Archive Listing
February 12, 2011 - February 5, 2011
Friday, January 08, 2010
"At war with al
Qaeda"
THE BUCK STOPS WHERE? Yesterday, the president did two things in his latest remarks about the Christmas Day bomb attack. He pulled what we Philadelphians call a Donovan McNabb, beginning by taking full responsibility for another embarrassing failure and then proceeding to shower blame everywhere else. The buck stops with him, he proclaimed, but everybody else screwed up big time. Just so we all know. Then he did a second thing. He carefully and definitively framed what he now concedes is a war on terror:
President Obama Thursday afternoon
publicly called for the intelligence community to do better in the wake
of the Christmas Day bombing attempt. In the process, he offered a response to critics on the
right who have complained that he has not used rhetoric indicating the
seriousness of the situation.
"While passions and politics can often obscure the hard work before us, let's be clear about what this moment demands," the president said. "We are at war."
"We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again," he continued. "And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them."
The president said America has "made progress" in that war, having inflicted "major blows against al Qaeda leaders." He said "we have disrupted plots at home and abroad and saved American lives."
He then reached out to the Muslim world, as he has in the past.
"We know that the vast majority of Muslims reject al Qaeda," he said. "But it is clear that al Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations, not just in the Middle East but in Africa and other places, to do their bidding."
He said that is the reason he has directed intelligence officials to develop a new strategy to deal with "lone recruits." And he added that it was also crucial to "communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death, including the murder of fellow Muslims, while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress."
America, he said, believes in the aspirations that all people share, such as "to get an education, to work with dignity, to live in peace and security."
"That's the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists," he said.
"While passions and politics can often obscure the hard work before us, let's be clear about what this moment demands," the president said. "We are at war."
"We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again," he continued. "And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them."
The president said America has "made progress" in that war, having inflicted "major blows against al Qaeda leaders." He said "we have disrupted plots at home and abroad and saved American lives."
He then reached out to the Muslim world, as he has in the past.
"We know that the vast majority of Muslims reject al Qaeda," he said. "But it is clear that al Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations, not just in the Middle East but in Africa and other places, to do their bidding."
He said that is the reason he has directed intelligence officials to develop a new strategy to deal with "lone recruits." And he added that it was also crucial to "communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death, including the murder of fellow Muslims, while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress."
America, he said, believes in the aspirations that all people share, such as "to get an education, to work with dignity, to live in peace and security."
"That's the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists," he said.
We're not at war with an entire sector of fundamentalist Islam that has been sponsored and proliferated throughout the middle east and beyond by Arab kings, Persian and Palestinian despots, powerful muslim clerics, expatriate academics, and numerous front organizations here and abroad which masquerade as peaceful ambassadors of good will. No. We are at war with a single entity called Al Qaida, which deals in some mysteriously nameless brand of hatred that rounds up "lone recruits" for unspecified violent ends. And if this one nefarious organization could be made to go away, that would end all the present foolishness as well as the need for our Nobel Peace Lord to sully his silver tongue with bellicose words. Because as we all know, the rest of us would be perfectly happy if we could just be guaranteed an education, dignified employment, and, you know, peace and security.
I don't know. Maybe he's sincere. Maybe that's how he really looks at it. But I can't help thinking that he's actually doing his best to send al Qaida a tip based on his own lengthy experience as a community organizer. If they could simply change their name, diversify into all manner of activities, some putatively focused on education, dignity, etc, and others, well, never mind, then he, the Ultimate Community Organizer, would be able to ignore them and go back to dismissing all acts of terrorist violence as isolated, meaningless events. I mean, could he be telling them to get smart and go legit, at least on the surface?
It's not like there's no precedent he might have in mind...
Change the damn name, fellas!
Are you listening, bin Laden? Get a reassuring makeover. Get some government grants and a thousand little offices. It makes recruiting far easier to do and far harder to track. If nobody can figure out who you are, what you're doing, or how it all works, then nobody can be blamed. Especially not the remote and austere president of the United States.
It's
called the Chicago Way.
