Don Imus August 18, 2001

MAR. 16, 2006: MY OWN IRAQ QUESTION Iraq may be a disorderly and violent place. But it is not west Africa. It seem that every Iraqi has a (working) cell phone. It seems that every building in Sadr City has a satellite dish – presumably connected to a TV. One hears no complaints of hunger and malnutrition. The streets are full of cars. (We’re told: 1 million more than before the war.) When you fly over rural Iraq, you see green farms, meaning that somebody has both an irrigation system and irrigation rights.

So my question is this: Where do Iraqis get their money? Corruption tends to enrich a well-placed few, not to put cell phones in the hands of everybody. And yet when I asked Americans in Iraq about the Iraqi private economy, everybody agreed that it must exist – but nobody seemed to know what precisely it was, how big it was, or how big it had been in the immediate past, to enable an assessment of whether it was growing and if so, how fast.

In the past, I have cited statistics here about Iraqi economic growth. I am baffled now how anybody could have generated them in the absence of so much information. On the other hand something is obviously going on. Any NRO readers have any insights?

http://frum.nationalreview.com/

 

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2000168/
Subject: The Rules Girls Are Back
Friday, May 12, 2000, at 9:17 AM ET

Yes, I thought that was a rather curious intervention by Eric Alterman, too. Maybe you could try to worm your way back into his good graces by getting caught for having slipped American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union?

All superb points about the Not Quite a Million Moms. Can I go back though to the even more troubling media treatment of the Claudia Kennedy sex harassment case? Despite their chunky appearance, America’s feminists impress me as an unusually agile bunch, able to execute ideological pirouettes at a speed that would have dazzled Nijinsky. Back during the Anita Hill controversy, we were all introduced to the four rules for understanding sexual harassment:

A) It doesn’t matter that the annoyance in question seems trivial to most men or even to many women: It becomes punishable harassment if the woman on the receiving end was offended by it. Millions of Americans might have thought Anita Hill hysterically over-sensitive even if everything she said were true, but what mattered were Hill’s feelings……

Hugh Hewitt is still a complete ass.

 

 Thursday, March 16

Mark Steyn’s position on commissions.

03-16steyn.mp3

HH: I begin this Thursday as I do most with Mark Steyn, columnist to the world. Mr. Steyn, we begin a story that centers on you. What has happened to the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator? The Hugh Hewitt listeners want to know where the Mark Steyn material is.

MS: My relationship with the Telegraph group, which the Spectator also belongs to, deteriorated over the last year, and became adversarial, which I don’t think is particularly healthy. And I don’t mind…I’ve been the token conservative on liberal newspapers. I don’t mind an adversarial relationship in terms of your position on the Gulf War, or Afghanistan, or the European Union or whatever. I don’t mind having differences with editors and so forth on that. But when it gets into, when the whole relationship just becomes generally toxic, then I think it’s best to hang out your shingle somewhere else, which I will do in the United Kingdom at some point.

HH: That’s the important part. You will be back writing in the UK. Any time frame set for that, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I would hope sooner rather than later. One of the things, if you’re a controversial writer, when I parted company with the National Post up in Canada, I thought well, every newspaper’s going to start calling me, because I was the hottest columnist there, according to some of their reader surveys and things. And of course, instead, these editors think oh, well, good riddance to that right-wing wacko. We don’t need a crazy guy like him. And after a couple of years of the phone not ringing, they all came kind of slinking back and made me derisory offers of one kind or another. And I would bet on the same thing happening over in London.

HH: Now isn’t this sort of suicidal behavior on the part of newspapers, Mark Steyn? And we’ll take you out of it. But we just had a Pew report showing they’re in terrible condition. Nobody cares about their in-house tubas that go on, boom, boom, boom on the old, same notes. They’re killing themselves if they deny their readers what their readers want.

MS: Well you know, one of the things I find, and I’m sure you do, too, you travel a lot around the country. And the thing about American newspapers in particular, but it’s also true of Canada and certain others, is that if you get off the plane at almost any airport on the continent, and you’ll pick up the local paper which will be a monopoly daily, published by Gannett or some other similar company, and it will just have like the world’s dullest comment page, the world’s dullest op-ed page. This is a great riveting time of war, and say what you like about crazy folks on left or right, but there’s a lot to say about it. And in fact, the newspapers, and their monopolies, have made them dull, and that’s the danger, I think, in much of the United States, that you want someone, whether you agree with him or not, that you want something that will be riveting and thought-provoking. And some of these guys have been just holding down prime op-ed real estate for decades. It’s amazing to me.

