The Abu Ghraib H-Blocks

A few times in our 16 month history of blogging, we have felt compelled to note analogies between the current war in Iraq and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In one recent post, we noted, with what was meant to be tone of sarcasm:

The US forces in Iraq should be getting advice from their British counterparts on how not to run their War on Terror.

This was in the context of the demonisation of the people of Fallujah in terms of a savage mob that had attacked a convoy of US contractors; a similar demonisation of an Irish mob had arguably led to the state-facilitated murder of the lawyer for members of this supposed mob. But as we say, we thought we were being sarcastic about Britain's War on Terror guiding the war in Iraq. That was until we read the analysis of the stunning "torture memos" which are now leaking to every big newspaper here in the USA. Brad DeLong has very helpfully pointed his readers to an expert analysis by Michael Froomkin of one of the Justice Department memos from August 2002, and as we read down we see the following:

Despite the increasingly heard right-wing complaint that the [US] Supreme Court should not rely on the decisions of foreign courts, the [US Justice Department] Memo then turns to what other nations have said constitutes torture. The most important case on which the Memo relies is "Ireland v. United Kingdom":, a 1978 decision of the European Court of Human Rights which held that "interrogation in depth" involving "five techniques" was not "torture" but merely "inhuman and degrading treatment". The five techniques were:

a) wall-standing: forcing the detainees to remain for periods of some hours in a "stress position", described by those who underwent it as being “spreadeagled against the wall, with their fingers put high above the head against the wall, the legs spread apart and the feet back, causing them to stand on their toes with the weight of the body mainly on the fingers”;

b) hooding: putting a black or navy coloured bag over the detainees’ heads and, at least initially, keeping it there all the time except during interrogation;

c) subjection to noise: pending their interrogations, holding the detainees in a room where there was a continuous loud and hissing noise;

d) deprivation of sleep: pending their interrogations, depriving the detainees of sleep;

e) deprivation of food and drink.. subjecting the detainees to a reduced diet during their stay at the centre and pending interrogations.

Froomkin goes on to discuss whether US law even admits a distinction between torture and "inhuman and degrading treatment" (he thinks it doesn't) but we were simply flabbergasted to see that the Pentagon is in fact relying on techniques drawing directly from the Northern Ireland experience. We're not sure that anyone has ever argued that these tactics were even "effective" in the sense of proving the security forces with good information, but they certainly created an ongoing public relations debacle and surely fueled the disastrous IRA hunger stikes of the early 1980s. Just what do Blair and Dubya talk about at these summits?

UPDATE: In all of Christopher Hitchens' lust for war in Iraq, it looks like the one thing that finally awoke his conscience is the Northern Ireland analogy.

[Updated link: the relevant sections are pages 27-29 of the Bybee memo].

FURTHER UPDATE 1 MARCH 2005: Another quote and link to back up our closing paragraph above. This New Yorker article notes the futility of the US resorting to 1970s British tactics in Northern Ireland, when the British themselves gave up on them:

Tom Parker, a former officer for M.I.5, the British intelligence agency, who teaches at Yale, argued that, whether or not forceful interrogations yield accurate information from terrorist suspects, a larger problem is that many detainees "have nothing to tell." For many years, he said, British authorities subjected members of the Irish Republican Army to forceful interrogations, but, in the end, the government concluded that "detainees aren’t valuable." A more effective strategy, Parker said, was "being creative" about human intelligence gathering, such as infiltration and eavesdropping. "The U.S. is doing what the British did in the nineteen-seventies, detaining people and violating their civil liberties," he said. "It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalizing the entire population."

The gombeens of the dish

[Apologies in advance to non-soccer fans]. Yesterday from our USA-based exile, we watched England play France in the 2004 European Football Championships. As widely reported, the match featured a jaw-dropping conclusion; we are still looking for the inevitable newspaper headline ZZ Top as the most apt summary of what happened. But that's not our issue today.

We watched the match at home on pay-per-view from our local incompetent cable monopoly, which charges $20 (plus unspecified "taxes and fees"). In this case though, we can't blame the cable company too much for the price, because we knew what the problem was when the first screen came up at the start of the broadcast: "..Presented by Setanta."

Setanta is the epitome of the downside of Celtic Tiger Ireland -- a greasy till bunch of aspiring monopolists who attract little scrutiny back home because there's still this plucky little Ireland mentality that expects us to be proud when our home-grown rapacious suits do just as well as overseas suits in making loads of money -- especially when it's dressed up in a Celtic-tech veneer as with the company's name, drawing (like their parasitic counterparts in government, Fianna Fail) on Irish mythology. Traditional Irish slang had coined the appropriate word for the village version of this character, the gombeen man, but he's alive and well and running a much slicker enterprise now.

And $20 is a magic number for them -- it's the benchmark price for any football broadcast (soccer or Gaelic) over which they have the rights, and it's $20 whether you get it at home on PPV or in the pub. [As it happens, the audio track on our broadcast was dreadful, so they are not even delivering competence for the high price]. Now in fact, we had a tendentious conversation with the manager of a branch of an Oirish pub chain in Philadelphia a few years ago, during which he said "...it's Setanta that requires we charge $20 per customer for the broadcast."

At which point we started to wonder...is that legal? Setanta is distributing a product (the satellite feed) to pubs and setting the price at which this product can be sold on to customers. That's called resale price maintenance and it is of questionable legality in the USA and in other countries where Setanta does business. Where's a regulator when you need one? And why would UEFA, which presumably wants to broaden the audience for football as much as possible, allow Setanta these monopoly rights that essentially restrict the US viewing of their showpiece tournament to expats willing to stomach the high cost?

