December 1, 2005
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Election Fraud in 2004
Lyn Davis Lear Bio
11.30.2005
Paging Frank Rich! GAO confirms – 2004 Election Was Stolen (26 comments )
I had a chance to talk to my hero, Frank Rich, a few months ago about election fraud and he claimed he didn’t know much about it. Perhaps he has his plate full unraveling the administration’s lies about Iraq, but with the midterm elections coming up someone has to take this issue on.
I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some young computer hackers on bragging about how easy, embarrassingly easy, it is to switch votes on the Deibold machines. Bill Clinton once mentioned that India has flawless electronic voting while ours is mired in unaccountability. I hope Frank and other journalists and bloggers of his caliber read this article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman about the GAO report on the 2004 election. Paul Krugman and the NYTimes editorial board have been good on this issue in the past, but it has been a while since anyone has raised the subject.
The Government Accountability Office is the only government office we have left that is ethical, non-partisan and incorruptible. They investigate and tell it like it is. Thank God for them. This report is very serious and must get more attention. It has taken years for the mainstream press and Congress to finally understand what we in the blogisphere have known since 2000. This administration will distort and cheat about anything and everything to get its way. If this report got the attention it deserves and broke through the static of our 500-channel universe, it could be the coup de grace of the Bush White House.
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman October 26, 2005
As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.
The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.
The government’s lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as “conspiracy theories” adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.
Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.
According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received “more than 57,000 complaints” following Bush’s alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.
The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”
The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that “public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines.” The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O’Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.
Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O’Dell’s statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.
Among other things, the GAO confirms that:
1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.
2. “It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
3. “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a “widespread conspiracy” but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.
In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.
The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives — or less — to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.
The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:
The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.
A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County
Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry’s name saw Bush’s name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems inFranklin County (Columbus). Kerry’s margins in both counties were suspiciously low.
A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.
In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called “electronic transfer glitch” gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the “loaves and fishes” vote count.
In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.
In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county’s central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote – 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.
In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.
Prior to one of Blackwell’s illegitimate “show recounts,” technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.
In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.
In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation—only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.
In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that “by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon – the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better.”
But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.
Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear
that’s exactly what happened.
Revised 10/27/05
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via http://freepress.org and http://harveywasserman.com. Their What Happened in Ohio?, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published in Spring, 2006, by New Press.
Elia Kazan
Columbia Pictures
November 27, 2005
‘Elia Kazan,’ by Richard Schickel
On the Kazan Front
Review by JOHN SIMON
A BIOGRAPHER’S life is not an easy one. Aside from taxing demands of I.R.S. (insight, research, style), there is the supreme test of tact: knowing what to include, what to exclude. There are not only sins, but also virtues, of omission. A good biography is like a good marriage: biographer and biographee (if they knew each other personally) must have a mutual love, but a discriminatingly nuanced rather than blind one. And both had better be interesting. All this obtains in Richard Schickel’s “Elia Kazan: A Biography,” the life story of the distinguished stage and screen director.
No mere page turner, this is a page devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist. But Elia Kazan’s life, as lived and written up here, is dramatic to a fault, and easily as strange as fiction.
To start with the prose, take this sentence from the discussion of the making of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” during which, Schickel says, Kazan started “inhabiting that sublime zone directors sometimes achieve, a zone in which they sense that their every decision is the right one.” Promptly, there is even better: Kazan “wanted his actors to bring their discoveries to him, like children finding pretty objects on a beach.” Lest, however, this make Kazan out to be a laissez-faire director, there follows, “Impact – the more shattering the better – was everything with Kazan.” And there you have him: permissive yet manipulative, enlightened but also commercial.
Kazan is a tough subject because there is so much to deal with. Equally renowned as a stage and screen director, he also became a lacerating autobiographer and prolific novelist. He helped found the enormously influential Actors Studio, cradle of the questionable “Method.” He kept profuse, revelatory notes on virtually every project he undertook; there are numerous published articles by and interviews with him, including a book-length one with the French critic Michel Ciment. Further, he appears in autobiographies by major writers. Moreover, as a friendly witness naming names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he became politically controversial, necessitating knowledge of the McCarthy era and its long shadow. Lastly, this complex and contradictory figure has inspired reams of important film and drama criticism.
