Browsing PBH By Articles

Hard Ons For Hypocrisy

Ugh, I fucking hate Joe Lieberman:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, yesterday called for the U.S. to confront Iran — possibly with militarily force — after U.S. military officials reported that Iran was training Iraqi Shi’ite fighters, reports S.A. Miller of The Washington Times.

“These revelations should be a wake-up call to the United States about the threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as a reminder why Iraq is, in fact, the central front of the global war on terror,” said Mr. Lieberman….

“Although no one desires a conflict with Iran, the fact is that the Iranian government by its actions has declared war on us,” said Mr. Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice president.

And in the Gawker post of the week (awarded by me): Pasture-fed animals who live lives of gentle ease before having their lips and udders ground up and stuffed into natural casing are the wave of the future: Now you can have your hot dog, eat it too, and still be the kind of sanctimonious prick who complains about cruelty to lobsters while you stuff your Whole Foods canvas bag full of organic radicchio that was picked by some kid making five cents an hour.

Other things worth perusing:

Asshole driven development

Fred Thompson Voted ‘Guilty’ on Clinton Perjury Charges, Now Supports Libby’s Half-Pardon

Why Terrorism Doesn’t Work

Ron Paul supporters spam auditorium to capacity

Bush Crimes That Will Get Him Impeached, Tried, Removed and Tried Again as a Common Criminal

How dare cartoonists make fun of atheists?

Please Don’t Let Him Do What He Wants

The Article: For President, Libby Case Was a Test of Will by Sheryl Stolberg in today’s New York Times.

The Text: President Bush’s decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. was the act of a liberated man — a leader who knows that, with 18 months left in the Oval Office and only a dwindling band of conservatives still behind him, he might as well do what he wants.

The decision is a sharp departure for Mr. Bush. In determining whether to invoke his powers of clemency, the president typically relies on formal advice from lawyers at the Justice Department.

But the Libby case, featuring a loyal aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was the architect and chief defender of the administration’s most controversial foreign policy decision, the war in Iraq, was not just any clemency case. It came to symbolize an unpopular war and the administration’s penchant for secrecy.

Even as he publicly declined to comment on the case, Mr. Bush had privately told his aides that he believed Mr. Libby’s sentence, to 30 months in prison, was too harsh.

“I think he sincerely believed that Scooter was not shown proper justice,” said Charlie Black, a Republican strategist close to the administration. “We can get into the whole definition of justice versus mercy, but the point is the president didn’t say justice wasn’t done, he just didn’t think the sentence was fair and therefore he showed mercy.”

Mr. Bush is not a man to dole out pardons lightly, and in offering a commutation — which left Mr. Libby’s $250,000 fine intact — rather than a pardon, he chose not to use his Constitutional powers of clemency to offer Mr. Libby official forgiveness.

The decision was closely held; only a few aides knew. The commutation seemed to catch Justice Department officials, and even some of Mr. Bush’s closest aides, off guard. At the Justice Department, several senior officials were on their way out of the building shortly before 6 p.m. when news flashed on their Blackberries. They were floored.

At the White House, Tony Snow, the press secretary, said he did not know who was consulted, or how the decision reached. Asked if Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, had been advising Mr. Bush on the matter, Mr. Snow said, “My guess is Fred did, but I’m guessing with you right now.”

Mr. Libby had close allies in the White House. The president’s new counselor, Ed Gillespie, who started at the White House just four days ago, played a role in Mr. Libby’s legal defense fund. Asked if he had spoken to Mr. Bush personally about Mr. Libby, he said, “I’m not going to go into any internal discussions.”

One big question is what role, if any, Mr. Cheney played. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney are extremely close — they often rode to work together before Mr. Libby’s indictment forced him to resign as Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff in October 2005 — and aides said the vice president viewed Mr. Libby’s conviction as a tragedy.

Mr. Bush comes at the decision a weakened leader, with his public approval ratings at historic lows for any president, his domestic agenda faltering on Capitol Hill and his aides facing subpoenas from the Democrats who control Congress. Those circumstances offer him a certain amount of freedom; as Mr. Black said, “He knows he’s going to get hammered no matter what he does.”