UPDATE 23 Dec 2004: Not only does Setanta fleece those abroad watching the matches, it fleeces the players -- they are marketing a DVD about Cork's exploits with not a penny going to the players.

Another way we might have gotten a united Ireland

Funny cartoon on supposed D-Day/Iraq war analogies, with Irish-related punchline.

Six Degrees of George Soros

The word has gone out from the Republican National Committee to their spinners in the media: use any and all means to attack George Soros. Soros is a Dubya critic with money and is therefore viewed as a particular threat. Things quickly turned ugly with Washington insider Tony Blankley's outright anti-Semetic attack on Soros: "He was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the holocaust." The fangs had to come in a bit after that one but now there's a new game to find links, however tenuous, between Soros and, like, bad stuff.

So readers of the Wall Street Journal today go the editorial page and find the following:

THE AMERICAS
How to Lose Friends in Latin America

George Soros gets millions, but what does the American taxpayer get?
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady


Duly intrigued, we wade through the entire article (subs. req'd), which concerns a convoluted dispute between the US State Department and an Ecuadorian activist, looking for this bombshell revelation about that awful Soros, and then it comes:

While Mr. Teran [the activist] has had to go to the mattresses for his project, [the US Agency for International Development] has "obligated" more than $9 million to the Soros Foundations and George Soros's Open Society Institute since 1994. Recall that Mr. Soros is a renowned critic of the classical economic liberalism that made America great.

So that's it: USAID is not giving money to a particular project. USAID has given money to a George Soros-supported institution, along of course with the thousands of other projects that USAID has supported over the same period. Spin mission accomplished.

A Shining Candle in the Wind

In the manner of Roger Ailes (not the bald repulsive one), we offer a little puzzle: Of which event, concerning the death of a major global figure, is this Wall Street Journal online editorial page article writing?

vulgarity and gaudy grief...The obscene hyperventilation that followed X's death, the breast-beating, the bawling, the wailing, the flailing...the martyr worship, the rampant mythology, the ululation...grieving for X as if X were a saint, a sage, an angel...

Every two-bit hack became a hagiographer; every chain-smoking, beer-swilling, quote-piping reporter became the builder of a monument of grief...Sonorous editorials were written--by men and women who should have known better--and headlines of the most excruciating unctuousness were confected by normally hard-bitten copywriters...

[I] gathered a bushel of inane quotes from sniffling teenagers and yentas. Never have I hated my job more, or had more contempt for the journalist's milieu. I was only obeying orders; but we've heard that line before, and have learned to treat it with scorn...My editors had become praise-singers. I had a bit part in this process of X's deification, but a part all the same. The memory makes me feel ill.

UPDATE: Yes, Princess Diana and not Ronald Reagan, a tirade from Dorothy Rabinowitz's Media Log column, though actually penned by fellow spite-meister Tunku Varadarajan.
We welcome guesses for these additional questions: (1) When will Dorothy Rabinowitz offer a similarly contemptuous account of some of the more mawkish aspects of the Reagan memorials, and (2) will such an article come sooner than an OpinionJournal retraction of their gloating over the State Department Global Terrorism report for 2003, which showed a reduction in global terrorism -- given that the numbers have now themselves been retracted? Their gloating included the following:

We're Winning
....
But isn't it more newsworthy that the State Department numbers suggest the Times' cliché [of rising terrorism in the Arab world] is false?

DUDES! Sometimes a cliche is a cliche because it's TRUE!

The mutation of Irish-American populism

It's getting more difficult to ignore the pronounced rightward drift of Irish-American public figures and commentary. One could point to the pro-Hitler rantings of Father Coughlin in the 1930s as an indication that some latent reactionary tendencies have been there for a while -- surely though, Coughlin was a bizarre exception to the potent combination of hawkish liberal populism that Irish-American politics used to represent.

But even if reaction was present before, it's now a phenomenon of much broader scale and scope. Some of it is fairly benign and is presumably what people have in mind when they use the expression "Reagan Democrats." However, a quick tour of US TV screens and newspapers on any day over the last few years would range from the ranting and thuggery of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, to the inexplicably embittered vitriol of Michael Kelly (RIP) against Bill Clinton and Al Gore, to the shallow superficiality of Maureen Dowd aimed at the same two men. And then there's the pure unadulterated Irish-American spin of Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie.

We were prompted to actually post about this by the following observation from Andrew Sullivan:

Ah, yes. Modern populist conservatism [Ann Coulter]. O'Reilly is another case. When I listen to him blather on, I'm reminded of a drunk Irish uncle at Christmas, who can't shut up and cannot be argued with. Switch him off.

It's always tough to get a read on how Sullivan feels about his Irish-Catholic identity; sometimes it appears as useful evidence of quasi-victimhood, when Dubya is perceived as playing too much to the evangenical gallery, sometimes it's an almost sub-conscious pride in an Irish Tory identity, but in this case it's serving as the equivalent of the bleacher seats for the more gauche members of the political movement of which Sullivan is a part. It's like those posh Oirish types who announce that they are holidaying in the "Balearic Islands" to separate themselves from the Irish plebs also on their way to Majorca, emphasis on the 'j.'

We still don't have a good theory for why Irish-American punditry has evolved the way it has. But looking at present day politics in the Irish Republic might lessen some of the mystery given the current government's combination of cronyism disguised as populism and outright incompetence. If it's really innate, that's bad news, because it means we're stuck with the Bills and Seans, the Maureens and the Eds, for quite a while.

Dubya does Krusty

[White House chief lawyer]: Anytime a discussion came up about interrogations with the president, . . . the directive was, 'Make sure it is lawful. Make sure it meets all of our obligations under the Constitution, U.S. federal statutes and applicable treaties.'

