The story behind the story

My dad used to use the phrase "the story behind the story" -- often, when we were talking about the news of the day, he would ask "So what's the story behind the story?" -- meaning we had to look not only at the news story itself, but at why that particular story came to be cosidered as newsworthy.
This weekend, I wondered how come it took the traditional media weeks to cover the Downing Street memo and the Plame leak investigation, but both Newsweek and Time were all over a trivial column on The New Republic website in less than 24 hours.
Billmon writes a perceptive post explaining the swiftboating of Kos this weekend:

. . . I suspect the real objective here is to try to scare away the Democratic pols who have been cozying up to Kos and the liberal blogosphere. The sight of all those powerbrokers -- Harry Reid, etc. -- lining up to kiss Kos's ring in Vegas must have really set the klaxons wailing at DLC HQ . . . The Lieberman Dems don't hate and fear Kos and the Daily Kos "community" because they are too far to the left. They hate them because they represent an emerging power center within the Democratic Party that they don't control -- what's more, one that is now much closer to the public mainstream on the central issue of our time (the Iraq War) than they are.
The overriding concern for the neolibs, I think, is not that Kos and the netroot activists will lead the party off to the far-left fringes, but rather that they are willing, even eager, to form alliances with conservative nationalists like Jim Webb (the Va. Senate candidate) who've been forced out of the GOP because of their opposition to the neocons and their insane schemes. From Marty Peretz's point of view, this is very bad. Left unchecked, it could even pose a threat to the sacred alliance with Israel.
It's not that Kos (or Webb, for that matter) are outspoken critics of the special relationship. Far from it. But it is clear that the constituencies they represent, or hope to represent, are much more skeptical about U.S. intervention in the Middle East than the Democratic old guard -- which, let's face it, is practically welded to the Israel lobby. Even worse, this is all happening at a time when the Iraq quagmire is making the costs of our imperial role in the region painfully clear.
Add in the cheerful brutality with which Kos and Jerome have skewered the consultants and the DLC Dems, the primary defeat now looming over Joe Lieberman's head, and the rice bowls that could be broken if the old system of campaign graft is abandoned, and it's easy to understand why the long knives are out.
Whether the grown ups (Peretz, Lieberman, Hillary) actually set the Swiftboat in motion, or just watched approvingly ("Who shall rid us of this meddlesome blogger?") as their hatchet boys did what comes natural, is almost irrelevant. The important thing to understand is that we have reached the point where the Dinos and their media allies are willing to use Rovian tactics against anyone who challenges their entrenched position -- even someone like Kos, who is hardly the second coming of Henry Wallace or George McGovern.
Whether that's good or bad for the Kossaks I don't know -- I suppose it depends on how much credence you give to Gandhi's old saw: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." In the real world -- and in imperial America, too -- the truth is that sometimes they ignore you, then ridicule you, then fight you and crush you like an overripe eggplant. We'll see if that's true this time. Either way, though, it looks like the battle between the netroots and dino Dems is going to get very down and dirty indeed.

This gives the whole fight a larger frame, and in an odd way, makes its very triviality more meaningful.

"We're here, we're queer"

We have participated in Gay Pride parades with our daughter, and they are amazingly energetic and joyful events, combining an incredible sense of individual freedom with the power of group solidarity -- there's no other event quite like it in the world, really.
I couldn't find many photos online yet of Toronto's gay pride parade today -- except for these small ones on CTV's site -- so here are some from the rest of the world.

Paris


Madrid


Mexico City


San Salvador


Panama City


Lisbon


New York


Kolkata, India


Atlanta


Seattle


San Francisco

Keep up the fair work

Well, finally -- here's some good news from Iraq.
Instead of killing 30 innocent people a month at checkpoints, American soldiers have adopted new procedures.
And so they were able to reduce the slaughter to 12 innocents a month by January this year.
And now its down to just four innocent civilians a month!
Hooray!
The Reuters story says:

Since the U.S. invasion three years ago, shootings by U.S. troops have been a source of complaint among Iraqis, despite repeated attempts to ensure both civilians and troops are aware of the procedures to follow and danger signs to monitor.
New efforts were being made to inform Iraqis of checkpoint and convoy procedures and to train troops, the briefing note said. Soldiers were also being given new equipment, including lasers, to attract drivers' attention without opening fire.
This year 12 percent of escalation of force incidents, not all of which involve opening fire, resulted in serious injury or death. It was not clear how many incidents there were last year.
One senior military intelligence source has said there were about 4,000 such incidents last year, but that could not be confirmed. Of those, the source said, less than 2 percent were later found to have involved an actual threat to the troops.