And even that is not quite the last. There remains Kazan the great adulterous womanizer, with his passion for blondes. From the semiautobiographical novel “The Arrangement,” Schickel quotes, “Being Greek, blondness is my fetish.” (Opposites, you’ll recall, attract.) “All three of Kazan’s wives were blondes,” Schickel writes. “Almost invariably his leading ladies were, too.”
Like Kazan, Schickel names names. The major extramarital affairs are there: the extended ones with the actresses Constance Dowling (causing a serious rift with the first wife, Molly Day Thatcher) and Barbara Loden (later legalized); the more playful ones, too, as with Marilyn Monroe, whose favors he shared with Miller; and even some minor ones. Their treatment is commendably succinct, short on gossipy details.
As for research, there is enough here for a lesser biographer to leave you bleary-eyed: Kazan’s often fussily meticulous tomes could stop a portcullis, never mind a door. Schickel has clearly grappled with them all, but keeps matters relatively concise yet amply informative. No reader will leave either hungry or unduly replete. As for insight, Schickel makes good use of others’ as well as his own. Aptly he quotes a passage like the following from Ciment’s book, about a confrontation with the notorious studio head Louis B. Mayer during Kazan’s shooting of “The Sea of Grass,” concerning Katharine Hepburn’s crying scene:
MAYER. She cries too much.
KAZAN. But that is the scene, Mr. Mayer.
MAYER. But the channel of her tears is wrong.
KAZAN. What do you mean?
MAYER. The channel of her tears goes too close to her nostril, it looks like it’s coming out of her nose like snot.
KAZAN. Jesus, I can’t do anything with the channel of her tears.
MAYER. Young man: you have one thing to learn. We are in the business of making beautiful pictures of beautiful people and anybody who does not acknowledge that should not be in this business.
As Schickel points out, Mayer “was, in a sense, right.” He expatiates on how all this affected Kazan, and why he too was right not to yield to his temptation to quit, but instead “at least insist on doing things his way and get fired.” Which did not happen.
In 1913, the 4-year-old Kazan, whose family name was Kazanjioglou, arrived in the United States from Anatolia with his mother; his father and an uncle had preceded them, starting a rug business for which Elia seemed destined. His formidable father, George, was the only man Kazan ever feared, yet he defied him in choice of career. Sensibly, Schickel wastes little space on family history, or on Kazan’s studies at Williams College and the Yale Drama School, from neither of which the young man felt he had gained much.
Not so, however, from the Group Theater, into which he inveigled his way through charm and sweat, eventually reaching the top echelon. He had some respect for Harold Clurman, but scant use for Lee Strasberg, whom he resolved to supplant. Beginning as a character actor, he specialized in gangster roles; no less a critic than J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed him the most authentic hood he had seen. He befriended Clifford Odets and appeared in “Waiting for Lefty” and “Golden Boy”; in Chicago, the Mafia was so impressed as to get him better housing than he could afford. Still, Clurman had told him, “You may have talent for the theater, but it’s certainly not for acting.”
DIRECTING, he gradually decided, was a more “manly art” than acting. He also joined the Communist Party in 1935, but left it in disgust after 19 months. “I understood Communism better than they did,” he was to declare. By directing a popular downtown Jewish comedy, “Café Crown,” he gained a foothold in the commercial theater. Next he wangled the job directing Thornton Wilder’s demanding “Skin of Our Teeth” with a notable cast. He was only 34 and inexperienced, but his services came cheap.
That piece was a milestone. Everyone in it was fighting with almost everyone else: Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, with Tallulah Bankhead; Florence Reed with Bankhead; and, most ferociously, Bankhead with Kazan. Tallulah did her level best to get him fired, but he survived her tantrums and maneuvers. Later he said she had “made a director of me,” because “every fighter has one fight that makes or breaks him. That was my fight.”
Soon Kazan was working with Helen Hayes, for whom he could do nothing, and Mary Martin, whom, in “One Touch of Venus,” he was able to make “more down-to-earth, less of a soubrette.” In the delightful “Jacobowsky and the Colonel,” he learned from its beguiling star, Oscar Karlweis, that there was more to acting than the glorified grubbiness of the Group Theater. He also realized that his great successes were to be built around star turns, without which his shows would fail.
