Category: World Affairs

Here are the finalists for the Bushin30seconds Political Ad Contest. My favorite is: Bush’s Repair Shop, but all are creative and well done.

Michael Moore on the Support Our Troops line:

Remember back in March, once the war had started, how risky it was to make any anti-war comments to people you knew at work or school or, um, at awards ceremonies? One thing was for sure; if you said anything against the war, you had better follow it up immediately with this line: “BUT I SUPPORT THE TROOPS!” Failing to do that meant that you were not only unpatriotic and un-American, your dissent meant that you were putting our kids in danger, that you might be the reason they lose their lives. Dissent was only marginally tolerated if you pledged your “support” for our soldiers.

Of course, you needed to do no such thing. Why? Because people like you have always supported “the troops.” Who are these troops? Most of them are our poor, our working class. Most of them enlisted because it was about the only place to get a job or receive the guarantee of a college education. You, my good friends, have always, through your good works, your contributions, your activism, your votes, supported these very kids who come from the other side of the tracks. You never need to be defensive when it comes to your “support” for the “troops” ? you are the only ones who have always been there for them.

Michael Moore’s 7 Questions for George W. Bush. I heard from a friend that Moore is working on an anti-Bush film to show in theatres in Fall, 2004.

I’ve been listening to the BU radio station, a really jamming station of Thai pop music. I’ve been particularly excited about this Ratree 2002 compilation CD, and then I found this: Thai Grammies CD. Could it be possible that Grammy’s is already localizing their brand.

Speaking of which, listening to Kumar Kishore, an amazing Bollywood singer. He just doesn’t sing a bad song.

Had to chuckle at this story about
a Hong Kong education minister getting caught playing computer games at a meeting. I really miss doing my Asiafirst weblog. Frank Yu, where are you when I need you?

Another amazing expose by Seymour Hersh speculates that CIA agents frustrated with the Bush Administration’s sloppiness with intelligence decided to forge documents in order to embarrass the Bush administration later:

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, ?Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.? He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

?The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,? the former officer said. ?They said, ?O.K, we?re going to put the bite on these guys.?? My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. ?Everyone was bragging about it??Here?s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.?? These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

?They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go?to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,? my source said. ?They thought it?d be bought at lower levels?a big bluff.? The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. ?It got out of control.?

This is hearsay reporting, But Hersch has an extremely skeptical ear and thoroughly investigates things before he reports even speculation (maybe the CIA should hire him). I saw Hersch give an amazing talk to a small group of 20 at my university (we found out later that he was investigating the shooting down of Korean KAL plane at one of the local air force bases).

Other revelations he has made: some of Kissinger’s unscrupulous tactics, the link between Saddam Hussein and Russian premier Chernomyrdin and several others. He also broke the Mai Lai massacre and suggested that Pakistan provided nuclear weapons technology to North Korea.

An amazing study on the hazards of watching Fox News compared the level of knowledge of people by the news channels they watched. The conclusions (hardly surprising) was that people who watched Fox News tended to have more misconceptions about the Iraqi conflict than those who watched PBS or NPR. The implications are a little broader than that though.

It found a high correlation between respondents with the most misperceptions and their support for the decision to go to war. Only 23 percent of those who held none of the three misperceptions supported the war, while 53 percent who held one misperception did so. Of those who believe that both WMDs and evidence of al-Qaeda ties have been found in Iraq and that world opinion backed the United States, a whopping 86 percent said they supported war. More specifically, among those who believed that Washington had found clear evidence of close ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, two-thirds held the view that going to war was the best thing to do. Only 29 percent felt that way among those who did not believe that such evidence had been found.

And another:

The average frequency of misperceptions among respondents who planned to vote for Bush was 45 percent, while among those who plan to vote for a hypothetical Democrat candidate, the frequency averaged only 17 percent. Asked “Has the US found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda?” 68 percent of Bush supporters replied affirmatively. By contrast, two of every three Democrat-backers said no.

While I think the conclusions of this study are generally valid, this is a case where you need to look at the exact wording of the questions and the order in which they are presented. In other words, you have to distinguish between beliefs and understanding of facts. Even though pro-war people might understand that there was no hard evidence linking Al Queda to Saddam, perhaps it was their belief that this was the case based on the facts available at the time. How do you form beliefs? By listening to people you trust, and assigning credibility to what they say. And if you believe that Bush is generally a honest god-fearing president and that Bush believes that there is a WMD/Al Queda/Saddam link, then saying that Saddam possesses WMD becomes something you agree with. It has to do with presumption. When you are preying on people’s fear, the presumption first of all is to be safe. The question turns from “how can be sure that Saddam has WMD?” to “how can we be sure that he doesn’t?”

Lately, I’ve been following Tapped, the wonderful liberal group weblog on the American Prospect website. Found the link to the Presidential Mendacity Index, a list of the most famous presidential lies (and a rather biased attempt to rate the level of each president’s lies). My favorite by Ronald Reagan:

After opining in August 1980 that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” Reagan arrived at a campaign rally to find a tree decorated with this sign: “Chop me down before I kill again.”

Arnold Kling points out the inconsistencies of Howard Dean’s political beliefs.

Consider two families living under identical middle-class circumstances. One family chooses to spend its discretionary income on cable television, a brand new SUV, and extravagant birthday parties. The other family chooses to do without cable, drive a used car, and have modest birthday parties, so that it can spend its discretionary income on health insurance. Howard Dean would tax the second family to pay for health insurance for the first family.

I’ve been posting away on watchblog. Plogging for President and Bush’s trade policy and election strategy. I quote from an editorial written by two African presidents:

In the period from 2001 to 2002, America’s 25,000 cotton farmers received more in subsidies ? some $3 billion ? than the entire economic output of Burkina Faso, where two million people depend on cotton. Further, United States subsidies are concentrated on just 10 percent of its cotton farmers. Thus, the payments to about 2,500 relatively well-off farmers has the unintended but nevertheless real effect of impoverishing some 10 million rural poor people in West and Central Africa.