Krusty the Clown: I heartily endorse this event or product.

And Liam Neeson is not actually Michael Collins either

You'll never beat the Irish...when it comes to our celebrities having a higher profile in the US than our politicians. For, in the planning for the Reagan funeral service on Friday:

Irish tenor Ronan Tynan has been asked by Nancy Reagan to sing at the funeral of her husband. Mr Tynan will sing Ave Maria and Amazing Grace.

but,

Other countries, however, held off final plans until their embassies in Washington received the official invitation to attend the ceremony at the [Capitol] rotunda on Thursday and the funeral on Friday.

Even Ireland, the home of Mr. Reagan’s forebears, who hailed from Ballypooreen in County Tipperary, had yet to hear from the administration.

"The funeral is by invitation only," said Josephine Doyle, administrator at the Irish Embassy here. "We don’t know whether it will be Prime Minister Bertie Ahern or President Mary McAleese. We’re waiting to be invited."

Since then, Mary got the invitation, but Ronan will still have the primo spot amongst the Irish at the service. And yes, that business about Reagan being from Ballyporeen. Given the Boston Globe's obsession with John Kerry's non-Irishness, we eagerly await their crack team analysis of this factoid, which doubtless they are working on as we type.

UPDATE: Whatever about Reagan's actual credentials as a Tipperary man, he has a spiritual descendant alive and well in Dublin. Various people have run the risk this week of raising Reagan's tendency to "remember" his role in events that he could not have been a part of, such as being in Europe during World War II. Lord Mayor of Dublin Royston Brady, a member of Ireland's permanent party of government, Fianna Fail, is also a candidate in the country's European Parliament elections on Friday. Now, not to put too fine a point on it, there's already abundant evidence that Royston is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but such are the people who get elevated to stardom in Irish politics.

But two days before the election, the Irish media have performed the valuable service of airing a piece of supposed family lore claimed by Royston: that his father's taxi was hijacked and used by bombers in a devastating attack in Dublin in 1974. This claim, which is considered implausible, might be taken as a bit of harmless Zelig-like fantasising by Royston, except for the serious business that the crime remains unsolved, to the distress of the bereaved, and progress in solving it has been hindered by Fianna Fail's odd reluctance to press the British government for potentially valuable information on it. It is therefore unlikely that Royston will be able to let his "recollection" float above the facts in the way that Reagan managed.

So it was like Duran Duran compared to the Sex Pistols

Andrew Sullivan on Ronald Reagan:

But as a performance in general, Reagan's was an exemplum of style and class, after a decade of tackiness and grime.

UPDATE: We expect that Sullywatch is going to have more to say about Sullivan's article, not least because it continues his comical tendency to stage his acts of defiance of totalitarianism from, shall we say, sheltered locations. So in this article:

I remember a crisp sunny day in Cambridge [Mass., but it might as well be the shire] after the bombing of Libya in retaliation for terrorism. I was exultant. Others were outraged...I remember seeing a cover-story in The New York Times at the time [1984] by Johnny Apple: "Why Is This Man So Popular?" I remember laughing out loud at it in a sandwich shop in Georgetown [DC], and thinking, not for the last time, "How Can Some Liberals Be So Dumb?"

This from a member of the crowd that loves to invoke Churchill at every opportunity, who told the British people that "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." Fine, but how about a capuccino?

The Kingdom of the United States of America

Royal terminology watch:

1. Monday's Wall Street Journal editorial:
The Reagan Restoration

2. Remarks from Dubya to the Pope:

I also bring a message from my government...

3. Remarks from Dubya to a conference on faith-based initiatives:

Listen, what I'm telling you is, is that I told our government, the people in my government rather than fear faith programs, welcome them.

(to be continued)

And now for something completely different

To give everyone a break from the Reagan coverage, we are pleased to announce that due to our excellent sources in Washington DC, we have been given access to a key document which initiated a diplomatic scam perpetrated on a gullible diplomacy "newbie." Due to embarrassment, the scam's victim is remaining anonymous but the CIA is confident that there is enough identifying information in the document that, with a few weeks work, their analysts can track him or her down. Here is the document:

JANUARY 2002
WASHINGTON, DC USA

ATTENTION: THE SECRETARY OF STATE

DEAR SIR,

CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL

I AM THE SON OF THE FORMER RULER OF MY COUNTRY, GEORGE H.W. BUSH. HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER A SUBSTANTIAL SUM OF CREDIBILITY INTO YOUR ACCOUNT. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR OVER THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS (200) AGO BY THE USA. THIS ACTION, RESULTING FROM WINNING TWO WORLD WARS, WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE UNITED NATIONS AND AMONGST POLICYMAKERS WORLDWIDE.

WE ARE NOW READY TO TRANSFER THE FUND TO A NEW PROJECT IN IRAQ AND THAT IS WHERE YOU COME IN. IT IS IMPORTANT TO INFORM YOU THAT AS SOMEONE WITH A COWBOY IMAGE, I AM FORBIDDEN TO OPERATE THIS CREDIBILITY ACCOUNT MYSELF; THAT IS WHY WE REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE. THE TOTAL SUM WILL BE SHARED AS FOLLOWS: 70% FOR US, 25% FOR YOU AND 5% FOR LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL EXPENSES INCIDENT TO THE TRANSFER.

