bark, bugs, leaves, & lizards

Accidentally On Purpose [Updated]

Call me paranoid, but I think conservatives like former Bush Administration spokesperson Dana Perino and former New York Mayor Rudy Guliani are setting the table to claim 9/11 doesn’t count as a terrorist attack on “Bush’s watch” because EVERYTHING CHANGED ON 9/11, thus the terrorism clock didn’t start on the Bush Administration until 9/12/01.

Update: Guliani “clarifies“:

The Mayor’s spokesman says that the remark “didn’t come across as it was intended” and that Giuliani was “clearly talking post-9/11 with regards to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil.”

Bad News Day

Very bad. I wish Mr. Carosoli the best, we were lucky to have him in New Orleans.  I’m sort of heartbroken about it.  Out of towners might wonder about the intensity of our feelings for Mr. Carosoli here, so I feel obliged to share this nugget:

“On a difficulty scale of one-to-10, [New Orleans is] a 10. I would compare it to governments I’ve looked at in the developing world, ” said Cerasoli, who has given lectures about corruption in such Third World countries as Sierra Leone and Swaziland. In New Orleans, he said, “information technology is in a terrible state. Getting access to information people regularly access in other places is a major problem. Public documents aren’t being made public, if they exist at all.

“And I don’t think the city government truly understands what the inspector general is supposed to do — and might provide more resistance as it becomes more clear, ” he said.

I met him with some other bloggers before the Rising Tide Conference and thought he was the real deal, someone unassailable from an ethical standpoint–smart and tough, entirely trustworthy.   I can only hope the institutionalization of his office has a momentum that cannot be contained–and that Mr. Carosoli will survive his health problems and have many more years to share with his family.  I can’t thank him enough for what he’s done for New Orleans

“What Manner of Man He Was”

In Errol Morris’ latest post on his New York Times blog Zoom, he gathers the head photo editors from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Thomson Reuters to discuss a series of (mostly) iconic photos taken of George W. Bush during his presidency.  It’s worth reading in its entirety (and not as painful to read as it may have been prior to Jan. 20, 2009).

Morris:

What fascinates me is that George W. Bush often references photographs. What disturbs him most is the photographs that make him look bad. So, for example, there’ll be “Mission Accomplished,” and he’ll say, “Well, you know, that was a bad idea to put up Mission Accomplished.” But he doesn’t say, for example, it might have been a bad idea to go to war for fraudulent reasons. Or it might have been a bad idea to destabilize an entire country or to immiserate an entire population.

…

Or in the case of Katrina, the photograph that was taken of him looking out the window of Air Force One. In his last press conference he expresses concern not about the lack of coordinated federal response to a hurricane devastated city, but about the bad impression left by the photograph. It goes back to the photograph, not to the underlying reality.

Totally Crazy

We’ve gone to a couple Totally Vegan Potluck dinners, but little did we know we may have broken (totally vegan) bread with fed moles looking for “terrorists”?

Don’t Read Too Carefully

Wired‘s profile of Errol Morris needs your attention. I’ve liked all Morris’ movies and look forward to his new one, Standard Operating Procedure, about Abu Ghraib (“look forward to” isn’t quite right, maybe “anxiously anticipate with a certain dread”). I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his NYT blog called Zoom when I’ve had the head space for it. Here’s a longish snippet of the Wired article:

“We manage to survive in the world because we don’t think about it carefully. Or scrutinize it. Otherwise, it would just be too horrific,” [Morris said].

The 230 photographs Morris examines so intensely in Standard Operating Procedure, which formed nearly the entire case against the soldiers who went to prison for the abuses, are merely a fraction of the many thousands of Abu Ghraib photographs. “Even I have thousands of Abu Ghraib photographs,” Morris says enthusiastically, spreading his hands apart to indicate their extent. His point is that we live in a solid world, but our perception of it is flawed and partial:

Q: But don’t you think that we manage to keep up a coherent narrative of who we are and where we’ve been?

A: No! We remember things selectively. We experience things selectively. We think about things selectively. We live in a kind of incomplete, patchwork-quilt universe. A bric-a-brac. Assembled in some higgledy-piggledy way.

He pauses for a moment. A new link in the digressive chain is forming. Morris starts talking about a new idea with the excess energy and over-enthusiasm of the philosophy grad student who will sooner or later get an ashtray thrown at his head by a grumpy professor. (It happened to him at Princeton, he says.)

“In 1974, this guy Brandon Carter came up with what he called the anthropic principle,” Morris continues. “There was the thought that the reason the world looks the way it does is because we’re in it, but that doesn’t mean that in the areas we’re not in, the world actually is the way it is here.”

We think about Abu Ghraib the way that we do because of a particular grouping of photographs. But the photographs that we have are in turn only a small sample of the larger universe of photographs taken in Abu Ghraib. “You know, someone hands you this pile of photographs, and they say, This is the world,’” Morris explains. “And you say, Oh, thank you very much. I see. This is the world.’ But you look no further! Abu Ghraib exists in part because of that phenomenon.”

Errol Morris is watching a videoclip on his iPhone in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan. The walls are painted white, and there are soft couches to sit on, soft light from standing lamps near the couches, and soft conversation. Only guests of the hotel are allowed to order food in the lobby, which is stuffed with creative types on expense accounts talking about Fashion Week. Morris is in New York to direct a commercial. We are talking about the dessert menu and the Saddam-hanging video, which he references at the end of Standard Operating Procedure in a shot of a noose and a trapdoor opening in a scaffold.