Forgive my snark, but how else can anyone respond? I am sure in the end there will not be a single family in Iraq unaffected by the horror and cruelty of this occupation.

Ave, Kos, morituri te salutamus

I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlord, The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.
The quicker he takes over everything, the better. He couldn't possibly do any worse than Bush and Cheney, and at least he's got military experience.

Follow the money

$100,000 for a meeting with Bush or Rove?
But neither Bush nor Rove got a penny of all that money?
Oh, of course not. I'm sure the President of the United States met with wealthy strangers out of the goodness of his heart. And I'm sure those lobbyists kept all that money for themselves . . .

Why I will never subscribe to The New Republic

If you can't lead and you won't follow, then get out of the way.
Today Hunter writes:

[New Republic magazing owner Martin] Peretz writes two paragraphs of personal attack blasting the shabby illiteracy of personal attacks, ignores the issues raised as to his magazine's own 'reporting', and considers himself smugly vindicated.
Perhaps he is. And perhaps that demonstrates, as much as anything, the tattered shreds of that old and once-proud banner, one that many of us will no longer pretend at propping into relevance.

Yes, that pretty well sums it up.
Perez starts off his little rant by proudly stating that he had never read Daily Kos before.
My question is, why not? The largest progessive website in the United States, with close to half a million readers a day, and the owner of a supposedly progressive magasine is proud of himself that he doesn't read it?
He just doesn't get it.
The New Progressives like Kos and left blogistan are trying their best to work with the "old progressives" like the Kewl Kid pundits, the Democratic "strategists", the "liberal" columnists -- but make no mistake, the New Professives are now leading this parade.
If the Oldsters aren't willing to follow, to engage in discussion rather than garbled attack and insult, they will be left behind by history.
The public always knows who is really on their side. And who is not.

Great line of the day

Digby says Iraq is pushing the Republicans off a cliff --

. . . they are telling the American people there is no end in sight and there is nothing they can do about it. That's the reason why Dems must step up now and aggressively pound this message home that the president has no plan. In order to win, the people must believe that by electing Democrats they are taking action to change the status quo. Democrats need to hammer the fact that for all the president's bluster --- he's paralyzed by his inability to admit that he's made a mistake.
Democrats may not have all the answers. The administration has got us in a hell of a mess and it's not easy to get us out of it. But the Republicans have made it quite clear that their intention is to keep doing exactly what they are doing until somebody stops them. Democrats need to stop them --- and they need the American people to understand that they are the only ones who can stop them. The Republicans can't stop themselves.

Emphasis mine.

Canadian military - read this article

Every member of the Canadian military should read William S. Lind's article, Aaugh!. Here's the gist of it:

At present, the bombing is largely tied to the latest Somme-like “Big Push,” Operation Mountain Thrust, in which more than 10,000 U.S.-led troops are trying another failed approach to guerrilla war, the sweep. I have no doubt it would break the Mullah Omar Line, if it existed, which it doesn’t . . . Should be in Berlin by September, old chap.
Of course, all this is accompanied by claims of many dead Taliban, who are conveniently interchangeable with dead locals who weren’t Taliban . . .
Icing this particular cake is a strategic misconception of the nature of the Afghan war that only American generals could swallow . . . the power of the U.S.-created Afghan government is receding, not growing, and the Taliban’s “window” only closes when Christ comes again.
Aaugh! The last time a nation’s civilian and military leadership was this incapable of learning from experience was under the Ching Dynasty.
Perhaps it’s time to offer a short refresher course in Guerrilla War 101:
Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.
Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and he’s still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the “ink blot” strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.
Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistan’s Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end.
Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.
You need closure, but your guerilla enemy doesn’t. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just that—if not you, then someone else.
The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

This article comes via Billmon.