THE TRANSFER IS RISK FREE ON BOTH SIDES. I AM IN A POSITION TO GIVE YOU DIRECTIVE ON WHO TO CONTACT IN MY COUNTRY FOR THE PROCUREMENT. IF YOU FIND THIS PROPOSAL ACCEPTABLE, WE SHALL REQUIRE THE FOLLOWING ITEMS:

(A) A SPEECH MAKING CLAIMS ABOUT MOBILE WEAPONS LABS, AND OTHER WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

(B) ONE (1) EMPTY ANTHRAX VIAL - FOR PUBLICITY AND EASY COMMUNICATION.

(C) YOUR VOICE AND VISAGE, FOR USES TO BE DETERMINED BY US.

ALTERNATIVELY WE WILL FURNISH YOU WITH THE TEXT OF WHAT TO TYPE INTO YOUR LETTER-HEADED PAPER, ALONG WITH A BREAKDOWN EXPLAINING, COMPREHENSIVELY WHAT WE REQUIRE OF YOU. THE BUSINESS WILL TAKE US FIFTEEN (15) WORKING MONTHS TO ACCOMPLISH.

PLEASE REPLY URGENTLY.

BEST REGARDS
GEORGE W. BUSH

So that's what he meant about being a uniter not a divider

From a scoop in today's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd):

Citing confidential Justice Department opinions drafted after Sept. 11, 2001, the report advised that the executive branch of the government had "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit [including torture] because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."

A request for honesty

In the coverage of the death of Ronald Reagan, if the pundits are going to emphasise its occurrence on D-day weekend as a sign of his sense of timing (as Wolf Blitzer is currently doing), then please consider the alternative possibility that the Reagans chose this weekend for his death.

UPDATE: Sullywatch's measured dissent from the Reagan hagiography gets it right.

FURTHER UPDATE: Someone writing in a major media outlet finally floats the Reagan death timing hypothesis:

New York Times Op-Ed June 18
Planning for the Long Goodbye
By BARRON H. LERNER

...Was Mr. Reagan's pneumonia, the cause of his death, aggressively treated with antibiotics, or was the disease allowed to be the "old man's friend?"

Agent Raines: Mission Accomplished

Former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines seems to have a new gig as an opinion columnist for the Guardian. The debut piece, his reflections on the Presidential campaign season so far, has attracted much blog commentary. Initially it was seized upon by the reactionary right (Andrew Sullivan, OpinionJournal) as proof of a supposed leftist agenda that Raines must have had with him at the NYT.

But it didn't take much of a reading to see that Raines' article, while exhibiting some primitive Marxist claptrap about a deceived proletariat, was really emblematic of the elitist superficiality that caused Bill Clinton and Al Gore so many problems in the NYT's editorials and political reporting. Sullywatch was quickly on the case, and Brad DeLong has collected several critiques here.

It would be interesting to know how the Raines diatribe went down with Guardian readers; our fear is that its smugly fatalistic view of American politics found a ready audience. And in what must rank as one of Andrew Sullivan's more prophetic insights, a full two years ago, with Raines then in charge of the NYT, he wrote:

RAINES WATCH: [NYT editorial appointment] The Guardianization of the New York Times continues.

So Raines is in fact like one of those undercover operatives who has to lie low for a while after a crisis, but then can return to the fold.

And while we're looking through Sully's 2002 archives, he draws our attention to a bizarre statement by a fellow reactionary that deserves another look:

I guess he's just being honest, but Mickey Kaus says it's "intensely disappointing" that [Democratic Congressman] Condit might be legitimately cleared in the Chandra Levy investigation.

It's worth looking back at the Kaus obsession with the Condit-Chandra business just to see the level of dysfunction that he, (like Howell Raines), displays with Democratic politicians and women to which the media links them. Especially because Kaus is at it again with Alex Polier, the woman who did not have any kind of affair with John Kerry. But she has not explained herself to Mickey's satisfaction, because after all, it would be "intensely disappointing" to him if the rumour was not true. Roger Ailes (not the bald repulsive one) collects the offending quotes with appropriate commentary.

Believe it or not, Benny Elon isn't at home

Remember that Seinfeld episode where Alison wants to break up with George, so he avoids her to maintain the relationship until the big ball where he can made a Great Entrance? Well, it's never a dull moment in Israeli politics:

An Israeli government minister has gone into hiding to try to thwart Ariel Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan. The prime minister intended to fire two cabinet members who oppose the plan, but the dismissal notice has reportedly not reached one of them, Benny Elon.

Mr Sharon planned to ask his government to vote on the scheme on Sunday but, if Mr Elon is not found, the prime minister may have to postpone the vote.

[Elon] told Israel Radio that he had received a call from someone who sounded like the prime minister - but that he could not be sure if it was Mr Sharon or a comedian who impersonates him.

What remains to be determined is who Ariel will pick as his Kramer figure to meet Benny at Pomodoro in Jerusalem and complete the breakup, a classic scene which we can't resist briefly excerpting here:

KRAMER
[dismayed] So what am I in this for?
You know, I'm getting to a point in my life where I need something more than just.. a good time. [is tearing up]
GEORGE
[pause] Are you?
KRAMER
Wha--me? No! No. But she is.

Vatican follies

From Remarks by Dubya in Presentation of Medal of Freedom to Pope John Paul II:

"A devoted servant of God, His Holiness Pope John Paul II has championed the cause of the poor, the weak, the hungry, and the outcast. He has defended the unique dignity of every life, and the goodness of all life.

From July 17, 2003 Press Conference of Dubya and Tony Blair:

Q Do you have concerns they're not getting justice, the people detained there [at Guantanamo]?
PRESIDENT BUSH: No, the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people...