Indeed, to administration critics, the commutation was a subversion of justice, an act of hypocrisy by a president who once vowed that anyone in his administration who broke the law would “be taken care of.”

Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, called it a “get- out-of-jail-free card.” Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, called it “a betrayal of trust of the American people.”

But to the conservative believers who make up Mr. Bush’s political base, the Libby case was a test of the president’s political will. In the end, although he did not go so far as to pardon Mr. Libby, Mr. Bush apparently decided that it was a test he did not want to fail.

“It became an issue of character and courage, really,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who had argued in his magazine that if Mr. Bush was not going to pardon Mr. Libby, at least he should commute his sentence. “I certainly think Bush did the right thing and I think he did something important for his presidency. I think conservatives would have lost respect for Bush if he had not commuted Libby’s sentence.”

Even as Mr. Libby’s defenders lobbied the White House intensely for a pardon, the deliberations were closely held. In fact, Mr. Bush only reached the decision on Monday, hours after a federal court ruled that Mr. Libby could not remain free while his case was on appeal.

The decision was announced by the White House in a formal statement, just after Mr. Bush had returned to Washington from Kennebunkport, where he spent the weekend meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In it, Mr. Bush said he had carefully weighed the arguments of Mr. Libby’s critics and defenders.

“I respect the jury’s verdict,” he said. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.”

From the outset, Mr. Bush tried to keep his distance from the Libby case, which grew out of the investigation into who leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. He declined to talk about it, and until Monday had insisted that he would let the legal process run its course before considering a pardon.

But aides said the judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton of the Federal District Court, pushed Mr. Bush into a decision when he ordered Mr. Libby to begin serving his time — a decision upheld Monday by a three-judge panel. So, unlike predecessors, including his father, who used their powers of clemency as they were leaving office, Mr. Bush was forced to act now. He has 18 months left to absorb the political risks, and benefits, of his decision.

The Analysis: I’ve known lepers with more friends then George Bush.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Off the AP Line:

WASHINGTON – President Bush commuted the sentence of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on Monday, sparing him from a 2 1/2-year prison term that Bush said was excessive.

Bush’s move came hours after a federal appeals panel ruled Libby could not delay his prison term in the CIA leak case. That meant Libby was likely to have to report to prison soon and put new pressure on the president, who had been sidestepping calls by Libby’s allies to pardon the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I respect the jury’s verdict,” Bush said in a statement. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.”

Bush left intact a $250,000 fine and two years probation for Libby, and Bush said his action still “leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby.”

Libby was convicted in March of lying to authorities and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative’s identity. He was the highest-ranking White House official ordered to prison since the Iran-Contra affair.

Bush said of Cheney’s former aide: “The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.”

What about her visage covered in your go-rilla juice??

Harry Potter Made Me Emo

The Article: Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes. By Harold Bloom in the Wall Street Journal (this article is actually from July of 2000).

The Text: Taking arms against Harry Potter, at this moment, is to emulate Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. By opposing the sea, you won’t end it. The Harry Potter epiphenomenon will go on, doubtless for some time, as J. R. R. Tolkien did, and then wane.

The official newspaper of our dominant counter-culture, The New York Times, has been startled by the Potter books into establishing a new policy for its not very literate book review. Rather than crowd out the Grishams, Clancys, Crichtons, Kings, and other vastly popular prose fictions on its fiction bestseller list, the Potter volumes will now lead a separate children’s list. J. K. Rowling, the chronicler of Harry Potter, thus has an unusual distinction: She has changed the policy of the policy-maker.

Imaginative Vision

I read new children’s literature, when I can find some of any value, but had not tried Rowling until now. I have just concluded the 300 pages of the first book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” purportedly the best of the lot. Though the book is not well written, that is not in itself a crucial liability. It is much better to see the movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” does not, so that one needs to look elsewhere for the book’s (and its sequels’) remarkable success. Such speculation should follow an account of how and why Harry Potter asks to be read.