HH: Mark Steyn, last question on this. One of the Telegraph suits sent out an e-mail to someone questioning, saying we hope to have Mark Steyn back within the Telegraph family soon. Is that just shining on their distraught readers?

MS: Yeah, I don’t quite know why they’re saying that, because (laughing)

HH: You’re not coming back soon. All right.

MS: I’m not…that’s certainly something that…there’s no reason for them to be sending that out to readers.

HH: Oh, except to get the readers to go away for a while. Let’s turn to international affairs, but beginning in the domestic side. Yesterday, there came word, Mark Steyn, that the Iraq Study Group had been formed. Now I cannot find the statute that authorized this, and I suspect it’s a John Warner/Frank Wolfe gambit. But it’s got James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and a bunch of the usual suspects to study the war. I can’t believe we’re going to do the 9/11 Commission again. What’s your reaction to the formation of this group?

MS: Well, the 9/11 Commission is the…I mean, you know me. I’m a foreigner, but I’m pro-American. And yet I must say, the 9/11 Commission is everything I loathe about the United States, in that its legalistic, retrospective, showboating blowhards, pompous people going on TV round the clock. And in effect, it becomes something in and of itself. It’s not just commenting on something like a play by play guy is, but it actually changes the course of the something its commenting on. And that’s what’s bad about this. You know, Iraq isn’t a Broadway play in previews. The show has opened, and it’s on now. So it’s too late to have arguments about this little weak spot in the first act, and we should get it re-written. The show has opened, and the responsibility of these people involved in this, James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Rudy Giuliani, all these people, is that they should now be saying let’s win it, and then have the arguments.

HH: But do you suspect the White House attempted to stop this? Or are they at this point reeling on so many fronts, they didn’t think they had the ability to say no?

MS: Well, I think there is a danger in the last couple of weeks that they have lost control of they…not what’s going on in Iraq, but in a sense, the rationale behind it. Now I would imagine that James Baker, who’s very close to the Bush family, I can’t imagine him taking this, if he didn’t at least have a tacit approval from the Bush family. But at the same time, I think this is an example of just what we don’t need with Iraq. We do need a refreshing renewal of war rhetoric, but we don’t need to argue, you know, have a big commission on where the WMD are and all the rest of it, and all that hooey.

HH: Now speaking about the renewal of war rhetoric, yesterday, General John Abizaid, commander of United States Central Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. It’s available on the web. It is hard-hitting. It is actually fierce, and quite unsparing in the protrait that he paints of al Qaeda, and what they will do. And then today, the National Security strategy comes out, which is equally unsparing about Iran and the necessity of defensive action against them, if they refuse to abandon this. Is this what you’re talking about, Mark Steyn? Getting back to basics on the stakes?

MS: Absolutely. I think we have to take these guys at their word. You know, the fact of the matter is that Saddam behaved as if he had weapons of mass destruction. And the basis of American policy in this world should be that if you go around claiming to have weapons of mass destruction, and threatening to use them as the Iranians are currently doing, then it shouldn’t be a matter whether you’re just bluffing or not. We have a responsibility to take you at your word and do something about it. And that’s really the issue in Iran. Iran, actually, does generally walk the walk as well as talk the talk. They are people who have blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires. And it’s hard to, even by the biggest stretch, it’s hard to say that’s a legitimate grievance because of Israeli occupation of Palestine. I mean, they are people with a long reach, and a 25 year history of extra-territoriality. Why would they have nuclear weapons if they didn’t, at the very minimum, intend them for serious nuclear blackmail?

HH: Let’s turn to the domestic side of the attack on national security. Russ Feingold wants to censure the President. How should the GOP in the Senate respond, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I would very much hope that the only reason he’s doing this is because Karl Rove has opened up a big bank account in the Cayman Islands for him, because it’s hard to see how this can be of any advantage to the Democrats. It’s amazing to me. Just as they’ve found this sort of rather shrill opportunist bit of good news for them on the Dubai ports deal, where they found a national security angle that somehow in crude political terms worked for them, then they go and blow it all back to…Russ Feingold, basically demanding that we censure the President for eavesdropping on al Qaeda phone calls. There is no good that can come for the Democratic Party out of that, and if Russ Feingold wants to pursue it, to shore himself up with the party base, good luck to him, because it’s only going to make things worse for Hillary Clinton. Hillary will have to run to the left to avoid him peeling off significant support for her.

HH: But do you think Bill Frist will be successful in pushing this through the Judiciary Committee, onto the floor for a debate, and should he?