Pretty soon he branched out into movies, where his first success was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in 1945. Here he developed his technique, which often consisted of setting up creative antagonisms between actors, or, as in the case of the young Peggy Ann Garner, of tormenting her into evincing grief for her alcoholic father, played by the excellent James Dunn. The film allowed Kazan to address one of his perennially favorite topics, that of “the immigrant outsider, ever the imperfect American,” which no success could quite uproot from his mind, producing a neediness that “drove almost all his actions – from his marriages to his politics.”
We are taken in breathtaking, often riotous but never excessive, detail through Kazan’s many achievements. We get the making of such hits as “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of a Salesman,”plus several more by Williams and Miller, vividly conveying how much the plays owed to him, how different their authors’ careers might have been without him. Also works by lesser dramatists like Robert Anderson, William Inge and Archibald MacLeish, whose genesis is no less stimulating. Even a number of flops provide compelling evidence of how effectively, even if sometimes adversarially, Kazan worked with different playwrights and players. Especially gripping is the interaction with Marlon Brando, whom he loved, and James Dean, whom he didn’t.
And then all those movies! “Boomerang” and “Panic in the Streets,” with its exciting location photography; then “Streetcar” and his heroic grappling with censors and Vivien Leigh,the affair with whom Kazan was to ungallantly brag about. The fine “Viva Zapata!,” with Brando again and a screenplay by John Steinbeck, was nevertheless, as Schickel shows, a problem picture. The biography goes exuberantly to town on “On the Waterfront,” the collaboration with Budd Schulberg, an account so rich in funny and grim particulars that it could form a terse, mandatory volume for all film courses. It is Brando’s on-screen best, later prompting Martin Scorsese’s observation that Kazan “was forging a new acting style.”
Indeed, Brando and Eva Marie Saint infused the film with great tenderness. As Saint was to comment about her director, “There was such empathy felt from this man.” Kazan knew how to get to know his actors intimately, to tremendous artistic effect.
Another major success was “East of Eden,”again with assistance from Steinbeck. Here the technique of sharpening intramural antagonism was perfected, in this case between Dean and Raymond Massey as his father, eliciting rewardingly taut performances. For autobiographical reasons, the father-son conflict kept running through, and lending power to, Kazan’s oeuvre. Schickel’s pungent account of “Baby Doll” reawakens interest in that memorable but neglected comedy, Kazan’s most erotic picture. As his wife, the patrician, puritanical Molly, hitherto a useful literary adviser, became ever more “calcified” to him, Kazan started an affair with Barbara Loden. Molly’s opposite, she was passionately lower-class, free from abstract ideas, very attractive and, of course, blond.
With the satirical “Face in the Crowd,” Kazan returned to a favorite theme, “the hidden ambiguity of idealistic enterprises.” Schickel also makes a strong case for “Wild River,” about problems involving the Tennessee Valley Authority; here Kazan worked with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick to splendid effect, but meager box-office returns.
Kazan’s last hit movie was “Splendor in the Grass” in 1961, with Warren Beatty (in his film debut) and Natalie Wood, from whom Kazan evoked superb performances, well beyond Inge’s script and powerfully caught by Boris Kaufman’s camera. Onstage, meanwhile, Kazan was stuck with Arthur Miller’s political and marital auto-whitewash, “After the Fall,” which, in spite of the shaky writing, provided Loden with her greatest success.
Kazan’s scrappiness comes across in such statements as “It’s stimulating to dislike someone, don’t you think?” But the later phases of his career were less than stimulating. The marriage to Loden soured, and though his unremarkable novels kept morale and cash flow going, the Kazan star was fading. Yet there was still a happy adventure with a recent widow on a romantic trip to Europe. And Elia faithfully nursed the by-then-estranged Barbara through her two-year-long losing battle with cancer.
His final movie, “The Last Tycoon,” flopped: “The resilience has gone out of me. And the fun.” To a film teacher he remarked, “Tell your students they’ll throw you away eventually.” But he had a good third marriage with Frances Rudge, a blond Englishwoman. His last novel, “Beyond the Aegean,” a sequel to his family-historical book and movie “America, America,” was reviewed practically nowhere. Afflicted with deafness and arteriosclerosis, he was only half there when receiving his controversial lifetime-achievement Oscar in 1999. Four years later he died, having just turned 94.