Great line of the day

Via Digby, we find Gene Lyon's latest column:

. . . As history, this cut-and-run business is nonsense. It wasn’t Democrats who made peace in Korea. It was President Dwight Eisenhower. Democrats didn’t dispatch Henry Kissinger to whisper to China in 1972 that the U. S. could live with a communist Vietnam. President Richard Nixon did. He began the long, bloody retreat that ended with the North Vietnamese taking Saigon under President Gerald Ford.
Maybe the oddest thing about the legacy of Vietnam is that the worst thing that could happen, from a rightwing perspective, did happen. The U. S. lost the war. Communists conquered much of Southeast Asia. And the effect on national security ? Well, we got lots of good Vietnamese restaurants out of it. Otherwise, none.
The communists soon fell to fighting among themselves, with Vietnam invading Cambodia, China attacking Vietnam, and the Chinese and Soviet Russians entangled in a blood feud. Next, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Domestic fallout from that bloody fiasco helped cause the collapse of the U. S. S. R. and the demise of communism almost everywhere—also because nobody but a few crackpot professors in the West believed in it anymore.
Exactly why so many like Rove, Bush and Cheney, who avoided Vietnam, subsequently metamorphosed into countryclub Napoleons is mysterious. Personal psychodrama appears to be involved . . .

Emphasis mine.

"You forget who's got the knife"

Years ago, my husband and some co-workers were at one of those Japanese chef restaurants. One of my husband's co-workers was trying to be funny by insulting the chef, whom he saw as just a glorifed waiter, really. The chef put up with it for a while -- good sport, hahaha, and all that -- but finally he had had enough. The jokes ended when he said, pleasantly but meaningfully, "You forget who's got the knife!"
The professional Kewl Kid pundits in Washington are feeling the cold breath of irrelevance on their necks, given the success of Yearly Kos and all the attention now being paid to Markos and Jerome Armstrong and Jane Hamsher and Crashing the Gate.
So now they're trying to slap down the bloggers -- for example, the smear jobs on The New Republic yesterday and on Instapundit today.
But Atrios dishes it right back at them in a subtle post which sends a pretty direct message to the Kewl Kids -- and the message is, we know you better than you know us, so back off before we start spilling the beans on you:

. . . Generally, "political strategists" are quoted all of the time in the media, or have spots on cable news, and miraculously they never seem to have any clients. Or, more to the point, we are never told who their clients are. Perhaps they just stand on a soap box on the corner and announce their strategy to Washington pedestrians. Still, one assumes that they do have clients and that what they say is indirectly or directly motivated by that . . .

And he didn't make any jokes this time about blogger ethics panels.

The Bush Plan for Iraq

1. Declare victory.
2. Leave.
Simple, huh? Why didn't they think of this before?

Today's pop quiz

1. What does the National Rifle Association think of the United Nations?
Answer: Those blasted @#$%&*

2. What does the United Nations think about the National Rifle Association?
Answer: Just what IS this "National Rifle Association"of which you speak?

Great line of the day

At Rising Hegemon, Attaturk asks Who the fuck is this monster in the White House?

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be . . . Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality." Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." . . . "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.

They tortured an insane person to make George W. Bush look good. Good luck explaining that one to Jesus, Dubya!

Emphasis mine.

Funny, funny

Isn't it fun finding great blogs?
Of course, I hope you return to this one, but I would understand if you couldn't because you were laughing too hard.
Cynic flagged one the other day that I love - Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry - and here another -- Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. Sample:

Speaking of monkey gods, George Bush is visiting Austria for the very first time. He keeps looking for kangaroos. He had a press conference with his good friend, Austrian Chancellor Schüssel (“I call him Wolfgang, he calls me George W.”). Near as I can figure it, Bush was in Europe to send messages to non-Europeans. He told Iran, which says it will respond to the nuclear proposal by August 22: “It seems like an awful long time for a reasonable answer -- for a reasonable proposal, a long time for an answer.” Yeah, George, like you’re such a fast reader. He told North Korea it should “not fire whatever it is on their missile.” Kimchee? Bush was shocked and offended to hear that Europeans consider the US the biggest threat to global stability. “Absurd” he called it, chuckling. “It’s a -- we’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind.” And you don’t see any correlation between people knowing what’s on your mind and them considering you a threat to global stability, George? He added, “For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking.” And, let’s face it, a change of underwear.

"It's not happening here but it's happening now"

Today in Iraq links to this site, Roads to Iraq, which describes a new Amnesty International advertising campaign in Europe. They are using transparent bus-stop ads with the tagline "It's not happening here, but it's happening now" and here are some of the startling images: