It's Rose Mary Woods' fault: Records that could have provided a more thorough explanation of what it was George Bush was doing in late-1972 when he had priorities other than serving as a member of the TANG were mysteriously "destroyed" in the mid-'90's during a microfiche salvaging expedition by the Defense Department. A sinister force, no doubt....

The New Republic reports that the Bushies have been pressuring the Pakistani government to produce Osama bin Laden, or some other high-profile terrorist, before the November election, with the preferable period being the first three days of the Democratic Convention later this month. [link via Kevin Drum]

A few months back I was e-mailed an invitation to apply for a credential to attend the 2004 Democratic Convention. Since I haven't actively participated in partisan politics in over a decade, I have to admit the offer didn't intrigue me; I mean, who the hell wants to spend four days in Boston during the summertime. The type of blogger who would get all moist over attending is probably already in the pocket of Terry McAuliffe, so I could hardly see how the party would benefit from my presence. And, convention or no, I'm not that hard up to get laid.

But I guess the real problem I have is the same one any serious journalist would have about attending: its lack of importance. At one time, delegates attending a party convention were prepared to advocate policy and enact a platform, even if they weren't choosing the next President and Vice President. The last time the outcome was in doubt going into the convention was 1980, and now, the festivities are little more than infomercials, ratifying decisions that were made many months earlier. Why go to something I'm not planning on watching in the first place?

Kerry picks Edwards: I don't know why exactly he so impresses the pundits; Kerry kicked his ass in the primaries, just as easily as he did Howard Dean and General Clarke. Even with him on the ticket, his home state comes into play only if there is a huge national wave in Kerry's favor; the only states Kerry really needs to focus on in Deliverance Country is Florida and Arkansas. He is also a Senator, like Kerry, so the ticket doesn't exactly play to an anti-insider message. And he made his fortune as an "ambulance chaser"; he was quite good at it, but I can just hear that meme being spread amongst the talk radio brownshirts.

He does bring something to the party, though. His optimism plays well against Cheney, just as Kerry's seriousness plays well against Bush. He's charismatic on the stump, a trait that no doubt led to some his multi-million dollar wins before North Carolina juries. Tort lawyers are perhaps the best defenders of the rights of the little guy out there, which is why the powerful hate them so. His lack of political experience will be a wash; Bush had even less experience in foreign policy last time, and I doubt the GOP really wants to spotlight that. It can be safely predicted that he will do a better job as a candidate than Joe Lieberman.

Maria Sharapova may well become the Tiger Woods of tennis, someone whose success catches the interest of casual sports fans and creates an alternative storyline (as in, who won? and how did Maria do?) to every tournament she plays in. Her dominating performance this morning in winning Wimbledon was reminiscent of one of Tiger's Majors: an efficient, methodical pasting of the best the sport had to offer that could only leave one in awe.

It is almost sad how quickly Anna Kornikova is going to be forgotten....

Eric Alterman raises an interesting point about Michael Moore: why are media critics more aggressive in fact-checking F9/11 than the various "misstatements" of the Bush Administration? BTW, for an interesting compendium of said falsehoods, check out this Congressional report on same.

I figured this sort of argument was inevitable: right wing moral relativism, in the form of a defense of Dick Cheney's dropping the f-bomb last week. As I wrote at the time, I was less outraged at the shocking fact that the Vice President swears than the fact that he was so unapologetic about it later. And when you have someone as sycophantic as Charles Krauthammer defending you, it's no wonder that the Bushies are so clueless when it comes to the way normal folks perceive them.

That Krauthammer is unable to distinguish between the angry use of the f-word by someone cut off on the 405, or a coach arguing a bad call, and its use by someone who is arguably the most powerful man in the country, who holds the positions of both Vice President and President of the Senate, on the hallowed floor of Congress, uttered within the context of a debate on a matter of public interest, is remarkable. Besides the fact that the odds are nil that the same justification would have been made if the recipient of the vulgarity had been Dick Cheney or Arik Sharon, it goes to show how one-sided the calls for civility in our public discourse have been. That it should not be surprising that this sort of conduct can be defended, in much the same way Southern slaveholders defended the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate by Preston Brooks more than a century ago. The breakdown in civility back then led to the Civil War; I only hope that there are still enough people of good will on both sides of the fence, who recognize that some sanctified arenas, such as a courtroom or the floor of Congress, should encourage polite, reasoned debate, and that f-bombs should be reserved for barroom quarrels between drunks.

Maria Sharapova: She's prettier, smarter, plays better tennis, and has more class than Anna K: What's not to love?

Idiot Son Update: Perugia club owner Luciano Gaucci denounced his team after it lost a home-and-home series with Fiorentina, relegating the team to the minor leagues (Italian Serie B). Promising that he would purge the players he deemed unworthy to play professional soccer at the highest level, he vowed that the only players who could be assured of employment next season were Italian superstar Fabrizio Ravanelli, and, of course, our old friend Saadi Ghaddafi. Apparently the one game he played this season must have made more of an impression on the boss than his frequent "injuries", carousing and positive drug tests.

Admittedly, I did not anticipate the impact Fahrenheit 9/11 would have on me after seeing it this morning. I've learned to take much of what Michael Moore says with a grain of salt, and his snarky humor usually undercuts his message. One didn't exit the theatre after Roger & Me wanting to overthrow capitalism. His newest film, however, stays with you long after you leave the cineplex. It must be experienced with a group of people to be understood, something that I can't recall saying about any recent film. There are two types of people in the world, Blondie: those who've seen the film, and those who haven't. Discussing the film with people who haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet, either because they hate Moore or hate his politics (or both), is like trying to have a discussion about sex with a priest; he may have some interesting thoughts on the subject, but he just hasn't been there.

The importance of seeing this film came back to me when re-reading the post below about Mr. Hitchens. When I first read his "review", I couldn't wholly comprehend the intensity of his hatred for Michael Moore, or fathom what could have been the source of his animus. Most of the piece consisted of nothing more than a string of clever insults about Moore, but almost nothing to justify them at a substantive level. Hitchens, however, had seen the film; at the time, I hadn't. After spending two hours in a packed Woodland Hills theatre Sunday morning, I got it. I understood.

This was, by no means, a perfect film. The first half hour is spent regurgitating standard lefty claims about Florida and the 2000 election, and drawing broad (and I believe unsupportable) claims about Bush's ties with the Saudis. And some of Moore's annoying personal tics make their unwelcome appearance in this film. Yes, politicians get pampered by make-up artists before they go on camera, and if we're before the unblinking eye long enough, all of us will reveal some pretty gross examples of our humanity. Let he who is without sin lick the first comb. And anyone who remembers John Ashcroft's defeat in his 2000 Senate bid knows that he handled an impossible situation with enormous class (unlike the Republicans after the Wellstone Memorial), and pretending that the voters were voting for a corpse in that election when it was clear that they were picking the very-much-alive widow of his opponent is not a high point. One can acknowledge the occasional acts of decency in our opponents and still disagree with the Patriot Act.

Where the film picks up steam, and becomes a powerful indictment of our nation's leadership, comes when Moore gets out of the way, and simply focuses on the actual reasoning used to justify attacking Iraq last year. For someone who, in good faith, supported the Bush Administration and their policies, viewing Fahrenheit 9/11 must be comparable to what it was like for some French career civil servant to see The Sorrow and the Pity thirty years ago, and then be forced to justify what he did in WWII. Even if one served the Vichy government with what started out being only the best of intentions, that famous documentary shoved the issue of collaboration right in your face. You either did some soulsearching, or you lashed out at the messenger.

Here, Hitchens lashes out. There can be no way anyone watching the last half-hour of F9/11 can not be moved by the patriotism of the least-privileged (whom Hitchens patronizingly refers to as "duskier than others"), or not be angered that their sacrifice was so arrogantly and mendaciously exploited by our government. Hitchens disingenuously asks whether the use of proxies, and the anti-draft riots, would have meant that Moore believes the Civil War should never have been fought, ignoring the fact that slaves, unlike WMD's, actually existed. He has nothing to say to the friends and family of the dead, other than que sera, sera. But as Hitchens admits at the end of his piece, "'fact-checking' is beside the point."

U.S. Transfers "Sovereignty" to New Iraqi Government: Thank God we don't have to worry about that anymore. No doubt, General Thieu Prime Minister Allawi will provide legitimacy. Maybe Senator Aiken was right.

