A "Modest" Proposal

As I said a while ago while discussing Peggy Noonan, I love when a writer makes a point without even knowing they're making it.

This time it's New York Times Supreme Court writer Linda Greenhouse, whose book Becoming Justice Blackmun I quite enjoyed.

In today's Times she writes an article on the dearth of female clerks for Supreme Court Justices. This is a valid topic, and only to be expected given the increasing conservative rigor of the court.

But then she writes something that makes an impression that I'm not sure Ms. Greenhouse intended.

In the seventh paragraph of her article, Ms. Greenhouse writes:

"While their pay is a modest $63,335 for their year of service, a Supreme Court clerkship is money in the bank: the clerks are considered such a catch that law firms are currently paying each one they hire a signing bonus of $200,000."

Do you see what I see?

Now, she might have phrased that sentence differently. She could have written, "While their pay is $63,335 for their year of service, considered modest by recent law-school graduate standards..."

But she didn't. She wrote it in such a way that she made it clear that she personally believes that to earn $63,335 a year is nothing.

I would humbly submit, Ms. Greenhouse, that for many Americans who are struggling to support their families, $63,335 is hardly a "modest" amount, and the fact that you consider it to be so says quite a lot about your unconscious attitudes and those of the newspaper you work for.

Personally, I think Ms. Greenhouse needs a crash course in reality. Maybe the Times could take her off the Supreme Court beat for a short while and assign her a hard-hitting investigative piece where she'd have to go undercover and work in a McDonald's for a month or two. Or as a chambermaid in a hotel. Or as a cocktail waitress. It doesn't matter what job, really -- just so long as it pays minimum wage. It might do her some good.

In fact, maybe the whole staff of the Times should have to do that -- one week a year they would have to work for minimum wage at a demeaning job with no benefits of any kind, where they would be treated like absolute shit.

Then maybe they wouldn't consider $63,335 a year to be a "modest" amount of money.

Tom Moran

What is (Literal) Truth?

It seems, according to an item I read on a website called Rasmussen Reports, that you can divide all Americans up neatly into two categories, based on how they respond to one simple question.

What's that question? It's simple: Is the Bible literally true?

In Alabama and Arkansas, 75% of those surveyed said yes.

In Vermont and Massachusetts, only 22% of those surveyed said yes.

Now what does this mean (except that we should all move to either Vermont or Massachusetts as quickly as possible)?

Well, if you live in the South (in the aptly-named Bible Belt), you're far more likely to believe that the Bible is literally true. West Virginia (70%) and Tennessee (68%) aren't far behind Alabama and Arkansas in their belief in the literal truth of Scripture.

According to the Rasmussen item, 54% of American adults believe that the Bible is literally true.

54%? Really? Last time I checked, that was almost half.

Now you have to admit, that is a fascinating statistic. But I find it a little incomplete. I think that the person who made up the poll should have added the following questions, to round out the sampling somewhat:

• Do you believe the Moon is made of green cheese?
• Do you believe in reincarnation?
• Do you believe in ghosts?
• Do you believe in Santa Claus?
• Do you believe in the Easter Bunny?
• Do you have a High School diploma?
• Do you believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in planning 9/11?
• Do you believe that George W. Bush is a great president?
• Do you believe that Jesus would want large corporations to make billions of dollars in profits while poor Americans sleep on the streets for want of affordable housing?
• Do you believe that Jesus loved the rich?
• Do you believe that liberals are evil?
• Do you believe that all people who don't believe in Jesus as their personal savior should die a slow, painful death unless they convert to Christianity?
• Do you believe that Jesus would bomb abortion clinics?

That would tell us rather more about the people who took the survey, don't you think?

I would add one more question, for my own personal reasons:

• If you believe that every word in the Bible is meant to be taken literally, then why did Jesus talk in parables?

Because, of course, if you believe my dictionary (which states that a "parable" is "a usually short fictitious story that illuminates a moral attitude or a religious principle"), parables are not, by definition, meant to be taken literally.

And then of course there's this final question. If you really think that every word in the Bible is to be taken literally, then what do you do about this?

"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me." (Matthew 19:21)

If you believe the Bible is literally true, have you taken Jesus at His word? His literal word? Have you taken everything you have -- literally everything -- and given it away to the poor, so that you can follow Jesus the way He commands you to follow Him?

Yeah, I thought so.

Tom Moran

The Quote of the Day

I don't often look at other people's blogs (don't want to be an echo chamber here...), but occasionally I will admit to checking out a blog that I more or less stumble over. And I more or less stumbled over Girl With a One Track Mind (sorry, no links -- we're not about links here either).

Anyway, this young lady has just published a blook (that's a book made from a blog), and is seemingly a little defensive about it. And in the process she has created what I consider to be The Quote of the Day:

"If there are any bloggers who think writing a book is easy, let me tell you, it isn’t. My blog wasn’t ‘lifted’ and pasted into bound form as some might assume; whilst I did use some posts from it, I also had to write an entire book, with shitloads of new material, from start to finish. It took me four months of hard work to get it completed."

Four whole months! You poor baby! However did you manage?

Tom Moran

The Wave of the Future

Everyone agrees that it's going to be big. The only question is -- just how big will it be? A Category 3? Or a Category 5? Will everything get swept away?

I'm speaking, of course, of the November midterm elections, that are, as of tomorrow, ten weeks away. Everyone seems to agree that the Democrats are probably going to regain the House if Representatives. The question then is: will they also take back the Senate?

Al Hunt of Bloomberg has an interesting piece on this. Hunt quotes Tom Davis, a Republican House member from Virginia, as saying that: "The issue matrix and political dynamics are not good for us. Only some big national or international event before the election can change that.'"

