Just Throwin' It Out There: Chris Ware and John Updike

An analogy just occurred to me, and I thought I would share it with my Noble Readers. This is a sort of off-the-cuff thing, so I might end up retracting it tomorrow. Further, I know the novelist in question largely from his short stories and essays, so I am almost certainly (if not uniquely) unqualified to write about him at all. Taking all that as read --

I think that Chris Ware is to the contemporary comics world as John Updike is to American (prose) fiction. Not only in the sense that each is one of the marquee talents celebrated in their respective media, nor in the sense that each writes closely observed portraits of (often despairing, although far more so in Ware's case than Updike's) daily life.

I also mean this to apply to what they do well -- and what they don't.

In both cases, Ware and Updike are utter masters of their mediums on the micro-to-mid levels. Ware draws and colors with grace and clarity and beauty. And Updike is probably the best composer of English-language sentences since Nabokov. Further, each works superbly well on a slightly larger scale: Ware's page design is brilliant, among the best in the medium today; Updike's paragraphs too are graceful and carefully constructed. (Although one place in which the analogy breaks down is that Ware is more experimental than Updike.*) They are both celebrated for these talents -- their undeniable genius in simply drawing superb comics pages, or writing great English prose, respectively.

Here's an example of each, pretty much chosen at random. A paragraph by Updike:

Different things move us. I, David Kern, am always affected -- reassured, nostalgically pleased, even, as a member of my animal species, made proud -- by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage of human feet. Such spots abound in small towns: the furtive break in the playground fence dignified into a throughoufare, the through of dust underneath each swing, the blurred path worn across a wedge of grass, the anonymous little mound or embankment polished by play and strewn with pebbles like the confetti aftermath of a wedding. Such unconsciously humanized intervals of clay, too humble and common even to have a name, remind me of my childhood, when one communes with dirt down among the legs, as it were, of presiding fatherly presences. The earth is our playmate then, and the call to supper has a piercingly sweet eschatological ring.

-- John Updike, "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car" (from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1963))

And a page by Ware:

(Page by Ware from The Acme Novelty Library #18; scan from this site. Click for a larger version.)

Brilliant, both, each in their own domain.

But I think both Ware and Updike fail at the larger levels -- character construction, plot, story. Updike, for instance, is a prose writer at the Nabokov level; but does he have any characters who are as powerful as Kinbote, Humbert or Pnin? If so, I haven't encountered them.** Ware designs pages as well as any artist working in comics today; but his overall stories are tales of unremitting bleakness -- a trick that is very difficult to pull off and still be interesting and worth reading. Beckett pulled it off; I don't think Ware does. Neither of them tells a good story, in a way that is occasionally scorned in modernist-influenced high-brow art discourse, but whose virtues, I think, can't be underestimated.

So I will continue to read both Ware and Updike, to learn about the possibilities of comics panel-and-page construction and the marvels of good English prose, respectively. But I usually find myself browsing rather than reading: since the shimmering, masterful surface is the point -- not the structure or the whole, which is usually less than the sum of its parts.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Share 'em: I'd love to hear 'em.

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* Ware, in turn, has (to my knowledge) no body of work analogous to Updike's extensive criticism, nonfiction and reviews -- where (as Baker says) some of his best prose appears. Actually, probably my single favorite Updike piece ever is his baseball essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."

** Even Nicholson Baker, whose fabulous book U and I first got me to read Updike, says that Updike is "our best writer", but not "our best novelist" (he says Iris Murdoch); I think that Updike's deficiency in story and character are what Baker is capturing here (although, granted, he's hardly one to complain on those fronts, having a very similar set of strengths & weaknesses to Updike.)

Fear My Incredible Mind Control Power

The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug.

-- Jesse Helms, 1966

Yes: my hypnotizing swaying and gesturing is unstoppable. You will all grovel before me.

Now, who is this Watusi person? I didn't know I had a rival...

***

(My serious reaction to Helms's death here (or just scroll down); I've updated since it's posting.)

Thomas M. Disch, 1940 - 2008

I just learned (here) that Thomas M. Disch, science fiction writer, poet and critic, died on July 4 at his own hand.

Disch's Camp Concentration is an absolutely fabulous novel (one of the books I've tried giving as a sampler to people who don't like SF, with some success). I posted* two of his many poems on this blog, the first three years ago ("Dreams: a Darwinian View") and the second just this January ("Waking Early New Year's Day, Without a Hangover"). You can read more of his poetry here. I found his book of poetry criticism The Castle of Indolence a lot of fun to read. While there is a lot of his work I haven't read yet, what I have read of it has meant a lot to me.

I met him a few times at Readercon; despite a reputation for being difficult to get along with, he was, on the occasions I spoke with him, friendly, charming and interesting. One of the times I talked to him he looked at my my name tag and said to me, "The worst story I ever wrote was a called 'If You Don't Frug Baby Then What Do You Do?'". He said it was a pornographic story he wrote under a pseudonym; and despite my repeated begging, he wouldn't tell me where it was published.

I just went to his livejournal and found that -- ominously -- the penultimate post was titled "Letters to Dead Writers" -- an idea for a book he said he'd never write. (The last entry speaks about inflation and food; people have started leaving goodbyes on it. I clicked on the "next" button, and the standard error message -- "There is no entry following this one." -- took on a darkness that it probably doesn't usually have.)

Just a few weeks ago I went looking for his essay (story? joke? what was it?) "Pyramids For Minnesota", and couldn't find it anywhere.** It's not in any of the Disch books I have, nor in any anthologies I could find, nor online (that I found). I remember it quite vividly -- and like it a lot, which is why I wanted to reread it -- but I haven't the slightest idea where I could have read it.

Locus has an obituary here. And Making Light has a thread on Disch here.

Rest in peace.

Update: Another anecdote from one of the occasions I chatted with him. (I assume this is common knowledge and he said it in interviews, but for all I know no one else knows.) Disch's first poetry collection, from 1972, was The Right Way to Figure Plumbing. Disch told me that he named the book that because a person named Tom Disch -- if I remember correctly, no relation that he knew of -- published a book in the 19th century called The Right Way to Figure Plumbing, and he was amused at the notion of some librarian (for some reason I remember him mentioning the NY public library -- maybe they had a copy?) holding the two books, by two Tom Disch's, and being absolutely baffled. I mentioned that I had an ancestor, S. Frug, who was a Yiddish poet, and must have mentioned that I wrote, because he encouraged me to find out the name of a book that Simeon Frug had published and to publish a book under the same title, for the same joke.

Update 2: There's a round-up of reactions/remembrances/what-have-you here. And here's one they missed, by Jim Henley.

Update 3: The New York Times obituary. And the Washington Post obituary. (Both via this thread.)

Update 4: Via, the eulogy from Elizabeth Hand at Salon. And John Clute's obituary for the Independent here.

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* Yeah, illegally reprinted. Whatever. I like 'em. Go read them and see what you think.

** Harpers has it online, but only if you have a subscription. Enough to let me correct the title, though (for, not in).

Department of Nuclear-Strength Irony

In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue.

-- David Frum, June 29, 2008

The gloomsayers... have been proven wrong when they predicted the United States would sink into a forlorn quagmire in Iraq... Like General Barry McCaffrey, they predicted a military disaster in which the United States could potentially suffer, 'bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties.'

-- David Frum (with Richard Perle), An End to Evil, 2003

George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man.