MS: Yes, I think he should, because I think every time the Democrats come up with this joke…these joke talking points, censure, impeachment, withdrawal from Iraq, timetable for withdrawal now, we need to set a timetable for withdrawal on April 17th, I think you should call them on it, and say fine, let’s get it to a vote, and let’s see how many of you, how many of you trinners and weather vane politicians, the John Kerry’s and all the rest of them, how many of you are actually prepared to put your vote where your party’s big mouths are.

HH: Well put. Now I want to close with a cultural question. The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame had its induction this week. James Lileks has been on this program defending, and will be later again, Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols, as pretty much the summit of American culture. Your reaction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a general proposition, Mark Steyn, and if you have any thoughts on this year’s inductees?

MS: One of the most disgusting examples of the bloated federal budget is that federal money goes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

HH: Oh, I didn’t know that.

MS: And if rock and roll is not even self-supporting, nothing in America is.

HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure. I will put my note to the Sunday Telegraph’s editor, and call him a man of not great precision or truth when he’s communicating with his e-mailers. Talk to you again next week, Mark Steyn.

End of interview.

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/040216fa_fact

http://operationyellowelephant.blogspot.com/2005/07/operation-yellow-elephant-overview.html

Friday, July 08, 2005

OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT Overview

 

 

One of the General’s readers pointed out that there isn’t a good, one stop place to learn everything you need to know about OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT. Hopefully, this post will serve that purpose. Check back often for updates.

The objective of OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT is to recruit College Republicans and Young Republicans to serve as infantry. They demanded this war and now viciously support it. It’s only right that they also experience it.

The 56th College Republican National Convention (June 24-26) and the Young Republican National Convention (July 6-10; directions) are the settings for most of the ops.

The General encourages his readers to take the initiative to create materials and to plan and conduct special operations. Please let him know what you’ve done and he’ll try to post it.

Regular readers know that the General is a proud heterosexual, Christian conservative. He is not trying to embarrass the College Republicans. Rather, he believes that by encouraging them to enlist, he is pushing them to be more vocal about the good work their doing to make our homeland safe–things like holding affirmative action bakesales, holding immigrant hunts, almost single-handedly funding Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin, relieving the elderly of the burden of having money, and punching out Joan Jett.

 

 

2/08/06: Air America:  Al Franken:  Franken interviews John Dickerson (excerpts)

Al Franken:  John Dickerson is the senior political correspondent for Slate magazine, former White House correspondent for Time magazine.  In the former role he’s gotten into a little controversy here and maybe trouble… He was the White House correspondent for Time magazine, very, very good White House correspondent, asked President Bush the embarrassing question:  What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made since 9/11?  It’s only really embarrassing in the sense that the President couldn’t answer it. Most people can pick a mistake that they’ve made and actually turn it into a positive…  And the President, as you remember, paused at times where you could drive a truck through it or an entire convoy of trucks…  So one of the most respected members of the White House press corps.  Now he’s moved on to Slate...

John,  we’ve been talking about the controversy you’ve been caught up this week — I don’t know how serious you consider it but some people do.  You were, as White House correspondent for Time magazine privy to the fact that Matt Cooper had talked to Karl Rove and that Karl Rove had outed Valerie Plame — not by name but by identity — to Matt Cooper.  Tell me if I got this wrong:  That there were subsequent articles you contributed to in one way or another in Time magazine about the controversy of Plame gate.  There were things like quoting Scott McClellan saying the White House had nothing to do with this… where you guys knew what he was saying wasn’t true.  And that you allowed it to stand without saying, We know this not to be true.  Which I understand why you would do that, but there are some people who are peeved about this.

John Dickerson:  Yes, there are some people…  I think that’s right.  I think if you look at the articles… when they were written it was all very carefully written.  And the reason you can’t just come out and say,  They’re big liars!, They’re big liars!, is because you end up giving up a source.  Now the people who hate Karl Rove and hate the President say, You’ve gotta give up your source. 

Franken:  Do you really give up the source, or do you just go, They’re big liars…., and not say who…

Dickerson:  Well, you can’t do that for two reasons.  One, you’ve got to show your proof.  You can’t just they’re big liars and we know something you don’t but we’re not going to say anymore.  And if you do say they’re liars, and you’re talking about whether you know Karl Rove was involved or not…

Franken:  Wait a minute!  Why can’t you say they’re big liars and not show the proof because you don’t show your proof all the time?

Dickerson:  Well, but you can’t say, in that instance if you say we’re certain we know when you’re talking about Karl Rove.. if you know, you know it’s Karl!… There’s not a huge universe of people…

Franken:  …There’s a huge universe of people in the White House!  Not a huge universe but a universe…

Dickerson:  When Scott McClellan was saying Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were not involved, you can’t say, We know they were but we’re not going to tell you how.”