The ultimate model for Harry Potter is “Tom Brown’s School Days” by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes’ book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken “Tom Brown’s School Days” and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkein. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time.

In what follows, I may at times indicate some of the inadequacies of “Harry Potter.” But I will keep in mind that a host are reading it who simply will not read superior fare, such as Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” or the “Alice” books of Lewis Carroll. Is it better that they read Rowling than not read at all? Will they advance from Rowling to more difficult pleasures?

Rowling presents two Englands, mundane and magical, divided not by social classes, but by the distinction between the “perfectly normal” (mean and selfish) and the adherents of sorcery. The sorcerers indeed seem as middle-class as the Muggles, the name the witches and wizards give to the common sort, since those addicted to magic send their sons and daughters off to Hogwarts, a Rugby school where only witchcraft and wizardry are taught. Hogwarts is presided over by Albus Dumbeldore as Headmaster, he being Rowling’s version of Tolkein’s Gandalf. The young future sorcerers are just like any other budding Britons, only more so, sports and food being primary preoccupations. (Sex barely enters into Rowling’s cosmos, at least in the first volume.)

Harry Potter, now the hero of so many millions of children and adults, is raised by dreadful Muggle relatives after his sorcerer parents are murdered by the wicked Voldemort, a wizard gone trollish and, finally, post-human. Precisely why poor Harry is handed over by the sorcerer elders to his priggish aunt and uncle is never clarified by Rowling, but it is a nice touch, suggesting again how conventional the alternative Britain truly is. They consign their potential hero-wizard to his nasty blood-kin, rather than let him be reared by amiable warlocks and witches, who would know him for one of their own.

The child Harry thus suffers the hateful ill treatment of the Dursleys, Muggles of the most Muggleworthy sort, and of their sadistic son, his cousin Dudley. For some early pages we might be in Ken Russell’s film of “Tommy,” the rock-opera by The Who, except that the prematurely wise Harry is much healthier than Tommy. A born survivor, Harry holds on until the sorcerers rescue him and send him off to Hogwarts, to enter upon the glory of his schooldays.

Hogwarts enchants many of Harry’s fans, perhaps because it is much livelier than the schools they attend, but it seems to me an academy more tiresome than grotesque. When the future witches and wizards of Great Britain are not studying how to cast a spell, they preoccupy themselves with bizarre intramural sports. it is rather a relief when Harry heroically suffers the ordeal of a confrontation with Voldemort, which the youth handles admirably.

One can reasonably doubt that “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is going to prove a classic of children’s literature, but Rowling, whatever the aesthetic weaknesses of her work, is at least a millennial index to our popular culture. So huge an audience gives her importance akin to rock stars, movie idols, TV anchors, and successful politicians. Her prose style, heavy on cliche, makes no demands upon her readers. In an arbitrarily chosen single page–page 4–of the first Harry Potter book, I count seven cliches, all of the “stretch his legs” variety.

How to read”Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”? Why, very quickly, to begin with, perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do. is there any redeeming education use to Rowling? Is there any to Stephen King? Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality? For all I know, the actual wizards and witches of Britain, or America, may provide an alternative culture for more people than is commonly realized.

Perhaps Rowling appeals to millions of reader non-readers because they sense her wistful sincerity, and want to join her world, imaginary or not. She feeds a vast hunger for unreality; can that be bad? At least her fans are momentarily emancipated from their screens, and so may not forget wholly the sensation of turning the pages of a book, any book.

Intelligent Children

And yet I feel a discomfort with the Harry Potter mania, and I hope that my discontent is not merely a highbrow snobbery, or a nostalgia for a more literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say) intelligent children of all ages. Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter.

A vast concourse of inadequate works, for adults and for children, crams the dustbins of the ages. At a time when public judgment is no better and no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study, anything goes. The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum, and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies.

The Analysis: I hate Harry Potter, so thank you Mr. Bloom for putting down my thoughts in a fashion a lot more intelligent than I would have.