-- David Frum, The Right Man: the Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush

[O]rder was restored to Afghanistan. For all the questions about whether the United States has done enough to stabilize Afghanistan, there's no doubt at all that the world's wildest country has become freer and safer than ever before, and that it has ceased to be a base of operations for al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.
.
-- David Frum, December 28, 2002

The United States and its allies are now ready to strike at Saddam Hussein... My prediction is that the war will go with blinding speed.

-- David Frum, Ibid.

If the preparations for the Iraq round of the war on terror have gone very, very slowly, the Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts. The sooner the fighting begins in Iraq, the nearer we are to its imminent end.

-- David Frum, February 24, 2003

Fortunately, it now seems overwhelmingly probable that the US will succeed in Iraq and that Bush will be re-elected; that the Iraqis will gain their freedom and the Palestinians will get their state.

-- David Frum, November 23, 2003 (Maybe 1 out of 4 ain't bad?)

But perhaps, if I quote the context for the first quote above, it will explain something:

In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head. (emphasis added)

Ah, that all makes sense now.

The Key Point About the Late Jesse Helms

Matt Yglesias captures what is to me the key point about the career of the late Jesse Helms:

One fascinating thing about the death of Jesse Helms is the conservative reaction. One might expect that Helms' death would prompt from conservatives the sorts of things that I might say if, say, Al Sharpton died -- that he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don't regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but that he's a problematic guy and I regard him and his methods as pretty marginal to American liberalism. But instead conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.

And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies.

Lindsay Beyerstein makes a similar point here. And it's true; conservative web sites have been falling all over themselves to praise Helms. (A sampling of links is collected here (via.))

The one quibble I'd have with what Yglesias said is his implication that this is a choice that conservatives are making -- "if that's what [conservatives] want me to believe" and all that. But it's not a matter of spin. Jesse Helms's politics and all that it stood for (well, maybe not tobacco subsidies) are deeply bound up in the DNA of the conservative moment -- a point that increasing numbers of historians are writing about, incidentally. This is not to deny the rhetorical shifts that have taken place in the past forty or more years -- hell, I just wrote a whole dissertation about 'em -- but the point is that the writers from the National Review & elsewhere are right, that Helms is not incidental to, or extricable from, the modern conservative movement. (However much a few conservatives would like to pretend he was.)

It's just that Yglesias is right that this "reflects just absolutely horribly on them."

(Elsewhere in Yglesias Helms blogging, he notes that

One strange aspect of the settlement of the Civil Rights controversy was that this social and political upheaval resulted in surprisingly little actual political turnover. Instead of segregationist politicians being defeated and hounded of out public life, in essence they agreed to stop challenging the core principles of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (gutting enforcement under GOP presidents was still okay) and in exchange everyone else agreed to sort of ignore their backgrounds.

And that too is a major theme of the dissertation I just submitted.* Look for it from a University Press.... maybe, sometime, after I do a lot more revisions, and then begin to submit it...)

Update: I'm pleased to see that this is being talked about a lot. Yglesias has a bit more on this here. Steve Benen discusses this in the context of the National Review's editorial on Helms. Then there's Johnathan Chait here, and Ezra Klein here.

But the single other post to read, if you're going to read one, is Hilzoy's extensive round-up of both conservative praise for Helms and for Helms's record here. She (as so often) nails it. It's not a pretty picture. But it's an accurate one.

Update 2: Still more: from Rick Perslstein, here and here. More from Ezra Klein here. And Andrew Sullivan here, although he doesn't quite come to grips, I think, with the implications of the entwining of Helms's conservative positions and his bigotry that he acknowledges.

Update 3: Not every conservative is celebrating Helms (although Hilzoy's list is certainly impressive); some (at least partial) dissents from Max Boot here, and from Ross Douthat here. The latter is in explicit reaction to the sort of liberal blog posts link above, including Ylgesias's and Hilzoy's.

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* Oh, and I promise I won't normally talk about it this much. It's just sort of on my mind this week, is all.

"Ordinary" is a Context-Dependent Term

From one of the pages in which Cornell walks you through the process of electronically submitting a dissertation:

For most, a final dissertation or thesis is a large computer file -- too large for an ordinary 3.5-inch floppy diskette.

Dude, where's your web page update?

Of course, what "ordinary" means hasn't changed in a decade; it's simply that what is ordinary has changed in that time -- to the point where I found the statement incredibly funny.

This has been a commentary on the original intent theory of constitutional interpretation ("cruel and unusual punishment", for instance).

Our Founding Fathers Knew How To Deal With "A Prince whose character is marked by every act which may define a Tyrant"

As always, I like to remember, on the Fourth of July, the nature of the cause we celebrate today:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King... is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world....

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

-- The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

A glorious cause indeed, and one well worth the pledge of "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" that the signatories to that noble document made -- a promissory note that, in some cases, was in fact cashed.

Let us hope that we live up to their noble example.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Update: What Joseph Galloway said. (via)

Pushing Back Against Pro-Bush Apologetics

Kevin Drum, who is sometimes far too much a "sensible liberal" to see the world clearly, tries to distinguish Nixon's law-breaking from Bush's law-breaking:

At the same time, the difference here really is pretty obvious. Nixon broke the law repeatedly for purely political purposes: to help his friends, punish his enemies, and keep tabs on domestic groups he happened to personally dislike. There was no ideological dispute about the value of what Nixon did: once it became clear that he had actually done the stuff he was accused of, liberals and conservatives alike agreed that he had to go. Obviously that's not the case this time around. So far, anyway, there's no evidence that George Bush has done anything wrong for purely venal purposes. He approved torture of prisoners and violated FISA because he genuinely thought it was necessary for national security reasons after 9/11 — and unfortunately, lots of people agreed with him at the time and continue to agree with him today. I too wish there were a broader consensus that Bush has acted illegally and ought to be held accountable, but the fact that he hasn't met Nixon's fate doesn't really say all that much about how tolerant we are of executive lawbreaking. Ideological disputes are simply a different kettle of fish than personal vendettas.

Even taking into account Kevin's update -- that these remarks apply only to the FISA/Torture issues, and not to the venality of, e.g., the the U.S. Attorney scandal -- this still won't wash.
This is wrong -- I'm tempted to say 'venal' -- in two respects.

First, the fact that there is a policy dispute about whether torture and widespread warrantless wiretaps ought to be legal is wholly irrelevant to the fact that Bush's actions were, on their face, illegal under our current laws. If he had gone to the Congress and tried to change the law before implementing his policies, that would be a different matter -- a matter of gross immorality and disdain for democratic principles but not flagrant illegality. And, as the recent cave by the Democrats on FISA shows, he'd probably have gotten whatever powers he asked for, up to and including John Yoo-approved crushing the testicles of children. But the point is, he didn't ask. He didn't advocate policy. He broke the law.*

So yeah, it says everything you need to know about our current attitude towards Presidential lawbreaking: IOIYAR. Nixon in today's climate would hardly have to give a press conference to explain himself, let alone resign.

And yeah, I think that Kevin Drum (who I like & read daily) is actually supporting the attitude here that's created this situation. The "as long as there's controversy, it's different" attitude... basically a subset of the old "opinions on the shape of the earth differ" motif.