Or some of Karl Rove's patented dirty tricks. At this point that's pretty much all I'm concerned about.

On the odds of the Democrats retaking the Senate, Hunt has this to say:

"To win the six seats necessary for a Senate majority, Democrats need a perfect political storm that even a tsunami may not produce. There is, party strategists believe, a good chance to knock off five Republican incumbents; any other victory would be a real upset, and Republicans are competitive for several Democratic-held Senate seats."

So it's possible that, just as Joe Lieberman managed to lose to Ned Lamont by only four points instead of the 14 that he was trailing by in polls taken right before the primary, the Republicans might be able to just barely hold onto the Senate by a seat or two.

That will be disappointing, although I'm still an optimist that the Democrats will take back the Senate as well as the House. But even if that does not happen, and the Dems only get the House and are a seat or two behind in the Senate, that's still good news. Can you guess why?

Al Hunt has the answer:

"The most important difference -- and the reason the White House desperately hopes to avoid a Democratic House -- will be much more aggressive oversight. With tough lawmakers like [John] Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California setting oversight agendas, defense contractors such as Halliburton Co., eavesdroppers at the national security and intelligence agencies and anti-environmentalists at the Interior Department will be in for a rough few years."

Imagine. This administration finally being held to account. People like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith finally being forced to answer questions under oath. Halliburton executives finally having to explain where billions of dollars of Iraqi redevelopment money went. The full story of the arrogance and hubris of the people who got us into this mess of a war finally being told, and the people responsible finally being held to account. One part of government actually doing what they're supposed to do under the Constitution.

Imagine that -- just for a second.

That will be worth it -- even if we don't take back the Senate. But be prepared. This gang of criminals is not going to let go of power easily -- they think they're entitled to it and that anything they do to hold onto it is morally and ethically justified. And the thought of Democrats forcing them to answer questions is having them crapping in their pants right now -- so expect Karl Rove and all the other crooks at the White House to do whatever they can think of to make sure it doesn't happen.

Tom Moran

Differing Views on Iraq

The theme of today's post is "Make Your Own Hegelian Triad."

I will give you the thesis, and then the antithesis. Then I will supply the synthesis.

But first, the thesis. This is from Ann Coulter's latest column:

"This year's Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.

To wit, they're claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they're all for the war against terror — absolutely in favor of that war — they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as "Iraqi civilians," even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.

As Howard Dean put it this week, "The occupation in Iraq is costing American lives and hampering our ability to fight the real global war on terror."

This would be like complaining that Roosevelt's war in Germany was hampering our ability to fight the real global war on fascism. Or anti-discrimination laws were hampering our ability to fight the real war on racism. Or dusting is hampering our ability to fight the real war on dust."

Okay. Got the thesis?

Now here's the antithesis. It comes from a study written by Jeffrey Record and published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. It's quoted in Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks (pps. 308-309 if you'd care to look it up):

"Of particular concern has been the conflation of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored crucial differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary pretentive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the [Global War on Terror] but rather a detour from it."

Rather an effective antithesis, wouldn't you say? Especially since it comes from an official Army publication, and not from some aging bottle blonde spinster with her head up her ass.

Now for the synthesis. I've quoted it before, but it's worth quoting again. It's from one of my favorite authors, Edward Gibbon. He's writing in Great Britain about that insurgency across the pond known as the American Revolution (Gibbon was, at the time, a Member of Parliament):

"I shall scarcely give my consent to exhaust still further the finest country in the world in the prosecution of a war from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success. It is better to be humbled than ruined."

I think that pretty well sums it up – don’t you?

Tom Moran

Viacom Dios

I have been a lttle remiss in not commenting on the whole Tom Cruise/Paramount imbroglio before now, but I wanted to hold off awhile and see how the whole thing shakes out.

And now the pattern is becoming clear.

Did Viacom (the parent company of Paramount Pictures) end their 14-year deal with Tom Cruise because of his recent bizarre behavior? Of course not: that was just a preemptive strike of sorts to try and get the moral high ground in spinning the failure of a negotiation.

The truth is a whole lot more complicated. And more interesting.

This is about business. Sumner Redstone could give two shits about what Tom Cruise does or does not do in public. He could have been spotted walking down Times Square stuffing his newborn baby in a blender to make Suri milkshakes -- and if "Mission Impossible III" had brought in $800 million dollars at the box office, Redstone would have told him that his kid was delicious and bought him a new blender.

Not only did the film underperform at the box office, the way Cruise's deal was structured meant that he might have made more money than Paramount. Cruise is one of a handful of performers (Tom Hanks is another) who get what they call "first dollar gross": between that and the amount of money he takes off the back end (from DVD sales and other ancillary rights), he stands to make an enormous amount of money from any given film. Way more than any studio is comfortable with him making.

And what's where we get down to the crunch of the issue, which is money and power.

Is Tom Cruise slipping? Possibly -- I implied as much in a previous blog entry. But he's still got a lot of clout at the foreign box office, even if he has damaged his domestic reputation with his arguments with Brooke Shields over prescription medications to fight post-partum depression and his ridiculously testy exchange with Matt ("You're glib") Lauer. But what Paramount is trying to do, it seems to me, is to send a shot across the bow, not just of Tom Cruise, but of every overpaid movie star out there whose films aren't grossing enough to satisfy the studios.

You're not worth the money we're paying you, the studios are saying. And we're not going to put up with it anymore.

There is a precedent for this kind of thing. Because this isn't the first time in film history that studio heads have tried to put recalcitrant movie stars in their place.

Back in 1919 the studios felt that the stars were getting too much money. Salaries were getting out of hand. So they decided to do something about it. Namely, to merge all the movie companies together into one big conglomerate -- and that way be able to demand whatever they wanted from their hired hands, otherwise known as actors. If filmmaking became a monopoly, the stars would have nowhere else to go, and thus would have to agree to whatever demands the studios made of them. Hollywood would become one big plantation.