Unless that's what the jihadists are already doing and Obama's too dumb-smart to recognize his own M.O.
Or...
But no, that can't be right...
posted at
10:14 am
by
LocoPunk
Pumpkinhead
speaks...
"Connecting
the dawts..."
WHAT'S OLD IS NEW AGAIN. Oh please. How would the bobble-head doll of alphabet network news respond if 300 Americans had (nearly) died under the watch of a Republican president? As it happens, we know. Back in May of 2004, Koppel presided over a morbid ceremony of reading the names of American servicemen killed in action. It was a purely political exercise for the purpose of undermining U.S. foreign policy, specifically the War in Iraq, that illegal and delusionary engagement which, only now, can we see helped distract the terrorists who want to kill us from focusing their attention on ordinary American citizens. Here's how we reported it at the time:
I watched some but not all of Ted
Koppel's memorial on Nightline.
My guess is that hardly anybody watched all of it. What was there to
learn
or feel? At approximately two seconds per name and photo, there was no
way to connect with any individual casualty in the list. The show's
format
deliberately restricted us to only this duad of data -- name and photo,
name and photo, name and photo -- as if we were being subjected to a
kind
of sensory deprivation. I experienced the illusion that the broadcast
was
actually being transmitted in black and white.
The absence of music in a medium where it is a standard part of the experience reminded me of Failsafe, the 1960s nightmare fable of the Cold War. In that soundtrack-less movie, the nuclear annihilation of New York City is rendered through a sequence of soundless freezing of live action shots. Children playing. Freeze. Pedestrians bustling. Freeze. It's an act of reduction and diminishment. This is it; this is all they are now; it doesn't matter who they really were, what they believed, what they loved; they're just gone. Though Koppel titled his piece The Fallen, the broadcast was not about honoring individual sacrifice. It in no way compared to the newspaper tributes that memorialized the 9/11 dead. Those were about introducing us to people whose lives had value and meaning despite their premature end. The Fallen was not that. It was a featureless droning process of accumulation. It was the broadcast equivalent of the Vietnam Memorial known as The Wall, a bleak rendering of futility.
Connecting the "dawts"? (I just love it when American pseudo-intellectuals put on their Euro-affected accents for the Brit press. Don't you?) Here are two more "dawts" to connect:Koppel made his whole career out of the
Iranian
hostage crisis that occurred in the Carter administration.
He wrote the epitaph for that career by journeying to Iran and concluding that Iranians were smarter than Americans who supported Bush.
He wrote the epitaph for that career by journeying to Iran and concluding that Iranians were smarter than Americans who supported Bush.
All this should be ancient history, shouldn't it? Network dinosaurs should go politely extinct like everyone else, right? But all things Carter administration are new again, ain't? Including Ted the Head.
Gawd-help-us.
P.S. I forgot to mention just how much this midget with the gigantic head and even more gigantic ego offends me. It's, like, a lot. I didn't like him even before the 2004 memorial obscenity. Back when I was doing Shuteye Nation (c. 2000), I wrote (and still stand by) this:
Ted Koppule. The sheer size of
his head is stupefying.
It's so awe-inspiringly huge that no one has ever been able to listen
to
a word he says. Maybe that's why he always gives the impression that
he's
talking to himself, for his own amusement, but really really loud. It
gives
you the feeling that if you could listen to him, he's being
kind
of wry and witty and cogent, though loud. But it might be that he's
just
reading the phone book off the teleprompter, really loud. His show is
called
Nightmine,
and did we mention that his head is just shockingly enormous? Oh.
I thought I was doing satire then. Now -- after hearing him read the names of U.S. military casualties as if they were entries in the phonebook -- I'm convinced it was the literal truth of a small small man with an ego 20 times the size of his actual worth. I despise and detest Ted Koppel. If you object, you know where to find me.
posted at
2:04 pm
by
InstaPunk
Thursday, January 07, 2010
A New Media Beacon
No,
not him. The place I swiped this pic from. You'll see.