Also the fact that there is widespread support for Presidential venality makes it no less venal. Under Kevin's reasoning, Nixon would have been fine if Republicans had simply rallied around to what he did. I think there's actually some circularity here: Kevin is arguing that Bush was ok because a lot of people thought that his flagrant breaking of the law was justified... therefore, people gave him a pass on his breaking of the law. Which is to say, if the David Broders of the world had screamed (as Broder, at least, didn't in the case of Nixon, actually) about Bush's lawbreaking, then the right would have had a harder time giving Bush ideological cover... and he might have actually faced some consequences for his misdeeds.

That's the main point, but the secondary point is worth making too: we don't know how venal Bush's actions were, because we still don't have the slightest sense of precisely who he wiretapped, or why. In some of his wiretaps (or even all), Bush's actions may have been as narrowly partisan as Nixon's. We don't know because the press and the Congress and the opposition party have all failed to investigate Bush the way they did Nixon. So to say that Bush's actions weren't Partisan is (perhaps) to excuse a cover-up on the basis of that very cover-up's success.

Nixon was a crook, and he should have been impeached. (And he should have been tried, not pardoned; it might have helped us go down this road again.) But Bush's actions have been, as Nixon aide John Dead said, "worse than watergate" -- many times over.

The only difference is the cowardice, connivance and corruption of the institutions that helped force Nixon out of power.

But don't worry. Once we have a Democrat in office -- FSM willing, Obama -- they'll all go back to believing in the rule of law. Because the flip side of the current "it's okay if you're a Republican" modis operrendi is that it's only okay if you're a Republican. Once Obama is in office, expect David Broder to be shocked, shocked by... well, he'll think of something, I'm sure.

Update: Similar thoughts from Firedoglake, and from Digby. But, once again, Tom Tomorrow puts it best. Update 2: And Matt Yglesias, to whom Kevin Drum was replying, makes the point as well.

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* Of course, to change the law in the torture case Bush'd have to have abrogated treaties as well as US law (not to mention US custom going back to George Washington).. but that just shows how seriously embedded in our legal system the Bush-violated prohibitions on torture are (or were).

By Such Means: an Anecdote

From Cosma Schalizi's review of S. Robert Remsey's The Languages of China:

A conference of scholars and politicians met... to decide on a national language for the newly-declared... Republic. Ramsey opens with just that conference, which in real life began on 15 February 1913 in Beijing. It was not a success: the participants lacked linguistic knowledge and worked largely on the basis of political jockeying, the Mandarin-speaking North against the more linguistically diverse, and socially and economically advanced, South. ``As tempters flared, Wang Rongbao, one of the leaders of the Southern faction, happened to use the colloquial Shanghai expression for `rickshaw,' wangbo ts'o. Wang Zhao [a Northern leader] misheard it for the Mandarin curse wángba dàn `son of a bitch' (literally, turtle's egg),' and flew into a rage. He bared his arms and attacked Wang Rongbao, chasing him out of the assembly hall.'' By such means Mandarin was declared the national standard for pronunciation.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it made me laugh.

Too Awful for Either Words or Silence

I somehow can't let this pass without comment, and yet have nothing to say, either. The Bush administration copied torture techniques from Mao's dictatorship. As Andrew Sullivan put it, conservatism has come to copy communism.

"We have met the enemy, and it is us."

Oh, and as Eric Martin says:

One of the candidates, John McCain, wants to continue to permit our government to engage in a policy of torture gleaned from observing the methods employed by brutal Communist regimes. The other candidate, Barack Obama, doesn't.

That about sums it up.

Bush borrowed his torture techniques from Mao.

He, and everyone else involved, should stand for trial as war criminals. And then spend the rest of his life in a very small cell.

Strange Theories of Causation

One of the conservative columnists I read from time to time -- whenever I feel a need to kill some brain cells and up my blood pressure -- is Dennis Prager. Prager is a figure of fun in the left blogosphere, and for good reason. But his most recent column, "Why I Support John McCain", is overall more reasonable than is his wont. His basic point is that if you're a conservative you should vote for McCain, since he's more likely to do conservative things than Obama is -- which is pretty inarguable. (Whether anyone, having seen a conservative government's record over the last seven and a half years, should want to promote conservative ends is a different matter.) Oh, the specific claims Prager makes, both about Obama and McCain, are generally silly. But his overall point -- McCain is the best choice for conservative voters -- is true, which is more than you can say about most of his columns.

Prager does make a insuperable claim* that Obama will be our first "leftist" President, as opposed to Clinton, Carter, LBJ, JFK & Truman, who were all just "liberals". What issues Prager bases this on is unclear. Presumably he says this because he needs some way to distinguish Obama from Clinton, since otherwise people might look at the country during the Clinton years, compare it to the Bush years, and decide that Prager's warnings about liberal harm to peace and prosperity are pretty weak tea. (This distinction also contradicts all the times that Prager has blurred the liberal/left distinction in order to criticize his target dujour... but never mind, that's a different blog post.) Anyway, as far as Prager's claim that Obama will be a leftist not a liberal President -- meaning, presumably, that he'll oppose imperialist policies in foreign policy and be a LBJ-ish figure on domestic ones -- all I can say is that I wish he was correct, but that it's pretty clear he won't be.

But the real kicker is in Prager's paragraph about the benefits that will flow from the fact that McCain will "win" in Iraq. The word is never defined -- magically turn a sectarian bloodbath into a Jeffersonian Democracy through military occupation seems to be the basic idea, presumably with a side-order of indefinite occupation of dozens of military bases -- and, of course, how McCain will differ from Bush (who has even in Prager's view obviously failed to "win", or we'd have "won" already) is left totally unspecified. Ok. Set all that aside. Let's look at what Prager claims will be a consequence of this promised victory:

It will teach potential enemies not to attack America (whether Iraq did so directly is irrelevant to the point).

Wha' huh?

OK, first there's the implicit lie, that Iraq did attack America indirectly. This is, as we really should all know by now, simply false. We were attacked by Al Queada; Iraq had nothing to do with it. (In fact, Al Queada hated Saddam for their own reasons.) So Iraq is a country that did not attack America at all. Full stop.

But even aside from this, I am really at a loss to understand what Prager could possibly be thinking -- I use the term loosely -- here. I mean, a lot of his stuff just flows from premises that I find either silly or malevolent (if you start out with the premise that gay rights are a terrible thing, a lot of what he says about the Supreme Court makes a lot more sense). But I really don't understand what the idea is here. If you attack us, we will respond by invading an unrelated country with a dictatorship that both of us (albeit for varying reasons) despise is hardly the sort of threat that will get most people shaking in their boots.

Ok, to be slightly less snarky, I think the logic (again, speaking loosely) goes like this. If you presume that "Islamists" are a monolithic group, united in their goal of opposing Western Civilization, then attacking them in one area is a reasonable response to their attacking us elsewhere. No one thinks that, just because Germany sent bombers at London from a particular base, that a British attack elsewhere in Germany was not a response. The problem, of course, is that this premise is -- to put the matter politely -- blatantly untrue and mammothly uninformed.

It is, however, a belief with a long pedigree. Throughout the cold war, conservatives insisted that international communism was a single, unified, monolithic force which acted in concert towards a single aim. This was bollocks, of course, and caused us to miss all sorts of big, obvious, important things like the Sino-Soviet split or the fact that the Vietnamese communists were quite suspicious of the Chinese communists (a few years after abandoning our ongoing war in Vietnam, a war fought in part to keep the Chinese from 'taking over' Vietnam, the Communist government of a united Vietnam actually went to war with China). But in the cold war, at least you could say that conservatives were just falling for enemy propaganda in a (stunningly naive) way. I mean, the communists did claim to be a monolithic block devoted to the elimination of the West.