Any possibility that Ralph Nader would be anything more than an asterisk in the November election was probably eliminated this afternoon, with the decision of the Green Party not to endorse his candidacy for President. Enthusiasm for his efforts seems pretty much limited to GOP financiers looking to hobble the Kerry campaign, he has yet to qualify for the ballot in a single state, and only the Reform Party, the quasi-independent movement started by Ross Perot but now coopted by Lenora Felani, offers any possibility that he could be a spoiler. Couldn't have happened to a nicer man.

I can't pretend I'm outraged at the fact that Dick Cheney dropped an F-Bomb on Senator Patrick Leahy the other day; people lose their cool from time to time, and a choice epithet was well within the vocabulary of Harry Truman, to name just one example. But his refusal to apologize for his public vulgarity only goes to show what a genuinely classless bunch this crowd really is. Big time.

Prof. Johnson uncovers classified secrets from the British Army at a Potomac bar this afternoon, to wit, that the war was about oil, that American tactics in Iraq have only exacerbated the problems there, and that David Beckham is a "wanker". And for that, he gets stuck with the tab?

One of the more noisome tendencies of the political blogosphere is the transformation of every disagreement into evidence of moral or psychological defects in your adversaries, so it should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens has become a popular writer among my more hawkish brethren. Like Westbrook Pegler, H.L. Mencken, and other controversialists, his focus is on the personal insult, the utter dehumanization of his ideological foes, rather than the reasoned brief of the advocate. Nowhere does this approach get played to greater effect than in his oft-cited review of Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Even the review’s title, “Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore”, promises much more than is ultimately justified by his criticism. Rather than critique the film, Hitchens is only interested in the ad hominem attack on his adversary, so he sidelines any attempt at a rational defense of the President’s post-9/11 policies in favor of making snide comparisons to Leni Riefenstahl. For a review that is ostensibly about the “lies” of the filmmaker, he introduces precious little evidence of deceit, and he provides nothing to suggest that Moore deliberately or recklessly falsified material within the film. To Hitchens, accusations of mendacity serve the same purpose as Charles Krauthammer’s frequent diagnoses of mental illness in his opponents: it takes the place of reasoned debate, since the hard work amassing facts to buttress your side of an argument is always going to be more time-consuming than being able to allege that your opponent is somehow beyond the pale.

Most of the review consists of nothing more than attacks on the character of Michael Moore and others in the anti-war camp. Moore is called a “silly and shady man”, and “one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture”, while his movie is slammed as “dishonest and demagogic”, “a piece of crap”, “an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing”, “a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness”, and “a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”

Biting, witty comments, no doubt, when presented as the opinion of the reviewer, but Hitchens provides no factual basis from the movie to support any of those calumnies, except to suggest that Moore had argued in a debate several years earlier that Osama Bin Laden should have been considered innocent until proven guilty, and that somehow means that Moore’s argument about not using enough manpower to finish the job in Afghanistan is discredited. He takes issue with Moore’s claim that Iraq had never attacked the U.S., but can only argue in rebuttal that Saddam gave sanctuary to Abu Nidal, and that American P.O.W.’s were mistreated during the first Gulf War, neither of which amounts to a causus belli this time around, and, in light of the revelations at Abu Ghraib, not exactly a well-timed argument. And as I noted a couple of days ago, the review culminates with a laughably ironic attack on Moore's use of Orwell, which only goes to show how insular Hitchens' world has now become.

At one point, he all but accuses Moore of doing the filmic equivalent of using ellipses to omit inconvenient passages from the works he’s citing, but one looks in vain for anything to back up that charge. He alleges that Moore does not “make the smallest effort to be objective”, nor “does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer”, all of which supposedly amounts to a betrayal of the craft on Moore’s part. But Hitchens earlier notes that he himself was the auteur of several documentaries, on subjects as varied as Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton, and anyone who remembers those works knows that Hitchens did not spend much time being fair to his targets. One would look in vain to find any part of his polemic against President Clinton that challenges the often-contradictory stories of Gennifer Flowers or Juanita Broaderick, or that mentions the fact that Kathleen Willey was thoroughly discredited in her testimony before the Starr Inquest (but you will find him disparaging Clinton's attempts to attack terrorism as "wag the dog" efforts to distract the public). And if the cop murdered by Rickey Ray Rector had a name and family, Hitchens isn't going to disclose that to the reader.