While Morris has avoided looking at online videos of jihadist beheadings, like the murders of Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, he watched the Saddam-hanging video immediately and repeatedly. As an advertisement for the US war effort, Morris says, the Saddam-hanging video was not particularly well scripted. Saddam looks like he is going to a premiere of La Boheme. “He has his beautiful scarf, his tailored overcoat, and he’s standing there really quite elegantly. I would even go so far as to say regally,” Morris points out. “He’s clearly angry, but completely composed.”

Meanwhile, on the platform with him are a lot of crazy-looking people, many wearing ski masks. “You know, the whole term ski mask is itself a joke,” he says. “If you saw somebody — you’re skiing in Vail, and you saw someone on the trail coming from behind you wearing a ski mask, you would go batshit. You’d try to call homeland security, the police. God help us! You know, it’s someone skiing with a ski mask! It’s a fucking terrorist!” He’s high on the energy of his riff. “No self-respecting skier would ever be caught dead with a ski mask. It would be risky. You’d get shot,” he says, bringing his voice back down to match the quiet conversations of the white-walled room. “And what you see, for all intents and purposes, is a bunch of terrorists who are disorganized, confused, angry, screaming, vindictive. And you see this guy, you know, ready to go to the opera in the middle of it.”

Creature Feature [Updated]

The BBC’s Matt Frei thinks President George Bush gets a bit of a bum rap:

“He’s fundamentally quite a good bloke, meeting him he’s quite charming, he’s not the evil creature that many people think he is, at all.”

Which makes me wonder: what kind of evil creature is Bush?

Update: If not the kind of creature that would drop a poor, defenseless dog, maybe …

(image credit: azrainman)

You’ve Probably Already Heard This, But Damn. [Updated]

George Bush gives up golf for the troops. Politico:

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

This one is up there with declaring victory on the aircraft carrier.

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed [Sergio Vieira] de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

(Paul McCarthy, White Head, 2007; photo credit: admkrm)

Update: War Room suggests Bush is wrong about when (and why) he sacrificed his golf playing:

It actually turns out that the day Bush refers to was not the last day he played. The man he refers to as de Mello is Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was the U.N.’s top official in Iraq. He was killed when the world body’s headquarters in Iraq was bombed in August 2003. But according to records kept by CBS News, Bush played his last round of golf in October 2003.

Also, as Warren Street at Blue Girl, Red State points out, at the time he apparently stopped playing golf, he was also dealing with knee problems that had forced him to stop his running routine.

Photo Op Trouble

I saw this AP photo up at HuffPo promoting a video clip in which President Bush tells the pontiff that his just delivered speech was “awesome.” Pretty funny stuff. But what’s with that flag between them in the background? I know it just can’t be the Confederate flag, it just can’t be … but who’s flag is it, then? Mississippi’s flag is the only one I can think of that features the Confederate stars and bars flag … but if they’re standing in front of the 50 state flags, couldn’t that one have been discretely placed off to the side somewhere, out of the main camera shot at least?

Happening Happens

CNN:

The president also hailed the operation as a sign of progress, emphasizing that the decision to mount the offensive was al-Maliki’s.

“It was his military planning; it was his causing the troops to go from point A to point B,” Bush said. “And it’s exactly what a lot of folks here in America were wondering whether or not Iraq would even be able to do it in the first place. And it’s happening.“

That’s “happening,” not “a happening,” and if by “happening” he means …

• The Mahdi militiamen are holding government troops at bay, and parading US-supplied armoured vehicles they had captured in front of television cameras.
• “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged ‘no retreat’ in the fight against Shiite militias in the Southern city of Basra, as [tens of] thousands of protesters demanded demanded he resign over the crackdown and extremists fired rockets [and motars] into the U.S.-protected Green Zone.” [Robert H. Reid/AP]
• “Abu Iman barely flinched when the Iraqi Government ordered his unit of special police to move against al- Mahdi Army fighters in Basra.

  “His response, while swift, was not what British and US military trainers who have spent the past five years schooling the Iraqi security forces would have hoped for. He and 15 of his comrades took off their uniforms, kept their government-issued rifles and went over to the other side without a second thought.” [James Hider/The Times (London)]

• “…the military situation in the city is a scene of real chaos because thousands of soldiers who are natives of the governorate–there are about 16,000 soldiers who are refusing to fight Al-Mahdi Army’s gunmen. The source stressed the gunmen were still in control of some police stations in the city’s neighbourhoods which the government forces were unable to control completely and asserted that Al-Mahdi Army seized dozens of Iraqi army military vehicles and wrote Al-Mahdi Army on them.” [Usamah Mahdi/Elaph]

… ah, must be the dissonant chords of freedom on the march or some shit like that. But wasn’t Dick Cheney in Iraq just a couple weeks ago? Why, yes he was, only 11 days ago, to be exact, in what was billed as a “surprise trip” before the 5th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. Big Dick didn’t go just for the cake. Maybe he prodded Maliki to make a move, expiration date of the Bush Administration coming due and all.

I’m certain Big Dick is telling the truth when he says he really doesn’t care what the American people think, and this civilian/executive-seizing-control-of-the-military approach Maliki has taken seems right out of the Big Dick playbook.

On Second Thought: Let’s Make A Deal!

(photo credit: Rongem Boyo)

Times Online:

A day after Mr al-Maliki had sworn to fight powerful Shia militias “to the end” he appeared to soften his tough stance and offered them until April 8 to surrender heavy and medium weapons. He also offered cash to those who comply, a tactic the American military used in 2004 when they failed to crush the Mahdi Army in fighting in Sadr City. The fighters handed in mostly old weapons, took the cash and rearmed for a brutal resurgence in early 2006, when full-scale sectarian warfare broke out in Baghdad.

A Mahdi Army spokesman in Sadr City said: “We are still fighting. Nobody handed in their weapons, we will never do that for cash.”