But do the Islamists even make that claim? I mean, I'm no more an expert in these matters than Prager, but my sense from reading the newspapers is that the Sunnis and the Shias don't make any particular secret of their disagreements; that Iraqi nationalism was pretty clearly articulated even before our invasion of that poor country; that Al Queada has a lot of enemies in the region, including a lot of governments and movements that we would think of (if we were being all monolithic about it) as "Islamist" -- although of course they are also opposed to a lot of the corrupt autocracies that we help to prop up too. Still, so far as I can tell, in this case, conservatives aren't even falling for enemy propaganda: they're just fighting phantoms in their own heads -- which wouldn't be so bad if the bullets they were shooting didn't hit real people.

I guess this is all just the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics: if we show the world our Indomitable Will, they'll be intimidated, even if we show that Will by invading unrelated countries in response to an attack by non-state actors located elsewhere. But it's always startling to think it through and see how stunningly detached it is, not only from the real world, but from any reasonable ideas about causation too.

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* Yeah, okay, among many, many others. But this is one I wanted to talk about. Sue me.

Just Another Brick in the Wall

I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation this afternoon.

I have some minor revisions to do before I turn it in (for an August degree); and then [cue Scarlett O'Hara voice] as God is my witness, I'll never take a class for credit again.

On the Length of Graphic Novels

This began as a comment on this post at Abigail Nussbaum's blog Asking the Wrong Questions, but it was substantial enough that I am reposting it here (with a few elaborations at the end). The quote it begins with is from Abigail's original post, which is a review of three recent graphic novels.

One of my greatest complaints about graphic novels is that very few of them are novels at all, by which I don't mean that it is ridiculous to call a memoir like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home a novel, though clearly it is, but that the amount of narrative material in most graphic works barely amounts to a novella. Black Hole may have taken Charles Burns ten years to put together, but I read it in a little more than an hour. It's hard for a work that demands so little of a reader's time to develop the breadth and heft that I associate with novels (or novel-like works of non-fiction).

I think Abigail's right about this, but I'm not sure that's the right frame of reference. I think graphic novels, in terms of the amount of "content" (however defined) they contain and the amount of time they take to absorb are comparable to movies. Movies, too, take "a little more than an hour" per go-through (1.5 - 2, usually, sometimes longer). And movies generally also have about a novella's worth of content to them (in my experience, novels made into movies need to be cut, short stories expanded; novellas work about perfectly).

Note that movies, too -- like graphic novels -- take an inordinate amount of time to produce: usually more people in fewer time, rather than fewer people in more, but still a great number of hours of human labor go into them.

I don't think this has much to do with the potential of the various mediums, nor with their youth/age or anything; I think it's mostly a matter of how human beings absorb visual (or in the case of movies visual/audio) versus linguistic information.

There are, of course, some graphic novels that take a lot longer to read (as, in fact, Abigail has noted in the past on her blog -- it'd be interesting maybe to compile a list...), just as there are long films, or films that flatly require multiple viewings for comprehension (and are thus effectively longer), just as their are novels that are short and rip quickly by. But these are the exceptions.

For graphic novels, incidentally, an additional limiting factor may be financial: it costs more to print illustrated pages than prose, and so graphic novels can't be as long as, say, a Dickens novel. (Or, if they are, they are serialized -- as was Dickens, for that matter.) Not to mention the basic financial issue of paying for the work to create the thing (whether lots of people for a year or two or a few people for many years). Thus lengthier comics narratives tend to be serials -- again comparable to movies, where the longer works are, in fact, TV shows (which in better cases work as long, serialized movies) -- where the financial burdens can be spread over time, interest can be gauged, etc.

***

As far as Abigail's complaint that "it is ridiculous to call a memoir like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home a novel", she would perfectly right if it were prose.* But, as I've noted before, this is simply the way the term "graphic novel" has been used since its introduction: it's never just meant the comics equivalents of what in prose would be called novels (literally since the term's introduction: the first widely-publicized work to be called a "graphic novel" (Will Eisner's A Contract With God) was a collection of shorter stories). A "graphic novel" is, generally, a book-length, sophisticated* comic of any variety, whether a single work or a collection, and whether fiction or non-fiction.

To repeat the point I made in my earlier rant on this: "graphic novel" is an odd and imperfect term, I admit, since it sounds -- to those unfamiliar with the medium -- like it refers to a type of novel. But it's the term we have -- the "wrong and only name for it" (to borrow a phrase from David Hartwell in referring to another publishing category ill-served by reviewers). It's now an official category in many bookstores. There are magazines and web sites and college classes on the form. It's what these things are called.

(And again, I think this is a common linguistic phenomenon -- that is, that a compound term will include items that won't be within the realm of the root term. I don't know the name for this, though, if there is one. Is there a linguistic in the house?)

***

Finally, a few stabs at the list. What is being listed are graphic novels that take a long time to read -- ones that have the heft of a novel in terms of time it takes to read them (putting aside the issue of artistic merit or lack thereof). This is easy to do if you consider a serial as a unit; but let's restrict the list to items available in a single volume. Books that, in Art Spiegleman;s words (in describing his ambitions for Maus) are comics that you need a bookmark to read. Off the top of my head: Maus, natch; Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell's From Hell; Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons's Watchmen; Jeff Smith's Bone; many of the various Love and Rocket books by los bros. Hernandez (certainly the really big hardcover ones published a few years ago); a few volumes at least of Dave Sim's Cerebus; Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison; Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan; and both issues of Shane Simmons's Longshot (which is pretty impressive for 24 page comics). A few of these are arguable; but there are a lot more, too. Leave other suggestions in comments.

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* Although the mistake is so common among my students that I wonder if the word "novel" is shifting into simply a pretentious word for "book" -- or, perhaps, a word meaning any book-length work, as long as it is a single piece (and not a collection of shorter ones). If so, it's a trend I'd resist -- there'd be no word left for "novel", which is something worthy of a term -- but in matters of linguistic change resistance is, most often, futile.

ROFL

Okay, as a thirty-seven-year-old fogey who remembers the days before email and the inernet, I am officially Old and Clueless. I get that. But even I found this pretty !@#$%ing funny. (Link via.)

And, really, it's the specific twists and turns of language that are hilarious. All emphasis added.

...North Carolina drivers whose license plates have the potentially offensive "WTF" letter combination can replace the tags for free. The News & Observer of Raleigh reported Tuesday the state Division of Motor Vehicles has notified nearly 10,000 holders of license plates with the letter combination. Officials learned last year the common acronym stands for a vulgar phrase in e-mail and cell phone text messages.

Learned last year? You're kidding me, right? This is news? ("It turns out there were two President Roosevelts...")

The DMV recently realized the same letters appeared on the sample license plate on its own Web site.

Recently realized? How hard is this, really? Put the pièce de résistance is the next phrase:

Officials are trying to remove the plate from the site.

Trying?

Trying?

DMV officials got word of the plates last July when a 60-year-old technology teacher from Fayetteville complained about the plate after her teenage grandchildren clued her in.

Ah, yes. Teenage grandchildren clue in, the grandmother complains. Shoulda known.

DMV officials said they try to keep up with the latest acronyms, and that anyone who has an issue with their plate can contact their local DMV office to request a new one.

