human being, is really prattling on about freedom, intimidating people with it, using it for purposes of self-interest – but does not at all believe in it. The grand-sounding phrase about freedom being a “long-distance race” is just another piece of flimflam.
Well done. God damn.
UPDATE II: I’ve never read the book myself, so peering its synopsis at on Wikipedia provided more hilarious irony. I’m not sure I used that word right.
Later, the two confront the woman’s brother (“the Arab”) on a beach and Raymond gets cut in the resulting knife fight. Meursault afterwards goes back to the beach and shoots the Arab once, in response to the glare of the sun. The Arab is killed, but Mersault fires four more times at the dead body.
At the trial, the prosecution focuses on the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother’s funeral, considered suspect by the authorities. The killing of the Arab apparently is less important than whether Meursault is capable of remorse.
So the book is centered around a guy killing an Arab. Did Bush get hit with the most unlikely cosmic bitchslap ever? He watches Talladega Nights and claims to have read the book featured in that, but no one looks it up and lets him know that its plot may be the most poetic possible for the man to read outside of Orwell? My head hurts.
UPDATE III: This is getting ridiculous. Back on the 4th, apparently he made his reading list public. The results? No Camus listed. You’d think if it was worthy enough to be mentioned in the recent article it would have been mentioned before. Unless he didn’t read anything at all and they just made something up.
[tags]bush, book, talladega nights, albert camus[/tags]
![]() Okay, got this one via the WaPo through AMERICAblog, but check this out. Bush is apparently annoyed with being portrayed as an idiot, so he supposedly did some reading while at his ranch. The book?
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer’s 1946 novel [The Stranger]– in English.
That’s right, Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”. Now, this is Bush’s 10 day vacation that ended yesterday. What came out last Friday, the day Bush went on vacation? Why Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (excellent movie by the way). If you haven’t seen it, here’s a bit of trivia:
At one point during the film, Jean Girard is seen reading the French existentialist novel The Stranger by Albert Camus as he races.
Dang, how about that! If you’ve seen the movie, obviously it’s the French version L’Étranger. Awesome coincidence. Bush just so happened to be reading the same novel that was featured in that book. I’m sure he didn’t just watch the movie and then claim he read it because it sounded smart. Then there’s this from the main article.
The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world.
Yes, because obviously Bush writes his own speeches and that was ad-libbed. The man just quotes Camus and other famous novelists at random. It’s not like this is a guy who couldn’t even figure out “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”. This is an intellectual heavyweight.
Man, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel with this guy.
UPDATE: Speaking of that quote, it looks like Bush muffed it up anyway, he missed Camus’s context in the “long-distance” quote from the book “The Fall”.
The quote, “freedom is a long distance race,” was ripped from its context, a context that establishes beyond a doubt that Camus’s words were not meant straightforwardly, but as a spoof of the thought of his former good friend, Jean-Paul Sartre.
…
Camus’s character, while sounding resolute and tireless about pursuing freedom, making it seem daunting and thankless, but the mark of a true human being, is really prattling on about freedom, intimidating people with it, using it for purposes of self-interest – but does not at all believe in it. The grand-sounding phrase about freedom being a “long-distance race” is just another piece of flimflam.
Well done. God damn.
UPDATE II: I’ve never read the book myself, so peering its synopsis at on Wikipedia provided more hilarious irony. I’m not sure I used that word right.
Later, the two confront the woman’s brother (“the Arab”) on a beach and Raymond gets cut in the resulting knife fight. Meursault afterwards goes back to the beach and shoots the Arab once, in response to the glare of the sun. The Arab is killed, but Mersault fires four more times at the dead body.
At the trial, the prosecution focuses on the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother’s funeral, considered suspect by the authorities. The killing of the Arab apparently is less important than whether Meursault is capable of remorse.
So the book is centered around a guy killing an Arab. Did Bush get hit with the most unlikely cosmic bitchslap ever? He watches Talladega Nights and claims to have read the book featured in that, but no one looks it up and lets him know that its plot may be the most poetic possible for the man to read outside of Orwell? My head hurts.
UPDATE III: This is getting ridiculous. Back on the 4th, apparently he made his reading list public. The results? No Camus listed. You’d think if it was worthy enough to be mentioned in the recent article it would have been mentioned before. Unless he didn’t read anything at all and they just made something up.
[tags]bush, book, talladega nights, albert camus[/tags]
By Hanlon, on August 15th, 2006 at 01:39 AM
![]() I think this can be safely filed in the “well no shit” folder. Just as I called it as soon as the story broke, those guys arrested for having all of those cell phones have no connections to terrorists.
The release also said the FBI had no information indicating that the men, Palestinian-Americans living in Texas, had any direct links to any known terrorist groups or to the alleged plot to bomb trans-Atlantic jetliners that was announced in London last week.
As I suspected, they were arrested for being Arab and buying cell phones. That was it. And then over in Ohio, with the same case, we find this:
“We’re grateful the Washington County Prosecutor’s Office has been willing to keep an open mind and look at all the evidence and make their decisions based on the evidence,” said William Swor, who is representing Houssaiky.
That’s where we’ve gotten to at this point. We’re actually grateful when the prosecution looks at the evidence. Here I thought in America that was ALL we did. That we looked at evidence and made decisions based on that. Then again…
[tags]cell phones, terrorism[/tags]
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