Several big name movie stars of the day learned about this scheme (with the help of a female PI getting information out of an infatuated studio executive), and when they found out about it they decided to act. And so Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and star director D.W. Griffith decided to pool their resources and create their own, independent studio -- United Artists.

Could Tom Cruise do the same thing today? Could he become another Chaplin and make his own films his way? Is he willing to put his sizable fortune where his mouth is and finance his films himself?

It's quite possible that Cruise could have the last laugh in this situation. But he might do well to remember the words of another man who put his cash into pictures -- William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst had gone into pictures in a big way, and had lost a lot of money in trying to turn his mistress, Marion Davies, into a movie star in big, bloated costume epics (she later found her true niche in comedy).

When someone told Hearst, "You know, there's a lot of money in pictures," he is alleged to have replied: "Yes, I know -- mine."

Something to think about if you're Tom Cruise.

Tom Moran

Some Enchanted Evening

It's hard to meet someone in the big city -- and it's even harder to meet someone who can get hard.

That's why I feel for 29-year-old Sarah. Sarah (no last names, please) is a comedienne who lives in New York City, and she is a real life virgin. No kidding. And she's looking to lose it -- in a hurry. By November 7th, to be precise. That's Sarah's 30th birthday, and she'd like to get laid before then. Can't say I blame her.

Now, you would think that in a city like New York that wouldn't be all that big a challenge. You head over to Dive 75 at closing time some rainy Tuesday night, and presto! Mr. Right Now is right at your woozy, beer-stained fingertips.

But not our Sarah. She's a little more finicky than that. Or perhaps more inept, I'm not sure which. She claims she has issues with intimacy, but come on -- you'd have to have more issues than The Complete New Yorker not to get laid by the cusp of your 30s.

So what's a girl to do? Well, she put in a call to her favorite magazine, Jane (which tells you something right there). And they have agreed to help her, um, achieve her goal. The dehymenification of Sarah is now underway.

Sarah has a blog, in which she says: "I could totally use YOUR help. Submit anyone you think might be a fit for a quirky gal who has a great sense of humor and loves the Red Sox."

Now, I know what you're thinking. Hey Tom, you're a rootin'-tootin'-macho-he-man, why don't you put yourself forward as the lucky guy to get lucky with Sarah?

Sorry, but it's not to be. Sarah is a fairly fetching young lady, but it's just not possible for the following reasons:

• She's 29, and is thus ten years too old for me.
• She's a blonde, and I'm notoriously peroxiphobic (comes from having a blonde twin).
• The woman's a Red Sox fan. I mean, really. No wonder she can't get laid.
• And if I were to take this chick's cherry, it would have to be a Pay-Per-View Special.

But I do have a candidate for Sarah. In fact, I think I have the perfect candidate for her. Someone who's young, cute and very talented. Someone who's romantic and could sweep a young, innocent woman off her feet.

I'm talking, of course, about Clay Aiken. Wouldn't that be perfect? I know, he's got those dorky bangs at the moment, but come on, we all know that every guy is a reclamation project at first. Either he has to be pried away from his beer buddies or he spends way too many nights at the Garden watching the Knicks lose or he's got a teensy weensy cocaine problem.

But all that can be worked out -- right? Love conquers all, doesn't it?

Look on the bright side. After all, it's not like he's gay or anything...

Tom Moran

Let's Do It Again, Redux

Almost a week ago I posted a blog item on three films that I thought could profitably (in the artistic rather than the merely financial, sense) be remade. The three were:

• "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"
• "Peyton Place"
• "Looking for Mr. Goodbar"

And now it occurs to me that there's another film that really could be done well as a remake. I thought about just adding it to the original post (you know, sort of ex post facto), but then I decided to do it as a new post.

And what might that fourth film be?

"Marjorie Morningstar": Herman Wouk's classic 1955 romance of a young Jewish girl in Depression-era New York who aspires to be a famous actress. There is a film version from 1958 with Natalie Wood as Marjorie (which, you have to admit, is perfect casting), but the rest of the film is flawed. Casting the brilliantly talented but very Irish Gene Kelly as the charming but self-loathing Jew Noel Airman (note Wouk's typically subtle-as-a-rubber-crutch use of symbolic names) is disastrous, and the film suffers from uninspired direction (from Irving Rapper, whose record as a director is spotty at best, although he did direct "Now, Voyager" with Bette Davis) and a schlocky script.

The rights to the novel have been purchased, it's said by Scarlett Johansson, and there appears to be a new screenplay by Frederic Raphael (he wrote "Two for the Road" and the wonderful British mini-series "The Glittering Prizes") and that inspires hope. But Johansson wants to play the lead herself, and if Natalie Wood was perfect for the part in 1958, there is another woman who is perfect for the part today -- and, as undeniably talented and beautiful as she is, it's not Scarlett Johansson. I would hope that Johansson would have the grace to step aside, produce the film and let Natalie Portman play Marjorie. With a Frederic Raphael screenplay and a halfway decent director, this could be a distinct improvement over the original.

Of course, I'd have to see what they do with the ending, which most women find offensive ("that disaster of an ending," as Marlene Adler Marks puts it in The Jewish Journal), but which the author of the novel has claimed in interviews is simply reality. I have to say that I agree with him, but it does jar a little -- and the reason for that is that "Marjorie Morningstar" is essentially a romantic novel with a realistic ending. The bulk of the novel doesn't mesh with the last twenty pages or so, and the millions of young women who identify with Marjorie and her struggles with career and romance are not thrilled, to put it mildly, when, at the end of the novel, she turns up as a greying bourgeois hausfrau, her dreams of an acting career just a fading memory. But I can tell you that, having known quite a few aspiring actresses in my day, far more wannabe thespians end up as greying hausfraus than Oscar winners.