Ok, guys, here's a thought. Track down one of those teenage grandchildren, and pay them to make a list for you. Not really that hard. -- Or, if you really don't have the budget for that, there's this nifty site that might help you out.*

I mean, really. WTF?

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* I have to admit that until writing this episode I was still using the apparently-outdated form "ROTFL" rather than "ROFL". But at least I thought to google it.

From the Annals of Future Conservative Ideological Pivots

If, as David Neiwert fears (with, alas, some justice), an Obama presidency were to be met with a wave of domestic terrorism -- as white supremacists, militia members and assorted other McVeigh-style right-wing crazies react to the election of someone who is not only a liberal, but an African American, with violence -- we will see mainstream conservative voices abandon -- all at once, with no coordination necessary -- everything they have said about terrorism in the past seven and a half years: that the proper response to terrorism is to destroy the culture out of which it emerges, that military force is the only proper response to acts of terrorism (and law enforcement approaches are too wimpy, etc.), that religions which are invoked to justify terrorist acts are ipso facto dangerous -- even, in some cases, abandoning the idea that no terrorist act is at all understandable, since some folks on the right will have sympathy for the future McVeigh's grievances if not their methods.

And no, this won't be met with any parallel switch. Liberals will believe what they do now: that terrorism is immoral and inexcusable; that it can be provoked by grievances both genuine and illegitimate, and that confronting those grievances (which does not mean giving into them or even acknowledging the slightest shred of validity to them) is essential to stopping future terrorism; that confronting the cultures that nurture hate is an essential part of ending terrorism*; and that the bombing and/or invasion of people who happen to share racial or religious identities with terrorists is not only an immoral response, but a flat-out idiotic and counterproductive one as well. And so forth.

(Actually, the one sort of "liberal" who will switch their positions were those who, in the run-up to the Iraq war, adopted the conservative position on the proper response to terrorism. Presumably the New Republic won't be deriding as pacifists those who oppose invading whatever state the future McVeigh hails from (or its uninvolved neighboring state that happens to share an ethnicity with the future McVeigh); even Tom Friedman won't advocate sending the U.S. army through such a state telling its residents to "suck on this". But really these pivots will be simply a subset of the above-mentioned conservative pivot: since anyone who supports invading random countries is not, in my book, a liberal in any reasonable sense of the word.**)

I can only think of one way in which this conservative pivot would not happen in response to such a right-wing terrorist attack: if they decided to ignore the fact that the perpetrator was a white, christian, right-wing, American extremist, and simply use the event as fuel for more calls to bomb people who are not white, muslim and non-American. Yeah, a few might do that. Because obviously if we don't bomb Iran in response to a domestic, homegrown terrorist's attack, we will never be safe. Which would, I suppose, be consistency of a sort.

Anyway, I obviously hope that the chatter from white supremacists and their ilk is just that -- chatter -- and that no such attack will happen in the event of an Obama presidency. If, however, the terrorist threat that Bush has decided to ignore*** does, in fact, occur in response to an Obama electoral victory, then the right-wing pivot described above is a virtual certainty. You can bank on that.

________________________________
* And if you think that Bush and his cronies did any such "confronting", please see the clause following the above. Bombing or invading people who happen to share an ethnic, racial or religious identity with terrorists is not confronting anything, will make the problem worse, and in many cases is morally comparable to the original terrorist acts.

** This, alas, is a prescriptive rather than descriptive usage of the term. Many liberals do, in fact, have a disgraceful history of advocating -- and perpetuating -- invasions of random countries, to their (and our country's) eternal disgrace and sorrow; see, e.g., LBJ and Vietnam. But in the contemporary world, it seems to me that a distinguishing feature of liberalism -- that is, something that we should make damn well sure is a distinguishing feature of liberalism -- is an opposition to any and all aggressive wars that our political classes should take a fancy to.

*** Rather than react to by shredding constitutional rights and invading uninvolved countries.

Supporting the Future Impeachment of President Obama: A Liberal Dilemma

Obama's recent support for the foul FISA capitulation brings to the fore a liberal dilemma, one that we will, most likely, face in future years -- and one to which I have no ready answer. This is the dilemma that Atrios, in his usual pithy way, captured in this post:

...Democrats will regret embracing the expansion of executive power because a President Obama will find his administration undone by an "abuse of power" scandal. All of those powers which were necessary to prevent the instant destruction of the country will instantly become impeachable offenses.

So the question is: what do principled liberals -- ones who don't believe in untrammeled executive power or unconstitutional structures such as spying in defiance of the fourth amendment -- do about this situation?

The answer of principle is easy, and probably correct, but it leads to a larger structural problem that I have no idea how to deal with.

The answer of principle is: unconstitutional acts are unconstitutional acts whoever does them; if Obama does them, he must be impeached.

As far as it goes, this is obviously correct.

But the problem is, it won't do jack to reign in executive powers -- because the Republicans are totally partisan in their interpretation of these matters. We learned this (if we didn't already see it) with the comparison between the Clinton impeachment and the Bush support: to Republicans, Clinton's lying under oath about a private affair was an impeachable offense -- but Bush's repeated, blatant and admitted violation of numerous laws (including FISA and the laws against torture) are not. So all their bullshit about upholding the rule of law... was, in fact, just bullshit. Their principle is, if a Democratic president does it, it's illegal; if a Republican president does it, it's not illegal. End of story.

So when Republicans call for President Obama's impeachment on grounds which are A) substantively correct, and B) far less than what President Bush ('43) did, what are progressives to do?

If we say yes, Obama's actions are impeachable, we will be holding to principle -- but we won't be restraining executive power at all, because even if Obama is impeached and convicted and removed from office for a given offense, the overwhelming majority of the Republicans voting for this will turn on a dime and support worse actions from the next Republican to be elected President. All supporting President Obama's impeachment will do is damage any power that any Democratic President might have.

So the response of some liberals -- no, scratch that: liberals stand on principle; the response of some Democrats -- will be to say, Bush did worse and wasn't impeached, so we will oppose the impeachment of Obama on those grounds.

And this will make sense on the grounds of realpolitik: they did worse, why should we attack our own team for less than they supported their team for?

But the problem is, it's unprincipled. It's wrong. Liberals actually believe in checks and balances, in restrained government and the rule of law. If -- or when -- Obama breaks these things, we have to support his impeachment.

So we have a dilemma.

What do you do when the Republican party will support the impeachment of anyone on the other side, whatever the actions, and no one on their side, whatever the actions? For us to adopt those standards would be to sell out the principles we are fighting for. But for us to embrace them will be to inevitably and irrecoverably damage Democratic politicians, while doing nothing to restrain Republican ones.

Let's assume that half of all Democrats stand on principle, and half stand on party, while all Republicans stand on party, and none on principle. This is an exaggeration for the sake of simplification, but it's close to true -- how many Republicans would support the impeachment of Bush now? Given the open-and-shut nature of the case, it's a good bellwether for party v. principle. So, given these simplifying and reasonable assumptions, then, further assuming a rough parity of parties, any Republican president violating the constitution will have a 50-50 vote -- either won't be impeached (as now), or won't be convicted -- while any Democratic president will have a 75-25 vote -- will be impeached & convicted. Again, this is a simplification; but it reflects the reality... except insofar as a fair number of Democrats are actually in a third category, one that will support the unconstitutional expansion of Presidential power whatever party is in office. Which is to say, things are worse than this little scenario implies.