Eisenhower a la carte

Dubya is now pushing comparisons between himself and General Eisenhower. G.A. Cerny notes that the two have very different notions of personal responsibility. But in addition, Ike has been judged politically incorrect by Dubya's speechwriters. So in today's New York Times, we learn that:

Mr. Bush told the cadets that "on this day in 1944, General Eisenhower sat down at his headquarters in the English countryside and wrote out a message to the "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces" who would soon be invading Normandy. Mr. Bush said Eisenhower wrote that "the eyes of the world are upon you" and "the hopes of prayers or liberty-loving people everywhere march with you."

Mr. Bush omitted the first line of Eisenhower's message, which was, "You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months."

There's another line from his speech pushing the comparison of WWII with the War on Terror:

The terrorists of our day are, in some ways, unlike the enemies of the past. The terrorist ideology has not yet taken control of a great power like Germany or the Soviet Union.

Which again means that Ike has to be censored because in another of his D-day statements, the great man wrote:

This landing is part of a concerted United Nations plan for the liberation of Europe, made in conjunction with our great Russian allies.

D'OH!

The House of Bush and the House of Plantagenet

Dubya now says that all this stuff about him being mad at France was a mirage, that in fact he loves France:

I've had friends all my life who I call friends, who didn't agree with every decision I made...And Jacques made it perfectly clear to me he didn't believe the use of military force was necessary. And we discussed it as friends would discuss it...I've never been angry at the French. France has been a longtime ally.

Shakespeare leads us to a more subtle reading of this expression of love for France, via Henry V:

KING HENRY V [to Catherine Valois]
No; it is not possible you should love the enemy of France, Kate: but, in loving me, you should love the friend of France; for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine.

He is seated at the right hand of the Lord

These days the USA is in the grip of two full scale personality cults. One of course surrounds Dubya himself, and forbids any mention of policy costs, lies, or mistakes within his orbit. But the second, which has facilitated the first, surrounds Tim Russert. Now on its face, this is bizarre, because Russert has no formal place within the structure of government -- he is NBC's Washington bureau chief and host of Sunday morning's Meet the Press TV show.

We have paid special attention to the growing cult around Russert because of its extensive use of Irish supporting material: Russert has repeatedly invoked his Irish-American background as evidence of his populist credentials, even when, as his more dispassionate reviewers have noted, he has become a quintessential Washington establishment figure. The cult has many aspects: laudatory reviews of Russert from Washington Post/CNN media "critic" Howard Kurtz, a promotional blitz for Russert's current book, and a news cycle driven by the revealing willingness of Cabinet members to appear on his show.

But the surest sign of the cult is the enormous ego at its centre, and that's where the evidence is most damning. Other websites have been documenting this phenomenon much better than we ever could so we'll just point to a few things here. The incomparable Daily Howler deconstructed the episode from a few weeks ago when Russert's interview with Colin Powell in Jordan was cut short by a Powell staffer. What was initially dressed up as Russert's persistent chase of answers from the top and his fearlessness of power turned out to be a sign that his ten minutes of blather with Powell was considered by him more important than that of other interviewers, upon whose time he encroached.

Now there's the flap over a picture in the Boston Globe showing some Boston College students sensibly snoozing through Russert's graduation speech. Being caught sleeping through one of Stalin's speeches would of course have much more serious consequences, but it's a dent in the cult nonetheless, and a price must be paid. So the Globe was attacked, not directly for having dissed the Great One, but for being anti-Catholic. No, we are not making this up -- the complaints hinge on the fact that Boston College is Jesuit. And of course, as a frequent player of the Irish-Catholic card, Russert himself gets to feel wronged by this supposed arrival of Oliver Cromwell to the pages of the Boston Globe.

As we said above, the dual existence of personality cults around Russert and Dubya is no coincidence. Two more links to support this: Roger Ailes collects three instances of Russert's hypocrisy, revealing of Russert's crypto-reactionary tendencies, and today's Daily Howler captures his on-air sanctioning of criticism of Dubya (scroll down to the item about the interview with Nancy Pelosi). Let's leave the last very promising words to Howler:

Somehow, Russert has come to think it’s his job to make Democrats say nice things about Bush. This was an embarrassing "journalistic" performance by a man who has lost his professional way...we’re reading his self-glorifying new book, and we’re reviewing his endless promotions for same. Russert is so important a figure that his outlook should be examined in detail. We expect to start next week.

The Commanders of Destiny

In France they are called enarques, a cohort of suits who by virtue of their attendance at an elite college, glides effortlessly between careers in politics, the civil service, and the corporate sector. And in an interventionist state like France, there's often not much difference between these sectors; note for instance that even companies with a tech boom cachet, Vivendi and France Telecom, were driven onto the rocks by enarque CEOs.

It's a sign of the Irish Republic's bizarre mental block about class issues that no equivalent word has been found for the very similar cohort in Ireland. As Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole has repeatedly documented, our mixed-up attitude about class involves some combination of it being something that left with the Brits in 1922, or being manifested only in the existence of a grand total of 2 rich people in Ireland, Michael Smurfit and "Sir" Tony O'Reilly.

But we always had our own beneficiaries of dirigisme, and with Ireland being a much smaller place than France, and much more of a one-party state, there was a much more incestuous and entrenched quality to it, and a more propagandist element to their obsequious treatment by the local media. Many "corporate" jobs in Ireland are actually political appointments of the government (e.g. Aer Lingus) or in sectors of the economy that owe much to the government's laissez faire attitude to quasi-monopoly behavior (banking) or to handouts of government concessions and contracts (construction).

And unlike our counterparts in France who at least shake things up a little bit with a change of government every so often, there's a reliable 40-plus percent of the Irish electorate who'll vote for the party that operates at the fulcrum of this system of crony capitalism, Fianna Fail (the Soldiers of Destiny). And that's enough to keep them in power most of the time, to preside over what we previously labelled the World's Richest Banana Republic.