And the ending of the novel is in line with the somewhat Proustian endings of most of Wouk's major novels, but that's a discussion for another time.

I'm rooting for Scarlett Johansson, and I hope she pulls it off and gets the film made, whether she ends up playing the lead or not.

Tom Moran

Send Jenna Jameson to Iraq!

I've recently "personalized" my Google News page, and already it's paying dividends, because I doubt I would have come across this story otherwise (it's from GayNZ.com):

"A New York-based gay Jewish porn star is travelling to Israel to perform, free of charge for soldiers, as a show of solidarity with the Israeli people in their time of war with Hizbullah. Michael Lucas, owner and star of gay porn studio Lucas Entertainment, will perform in Israel from August 29, and produce a gay porn movie while there."

Now, can you imagine the USO sending Jenna Jameson or Stormy Daniels or any number of other porn stars over to Iraq to entertain the troops? It makes sense when you think about it -- after all, Marilyn Monroe went over to Korea to entertain the troops in the 1950s, and Jenna is pretty much the Marilyn Monroe of our time (in a future post I may explain why I think that Ms. Jameson is as important a cultural icon today as Marilyn or Elvis were in the 50s), so why shouldn't she go over and do her bit for our boys in uniform?

We know why, of course. Although Jenna and others like her are probably the people our boys (and some of our girls) really want to see, this government is so tight-assed that there's no way they'd send a porn star to entertain the troops -- right?

Or is it just that our government has its head up its ass in general?

Now, I've never met Ms. Jameson (and to be honest, although I acknowledge her importance in the history of American culture, I'm not much of a fan), but I'd be willing to bet that she would go to Iraq if she was asked. After all, the guys over there risking their lives are her fan base -- why wouldn't she go?

Could it be that Israelis are just cooler about these things than we are?

I've read that Lindsay Lohan wants to go over to Iraq with Hillary Clinton, but I say: fuck Lindsay Lohan! Send Jenna Jameson to Iraq!

Tom Moran

The Truth About Ann Coulter

There's an interesting piece in the online edition of The New Republic by a woman named Elspeth Reeve about Ann Coulter. Ms. Reeve is billed as a "reporter-researcher" and she is very young -- judging by her article either still in college or recently graduated. It helps to know that when you read the article. It explains a lot.

At any rate Ms. Reeve, who by her own admission is a "liberal" from a "red state," loves Ann Coulter. Seriously. Just loves loves loves loves her. And she's willing to admit it in The New Republic (although only in the online edition, not in the actual magazine).

You have to admit, that takes balls. Or deep stupidity, I'm not sure which.

"Coulter is a pretty woman who holds up a mirror showing us the ugliest parts of ourselves," Reeve writes, when it's palpably obvious that the opposite is true: Coulter is an ugly woman who holds up a mirror showing us the ugliest parts of herself. The only thing that is interesting in what Coulter writes is the glimpse she gives us into her terminally twisted psyche. Her books and column never tell us very much about their ostensible subject matter (primarily because her knowledge is usually faked and her scholarship shoddy), but they sometimes tell us far more than we'd really care to know about Ann Coulter herself (her obsession with "excrement" in Godless is a recent and typically icky example).

"All wrapped up in liberals' snarky comments about her hair is a wellspring of latent guilt for judging her by her hair," Reeve claims. Well, I can honestly say that I don't judge Ann Coulter by her hair: I judge her by her penis. Okay, I'm kidding.

Reeve can't really come up with anything to say in defense of Ann Coulter (which, one would assume, would seem to be the point of an article that is billed as: "A DEFENSE OF ANN COULTER") other than the fact that she is outrageous and says things that might occasionally have a slight glint of truth in them. Well, as Noel Airman says in Herman Wouk's novel "Marjorie Morningstar," two and two make four, even if Hitler says so, but that's no reason to admire Hitler.

Ooops, did I just compare Ann Coulter to Hitler? I apologize. That's so unfair. Hitler's mustache wasn't nearly as big as Coulter's. Ooops. Did I say that?

The fact is that I don't give a shit if Coulter weighs less than your average anorexic zygote, or if she drinks like a fish, or if she shoves her finger down her manly throat on a regular basis, or if she's a bottle blonde who wears skirts that cry out for a speculum when she's pushing fifty. None of that, in the final analysis, matters.

What does matter is that she's intellectually dishonest. What does matter is that she wrote a book that purports to be an attack on Darwinism when she hasn't bothered to read Darwin. What matters is that she accuses liberals of being traitors by lying about what we stand for. What matters is that she takes a lying, scurrilous, pathetic drunk like Senator Joe McCarthy and holds him up to be some kind of paragon of patriotic virtue. What matters is that she can claim that James Agee once called Holocaust footage a "hoax" when she obviously hadn't read the article in question and was inaccurately extrapolating from a one-sentence remark in someone else's book.

That's what matters about Ann Coulter, Ms. Reeve. She's a phony and a fraud. The fact that she's a butt-ugly bitch is just extra. She's as big a lunatic as Andrea Dworkin, only thinner and blonder. And she's not worth taking seriously by anyone with half a brain. I suspect that Ms. Reeve knows this, but, being young and ambitious, she knew that writing an article about how much a self-proclaimed liberal could "love" Ann Coulter would be a cheap (but effective) way of getting a clip in The New Republic -- even if it was only in the online edition.

My guess is that Ms. Reeve has no scruples whatsoever and will do or say pretty much anything to attract attention and advance her career. I have no doubt she will go far, and I suspect that her role model will be the woman she claims to love so much.