So what do we do?

I don't see any way out of this dilemma which won't mean either A) selling out vital constitutional principles, or B) loosing on all substantive political issues due to the lack of principles of the opposing party.

Of course, there was an easy way out of the dilemma: Democrats could oppose unconstitutional powers in the first place. But Obama just tossed that one out the window when he supported the FISA bill. Bush, in a open-and-shut impeachable offense, established unconstitutional surveillance. Liberals, following principle, called for his impeachment on those grounds. Now Obama has embraced Bush's criminal methods. When Republicans, following party (and a few Conservatives, following principle*), call for Obama's impeachment for violating the constitution by using the powers Bush established... what will we do?

Undermine our principles, and support Obama?

Or undermine our cause -- which include, let's recall, not starting aggressive wars: we're talking about things that can (and have) cost hundreds of thousands of human lives; these are not trivial matters -- and support our principles?

I don't know.

I don't think there's a good answer. I hope I'll support my principles. But the problem with dealing with an entire political party whose fundamental culture is amoral is that they can put you in these positions. Sociopaths have a sort of power that the rest of us do not; and this is true of cultures as well as of individuals.**

But I wish that Obama had allowed us to side-step this dilemma. Oh, I understand -- on some level - why he did not. People don't run for President, generally, to diminish the powers they'll have in office. And, yes, this doesn't mean I don't support him now: he is, at the moment, clearly the least bad choice.*** And he'll do good in a lot of crucial areas -- above all, again, the war.

So I'm not surprised. But I'm disappointed.**** And I'm dismayed by what this will mean in the future, when those who have no principles at all use his violation of ours to attack him with good grounds, and thereby harm all the good he might do.

In the end, I think -- and this is a matter on which I am perhaps naive -- morality is the best policy. In many areas, Obama clearly gets that. But in this area he doesn't. And I fear that it may ultimately prove his undoing.

And ours.

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* You can tell the difference easily: any Republican who opposed the impeachment of Bush is simply following party; any self-described conservative who supported the impeachment of Bush (did Ron Paul? Not yet, I don't think, but I can see him doing it...) is following principle. An easy test.

** This is one reason that corporations -- which are legally required to be sociopaths, i.e. to consider only profit and not moral issues, to make their judgments in fundamentally amoral ways -- are so powerful, and so hard to fight.

*** Clinton supporters can, I think, justly crow on this one: she voted against the bill. Although in fairness, it's not clear she would have if she had been the nominee (or that Obama wouldn't have if he'd lost); I think that both of them are using the calculus of power, and standing by principle only when convenient. But given the outcome, this is one that leads her to good things, and him to bad. And neither of them, alas, are doing what Feingold and Dodd are doing, and actually putting some effort into fighting this thing.

**** I expect -- and always have expected, really -- to be disappointed a lot by Obama in the next six months; and, FSM willing, over the next eight years. That I think (and have long thought) that he was by far the best candidate never meant that I was blind to his considerable flaws. And many of these are absolutely endemic to politicians in general, at least to ones who are contesting for (or hoping to contest for) non-safe seats. This is not, really, because politicians are bad people, but because structurally they are led to be. Open-eyed liberals have to support the best candidate -- knowing that they'll disappoint, and willing to fight to make them disappoint as little as possible. On this point, see this important post by Kathy G, "Barack Obama: deeply flawed, and it's our job to make him better". Even the best politicians do terrible things. The job of liberals is to try to make them do as many good things -- and as few bad things -- as possible. The burden I'm trying to articulate in this post is how to balance these issues given Obama's capitulation on this fundamental constitutional issue -- and the fact that the opposition will be totally unprincipled in their dealings about it.

Totally Random Thought of the Day

Isaac Asimov never used (probably never heard of) the internet.

(On the other hand, it seems that blogger's spellchecker has never heard of the internet either, so Asimov (up in heaven, natch) shouldn't feel bad about it.)

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes"

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

-- Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (ret.)

Will those who ordered the use of torture be held to account?

No, they won't.

They'll just have to curtail their vacation plans.

God bless America. 'Cause Bush has damned it.

Pelosi's House Attacks the Constitution

I seem to be in one of my periodic blogging lulls, but I wanted to note that I share the (left) blogosphere's broad and deep disdain for the cowardice, corruption, malevolence and or/idiocy for the Democratic-controlled Congress's pathetic capitulation on the issue of immunity for telecoms who collaborated with Bush to break the law. And shame on Obama for agreeing to this vile bill.

I presume most of my readers have been following this elsewhere. If not, Glenn Greenwald has been all over this (his latest posts are here and here; work back from there). Digby and Hilzoy explain why it's important in complementary ways; explore both blogs for more.

But really, go anywhere in the blogosphere to the left of Andrew Sullivan: we all get it. The Democrats -- Obama included -- joined with Bush & the Republicans to shred the constitution today. We are a less free country, a less just country, a worse country because of it. Damn them all.

Update: Also, what Atrios said. Hardly the most important reason to oppose this; but an important and true one.

A Poem for California's Equal Marriage Day

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116*

I wish a lifetime of joy and delight to all the couples married in California on the day that marriages are first performed there on an equal basis. Mazel tov, to each and every one.

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* Hat tip to Patrick who quoted this in a similar context.

Friday Bird Blogging

Sara's arm makes a nice perch:

(That's Boojum on the left and Snark on the Right.)

Communing with Sara:

A different pose:

Happy Friday!

Constitution Hangs In By a Thread

The incomparable Publius headlines his one-sentence summary of today's decision in Boumediene v. Bush "Court Reaffirms Existence of Constitution". And much of the instant commentary has been pretty celebratory in tone. But for me the chief fact is how slender a thread this decision hangs upon: one vote.

If this decision means that the "Court Reaffirms Existence of Constitution" -- not to mention the fact that everyone is "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuits of happiness", then the headline here as far as I'm concerned is that there is now a die-hard block of supporters of the "Elected Dictator" theory of the Constitution that is one-vote shy of a majority. Four guaranteed votes for tyranny: the only question is will the other five (including Kennedy, usually a pretty conservative guy) stand firm.

The next lede is that the conservative movement -- not as it exists in the fantasies of its idealistic proponents but actually existing conservatism -- is a solid block of pro-tyranny sentiment, with only a few outliers to throw things off.

Anyone who votes for McCain -- or does the functional equivalent (not voting, voting for a third-party candidate, etc.) -- should have not the slightest illusion about exactly what they're getting.

And any Senator who voted for Roberts or Alito; any Senator who failed to vote to filibuster Roberts or Alito; for that matter, any Senator who apologized for those who supported either of them even if they themselves voted properly -- should be deeply, deeply ashamed.

Today's ruling is not a triumph: it is a bare aversion of tragedy. We should be scared, not relieved.

(Souter apparently gave another, equally important reason that today's ruling is not a triumph in his concurrence; key quote here.)

PS: Glenn Greenwald writes a celebratory post and adds a cautionary update. He says in the latter:

Three of the five Justices in the majority... are widely expected by court observers to retire or otherwise leave the Court in the first term of the next President. By contrast, the four judges who dissented... are expected to stay right where they are for many years to come. John McCain has identified Roberts and Alito as ideal justices of the type he would nominate, while Barack Obama has identified Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ginsberg (all in the majority today). It's not hyperbole to say that, from Supreme Court appointments alone, our core constitutional protections could easily depend upon the outcome of the 2008 election.

