What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.


By Elton Beard

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't.


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ARCHIVE ARCHIVE ARCHIVE

Sunday, September 22, 2002
3:00 PM PDT
Welfare causes terrorism! Did I mention that welfare causes terrorism? Yes! Twenty seven times by my own count, and that's enought to hammer even Josh Marshall into admitting that there may be more than a grain of truth here. For that reason, and because I love immigrants and want to save them from a life of sloth, I am in favor of eliminating all welfare benefits to immigrants and their descendents for three generations, and for the implantation of painful slivers of wood under their fingernails (but only until they get a job, of course!).

But while my recommendations are just conventional wisdom in the United States, the Germans stubbornly refuse to take my advice! My extensive sources tell me that a) that might not be a bad thing since it will only end up discrediting the lefty pro-welfare types and b) no-one cares what the Germans think anyway... makes sense to me!

But wait! Under the President's well-meaning Faith-Based Initiative, there's still somewhere left for those terrorism-prone unemployed immigrants to go when they get hungry, isn't there? And how do we know for sure that the clerics of certain Armies of Compassion aren't hiding an explosives belt under those voluminous robes? Especially clerics of certain subversive religions who preach that "the most important thing is to do good deeds..." This could be a big problem for the Republicans once the public catches on...

Do the Democrats see an opportunity to outflank Bush from the right here? I certainly do...

[Update: Prof. Reynolds thinks I'm onto something here!]

Friday, September 20, 2002
7:15 PM PDT


 

Colin Powell resigns, joins Democratic Party


"We had one too many disagreements," Colin Powell explains.

Washington DC (CNN) - Saying that "enough is enough", Secretary of State Powell announced his resignation from the Bush administration in an unscheduled news conference today. "I thought I could work with these people," he explained, "but they keep making up this silly stuff, these ridiculous rationales, and then I'm supposed to explain all that to world leaders".

He realized what he had to do, Powell said, when he re-read the latest State Department report on states that sponsor terrorism. "We put Iraq on that list, but we really had to stretch for reasons. We accused them of not being sufficiently sympathetic to us after 9/11, of not extraditing a couple of Saudi fugitives, that sort of thing. And now Saddam is Hitler again. Give me a break."

Powell is also switching political parties. "I can't do much for the Republicans any more" he said, "but from the inside, maybe I can still help the Democratic Party. Somebody has to oppose the administration's politically-driven brinkmanship". He added that the Democrats "just don't really understand what they're up against".

Aides quoted Bush as responding "who cares what Colin does? I still get to keep Condy, right?"

Thursday, September 19, 2002
8:30 PM PDT
Does it matter if my Defense Secretary lies to me? It's not to that hard to come up with a list of excuses for Don Rumsfeld's lies about the circumstances under which UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq in December 1998. Let's go through the main ones.

  • Rumsfeld was using shorthand for the fact that Saddam Hussein didn't allow the weapons inspectors back into Iraq after the U.N. pulled them out so the US and UK could bomb his country. But there is no need for shorthand. To say that Iraq "refused the inspectors' re-entry" takes no longer than to say that it "threw the inspectors out", and the first formulation has the advantage of being true.

  • It's a trivial lie in the scheme of things, maybe on the order of equating "sexual relations" strictly with copulation. Except that Rumsfeld isn't fudging about private, personal stuff, he's misleading the American people about an arguably significant historical detail regarding a matter with little room for error - war.

  • He was just being a salesman, putting forth the best case for his side with a bit of embellishment. The thing is, the Secretary of Defense is not selling a soft drink here. His product is war, not the sort of thing you return for a refund if it doesn't work as expected. Rumsfeld owes his customers (who also happen to be his employers) truth in advertising, at least.

  • He really believed that the inspectors were thrown out by Saddam Hussein. You don't really buy that, do you? This is one smart SecDef and he knows when he's lying. And if he thought that this is a distinction without a difference, that not letting the inspectors return was morally equivalent to throwing them out, he could have said so. But he didn't.
The fundamental problem is that Rumsfeld is not using many facts in arguing for his war. Instead, he's asking you and me to believe that he has "connected the dots" - dots he won't share with us - and that his honest conclusion is that the elimination of Saddam Hussein is absolutely necessary, before the Iraqi leader is in a position to do us great harm. He expects us to take his word for this, to approve the war he finds so essential, and soon. Our Defense Secretary wants us to trust him. But when one of the few testable assertions that he does state (repeatedly) is simply false, the question remains: why should we believe this man?

Addendum:Tom Tomorow has another example of Don Rumsfeld's difficulty with matters of fact.

12:00 PM PDT
Lies my Defense Secretary told me. One would think that in making the case for something as serious as starting a war with a country that has not attacked us, the administration would be careful to not make assertions that can be easily disproved. One would be wrong. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services committee yesterday, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld said this:

And of course, the country that threw the inspectors out was not the United States. It was not the United Nations.

It was Iraq that threw the inspectors out. And they had thrown them out and they have rejected 16 resolutions of the United Nations and stipulations.

Later in the day, on the PBS Newshour, Rumsfeld repeated the same assertion:
So there clearly is a role in our world for inspections but it tends to be with a cooperate partner, and we have seen the situation with Iraq where they have violated some 16 UN resolutions and finally threw the inspectors out.
But of course, Don Rumsfeld was lying when he claimed that Iraq threw out the weapons inspectors. He was repeating a bold-faced lie, knowingly asserting a falsehood that has been repeatedly debunked. The truth is that the UNSCOM inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in December 1998 so that the US and the UK could proceed to bomb Iraq as punishment for insufficient cooperation. The truth is that the weapons inspectors were not thrown out by Iraq. But the truth appears to be an elusive concept for Mr. Rumsfeld.

Why should we believe anything uttered by this Secretary of Defense who so openly practices to deceive us?

Tuesday, September 17, 2002
10:45 AM PDT
We cannot allow some of the world's worst leaders to harbor and develop the world's worst weapons. That's how George W. Bush put it earlier this year, and variants of that phrase have appeared regularly in his speeches, most recently yesterday. Presumably, by "worst weapons" Mr. Bush is not referring to weapons that don't work well, but rather to those that are the most efficacious in sowing death and destruction.

But something is terribly wrong here. Leaving aside for another day Mr. Bush's reference to "the world's worst leaders", the assertion that others are harboring and developing "the world's worst weapons" is troubling. Our country's military spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, almost as much as the rest of the world combined, yet some two-bit dictator can develop and harbor weapons that are worst than ours? Does Don Rumsfeld know about this?

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Busy, busy, busy.

What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.


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