Tom Moran

Summer Reading

At the moment I'm reading a book by Thomas E. Ricks called Fiasco that's been getting a lot of attention in the press. Deservedly so: the book is a devastating indictment of the way the War in Iraq has been both planned and carried out by the idiots currently in power in the White House and the Department of Defense.

I'm about halfway through it at the moment so I don't want to discuss the book as a whole quite yet, although on the basis of what I've read so far (I'm up to page 207 as I write this) I would say that it's one of the three books published this year that everyone should read who wants to understand, as Trollope would put it, The Way We Live Now (the other two, if you're interested, are Cobra II and American Theocracy).

But right now I want to talk about one teensy problematic part of it.

On page 35, Ricks discusses "Rep. Ike Skelton, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee ... He is so deeply read in military affairs that he once released [in 2003] a national security book list, a compilation of fifty volumes he considered key to understanding the armed forces. It is a thorough offering, heavy on American and British campaigns, but ranging from biographies of Alexander the Great and Hannibal to Grant's memoirs and strategic thinker Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command."

Sounds pretty good, right? Ricks certainly sounds impressed. You can read Rep. Skelton's list here:

http://www.house.gov/skelton/natsec_booklist.html

Now I don't know if you know this about me, but I am rather a connoisseur of book lists. It doesn't matter what kind of list -- I look at them all and find the flaws in all of them. If you were to present me with a list of The Greatest Novels Ever Written by Latvian Writers Who Wrote Left-Handed, I would probably read it with interest -- and then proceed to tell you what's wrong with it. At excruciating length.

So it's not entirely a surprise that I read Rep. Skelton's list and found it, well, a tad inadequate. Actually, "inadequate" is not exactly the right word to use in this context.

It kind of sucks.

Now, lists like this all tend to share one big inadequacy. They're all bottom-heavy, relying heavily on books the compiler has read and been impressed with in the past few years. That explains the overabundance of titles on Rep. Skelton's list that were published after 1990. It also explains why he would choose Roy Jenkins's biography of Churchill over the one by Martin Gilbert. Rep. Skelton's list, like most lists of this kind, was thrown together relatively quickly, without a lot of rumination and second-guessing -- and it shows.

So I thought, as a corrective to Rep. Skelton's list, I would put together a list of my own to indicate the kind of books that the Congressman has left off his list. Ordinarily I would just send it to the congressman privately, but the fact is that you can't e-mail the congressman unless you live in his district.

Here's my list of books that Congressman Skelton forget to include on his list:

Books Not on Congressman Skelton’s National Security Book List

Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey

Arrian
Campaigns of Alexander

Thucydides
The History of the Peloponnesian War

Xenophon
Anabasis

Anonymous
The Bhagavad-Gita

Julius Caesar
The Gallic War
The Civil War

Tacitus
The Histories
The Annals

Jean Froissart
Chronicles

Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Thomas Macaulay
The History of England

David G. Chandler
The Campaigns of Napoleon

Shelby Foote
The Civil War

William T. Sherman
Memoirs

Edmund Wilson
Patriotic Gore

Alfred Thayer Mahan
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History

Thomas Pakenham
The Boer War

Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August

Robert Graves
Goodbye to All That

Winston Churchill
The World Crisis
The Second World War

Martin Gilbert
Churchill

Paul Fussell
The Great War and Modern Memory
Wartime

William L. Shirer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Herman Wouk
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance

Ted W. Lawson
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

E.B. Sledge
With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa

David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest

Michael Herr
Dispatches

Keep in mind that not one of these titles is on Rep. Skelton's list.

Now you have some reading to do before Labor Day!

Tom Moran

The War is Over

You'd never know it from reading or watching the so-called mainstream media, but this week is a pretty important anniversary in American history. I wonder why we're not hearing more about it?

It's the 61st anniversary of the end of World War II. Sixty-one years ago this week, the empire of Japan surrendered to the United States, and a war that had been expected to go into 1946 or possibly even 1947, with an invasion of the mainland of Japan that was expected to take hundreds of thousands of American lives, ended faster than anyone had anticipated.

A little time capsule of how people felt at that time is preserved in a very special radio broadcast. The minute word got out that Emperor Hirohito had made a radio speech surrendering to the Americans, people in the States went nuts. In Los Angeles, they immediately threw together plans for a "Victory Extra" broadcast of the radio show devoted to America's servicemen fighting overseas, "Command Performance."

They must have thrown that broadcast together in two or three hours. Everyone in Hollywood wanted to be a part of it -- so much so that they had more movie stars than they knew what to do with. The list is staggering: Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, William Powell, Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, Jimmy Durante, Burgess Meredith, Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Danny Kaye, Claudette Colbert, Carmen Miranda, Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra...

The irony of the broadcast is that the one man who should have been the host that night wasn't there. He was in England and couldn't get back in time, so Bob Hope missed what might have been the biggest show of his career. Bing Crosby hosted the "Victory Extra."

It's impossible to describe the emotion running through the crowd in Los Angeles that night. You just have to hear the broadcast (which is available on an MP3 disc through OTRCAT.com, as well as some other places). The war had ended so abruptly that the reality of the moment hadn't caught up with them yet -- you can tell that they can't believe it's really happening. They sound giddy. Crosby and Sinatra do a comedy bit together, and Sinatra gets so carried away by emotion that, after he sings "The House I Live In," he kisses Bing Crosby on stage -- and the crowd goes crazy. Crosby's deadpan reply is priceless: "I won't wash my face for days."

They had so many stars who wanted to be a part of the broadcast they didn't know what to do with them all, so at one point they just had a parade of movie and radio stars come up to the mike, identify themselves, and say just a sentence or two. With the benefit of hindsight it's unbearably poignant to hear these glamorous stars, voices filled with emotion, saying things like: "The world's rejoicing tonight. We've built a victory -- now we can build a peace!"