Schickel got to know Kazan by making a television documentary about him. He also put together the film clips introducing that rather stormy Oscar presentation. He is cogent about Kazan’s politics, and makes a convincing case for Kazan’s naming of names to HUAC – hardly heroic, but far from indefensible. Only a self-justifying ad Kazan took out in The New York Times, urged on him and written by Molly, earns Schickel’s just censure.
L ong ago, Schickel and I edited an obscure anthology together, but since those days we never communed or even communicated. I neglected, probably wrongly, his many books and TV documentaries. So I was stunned by the sharpness, levelheadedness and multifariousness of “Elia Kazan,” some errors notwithstanding. There are typos (“Irwin” for Erwin Piscator, “Tavianni” for the Taviani brothers, “Brodsky” for Harold Brodkey). Also problems of accidence (“whom some thought was a journalist”), subject and verb agreement, tautology (“reverted back”) and the nonword “thusly.” “The Changeling” is a 17th-century, not a 15th-century, play. “A bathetically bathed Oscar broadcast” is clumsy, and how is progress of a car “not enlightened” by knots of demonstrators?
But let’s forgive a book that, without any flab, manages to be, over and above a biography, a stirring bit of social history and a panorama of Broadway and Hollywood during what may have been their glory days. It could not be a more pertinent study of a spellbinding subject.
John Simon is the author of “John Simon on Theater,” “John Simon on Film” and “John Simon on Music.” He reviews theater for Bloomberg News.
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Watchmen
Fighting Evil, Quoting Nietzsche
Did the comic book really need to grow up?
By Tom Shone
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 3:30 PM ET
Alan Moore’s Watchmen, originally published in 1986, was the comic-book series that supposedly revolutionized the industry, defrocked the superhero, and invented the graphic novel at a stroke. Yet reading Watchmen today is a distinctly underwhelming experience. Its fans would say that is appropriate: The world’s first anti-heroic comic book is supposed to be, well, anti-heroic. The mode is pyrrhic, deflationary, its tone deadpan, spent. Either way, like a math savant at a party, the book seems to shrink from the hullabaloo surrounding its approaching 20th anniversary. A new edition, retitled Absolute Watchmen and published this month by DC, has drawn critical superlatives and comparisons with Pulp Fiction and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In truth, it’s more like the White Album, a fractious, blitzed masterwork. This is not a comic book that wants you to go “Wow.” It is a comic book that wants to let the air out of your tires.
Released the same year as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns—which turned the Batman mythos on its head and emptied it into the gutter—Moore’s book does the same for an entire alternate universe of superheroes. Outlawed since 1977, they now sit around in dark basements drinking beer, contemplating their middle-aged spread, and reminiscing about the good old days—just like Mr. Incredible. One, Ozymandias, has set up a lucrative franchise selling posters, diet books, and toy soldiers based on himself. Only one still paces the city: Rorschach, a psychotic vigilante attempting to wash the vermin from the streets, a la Travis Bickle. When one of his colleagues, the Comedian, is thrown from his penthouse-suite window, Rorschach decides that “someone is gunning for masks” and tries to corral his old teammates together for one last hurrah. Such is the inverted central conceit of the book, in which superheroes are far too busy defending themselves from the world to contemplate saving it.
And what a wicked world it is! Both Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four glancingly confronted the political turmoil of the times—drugs, racism, Vietnam—but Watchmen was the first comic book to allow the disenchantment to take root, albeit a decade too late. Watchmen was set in the ’80s but evinces a distinct nostalgia for the anti-American sentiment of the ’70s, when Moore was growing up in England: He loved the United States for its comics, hated it for its politics, and out of that was born the world of Watchmen, a world where Nixon is in his sixth term as president, nuclear apocalypse is looming, and the superheroes are trying to shake off accusations about their involvement in everything from Vietnam to Iran-Contra. “Yes we were kinky, yes we were Nazis, all those things people say,” admits one, Nite Owl, in his autobiography Under the Hood, chunks of which are excerpted at length along with disquisitions on the arms race, criminal psychology, and quotations from Nietzsche and Bob Dylan. What on earth was Moore trying to get us to do? Read?
