Daily Archives: September 4, 2003


Late Night Reading

Kevin Drum wonders why, since the bushies are executing a Democratic foreign policy, we didn’t elect a Democrat in the first place.
Is democracy possible in Egypt? Tarek Heggy discusses this in a guest appearance at Winds of Change.
Alex, A List a Day, continues to provide links to odd and not so odd lists…always good for some diversion. Try out Fametracker’s (who are they??) list of the 10 least essential fall movies of 2003.
And, over at Open Source Politics, Mark Kleiman has a proposal for Controlling Teen Drinking in an Age of Terror.
Good Night!


presidential Prevarication

Josh Marshall in his article The Post-Modern President, Washington Monthly September 2003, discusses presidential deception and has this to say about the bush administration:

Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion.

They may be slipping though. Rice and Rumsfeld have been arguing that our occupation experience in Iraq is similar to post war Germany. Their problem, though, is that the post war Germany experience is verifiable and as this Slate article asks:

So, how did this fanciful version of the American experience in postwar Germany get into the remarks of a Princeton graduate and former trustee of Stanford’s Hoover Institute (Rumsfeld) and the former provost of Stanford and co-author of an acclaimed book on German unification (Rice)? Perhaps the British have some intelligence on the matter that still has not been made public. Of course, as the president himself has noted, there is a lot of revisionist history going around.

I think the pressure getting to be too much for them and we are starting to see major cracks in the administration facade. If this is indeed the case we are likely to see increasingly drastic and dangerous maneuvers on the part of the bushies as they struggle to maintain power.
Via Walter at idols of the marketplace.


Civility in Discourse

Civility in the Blog World
Complete and continual civility in the kind of open forum that a blog with comments presents is wishful thinking as the trolls will always pop up.
This isn’t an issue here…Modulator’s comment threads currently are lucky exceed 0 in length. But we all read other blogs and from time to time add our comment to the discussion.
So, as Kevin Drum and Jane Galt point out civility is certainly a goal to reach for and will not only raise the level of discussion but increase the chances of your comment being thoughtfully read.
More discussion of this here and here.


Secret post 9/11 Flight?

On 9/12/2001 many of my family members were getting into cars to drive many miles to a funeral service. The airports were closed. But were they? According to this article:

Members of Osama bin Laden’s family were allowed to fly out of the US shortly after the September 11 terror attacks, a senior official has said.
Even though American airspace had been shut down, the Bush administration allowed a jet to fly around the US picking up family members from 10 cities, including Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston and Houston.
Some 140 high ranking Saudi officials were also on the plane.

The apparent source for this is Richard Clark the former White House counter-terrorism chief.
I hope this turns out to be false.
Via Skippy.