Franken:  Wasn’t he saying, there was no one in the White House involved.  That’s what I thought was quoted.

Dickerson:  Well, I’ll have to go back and look at the articles.  In the clips of Time pieces various people have cited on the web, it’s been the Rove and Libby parts..

Franken:  Oh…

Dickerson:  I may be wrong, but…

Franken:  You’re in an odd position…

Dickerson:  But the point is this: you have a source and you make an agreement with that source not to blow their identity.  You have to keep that agreement.  And the reason you do that, even in a situation where all those people who hate Karl Rove and this White House and want them to be outed, you’ve got to remember that the same protections that protect the people who came forth about the NSA wiretaps — and people come forward about things all the time knowing their cover isn’t going to get blown.  Sometimes it’s in an instance people would like because it uncovers an NSA wiretapping scheme they don’t think is appropriate, and sometimes it protects people they hate and would like to see run out on a rail.  You can’t pick and choose.

Franken:  Is there any distinction, however, between a whistleblower who is outing something that the government is doing which is possibly unconstitutional, and a whistleblower who’s outing a whistleblower.

Dickerson:  Sure, there is.  But the point is that when you make a promise to somebody, you make the promise.  It stands.  You don’t say, Well, I’ll keep this promise until I decide not to! Or until I decide I’m going to out you!  It’s not the way you do it.

Franken:  And Matt Cooper had made that promise, that it was off the record or something.

Dickerson:  Yes.  In my instance, these were not conversations that I had.  So I’m certainly not going to play with the arrangement that other people make and sources they have…

[  ]

Franken:  The president?  Did he out Valerie Plame?

Dickerson:  No, not to me.

Franken:  Okay.  Did anyone else in the White House do it?

Dickerson:  Not to me.  I never talked about…

Franken:  ….Not to you!

Dickerson:  … Wilson’s wife or Valerie Plame. 

Franken:  Anybody else in the White House talking to anybody else in the Time magazine press organization?

Dickerson:  Well, as we know, they talked to… Libby and Rove talked to Matt Cooper.

Franken:  Libby did too.

Dickerson:  Right. This has all now been a part of the Grand Jury…

Franken:  Okay.  I thought Libby talked to other people as well.

Dickerson:  But you asked about the Time organization and…

Franken:  Okay, okay. All right, all right.  You have to live with this!

Dickerson:  [laughs]

Franken:  But you’re going to get some tough questions on this show.  You know that, don’t you.

Dickerson:  Sure. But you can see how you can make a promise and then you decide to just break the promise.  You can’t have a press that works, functions without an anonymous source.  I mean maybe in a perfect world we’d like no anonymous sources ever.  But if one person decides, well I’m going to break this because in this instance it’s compelled.  Of course, if it’s a murder or some other situation, perhaps you have a situation where you’re saving lives by breaking a confidence, that’s another matter.  But in order for the system to stay whole, you have to keep your promises.

Franken:  I’m with you.  But I am going to continue to ask you tough questions.  How’s the book going?

Dickerson:  [laughs]…It’s coming along.  We’re getting there.  If only news events wouldn’t keep interrupting so frequently. It’s coming along…

Franken:  So what news events have kept you away from doing the book you owe your publisher. 

Dickerson:  Well, we had this — and it’s all still on track!  don’t think it’s late or anything — we had this Plame business.  The whole reason I wrote about this is that there were some documents that came out in the course of an exchange of documents between Libby and the court and Fitzgerald in which the conversations I had when I was in Africa were talked about in the court documents.

Franken:  That was the Africa trip in which the secret document was floating around.

Dickerson:  Right. Although nobody knew that at the time.  But yes, that’s where Powell left with the document that had Plame’s identity in it. 

Franken:  And by the way, it’s been shown now that Plame was an undercover agent and all these rightwing people — you know, apologists for the White House — had been saying, Oh, she wasn’t under cover.  But Fitzgerald discovered that she was undercover.

Dickerson:  Right.  That’s right.  Although there’s still massive debate about it.  And one of the things that Libby’s trying to do to knock the case down is challenge that notion.

Franken: But I thought he discovered that within the last five years she had been doing undercover work overseas and the CIA had been trying to hide her identity.

Dickerson:  That’s right.  And they’d been actively trying to hide her identity.  Libby’s going to try and challenge that in court.

Franken:  But that’s it.  That’s the definition.

Dickerson:  I know it’s the definition, but definitions have definitions that sometimes get unwound in court.  In these most recent filings, January 31st, that looks like it’s one of the areas they’re pursuing.

Franken:  Is he going to be convicted before he’s pardoned?

Dickerson:  Well, let’s see.  The trial begins in ’07.  Oh, I’m sorry!  I was taking you seriously…

Franken:  No!  I’m actually serious!