We post about this now because there is a crisis of still undetermined proportions amongst the cronies. It was touched of by a revelation that Allied Irish Banks had been overcharging on foreign exchange counter transactions for years. AIB was trying to work its way out of scrutiny following huge "rogue trader" (=passive management) losses at their Maryland subsidiary, Allfirst, a couple of years ago. Indeed, Irish banks have a history of making overseas investments that turn out terribly for the shareholders, which is what you'd expect to happen when lazy managers get exposed to real competition. We suspect that the real motivation for AIB's Allfirst investment was the chance for the managers to lord it over the plebs as they sat in Aer Lingus Premier Class on the flight to Baltimore.

But anyway, things have only gotten worse for AIB. Sensing that their cronies in government might be applying more scrutiny than usual with an election coming up, the suits started to look through their files for other potential problems, and found evidence of their top executives participating in schemes that involved a combination of tax evasion and being beneficiaries of insider transactions that hurt other AIB customers. And since the cronies just appoint each other to all the top jobs, having AIB executives embroiled in scandal was bound to drag in other companies from the crony sectors as well.

So far, the only member on the casualty list is the chairman of Aer Lingus, although the CEO of AIB rival Bank of Ireland also quit in a seemingly unrelated scandal about improper web-surfing; the speed of B of I's action in the latter case points to both banks sensing that the heat is on. It looks today as if the cronies initial strategy is to tough it out, helped by a government that will put on the appearance of outrage but with a few nods and winks to the boys thrown in. Consider for instance Taoiseach (PM) Bertie Ahern's usual hands-off stance:

[Ahern] has said that the future of AIB's Chief Executive Michael Buckley was a matter for the bank's management.
He added that as far as he was concerned Mr Buckley was a hard working civil servant and banker and his company needed good people to put their current problems right.

Note the reference to Buckley's previous civil service career. The supposedly tougher talk is being left to Tanaiste (Deputy PM) Mary Harney, but even Mary is spinning:

[Harney] also said any inquiries into tax evasion in AIB by the regulator should be paid for by the bank itself, and not by the shareholders or taxpayers.

Mary is making a bizarre distinction between "the bank itself" and its shareholders i.e. the owners of the bank (note that she didn't rule out the bank getting the cash by further fleecing its customers). Leaving aside whatever forced housecleaning takes place amongst the suits, the remaining question is whether the voters will finally overcome their cognitive dissonance between how they vote and their occasional outrage and disgust at the country they live in. We'll believe it when we see it.

Not that there's anything wrong with that

In last week's New York Times Sunday book review section, Michael Kinsley levelled the worst insult in Dubya's America at so-called "smart conservative" NYT columnist, David Brooks:

David Brooks is not merely a liberal. He's French.
J'accuse.

This accusation has stood the true test of a good theory: more proof arrives after it is put forward. For what do we find in Le Monde a week later, but a story about a Paris suburb now seeing an invasion of Brooks' key contribution to the sociological typology, the bobo (bourgeois bohemian). Headline:

Les bobos investissent la banlieue rouge de Paris

There's even talk of a ghetto bobo. So for Brooks, there's the good news of someone using his pet concept, but in what is, for the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, a hated publication. For how long more can Brooks can maintain the facade of another of Dubya's true believers?

The Irish Republican Militia

It couldn't last forever. Mark Steyn is back writing columns for the Telegraph newspapers, columns written in New Hampshire that need to sound like they are written in Hampshire. Hence, that spell check to catch sceptical, neighbours. And something that has to sound like it would make for witty repartee over a few G&Ts at the club:

I have been trying to persuade my Washington pals to look on Iraq as an exercise in British-style asymmetrical federalism: the Kurdish areas are Scotland, the Shia south is Wales, the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland. No need to let the stragglers in one area slow down progress elsewhere.

So there you are folks: hundreds of years of convulsive history of the Atlantic Isles reduced to just another Vast Rightwing Conspiracy spinpoint. There's just too much material to work with here; let's begin by noting that we wrote a post a few weeks ago called Belfast and Fallujah, little knowing that the VRC would soon be stealing our material. But remember what's actually going on in Fallujah and the Shia holy cities -- after thinking about a full-scale shoot-out with the illegal militias, the US military just caves in and negotiates a deal by which the illegal militia becomes a legal militia with the free run of the place.

The IRA and Sinn Fein were always keen to "internationalise" the Northern Ireland conflict, by which they meant bringing in multinational forces to keep the peace, as opposed to the British Army. Well now we know why: a few months of American military involvement in Northern Ireland and the Provos would have been on a path to power much quicker than via some pesky peace process. Does Tony Blair know quite where his love-in with Dubya is leading?

Read Headlines With Care

DIETER* SUES ATKINS ESTATE AND COMPANY

[NYT]. *As in, a person on a diet, and not Dieter from the classic Mike Myers Sprockets routine.

War on Terror: Miscellany

1. Wednesday's OpinionJournal displays a studied ignorance about what John Ashcroft could possibly have meant about al Qaeda trying to affect the election result in November:

The [terrorism news article about threats to US over coming months] doesn't say which candidate or party al Qaeda hopes to benefit, and so far as we know the terror group has not issued a formal endorsement. Such information would be most useful for voters in November.

Well on this point they are just wrong. One terrorist group apparently affiliated with al Qaeda has issued their position paper on the November election; we have searched the web and can find no sign that their statement, issued as part of a claim of responsibility for 11-M, was discredited. disowned by al Qaeda. Here is the International Herald Tribune account [IHT link is busted, this one has the gist of it]:

In its statement, Abu Hafs al-Masri..tells Americans that [it] supports the re-election of President George W. Bush.