And then someone steps up to the microphone who wasn't a movie star, but who at that moment might have seemed bigger than all the stars put together.

Most young people have no idea who Bill Mauldin was, but during World War II, and for many years to come, he was one of the most important voices of his time. Mauldin was the first man to win the Pulitzer Prize for cartoons (the youngest person ever to win it at that time), and if you want to know what it was really like to fight World War II, all you have to do is look at the cartoons of Bill Mauldin. His soldiers aren't the larger-than-life "greatest generation" heroes that people like Tom Brokaw would have you believe fought that war. His dogfaces are dirty, smelly, and doing an unpleasant job any way they can so they go home. One of my favorite Mauldin cartoons shows Willie (one of his two most famous characters, Willie and Joe), standing in front of a medic's table. The medic has a medal out in front of him and Willie says, "Just gimme a coupla aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."

Mauldin's cartoons in "Stars and Stripes" were so squalid, and depicted American GIs is such a realistic manner (bitching about officers, using profanity and knowing that dry socks are more important than almost anything else with the possible exception of alcohol), that no less than General George Patton wanted him fired, because he thought Mauldin's cartoons were bad for morale. General Eisenhower refused to allow it, because the soldiers in the field loved Mauldin's cartoons for the same reason that Patton hated them -- they told the truth about what a filthy, disgusting job fighting a war really is. All Willie and Joe want to do is grab the nearest bottle of booze and get as drunk as they can, and they're just praying that one day they'll be able to come home.

So when Bill Mauldin came to the microphone that August night, he didn't mince words. He knew exactly what every serviceman in that theater in Los Angeles, or listening by shortwave all over the world, wanted to hear about what the most famous fictional characters of the war were doing to celebrate America's victory.

"This is Bill Mauldin, gents," he begins. "Joe and Willie are tying one on tonight..."

He keeps talking, but you can't hear what he's saying over the noise of the crowd. They're laughing, screaming, cheering -- and some, I suspect, are crying as well. Because they know what that means. If Joe and Willie can go out and get stinking, shit-faced drunk, then the fighting really is over and the world is at peace. It's a beautiful moment in an amazing broadcast.

That was 61 years ago this week. And in January of 2007, sometime around the 23rd if my amateur calculations are correct, we will have been in Iraq longer than we fought World War II.

And there isn't going to be any "Victory Extra" broadcast when this war is over.

Tom Moran

Let's Do It Again!

Some time ago in this blog I mentioned (as part of my infallible rules for moviegoing) that you should never see a film that's a remake of another film.

And then I gave it some thought. While it's still a pretty good rule, surely there have to be exceptions, right? After all, John Huston's 1941 classic "The Maltese Falcon" isn't just a remake of the original film version of Dashiell Hammett's novel -- it's the second remake. The first film was made in 1931 by Roy Del Ruth (after the release of Huston's film it was retitled "Dangerous Female," under which title you can occasionally see it on TCM), and the first remake was called "Satan Met a Lady" from 1936, which might be the single worst motion picture ever release by a major American studio. Huston's classic with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor was number three (Warner Bros. loved to recycle literary properties),

So it got me to thinking: are there films, classic or otherwise, that could stand to be remade? Not just because they'd make money, but because the original film, whether classic or crap, didn't do justice to the original source material? In other words, are there potential "Maltese Falcons" out there ready to be turned from a flawed past film into a future classic?

I think there are. After giving it some thought, I came up with three possible contenders:

• "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie": Now, while it would be difficult for any actress to improve on Maggie Smith's Oscar-winning performance in the 1969 original, I'd like to see Nicole Kidman take a crack at it. And Craig Ferguson, who's really Scottish (although he's from Glasgow, not Edinburgh) would make the perfect Teddy Lloyd, the painter who spends his life pining for Miss Jean Brodie even while he's sleeping with one of her students. But it's not the cast that makes this film cry out for a remake: it's the direction. Ronald Neame admits in his director's commentary on the DVD that there are moments in the film where he just made the wrong decision -- one of them being the climax of the film. It would be nice to see a more restrained director try his hand at Jay Presson Allen's original screenplay (which I would use instead of commissioning a new script). And for God's sake don't let the cinematographer do all the incessant zooming that Ted Moore's camera does in the original -- I don't care what Stanley Kubrick did in "Barry Lyndon," you should never ever use a zoom in a period picture (unless the period is the 1960s).

• "Peyton Place": This is a film that could not have been made in the 1950s, under the Production Code, and still do justice to the source material. But what most people don't know is that the original source material itself was compromised before it was even published. In the original version of the manuscript for Grace Metalious's novel (which, I'm assured by Metalious biographer Emily Toth, no longer exists) Lucas Cross, who molests, rapes and is killed by his stepdaughter, Selena Cross, isn't her stepfather as he is in the published book and in the film, but her biological father. Metalious's publisher, however, made her change it -- a change which, Metalious complained, took a tragedy and turned it into trash. In a more honest adaptation, I would have Lucas Cross portrayed as Selena's father, and I'd love to see Rachel McAdams (easily one of the most gifted young actresses in Hollywood) play Selena Cross.