Far from hyperbole, Greenwald seems to me to be guilty of excessive understatement. It's not that "from Supreme Court appointments alone, our core constitutional protections could easily depend upon the outcome of the 2008 election"; it's that from Supreme Court appointments alone, our core constitutional protections do clearly depend upon the outcome of the 2008 election.

A vote for McCain is a vote against habeas corpus; a vote for McCain is a vote for an elected dictator, not a president. It's as simple as that.

PPS: I'm sure that, in defending the pro-tyranny side of the debate, a lot of conservatives will focus on the fact that the people in question are not U.S. citizens and were not captured in the U.S. This is part of a really disturbing trend towards the belief that non-citizens have "no rights" that the US government "was bound to respect". But the founders knew quite well that many of the rights of human beings -- including those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- were human rights. Freedom from arbitrary detention -- the heart and soul of tyranny -- is not a special privilege of citizenship. It is the basic minimum that every government is obliged to uphold for everyone.

Update: Just in case you doubt Actually Existing Conservatism's commitment to Executive Tyranny, Bush reacts poorly, and other Republicans are even more clearly pro-tyranny. (Incidentally, I'm not a journalist, but I suppose that in the spirit of "full disclosure" I should mention that I know the author of the first link). Both links via Steve Benen. Update to the Update: And of course McCain signs on to the pro-tyranny position. Why wouldn't he? Executive tyranny is a core principle of American conservatism in the twenty-first century. (And Lieberman, McCain's mini-me, signs on to the pro-tyranny position too. Again: why wouldn't he? Executive tyranny is a core principle of American conservatism in the twenty-first century. And Lieberman is a poster-boy for conservative values: aggressive war, torture, the abolition of habeas corpus, etc.) UtUtU: More McCain support for tyranny here. (via)

Iran War Watch

Remember that company that was doing brilliant stories on the Iraqi war buildup while the rest of the media was still regurgitating the Bush department's lies? (The one I was talking about less than two weeks ago?)

Here's what they wrote today (via):

Six months ago, after American intelligence agencies declared that Iran had shelved its nuclear-weapons program, the chances of a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran before President Bush left office seemed remote. Now, thanks to persistent pressure from Israeli hawks and newly stated concerns by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the idea of a targeted strike meant to cripple Iran's nuclear program is getting a new hearing.

Just so we're clear, we're talking about a criminal war of aggression which will unleash unknowable horrors on us as well as on millions upon millions of other people.

We don't know for certain if it will happen; if it does, we don't know for certain how it will go down -- will there be some incident to serve as a pretext, will Bush strike himself or just green-light Israel to do it, etc. But it will be a crime, and it will be a disaster. And the fact that there's a real chance that it will happen means that we should try to stop it now.

Let's try to get this one right this time.

The Insidious Plan of Liberals to Undermine Our Best Defense in the War on Terror Unveiled At Last

As a defense of it accurately says, everyone is ridiculing Mary Grabar's latest column at Townhall, largely on the basis of its first paragraph:

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices. (Emphasis added.)

Obviously, a certain misunderstanding about the binding and gaging of conservative professors is at work here -- someone should clue Dr. Grabar* about this whole phenomenon called "bondage". And, of course, I think we all will agree that the image of troops having "ensconced themselves in the thrones of power" at universities is quite terrifying. But what has been most ridiculed is the true but terrifying fact that these threatening Advanced Troops have been ravishing our virgins. This, sadly, is something that some on the left are -- horrifyingly -- taking lightly.

Obviously what is missing here is people's true appreciation for the importance of "our virgins" in the War Against Terror.

This is because people are failing to think the matter through. Obviously Dr. Grabar has learned that "we" -- America? Conservatives? It's not clear -- have a secret store of virgins which are a key component of our success in the current War.

Now, obviously Decadent Liberals will immediately assume that there is no job that virgins could do that a ravished virgin could not. But a moment's thought will reveal that this is wrong -- and, thus, demonstrate the true insidiousness of the Liberals Dastardly Plot.

One tempting but false hypothesis is that we have been hoarding virgins to try to compete for the loyalty of those who blow up planes and buildings in the expectation that doing so will earn them 72 of them. If we offer each of these gentlemen, say, 83 virgins, perhaps we could outbid them and get them to stand down. But, tempting as this plan is, a little thought will show that it has only a slight chance of success. After all, rumor has it that the countries these men are coming from are themselves filled with virgins. Now, while there is apparently a limit of 4 imposed in those countries -- presumably due to shortages -- still, it raises the troubling possibility that these warriors insist upon non-corporeal, heavenly virgins. So clearly the "outbid" strategy can't be the purpose of our secret store of virgins which the Liberal Advance Troops have so deviously ruined.

But what else, you cry, can a virgin do that a non-virgin cannot?

Why, the answer is obvious: feed dragons.

Dragons, as is well known, feast only upon virgins. Without a steady supply of virgins to devour, most dragons get listless and cranky, and will often refuse to fly at all, much less fight.

There can be no other explanation. Given Dr. Grabar's information that we are hoarding a secret store of virgins for use in the War on Terror, we can clearly deduce that we also have an advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons to use to protect the skies of America.

But! But! If the Advance Troops get in and ravish the secret store of virgins, then the advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons will, clearly, have nothing at all to eat.

And an army, as was famously said, marches -- or, in this case, flies -- on its stomach.

So, yes, my Noble Readers: the advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons -- known, according to anonymous sources, as the "Cheney Wing" -- which are our only defense against the Enemy in this terrible war -- are being deprived of its food source by the terrible hoards of Advance Troops coming in and rendering that food unfit for dragonian consumption.

A more dastardly and unpatriotic act is hard to imagine.

Dr. Grabar has sounded the alarm, and what can any patriotic American do but answer? Defend our secret store of virgins! Preserve the crucial fuel of the advanced fighter wing of virgin-devouring dragons! Act now, before it is too late!!

For -- terrifying as it is to contemplate -- if the Virgins are Ravished... the Terrorists Will Have Won.

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* Yes, I said "Dr. Grabar". She apparently has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Georgia. It certainly puts the notion of "silently calculate the measure by which your university, by conferring your degree, has cheapened the value of doctoral work across the globe," which I was just talking about the other day, in a new light, doesn't it.

35 Reasons to Impeach George Bush

This is awesome. (via comments here) Dennis Kucinich has introduced thirty-five articles of impeachment against Bush. Apparently he already introduced articles against Cheney. (And why do we have to go to the web site of a British paper to find out about this?)

What I particularly like here is the thoroughness of it: getting across the sheer number of impeachable offenses Bush has committed. I don't know if he left anything out -- given how much has happened in the past seven and a half years, he easily might have. Certainly some of these articles of impeachment would require investigation as to whether Bush was sufficiently involved in them (or in one or two cases whether or not they happened at all) to see if they should be passed. And I don't know if every single offense here is, or should be, an impeachable offense. But there is no question that Bush has done many of these things (in a lot of cases he's admitted it); there is no question that many of them are unquestionably impeachable offenses; and there is no question that there is a substantial overlap of those two categories.

Bush should be, must be, impeached. (Frankly, he should be tried for war crimes; and it's not even clear to me if his impeachment would be enough to repair the damage he's done to the republic. But impeachment is a crucial step.)