"We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," it said.

Addressing Bush, it said: "We know that a heavyweight operation would destroy your government, and this is what we don't want. We are not going to find a bigger idiot than you." The statement said Abu Hafs al-Masri needs what it called Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" because they would "wake up" the Islamic world. Comparing Bush with his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, the statement tells the president, "Actually, there is no difference between you and Kerry, but Kerry will kill our community, while it is unaware, because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish infidelity and present it to the Arab and Islamic community as civilization."

We now find ourselves in complete agreement with OpinionJournal in the hope that the voters find this information useful.

2. John Yoo, the Berkeley law professor who advised the White House on how to dodge the Geneva conventions, writes in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Enough said.

UPDATE: Regarding our item 1 above, it turns out that there's no accounting for the stupidity of John Ashcroft. As we noted, the only explicit political endorsement offered in the name of al Qaeda has been for Duyba, via the Abu Hafs al-Masri brigade. Intelligence experts don't take this group too seriously ("it may be no more than one man with a fax machine," says one, although it does appear to be a part of the broad al Qaeda propaganda machine) -- but this group was also the source of Ashcroft's terrorism warning. So here's Ashcroft's choice now: either he says the warning was based on a reliable source, in which case their endorsement of Dubya is also genuine, or he admits that his brilliant department's terrorism intelligence involves some chump sitting in an office and surfing the web.

Yesterday was a bad day to die

Here's a question that we didn't expect we'd have to ask one day: how many references does one hear these days in the media outlets of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy to the victims of 9/11? We refer in particular to key members of what Atrios labels the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, the fearless crew manning the home front in Dubya's War on Terror. And we don't think that it's a valid answer to say it gets old or repetitive to talk about the victims of a major reverse for the USA. Because the US, like other countries, has a tradition of trying to salvage some honourable memory from a crushing defeat. Now of course, this is one ability for which it's true that you'll never beat us Irish: one fateful reversal after another is constantly revisited to recount the overwhelming odds and plain bad luck (e.g. that recurring Protestant Wind that kept William of Orange on course and Philip of Spain off course). But even Americans, usually typecast as triumphalist, are happy to Remember the Alamo, which was after all a defeat. Some countries do try to whitewash the participants in a defeat, especially recent ones (e.g. it took the French a while to be reconciled with the 1950s loss in Vietnam), but eventually a healthy country seems to come around to disentangling the memory of the victims from whatever national failures their loss might have represented. Which brings us to what we suspect is a growing tendency for the reactionary right to want to use the dead exclusively as a weapon for Dubya's political agenda, but otherwise does not want to hear about them at all. A couple of things brought this to mind. The implicit equation sometimes made explicit between bereaved 9/11 activists and Democrats. The attempt to shout down Ted Koppel's sober listing of the American military dead on Nightline a few weeks ago. Another was some random web surfing that led us to news of a memorial event for Mark Bingham. Mark Bingham is believed to be one of the leaders of the passenger revolt on the 9/11 flight which crashed in Pennsylvania, most likely saving the lives hundreds of people in a ground target still unknown. Was it that long ago that Andrew Sullivan had latched on to Bingham's gay identity to make him one of his heroes in the War on Terror? But now 9/11 is now just the rhetorical wedge for another Dubya speech, and as far as OpinionJournal is concerned, another 9/11 would have its uses, victims bedamned: Will it really take another Sept. 11--or more than one--to persuade Americans to stay the course? That is what is at stake as President Bush battles for public opinion. Remember, these are the people who refer to 9/11 as an Epiphany so there is nothing surprising in this latest restatement of its potential usefulness. But anyway, what of Mark Bingham remembered for who he was, rather than as a political tool for the glorification of Dubya? The former approach will be taken in London this weekend: Held every two years, the Bingham Cup is an international rugby competition predominantly for gay and bisexual men. The theme for the event is 'Our world in union' and it aims to encourage inclusively in sport, whilst fostering lively competition and encouraging high standards of play...The competition is named after Mark Kendall Bingham, who died in the tragic events of 11 September 2001. He was passionate about rugby and played for San Francisco Fog RFC, a leading gay and bisexual team from the US. The Bingham Cup was set up by IGRAB, an international group of gay and bisexual rugby teams, with the goal of promoting rugby as a non-discriminatory sport. The inaugural event took place in San Francisco in 2002. London was chosen to host this year's event with a bid led by the Kings Cross Steelers RFC. Can a sneering article from Dorothy Rabinobitch (credit: Sullywatch) be far away?

The prison that dare not speak its name

Having watched Dubya's speech last night, we expected to find more commentary than we so far have on one particular matter today: his hat-trick of botched pronunciations of Abu Ghraib. He WAS at some meetings where the prison was discussed, right?

The finest words ever to appear in the Daily Telegraph

Mark Steyn is away

(Niall Ferguson fills in)

The Gentleman's C approach to war

Via a WSJ interview with Niall Fitzgerald, the outgoing co-chairman of Unilever, we were led to an apparent dictum of Colin Powell that we think deserves more attention. It's funny to check out this site, for instance, recounting Powell's lessons of leadership, in light of his current situation. But here's the lesson of particular interest:

Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired.

Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut. Powell’s advice is don’t take action if you have only enough information to give you less than a 40 percent chance of being right, but don’t wait until you have enough facts to be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late. His instinct is right: Today, excessive delays in the name of information-gathering breeds "analysis paralysis". Procrastination in the name of reducing risk actually increases risk.