• "Looking for Mr. Goodbar": This film could have been a classic. It had a great cast: Diane Keaton stunned people who only thought of her as the ditzy Annie Hall, and Richard Gere, although he'd done some small roles in other films, gave one of the great breakout performances as the small-time hood she sleeps with -- it made him a movie star. But Richard Brooks was probably the wrong man to write and direct it (even though he may have seemed a shrewd choice at the time -- after all, he'd directed "In Cold Blood" only nine years earlier), and his choice not to shoot the film in New York, where it was set, was a disaster. If a young Martin Scorsese had made this film on the streets of Manhattan (and in the Upper West Side neighborhood where the actual events on which both the book and film were based really happened) this could have been one of the great films of the 70s. It's to late to do that now, but I could see it being made as a period piece, with a better script. And someone like Laura Breckenridge (from The WB's "Related") would make a wonderful Teresa Dunn.

So those are three films I think could be remade. What are your choices?

Tom Moran

It's Time For Him To Go

Lawrence O'Donnell on The Huffington Post is writing that Joe Lieberman will drop out of the Connecticut Senate race.

"He probably knows right now that the day will come in late September when he will announce his withdrawal from the race. No one is going to have to talk him into it. By that time, the Democratic Party power structure will be doing its thing for Ned Lamont and Lieberman will be trailing by double digits.

It won't be a hard decision for Lieberman. He will drop out to avoid career-ending humiliation."

I find it surprising that a politician who is as self-consciously religious, moralistic, high-minded and patriotic as Joe Lieberman is (or claims to be) should, at this crucial time in American history, with all the tough decisions regarding war and peace that this country faces, be more concerned with salving his wounded ego than what is best for his party or his country.

"Lieberman is going to have one very big news day in late September and he'll milk it for all its worth. That's all his independent candidacy is going to be about--stage-managing his own exit. He didn't want an eighteen year Senate career to disappear under 'Lamont Wins' headlines. He wanted his own news day, his own headline. He knows how and when to get it."

Am I the only one who finds this unutterably pathetic?

Tom Moran

Foiled Again

I am so glad I'm not flying today.

The big news of today is, obviously, the terrorist plot to blow up several commercial airliners that were en route to the US from the UK. It's a big win for the British authorities that foiled the plot and arrested the majority of the plotters (some minor figures are said to be still at large).

The story as of this writing is still developing so I will refrain from too much comment right now, since more details will be coming in over the next few days.

But while I'm obviously glad that a major terrorist plot has been averted, I'm also concerned that, if this is, as some people suspect, an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot, once again Al-Qaeda may have given President Bush and the Republicans an inadvertent helping hand.

Remember that message that Osama bin Laden put out right before the 2004 presidential election? I can't help but wonder how many votes that may have swayed from Kerry to Bush. Everything that reminds people of possible terrorist attacks plays into the administration line of: "If we're not in power, you're not safe."

The only card this administration has to play at the moment is fear. And the Republicans in Congress who are desperate about their chances in the upcoming midterm elections might have been given a little help in their attempt to stay in power by whoever plotted to blow up those airplanes.

It's well to remember at times like these that, had Al Gore been in the White House in 2001, the attack on 9/11 most likely would never have happened.

Tom Moran

Dear Senator Lieberman

This is the text of a letter I just e-mailed to Senator Joe Lieberman via his Senate website:

Dear Senator Lieberman:

Ned Lamont is now the nominee of your party for U.S. Senator from Connecticut. I know that this result is disappointing. But I don't think that you should sully your reputation for probity and class by acting like a sullen and sulky poor loser and running as an independent.

You've always been a class act. This is not the time to go out like a loser.

Senator, it's time for you to accept reality. The voters of Connecticut have made their choice. It's up to you to accept and respect that choice.

It's time for you to go.

Sincerely,

Tom Moran
Feuillade@aol.com

If you'd like to send a similar letter to Senator Lieberman, this is how you can do it:

http://lieberman.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

Let him know how you feel about his prospective run as an independent.

Tom Moran

Rashomon in Iraq

It's interesting and often instructive to compare and contrast differing accounts of the same event, as they can sometimes offer insights into the perspective of the people writing about that event. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz knew this when they wrote "Citizen Kane." Akira Kurosawa understood this when he directed "Rashomon," the 1950 film that put Japanese Cinema on the map at the Cannes Film Festival.

Well, I recently read two different accounts of the same event, and I was struck by just how different they were -- and what that difference said about the respective news organizations that published them.

The stories were about the now-infamous rape and murder by American troops of a 14-year-old girl in Iraq, whose name was Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. One story is from an Australian paper called The Age. The second account is from the Associated Press.

The headline of the Australian story is: Rape: American soldiers 'took turns'

The headline of the AP story is: Soldiers Accused of Raping, Killing Iraqi Girl Were Stressed, Comrade Testifies

Interesting distinction, don't you think?

Here's the lead paragraph of the Australian story:

"Drunken American soldiers took turns to rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, a military tribunal has heard. The men murdered her and her family and celebrated by grilling chicken wings."

Here's the lead paragraph of the AP story:

"Frequent deadly attacks by insurgents sapped morale and raised combat stress in a U.S. Army platoon that included soldiers accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, a member of the unit testified Tuesday. "

See where we're going with this?

But wait -- it gets better.

This is the Australian paper's account of what happened, according to the testimony of Special agent Benjamin Bierce, who recounted sworn testimony given to him by one of the defendants, at the military tribunal hearing the case:

"[Former private Steven] Green is alleged to have raised the idea of killing some Iraqis. The men changed into black clothing and ski masks and told Howard to stand look-out.

The girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, and her father were standing outside a house. The soldiers allegedly dragged them inside and pushed the man, his wife and younger daughter, 6, into a side room where Green stood guard over them.

Barker's statement said Cortez pushed the girl to the floor and tore off her clothes as Barker held her down. She held her knees together and struggled as Cortez tried to rape her.

A gun shot came from the side room as the men switched places. More shots were heard from the side room and Green emerged with an AK-47. He allegedly said, "They're all dead," before raping the girl and shooting her several times.