I herewith present Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment Against George Bush:

1. Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq

2. Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression

3. Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War

4. Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States

5. Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression

6. Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114

7. Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

8. Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter

9. Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

10. Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

11. Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

12. Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources

13. Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

14. Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

15. Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

16. Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

17. Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

18. Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

19. Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to " Black Sites" Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

20. Imprisoning Children

21. Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

22. Creating Secret Laws

23. Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

24. Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

25. Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

26. Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

27. Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

28. Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

29. Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

30. Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

31. Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

32. Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

33. Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

34. Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

35. Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

The Congress should move forward -- at least investigate the truth and/or impeachability of -- every single one of these charges; and should impeach, and convict, on many of them.

Impeach George Bush. Impeach him now. (h/t)

Update: Kucinich's full 65-page text, flushing out the 35 articles is available here as a pdf. Here's the web site hosting the pdf (via).

The War Criminals Are Planning Their Next War Crime

Warning lights are flashing: a special, all-Think Progress link collection.

• June 5: Rush Limbaugh thinks Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office.

• June 5: Daniel Pipes thinks Bush will attack Iran if Obama wins.

• June 4: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert urges Bush to attack Iran before he leaves office.

• May: John Bolton thinks Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office.

• Last Year: Norman Podhoretz thinks Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office.

We don't know if this will happen or not. It's quite possible no decision has been made yet. But anyone who thinks this isn't possible because it's too crazy, or the NIE report means it can't happen, or because only seven percent of the public would approve, is underestimating the crazy radicalness of this administration. Basically, if you think they "can't" attack Iran, you're making the same mistake that all those pundits made in December 2000 when they declared that the nature of Bush's assumption of power meant that he'd "have" to govern like a moderate.

These people know no rules. They have announced that the Presidency is, essentially, an elected dictatorship. They think history will vindicate them on Iraq even now -- if, say, in sixty years it's a peaceful democracy.

(Oh, and by the way, Obama's echoing of Bush's Iran warmongering? Not helping. I don't know if he means it or if he's just pandering: but at the moment (until January 20) the latter is just as dangerous as the former, since it creates a climate conducive to aggressive war.)

I don't know what we could do to stop them. I think it's quite possible that there is nothing we can do. (It's certainly worth giving Arthur Silber's suggestions a try, though.) But if there is anything, we should do it.

Call your congresscritters. Tell them to pass, now, a resolution declaring that attacking Iran without specific, direct congressional approval would be an impeachable offense.

And talk about it. The fact that people think it can't possibly happen is one of the things making it more likely -- more possible.

It would be a crime of almost unimaginable magnitude; it would have ruinous consequences, for our country and for the world.

Let's try to act now. Before it's too late, and the bombs begin to fall.

(Oh, and by the way? If they get their way, we are never leaving Iraq.)

Update: June 9: Steve Clemons is worried not about a direct attack, but about "an increasing chance of a trigger event driving a fast escalation of higher and higher consequence military options." And he's been in the "don't worry" camp until fairly recently.

Mr. Obama Goes to AIPAC

This post will be written without the traditional supporting links, not for any good reason, but because I am feeling too damn lazy this particular morning to go dig 'em out. If you want 'em, you'll have to google 'em yourself.

I think I figured out why Obama's trip to AIPAC, mouthing all the ritual loyalty oaths and shibboleths to the Blind Support For Likud wing of American Jewry, was so frustrating.

It's because he is so often willing to tell people what they don't want to hear.

Obama is someone who went to the Cuban exiles in Miami, and talked about ending the embargo on Cuba.

He's someone who stood his ground as McCain and Clinton pandered with a useless gas-tax holiday.

He's stood up for negotiating rather than ignoring then invading countries we are at odds with.

-- And on and on. One of Obama's key strengths is going and talking to people he disagrees with in ways that earn their respect while not papering over the disagreement.

But not on Israel. On Israel, he just went and said the shibboleths.

Now, there isn't a single remotely plausible argument that this is a reason to vote against Obama -- simply because his opposition, John McCain, is equally bad on this score, and is overwhelmingly worse on every other score. So voting for McCain -- or not voting* -- is simply ridiculous as a response to this.

But it's disappointing.

There has arisen a cottage industry of trying to figure out Obama's "real" position on the middle east -- is he (as, of all people, Marty Peretz seems to think), a genuine Likudnik?** Or is he really secretly sympathetic to a just and equitable solution to the issue? Or does he genuinely not care much?

I have my opinion on this, but I won't give it, because I actually don't think it matters nearly as much as most people do. There are lots of issues on which the Democrats are better than the Republicans -- Iraq, the environment, health care, etc -- even if on none of them are they as good as I, for one, would like. But then there are the depressingly large number of issues -- copyright reform, ending the drug war, and, oh yeah, Israel -- on which both parties are essentially equally bad.***

On the former, the important first step to take is to elect Democrats. Then we can get busy applying sufficient political pressure/support to allow them to follow "the better angels of their natures" and actually follow through on their stated positions -- or even, heavens to betsy, improve on them. (Surgeon General's Warning: Even very good politicians will not behave well without constituent pressure to do so. Apply daily until problem disappears.)

But on the latter, whoever we elect won't help much. So on those, what's needed is sustained grassroots actions to change the political climate, so that a set of politicians -- probably Democrats, but who knows?**** -- will emerge who might be good on them. (Then we work to elect them; then we pressure them... see above.)

So if you care about peace between the river and the sea, go join J-Street or Brit Tzedek v'Shalom or whatever other organizations are out there. (Those two are specifically Jewish groups devoted to mid-East peace, which are just the ones I happen to know about.)

And vote for Obama... because of Iraq, and global warming, and health care, and restoring constitutional balance, and probably quite literally hundreds of thousands of other reasons: but not because of Israel.

But yeah, it's disappointing: because on some issues -- say, again, Cuba, or stupid gas-price-pandering -- Obama is one of the best democrats out there,***** willing to lead while others wilt into Republicrats. So there was some hope -- however dim -- that even on this issue he might be better than the run of Democrats.

But, alas, 'tis not to be.

______________________
* Which includes, as its functional equivalent, voting for Nader or Barr, writing in Ron Paul, or anything of the sort.

** That is, Peretz supports him, and in general seems to believe anyone who isn't a likudnik is an anti-semite, including, of course, half the Jewish population of Israel.

*** The hypothetical third category -- issues on which the Republicans are better than the Democrats -- is, at least at the moment, the empty set. A purely theoretical construct without any actual examples.

**** I know that Republicans are probably about as interested in my advice as, well, something disdainfully uninterested in something is in that thing, but what I'd suggest they do is rather than pursue policies in every single dimension of political life that have not only turned out, in practice, to be complete and utter disaster, but which the public is now starting to realize are disasters, they should instead pick some issues on which the Democratic party is actually bad -- again, Israel, copyright, ending the drug war, and maybe scaling back our overseas empire a la Ron Paul (just without the life-long publication of racist newsletters angle) -- and work out good positions on them. Don't double-down on failed imperialism, economic deregulation leading to catastrophe, environmental stalling leading to ditto, and let-em-die style health care; rather, pick some issues on which your opposition isn't very good and work on those.

Yeah, I know: as long as I'm wishing, I should wish for a pony. But where would I stable it?

***** The only issue I know of where Obama is not as good as the Democrats get (well, aside from a few Kucinich figures who have no realistic shot at national office) is health care: his health care plan was slightly worse than Hillary Clinton's, which was a genuine reason to support her. Although let's face it, neither were offering anything close to single-payer, which is what would be really ideal.