Good documentaries are often biased, subjective films, where the documentarian plays the same role as a prosecutor, ably marshalling the evidence in a one-sided manner to support his case. The viewer plays the role of a grand juror, examining the evidence to decide whether sufficient grounds exist for an indictment. Great films such as Heart and Minds, The Sorrow and the Pity, and, of course, Roger & Me, did not back away from taking a stand, nor, I assume, does Fahrenheit 9/11. As in the case of a prosecutor, calling a documentarian a “liar” is a crippling charge, since it is aimed at discrediting the entire case-in-chief by sowing seeds of distrust in the advocate; that is one of the reasons so many on the Right have made that charge against Michael Moore (and it should be noted, Moore is not afraid of making similar frivolous charges against his adversaries, as seen here). Claiming that the prosecutor has only presented an arguable, subjective case isn’t discrediting, since, as members of the jury, we already expect that to happen. If Bush’s allies want to dampen the box office this weekend, they will have to do better than that.

Sad to say, but the standards to qualify for being the William Hung or the Richard Hatch of the legal profession are higher than what the Bush Administration requires to be nominated for the Federal Court of Appeals. [link via TalkLeft, w/props to Molly for her tip]

Why doesn't a story like this ever get published in the papers? What liberal media, indeed....

As if this off-season hasn't already been a nightmare for Laker fans, comes word today that Gary Payton has agreed to a contract extension. I suppose that was an inevitable result of the team firing Phil Jackson last week; Payton was like a passing quarterback forced to run the wishbone last season, so once the Pistons' defense exposed the Triangle as the outdated, high maintenance offense that it is, someone was bound to feel that the Glove was thereby vindicated, and, as it turns out, that someone was Mitch Kupchak.

Department of Unintentional Irony (or why Mr. Samgrass would be well-advised not to write columns referring to African-American soldiers as "dusky" while he's hammered):

A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence.

--Christopher Hitchens, only a few lines after comparing Michael Moore to Leni Riefenstahl, reviewing "Fahrenheit 9-11".

Watching Clinton's interview on 60 Minutes last night made me realize how little has changed the last four years, at least in terms of political spin. With the Big Dog, it was trying to parse the meaning of the word "is" before the Starr Inquest, over the critical issue of whether he was involved with an intern. Now, it's a new crowd trying to salvage some measure of dignity before the country by claiming that, at the very least, Saddam had "connections", or "ties" to Al Qaeda, as opposed to the two parties actually collaborating together in the trenches before 9-11. Just as Prime Minister Blair was able to change the subject from his government's reckless use of false claims about Iraq's WMD's by attacking the BBC's use of the term, "sexing up", so too are Cheney and the Bushies by asserting that what matters most is not that the Iraqi government was working hand-in-glove with Bin Laden, but that they had at least a tangential relationship with Al Qaeda.

Somehow, I don't think the American people would have backed a war with Iraq if they had known that Hussein's people had spoken with OBL's on a couple occasions, but had not collaborated on terrorist attacks against the U.S.; in fact, by that standard, it could be argued that Al Qaeda had much stronger "connections" to the Bush Administration than it did to Saddam, since the President was friendly with the Bin Laden family, and the U.S. provided much of the funding received by the Mujhadeen in the '80's. Certainly, as far as real "ties" with Al Qaeda are concerned, there was a far greater circumstantial case to be made against the "friendly" governments of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but we didn't go to war with those countries.

The whole point of the war, according to the Bushies, was that Saddam was an imminent threat, and that he was an ally of the people who attacked us on September 11. The war was sold to the American People has a front in the larger war against terrorism. But now we're hearing that the war was really about something else, like changing the political dynamic of the Middle East, or "liberating" the Iraqi people, or, now, that Saddam, or one of his Ba'athist associates, had met on occasion with representatives of Bin Laden. If our spy services were doing their job, I would hope that we would have also met with representatives of Bin Laden on occasion, if only to gather intel or suborn a potential asset. I'm sure Jenkins' Foot or the assasination of the Archduke will factor in at some point with these people, but for now, the rationalization of hundreds of American(and thousands of Iraqi) deaths because of a few low-level meetings between Iraq and Al Qaeda seems like a cruel joke.