The suspicion lingers that Watchmen was more a triumph of writing than draftsmanship. The graphics were by Dave Gibbons, one of many artists who made their name on Judge Dredd, although he always felt a bit like the fill-in guy, lacking the ravaged punk impudence of Mike McMahon or the ebullient absurdity of Brian Bolland. Gibbons’ style was neat, tidy, and strong-jawed, which lent his work for Watchmen a flicker of irony, although it was unclear whether the hokey costumes he came up with for Moore’s superheroes were deliberately hokey or just the kind of stuff he came up with anyway. In which case, the joke was on him and the irony was all Moore’s. A typical comic script is 32 pages; for Watchmen, Moore’s ran to 150 pages, heavy with voice-over narration and speech balloons. Gibbons found himself cramming his graphics into a neat box-arrangement of nine frames per page, and the result was a minimalist, Philip Glass-y, metronymic tone. Watchmen also took comic-book chronology to new levels of complexity. It features an elaborate flashback structure and a fascination for slo-mo simultaneity that wouldn’t have embarrassed your average Modernist—when they coined the term “graphic novel” nobody mentioned that the novel in question was Ulysses—although how well this technique melded with the more straightforward dynamism of traditional comic-book panels is open to question.
Watchmen‘s whodunit plot was not allowed to kick into gear until late in the day and climaxes with Ozymandias spouting Postmodern art theory in his snowbound eyrie (“phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence”). Even that old windbag the Silver Surfer might have hung his head in shame. The book’s action highlight, on the other hand, comes when Nite Owl finally shakes off his midlife crisis, dons his costume, and heads out on the town for one last night of kicking criminal butt. One gets the feeling that Moore wanted to make us feel guilty for enjoying this—to take in the episode as one would a guilty pleasure. “See apathy! Everybody escapin’ into comic books and TV! Makes me sick,” shouts a news vendor, peddling comics while the streets around him run red with blood.
Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-hatred tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore’s slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so. But did the comic book have to “grow up”? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic “difficulty” or “self-consciousness.” Life is too short. Frankly, we’d much rather be watching The Incredibles.
Tom Shone is a former critic for the (London) Sunday Times. He is author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.
Huffington Blog
Arianna Huffington Bio
11.30.2005
Bush’s New Strategy for Victory: Stop Saying ‘Insurgents’ (11 comments )
So “the insurgency” really is in its “last throes”.
No, not the effort to drive U.S. forces America out of Iraq — that continues unabated. I’m talking about the Bush administration’s decision to stop using the words “insurgency” and “insurgent” to describe the rebel forces.
Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld said that “over the weekend” he’d had “an epiphany” that “this is a group of people who don’t merit the word ‘insurgency’”.
President Bush apparently had the same epiphany because in today’s big speech on Iraq he went to great pains to rebrand the enemy as “a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists”. Indeed, he only uttered “insurgents” one time in the entire speech — and even then it was when quoting a U.S. Lt. Colonel (who apparently has been too busy training Iraqi troops in Tikrit to have time for weekend vocabulary epiphanies).
So in the middle of a whole lot of the same tired rhetoric we’ve heard before (“September 11”, “as Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down”, “we will never back down, we will never give in”), here came the president’s latest “Plan for Victory in Iraq”: win the war on words.
Who says Bush’s only strategy is to “stay the course”? Not true. In previous big speeches, the administration set out to dazzle us with impressive-sounding numbers about the rapid growth of Iraqi forces. Now they’ve switched the focus to improved terminology. It’s Victory Through Vocabulary!
So “insurgents” are out and “rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists” are in. Here’s how the president broke down the new lexicon:
Rejectionists are “ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs” who “reject an Iraq in which they’re no longer the dominant group.” According to Bush, rejectionists make up “by far the largest” portion of “the enemy”.
Saddamists are former Saddam loyalists who “still harbor dreams of returning to power”. This group is “smaller” than the rejectionists “but more determined”. (Is it just me, or does “Saddamist” sound an awful lot like “Sodomite”? Hey, might as well shore up your evangelical base while charting your new victory vocabulary, right? Bush really brought this connection home when he referred to the “hard-core Saddamists… trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community”. While buggering each other and pushing for gay marriage, no doubt).