The geek in us says that Powell, or his transcribers, have their probabilities and percentages confused here, but anyway what's striking is his amazingly low benchmark for accurate information -- just a 40 percent chance of being right would be sufficient basis for action. A 40 percent exam score was probably enough to get Dubya a pass at Yale so maybe Colin is just incorporating his leader's standards in his own decisionmaking.

The rest of these lessons are good for a laugh. Think of Dubya as you read each one, but especially, when trying to understand where the USA has gone in the last four years, consider:

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

I told you I was Irish

An amusing postscript today regarding the headstone on Spike Milligan, a pioneer of post-war English comedy, who died a couple of years ago. Spike had frequently joked that he wanted his epitaph to be "I told you I was ill," and he now has his wish, with a twist:

However, the inscription had to be written in Gaelic in order for it to be approved by the Chichester Diocese.
It now bears the words "Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite"

Besides the BBC story linked above, we've read a couple of others and they are all unclear on what exactly the hold-up was -- getting the family to agree on the wording, or the language, or likewise for the Diocese. Spike was an Irish citizen despite having spent much of his life presuming (like his fans) that he was English. His father was Irish, his mother was English, but he was born in colonial India and was thus caught in a citizenship limbo by a tightening of UK citizenship rules regarding overseas births in the 1950s. He was of course still entitled to UK citizenship under the new rules but it seemed consistent with his brand of comedy to take the Irish route. But we don't know how much that played into the choice of language on the headstone.

UPDATE JUNE 15 2005: Spike's citizenship also figured in his receipt of an honourary and not an actual CBE:

[London Times] On This Day - June 16, 1992

CONFUSION surrounding the apparent snub of Spike Milligan in last weekend’s Birthday Honours was resolved yesterday with the confirmation of one of Britain’s best loved comedians as an honorary CBE.

News had leaked out before the weekend that the former Goon, 74, a comedy favourite of the Prince of Wales, was to appear on the list ... Yesterday it became clear that, because he is an Irish citizen, he could not figure in the list but was entitled to one of the honorary awards which are announced later.

You can't get there from here

Our previous post made reference to the sane part of the Wall Street Journal. Now to the er...other part. Perhaps to circulate some advance talking points for a weekend Vast Rightwing Conspiracy cocktail party which Andrew Sullivan will attend, Friday's OpinionJournal weighs in on legal aspects of the gay marriage debate. Much of this debate has featured an almost comical parade of pairings and permutations of perverted people and pets with which society will soon be confronted via the dreaded Slippery Slope.

Now, the dwindling number of rational people with some influence on this debate have pointed out that the Slippery Slope concept is total nonsense: a society can always evaluate each step along a chain of possibilities and decide where it wants to stop. If the courts go faster than society wants, then over time society can adjust the composition of the courts, or society can decide that yes, in fact, it likes the seemingly radical changes introduced by courts and does not wish to go back. We separate powers for a reason.

Undeterred, the OpinionJournal boys, perhaps having consulted a chump law professor somewhere, take another run at the slope, doubtless having congratulated themselves on finding favoured liberal bits of the slope:

The 14th Amendment [the 1868 Equal Protection clause] was the basis for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, which declared unconstitutional the segregation of government schools. But it has also been the basis for a series of other court decisions that have profoundly affected American life but have nothing to do with the rights of blacks...

A partial list of the Supreme Court-driven changes we owe to the 14th Amendment:

The ban on prayer in government schools and other restrictions on religious expression in public venues (Engel v. Vitale, 1962, and subsequent decisions).
The establishment of a constitutional right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965).
The right to abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973).
The right, subject to limits that are minimal in practice, to distribute pornography (Miller v. California, 1973).
The abolition of all state laws against consensual gay sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003).

Intriguingly, the boys have the same case of amnesia about key 14th Amendment jurisprudence as Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia, because like Fat Tony, they forget the nation's most traumatic recent 14th Amendment Case: Bush versus Gore.

But the incoherence and double-talk only grows from there:

The point of this list is not to make a judgment as to whether any of these cases were good law or good policy. It is simply to underscore the extreme unlikeliness that the framers of the 14th Amendment could have foreseen any of these results in 1868.

Yet there is a logical progression from the sweeping language of the 14th Amendment to the jurisprudence of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Here they've managed to make the opposite point to the one they intended: not being time travellers, it is indeed true that the 1868 framers couldn't have foreseen the subsequent cases, but it was their "sweeping language" that we can now see created a "logical progression" to current case law. So what's the problem? The world moves on, we acquire new problems, new standards, new tools, and new information, and if our ancestors were clever enough, they left us with a framework that can correspondingly adapt. This is not a bad thing.

And there's an iceberg sitting at their end of their rant, the little bit of danger visible at the surface signalling more malign material underneath:

Imagine if a conservative Southern politician had reacted to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 by issuing the following prediction: "If the court can strike down our precious institution of segregation, are there any limits? One day it will affirm the right to practice sodomy, and men will even marry men." History would have recorded this as a bigoted and hysterical pronouncement. But purely as a matter of prognostication, our hypothetical politician would have been proved right.

This a recurring style of rhetoric for opinionjournal: the repeated disassociation from a particular point of view to the point where they doth protest too much: imagine, prognostication, hypothetical. But nowhere do they lay out the logical sequence, the progression of cases, that leads from Brown v Board to the wedding announcement of John Kerry and Miss Piggy. The 14th Amendment provides us with a small core, with many lines of possibility radiating in different directions. Brown v Board sits somewhere on one line. The Kerry-Piggy nuptials sit at the end of another. Society dines a la carte.