"Why do they hate us?" was the big question on many people's lips right after 9/11/01. My stock answer: "Well, how about us having military bases all over the world when we're not actually at war with anyone?" Frequent response to that: "Bases? We have bases?" OK, as belated evidence of my assertion, please read Chalmers Johnson's report. He says we have 700 by a conservative count: it's hard to know for sure because the Pentagon plays shell games--pun intended--with the true numbers. How do you suppose that makes people in base-saddled countries feel? Glad because we're protecting them? But from what? People in their own countries that might otherwise overthrow their governments? Johnson points out the crude indiplomacy of the military's term for the geographical parameters of our control. It's called "the footprint."

I'm not planning to see Errol Morris's The Fog of War, a capital-I important film consisting of interviews with Kennedy/LBJ-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. A principal instigator of US escalation in the Vietnam War, McNamara now claims with pride ("No, shame." "Pride, Precious." "No...") that he encouraged low-altitude flights during the fire-bombing of Tokyo--a conflagration that killed more civilians than the A-bombs further south. Of course, he would have been too junior to have that power in WWII. Anyway, no way I'm going to sit in the dark for 90 minutes listening to the self-justifications of that 83 year old pathological liar. Alexander Cockburn makes me feel better about my decision. He says McNamara really got the better of Morris.

Lastly, Cockburn and his Counterpunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair filed an amusing, dyspeptic campaign report from Iowa. Kucinich is probably the candidate closest to their views on the war (and mine, FWIW, although our "getting the UN involved" as a solution sounds pretty presumptuous--surely only Iraqi citizens can make that call?). In any event Cockburn/St. Clair aren't Deanies, which makes the following quote more in the nature of an unbiased, general ad hominem slam:

What’s Kerry got going for him, apart from the money of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has propelled the sputtered Kerry campaign forward on a sea of ketchup dividends? Not much. Kerry is a chronic fence straddler on issues. Gore Vidal hit it on the head when he remarked that Kerry “looks like Lincoln…[pause]… after the assassination."

It is my understanding that, however wealthy the wife, the contribution she can bring to the campaign can not exceed $200,000 (or a figure very close to that). I'm not a Kerry fan but I'm also not a fan of taking a swipe at someone without doing your homework first. Cockburn/St. Clair are no better than Bushies if they just pull stuff out of thin air. I also disagree about the likeness post-assassination. He looks more like Wyle E. Coyote after an anvil has been slingshot into his face. GO EDWARDS!!!! he's pretty.
- Kevin 1-29-2004 2:03 am

Kevin, you just compared two of my heroes to the Bush clan! Anyway, lighten up, "propell[ing] the sputtered Kerry campaign forward on a sea of ketchup dividends" is comic exaggeration. The spousal cash infusions were widely reported and clearly grist for smart remarks by non-supporters of the man who will lose to Bush in '04 (unless the pro-Bush media changes its tune soon).

- tom moody 1-29-2004 11:53 pm

Be honest now. If that remark were made by a republican, whether it be O'Reilly, Limbaugh or Coulter (although I suspect it's much too clever to have been constructed that delightful mixture of penis-envy and jingoism) you would be pissed off. But I guess it's semantics. I say it's inaccurate, you say it's a comic exaggeration. The bigger issue is whether this guy, and it looks more and more like it's going to be this guy, can beat the hairless monkey that is currently in office. I'm not too optomistic about that. Liberals always seem to lack the sharp-edged focus that their dumber cousins, the conservatives, who, through the natural consequence of their tunnel-vision view of the world, easily maintain without a second thought (or a first in most cases).

So, any thought on who the new Pope will be? Again, I'm for Edwards.

- Kevin 1-30-2004 5:43 am

A good line is a good line, and yes I'd laugh at it coming from a right-winger; whether I'd laugh at it coming from any of the commentators you mentioned is unlikely, though, because none of them are that witty. I'm not "for" any of the frontrunning Dems. Edwards and Kerry voted for the war, so they're idiots and/or moral cowards as far as I'm concerned. I'm on record as saying I'd vote for a blender over the Bush Crime Family, but it looks like the media wants the hairless monkey and will destroy any opposition through endless repetition of Dem-embarrassing incidents and making shit up--anything to help their masters the Republicans. They've already nuked Dean and now I hear they're doing unctuous "did we go too far?" handwringing about their coverage of the Yawp.

- tom moody 1-30-2004 6:44 am

stop demeaning the hairless monkeys by comparing them to the bushes.
- dave 1-30-2004 7:25 am

The trouble with any comparison between that drooling boob we call our President and an animal is that every animal has at least one characteristic that is redeeming, something that, were it not here on Earth, we would be the sadder for it. Therefore, let me amend my previous description. The President is not so much like a hairless monkey as he is to what said monkey would throw in anger.

Cheney, however, still reminds me of a geriatric terminator that's suffered a stroke.
- Kevin 1-30-2004 8:55 am

More Cockburn, after Errol Morris won the Academy Award for his McNamara movie.

It reminds me of films of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and then head of war production. Speer loved to admit to an overall guilt. But when he was pressed on specific nastiness, like working Jews or Russians to death in arms factories, he would insist, eyes ablaze with forthrightness, that he knew nothing of such infamies.