And the terrorists? Well, they’re the ones who “share the same ideology as the terrorists who struck the United States on September 11”… the ones “responsible for most of the suicide bombings and the beheadings and the other atrocities we’ve seen on our television”. While calling them “the smallest” of the enemy groups, they are still clearly Bush’s favorite: he mentioned “terrorists” 42 times in his speech, compared to the five times he mentioned the “rejectionists” and the four times he brought up the “Saddamists”.
Following the president’s speech, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett appeared on MSNBC and addressed the administration’s counter-“insurgency” strategy, saying the word had been replaced because ‘insurgents’ implies that they are on the side of the people.
Fine. But, at the end of the day, we are losing the war not because of what we call our enemies in Iraq but because of how the people of Iraq see our enemies — and the U.S. military.
And as long as American troops are seen as, what a report by an Iraqi National Assembly committee called, “occupation forces”; and as long as Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni leaders agree, as they did at a U.S.-backed conference last week, that the insurgency is “legitimate”; and as long as Iraqi leaders like former Prime Minister Allawi and Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim continue to paint a dark picture of what’s going on in George Bush’s Iraq, the president’s new victory vocabulary is just another pathetic diversion. A diversion ginned up to fight the enemy he is most concerned with: the rejectionists here at home who are finally rejecting his lies.
Today’s Blogs
The Roberts Court Takes on Abortion
By Bidisha Banerjee
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 7:30 PM ET
Bloggers discuss the first abortion cases that the Supreme Court has heard in five years; they also respond to a Seymour Hersh piece about withdrawal from Iraq, and an FCC proposal for a la carte pricing for cable channels.
The Roberts court takes on abortion: The Supreme Court is hearing two abortion cases today. Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood is receiving the most attention. It concerns a New Hampshire law (that hasn’t yet gone into effect) that would require parental notification before a minor could have an abortion even if the minor’s health is at stake. (Listen to this morning’s arguments; read about the other case.)
As bloggers attempt to suss out whether the case is about health exceptions or parental notification, their views about abortion shine through. “While the major question in the Ayotte case is about health exceptions to abortion restrictions, the media has overwhelmingly been portraying it as a case about parental rights,” opines Laura Donnelly on Uncommon Sense, the blog of the progressive TomPaine.com. “The decisions in these cases could have sweeping practical implications about women’s abilities to actually access abortion services—potentially severely limiting reproductive choice even if Roe v. Wade remains untouched.” But Blogs for Bush‘s Matt Margolis is convinced that the case does fundamentally concern parental rights: “Planned Parenthood is trying to make this a case about women’s rights… But we’re not talking about women… We’re talking about minors… Children.” Adamantly Mike, a college student, agrees: “[A] sixteen-year-old cannot walk into a dentist’s office and have his teeth touched without parental permission. Abortion is an extremely invasive surgery. Why then, should it not be regulated under the same concern for the parents’ authority?”
Reporting from this morning’s hearing that there was “certainly no sign that Roe itself was in jeopardy,” SCOTUSblog‘s Lyle Denniston suggests that “the Court appeared to be dealing with the new cases as if abortion rights at this stage had become primarily a matter calling for technical legal precision.” Denniston notes that Chief Justice John Roberts “contributed to that impression.” However, liberal Echidne of the Snakes demurs. Quoting a news story that described Roberts as “sympathetic to the state”, she writes, “I suspect that the process of dismantling Roe will be a slow strip-tease, to keep the radical clerics at a fever pitch and their constituency voting for the Republican party.”
Read more about Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood. Read Dahlia Lithwick’s “Supreme Court Dispatch” on today’s hearing, and find out how to pronounce “Ayotte.”
Into thin air?: Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article claims that current U.S. plans for withdrawing from Iraq involve increasing air strikes over the country. Hersh writes, “The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”
Some bloggers are comparing this strategy to previous American moves, both positive and negative. “The plan sounds very similar to the strategy used to great success in Afghanistan,” claims Benny’s World‘s Benny, a “media entrepreneur.” But on Democratic Daily Kos, Ademption makes the Vietnam analogy, discusses Hersh’s appearance to talk about the article on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and writes, “I think Mr. Hersh raises a HUGE concern. If we can’t rely on Iraqis to give us the proper intelligence on the ground, then how can we rely on the same intelligence sources to target the right people in airstrikes?”