NOT THAT IT MATTERS... If you think it's been quiet around here because we've been goofing off, think again. We've been out looking for pinpoints of light in the enveloping darkness of this ill-starred new decade. The news itself has degenerated to farce as Obama tries to pretend he cares about protecting Americans from terrorists and the Democratic congress pretends that its process for passing the healthcare bill bears some resemblance to deliberative democracy. Are various voices being insightful or humorous about these ridiculous charades? Yes. But there's a flavor of gallows humor about it all, which is less like light than a chuckle in the dark.
And then there have been the usual dumb distractions, all the more annoying in the context of our dawning awareness that the Obama administration has hurled the nation's security apparatus all the way back to the 1990s and our economic strategy all the way back to the 1930s. So what are hot topics out in op-ed land? Brit Hume's arrogant suggestion that Tiger Woods convert to Christianity. The disgraceful fact that conservatives as a group are badmouthing the only genuine American economic success of the past year, James Cameron's anti-American blockbuster Avatar. The amazing discovery, reported with much less irony than outrage, that winter is still a season of cold and snow and ice. And btw, how dare Rush Limbaugh not die after being rushed to the hospital... and just how drunk was Mariah Carey at that awards banquet? At least she didn't look quite as foolish as JLo in her catsuit or Robert Gibbs stonewalling journalists about his boss's repeated C-SPAN, er, fibs. And so on.
In the dramatic form that used to be called tragedy (back before the term was coopted to be a synonym for anything sad or hurtful), there are two key moments. The first is the climax, which occurs when the tragic hero has committed the action or made the decision that dooms him to destruction. The second is called the catastrophe. It's the moment when the inevitable doom arrives. Everything in between is a kind of waiting, usually filled by playwrights with fine speeches and plot contrivances. But it's really just waiting. Something like the absurdist play Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which minor characters from Hamlet are offstage wondering what the hell is going on and, yes, waiting to find out how bad it's going to be.
Quite theatrically, the climax of our own national drama occurred on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Senate passage of the healthcare nightmare and the comedy of errors that was the underwear bomber's mission were both dooming events for President Obama and, unfortunately, for us as well. He cannot fully recover from the first, because he will be equally damned if the bill passes or it doesn't. Until that moment he still had the opportunity to pull the congress and nation back from the brink and, only somewhat humbled, call for a truly bipartisan do-over. But now his 60-vote majority is committed to a man in terms voters cannot mistake, and the senators who did Obama's bidding will be equally damaged by a failure to pass a bill with their filibuster-proof majority or by passage of a bill so recklessly corrupt and destructive they will never live it down. Catastrophe awaits. What specific form it will take we do not know. We can guess all we want, but we're really just twiddling our thumbs.
The same is true of the second climactic moment, which occurred just 24 hours after the first. The pundits and experts and administration spokesmen can jabber all they want to about reviews and reforms and procedures and fixing what's broken in "the system," but the reality is that it's too late. Obama's big gamble that he could end the war on terror by wishing it away, renaming it, making nice to fanatics who hate us, and transferring all the real action to the criminal justice system and a purely defensive homeland security strategy has failed. Utterly. A system as big and complicated and lethargic as this one is cannot be fixed quickly if it can be fixed at all. For eight years its seeming success was an illusion, procured by the aggressive stance of the Bush administration that put our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to lure Islamic terrorists away from the United States into the sights of the world's greatest military. They took the bait. Now the bait has been self-righteously and sanctimoniously withdrawn. Are they appeased? No. They are emboldened. Catastrophe awaits. Again, what specific form it will take we do not know. We can guess all we want, but we're really just twiddling our thumbs.
And whistling in the dark.
So most of what's going on at the moment, this week, this month, doesn't matter. We're all just Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern idling in the wings.
But. I did find one pinpoint of light. It may be just a flaring match today, but because it is aiming itself toward a much bigger and brighter future, it might eventually acquire some power to affect one of the Iago's who has conspired to lead us into ruin. Andrew Breitbart's new Big Journalism site is here, and I'm happy to report that all of the initial articles are worthwhile reading. Please do read them all and see if you agree with me that it sounds like an army abuilding. God knows, we need one here on the homefront.
That's why that small reedy sound you hear is me, whistling.