Dickerson:  Well. the trial starts in January ’07, so I don’t know how long that trial takes but it’s going to take a while because…

Franken:  So conceivably he could do a few months in prison. 

Dickerson: I don’t know.

Franken:  He could appeal and stuff like that, I suppose.

Dickerson:  Right….

Just Shoot Me Joe Klein jumps the shark.By Charles P. Pierce Web Exclusive: 02.24.06 Print Friendly

Web Exclusive | Joe Klein

Cheney’s Thousand-

Yard Stare

Did the Vice President’s behavior exhibit a disdain for accountability or a reaction to emotional trauma?

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• Talk Back: Ask Joe

Posted Saturday, Feb. 18, 2006
“In less than a second, less time than it takes to tell,” Dick Cheney mused last week, his quail-hunting expedition had gone “from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love—to, my gosh, I’ve shot my friend. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before.” It was perhaps the most eloquent, emotionally unguarded moment from the notoriously buttoned-up Vice President. He seemed stunned, uncertain for once. And the haunted look in his eyes reminded me of what soldiers in Vietnam used to call the Thousand-Yard Stare—the paralytic shock that comes from seeing the impact that even low-caliber weaponry can have on human flesh.

The Vice President’s hunting accident occasioned a familiar explosion of public inanity. We seem to have a primal need for these circuses; they are the postmodern equivalent of scapegoat sacrifice. There was the embarrassing, self-righteous reportorial melee in the White House pressroom. There was the predictable patter of late-night comedians, although the jokes didn’t seem quite so funny this time; a man had been shot. There were the cable-news shouting sprees, most of which had to do with the public relations process—Had Cheney erred in not informing the press immediately?—rather than the substance of the case. There were the attempts to inflate the belated revelation of the accident into a metaphor for the arrogance and secrecy that have defined the Bush Administration. And yes, the Vice President’s behavior did seem to be another manifestation of his well-known disdain for accountability.

But Cheney’s stubborn diffidence may have been something else entirely: a consequence of the incoherence and confusion that come with emotional trauma, as well as an understandable desire to protect oneself and one’s friends from the ravening horde at a moment of personal anguish.

The possibility of vice-presidential anguish was barely mentioned by most commentators at first. Cheney is a tough customer; Oprahfied “sharing” isn’t his way. But then, there he was, with that haunted look in his Fox News interview, saying, “[T]he image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling …” Hunting had given him “great pleasure” in the past, but he wasn’t so sure now. In fact, he sounded a lot like the combat veterans I’ve spoken with over the years, for whom the living nightmare of firing a weapon under questionable circumstances is a constant theme.

“Cheney’s the sort of guy who thinks in terms of black and white,” former Senator Bob Kerrey, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said. “But now he’s used a weapon the way a soldier often does, with unexpected results that come in shades of gray. Maybe now he’ll have a better sense of what he has sent our troops out to do.”

At 65, Cheney is too old to be a baby boomer, but his five draft deferments during the Vietnam War make him an honorary member of the tribe, as does his infamous explanation of why he didn’t fight: “I had other priorities.” The failure to serve—and the relative safety and affluence of our upbringing—has been a defining quality of so many baby boomers who have come to political power, and there have been consequences. Bill Clinton often seemed daunted and uncertain in his dealings with the military. Bush and Cheney have been the opposite. They rushed to war in Iraq without adequate cause or preparation. This is not to say that military service is a requirement for leadership in time of war; neither Abraham Lincoln nor Franklin Roosevelt was a combat veteran. But for 50 years there has been a growing cultural chasm between the military and the rest of society. Those of us who haven’t served have a special responsibility to listen to and try to understand those who have. The most common complaint I’ve heard from troops recently returned from Iraq is that Americans are oblivious to what soldiers have to do every day over there. At the heart of that lament, inevitably, is the debilitating emotional cost of combat. 

One valuable metaphor emerged last week. The New York Times described the possible legal charges that could be brought in a hunting accident. “Mr. Cheney could be charged with negligence, defined as failing to understand the dangers involved and disregarding them, or recklessness, defined as understanding the dangers and disregarding them.” Which is perhaps the neatest summary I’ve seen of the public debate surrounding the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq. Absent further evidence, the Administration seems guilty of negligence—a cavalier insensitivity to the unimaginable calamities that attend the use of lethal force. And while I have little faith that Cheney’s awful experience at the Armstrong Ranch will change his views of war and peace, I do hope that it gives him pause and that he gains wisdom from the intimate knowledge that there are experiences other than “pleasure” that can attend the firing of a weapon.

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http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10923