“The reality is that protecting critical economic infrastructure from motivated attacks by native people is impossible without imposing a complete police state,” writes the wonkish Outlandish Josh, who discusses Hersh’s piece in context of the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, a document that the president discussed today. Dismissing it as “an extended tautology,” Josh believes, “[I]t seems the war will grind on. Maybe more bombing; maybe more local paramilitaries; but basically the same war.” And The Lion’s Den‘s Aethern, is concerned: “I’m conflicted on this, because as a vet, I want my buddies to get their asses out of there as soon as possible, but if we replace boots on the ground with even more bombs and unaccountable mercenaries, then the very things that are enraging the Iraqis and fueling the insurgency will only be exacerbated, which will make things even more hellish on the troops that didn’t get lucky enough to be included in the PR drawdown.”
Read more about Hersh’s piece. Read Fred Kaplan’s analysis of President Bush’s speech in Slate.
Cable a la carte: The FCC’s Kevin Martin has suggested that cable and satellite channels should implement decency standards and/or a la carte pricing plans that would allow parents to select only the channels they want. (Read Martin’s oral statement to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.)
Some people think Martin might be on to something. “[I]s there any way to stop the a la carte system from eventually being implemented? It just makes too much sense and has too much positive consumer sentiment behind it to not make its way into standard practice,” insists Nicheplayer, a techie. “Indeed, why shouldn’t TV programming work exactly like the WWW, where people seek out and subscribe to what they like, and the news about good ‘shows’ is spread by word of mouth from one trusted friend or acquaintance to another?”
But libertarian bloggers think that Martin’s suggestions are a recipe for censorship. “[I]ndecency is in the eye of the beholder. For example, I think that the FCC is indecent. If I ask them, do you think they will commit group suicide or at least resign?” demands South Puget Sound Libertarian. And on Reason‘s Hit and Run blog, Nick Gillespie notes that Martin has asked, “You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don’t want [....] But why should you have to?” Gillespie’s answer: “Because It’s a Free Country, You Idiot!” He continues, “God forbid Smellivision ever happens–because you know the FCC will be in favor of blocking adult smells too.”
Read more about the FCC. Read Slate‘s Daniel Gross on Martin’s suggestion.
Got a question, comment, or suggestion? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.
Bidisha Banerjee is a Slate editorial assistant
Today’s Papers
Victory Strategery
By Andrew Rice
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 6:29 AM ET
The New York Times leads with a preview of President Bush’s speech at the U.S. Naval Academy today, where he is expected to unveil his “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” which critics argue is a little late in coming. The speech also tops the Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox. The Washington Post, which leads with a local story, off-leads a very different take on America’s future in Iraq, sitting in on a contentious town hall meeting held amid the falling mortar shells in Ramadi. The Los Angeles Times leads (at least online) with its second big Iraq break in two days, exposing a Pentagon-sponsored network that pays Iraqi newspapers to print dubiously favorable stories about the war. USA Today follows a scoop from yesterday’s WSJ: In a reversal, the Federal Communications Commission may now allow consumers to pick and choose which cable channels they want to subscribe to, rather than forcing them to buy expensive packages.
None of the other papers even front their pre-speech stories, and reading the NYT piece, it’s not hard to see why: The sneak-peek reporters got didn’t contain any bombshells (no pun intended)—though Bush will be asking Congress for an additional $3.9 billion to train Iraqi troops. Some analysts, like Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, think today’s speech will mark the beginning of the end of America’s occupation of Iraq. If so, Bush is being cagy about it, saying yesterday, “I want our troops to come home, but I don’t want them to come home without having achieved victory.” To that end, the administration will release a 27-page booklet outlining its “strategy for victory” today. The Times says that “much of it sounded like a list of goals for Iraq’s military, political and economic development rather than new prescriptions on how to accomplish the job.”
The WP‘s Ramadi dispatch shows just how far off victory may be. At an unusual meeting held between Iraqis in the restive Anbar province and the local American military commander, Sunni leaders railed against the “illegitimate occupation” and their country’s “terrorist government” and heckled an insufficiently demure female American official. The Marine general tried to sound conciliatory, telling the crowd, “We’re here to work through the problems,” but his message of understanding was undercut when an impatient interpreter translated his words into Arabic as, “I don’t have any time to waste.”
Facing such problems of miscommunication, the Army seems to have come to an innovative solution, the LAT reports: Buy good news. Secretly, through military contractors and Iraqi intermediaries posing as freelance journalists, the Pentagon has been paying local newspapers to run stories with headlines like “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism.” Some of the articles are labeled as “advertorials,” while others are passed off as straight news stories. The paper writes that it’s only the latest example of “how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between … the dissemination of factual information to the media” and creating propaganda.
USAT‘s lead doesn’t add much to the cable-channel story besides a few live quotes from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin at a Senate hearing yesterday. The proposed change has less to do with lowering prices—an FCC study last year found that consumers might actually pay more under the smorgasbord approach—than with pleasing families who want Nickelodeon but not Nip/Tuck. The WSJ, which unsurprisingly has deeper coverage, stresses that cable providers and networks are vehemently opposed, saying the change will kill niche channels that survive financially only by being bundled with ESPN and MTV.
The WP has news of some slightly reassuring developments on the bird-flu front: Two manufacturers are expected to deliver several million doses of a vaccine to the government by the end of December, and researchers are experimenting to see if these could somehow be diluted to cover up to 120 million people. The bad news: Nobody really knows if the vaccine can be stretched that far, and if it can’t be, the government is only sure it can protect 4 million people. In the event of a pandemic this winter, the Pentagon would be allotted a quarter of the vaccine stock, while the rest will “probably be restricted to critically needed personnel,” the WP says. TP would like to see a follow-up explaining who defines “critically needed” and how one gets on the list. (May I humbly submit: The world needs freelance journalists.)
For those who are still fuzzy about why a bug that has killed fewer than 100 people in Asia is so scary, the WSJ has a useful flu FAQ.
The USAT and WSJ both front stories pegged to an abortion case that is to be argued before the Supreme Court today. The New Hampshire case concerns a parental-notification rule for minors that does not include an exemption for cases in which the health of the mother is threatened*. The WSJ has an interesting feature on Americans United for Life, a little-known group that had a “guiding hand” in crafting the legislation at issue. Modeling its fight on the NAACP’s battle against segregation, the group’s strategy is to “chip around the edges” of Roe v. Wade until the Supreme Court is ready to overturn it.
The LAT alone fronts news that Mexico’s Supreme Court issued a ruling yesterday allowing alleged criminals who face life imprisonment—though not the death penalty—to be extradited to the United States for trial. Previously, life without parole was considered cruel and unusual punishment in Mexico.
By far the best most enjoyable read of the day is the WSJ‘s chronicle of fallen Russian oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s life in a Siberian prison camp. Surviving on porridge while performing menial tasks in a climate that reaches temperatures of 40 below, he may be plotting a comeback once he’s done his time in Siberia—following in the rich tradition, the story says, of “Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.”
Only the NYT fronts the latest round of kidnappings in Iraq. Pictures of four peace activists from Canada, Britain, and the United States turned up on the Internet yesterday, while a separate group threatened to execute a prominent German archaeologist.
Back to the Pentagon propaganda story for a moment. TP can’t help wondering whether any American newspaper should cast stones at their developing-world brethren for blurring the lines of journalism for big-spending advertisers—in the LAT‘s case, a scandal over a glossy advertorial touting the new Staples Center comes to mind. But the piece is worth reading if only for the hilarious reactions of the duped Iraqi newspaper editors. They range from (possibly feigned) outrage to shoulder-shrugging. (“We publish anything.”) Then there’s the head of Iraq’s “most cerebral and professional” newspaper, who ran three Pentagon advertorials and says he wishes he knew the U.S. government was behind them—so he could have “charged much, much more.” Mark Willes couldn’t have said it better.
Correction, Nov. 30, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly claimed that a disputed New Hampshire law that restricts a minor’s access to abortion doesn’t allow for exemptions even if the mother’s life is at stake. In fact, the law doesn’t allow for exemptions if the mother’s health is an issue. Return to the corrected sentence.
Andrew Rice is writing a book about Uganda