Barker said her body was set alight. Green opened the house's propane tank to set it on fire.

They burnt their clothes, threw the gun into a canal and, back at the checkpoint, brought out the chicken wings."

Note the factual nature of the account. It states what, according to one of the participants, happened at that location on that day.

Compare that with the AP account:

"Army criminal investigator Benjamin Bierce testified Monday about a sworn statement by Barker in which he spoke about a drinking session before the assault on the girl's house.

Bierce said Barker confessed in his statement that he, Cortez and Green took turns raping Abeer. Barker also claims in his graphic statement full of sexual details that Green shot and killed the girl and her family members."

Note that this account of Bierce's testimony leaves out all the "sexual details" that the Australian account provides. Also note how much shorter the AP account is that the Australian version -- 66 words, as opposed to the Australian version's 180 words. It's also much further down in the story (the expression "burying ther lead" leaps to mind).

But what's especially revealing, more so than the terseness of the grudging pair of paragraphs that the AP gives to Bierce's testimony, is the nature of what comes before it:

"Pfc. Justin Cross recounted the "mentally draining" conditions in which the unit served in Mahmoudiya south of Baghdad where Abeer Qassim al-Janabi was raped and killed along with her parents and 5-year-old sister.

"It drives you nuts. You feel like every step you might get blown up. You just hit a point where you're like, 'If I die today, I die.' You're just walking a death walk," Cross told the hearing."

Further on in the same AP piece, Cross's account continues:

"On Tuesday, Cross testified that soldiers often drank Iraqi whiskey and took painkillers to relieve the stress of not knowing whether the day would be their last.

Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, is one of the most dangerous places in Iraq, where bomb and gun attacks by insurgents take place almost daily.

Cross said the unit was "full of despair," and he himself felt he would die at a checkpoint before he could go home.

"I couldn't sleep mainly for fear we would be attacked," Cross said. He said the loss of two soldiers shot at a checkpoint "pretty much crushed the platoon.""

Gee -- don't you feel sorry for these guys? Under the circumstances, don't you think that their raping and killing a 14-year-old girl might be, well, understandable, given the stress they were under? After all, when you think you're going to be blown up any second, what's the big deal about raping and murdering a teenage girl and then killing her whole family?

The entire AP piece tries to whitewash what these soldiers did by pawning it off on stress -- it's the equivalent of the "rubber ducky scene" that Paddy Chayefsky used to complain about in 1950s live TV drama. That's the obligatory scene towards the end of the program where the psycho killer reveals that someone took his rubber ducky away when he was a kid, and that's why he's such a bad guy today.

The Australian article, without an axe to grind, says what happened according to the testimony.

The AP article, on the other hand, excuses the actions of the soldiers by blaming it all on stress -- which is an insult to all the other servicemen and women who are serving in Iraq, feeling the same sort of stress on a daily basis and who do not use it as an excuse to go around raping and murdering teenagers.

Guess which one of these pieces Fox News chose to run on their website?

Tom Moran

One Day Since Yesterday

Ned Lamont did it -- pulled off the political upset of the year.

And yet...

For some reason I'm reminded of a line at the end of the 1973 film "The Sting." After the big con has been pulled off, Robert Redford turns to Paul Newman. "You're right, it's not enough." Then he smiles, as only Redford in the early 70s could smile. "But it's close."

Lamont's victory last night was not enough. Polls had him leading Senator Lieberman by 14 points, and yet the winning margin was 52% to 48% -- hardly a landslide. I would have preferred for Lieberman to have received a more stinging rebuke from the voters of Connecticut. A four-point loss in the primary only emboldened Lieberman to declare that his loss was the victory of "partisanship" and that he intended to continue running as an independent. Lieberman last night sounded like a man in deep denial about the reality that was staring him right in the face.

I think it's time for people like Howard Dean, Bill Clinton and Chuck Schumer to call Lieberman and make the case that it's time to give it up and accept defeat gracefully. Ned Lamont is now the Democratic Party candidate for Senator from Connecticut. Lieberman should accept the will of the voters and step aside, for the sake of his reputation and the good of the party. Like the man said, it's time for him to go.

That having been said, what genius in the Lamont campaign saw to it that both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were standing directly behind Lamont at the podium when he made his acceptance speech? Now I know that Lamont's people might not have had anything to do with it -- both Sharpton and Jackson are noted publicity whores, and not averse to shoving their way in front of any camera within a hundred yards of them -- but is that really the message the campaign wants to send to the kind of moderate Connecticut voters you need to win a general election? That a vote for Ned Lamont is a vote for Al Sharpton?

These guys are in the big leagues now. They need to get their act together.

All that having been said, last night was a good night. We got the results we wanted, and now it's time to move forward. If Lieberman insists on being a sore loser and pouting his way to the polls in November as an independent, then Lamont will have to do whatever it takes to beat him again and send Lieberman into political obscurity.

But I'm hoping that Lieberman will be made to see reason and that it won't come to that.

Last night wasn't enough. But it was close.

Tom Moran

Paris Hilton's Revirginization

It is a sad fact of life that some college girls have early (and sometimes first) sexual experiences that don't go as well as they might have. They can be downright disappointing. And sometimes, when that happens, the girl involved will deal with the situation by going into denial, and just in effect pretend the whole thing never happened.

I used to refer to this process as "revirginization."

Well, that seems to be what Paris Hilton, America's most famous skank, is attempting to do. She has told British GQ that, in an interview reported by the Associated Press, that she plans on being celibate for a year.

Celibate. Paris Hilton. Do not adjust your computer screen. That's what she said. Really.

"I'm not having sex for a year. … I'll kiss, but nothing else," Ms. Hilton is quoted as saying.

Of course, she doesn't say what she might be kissing or how long she might be kissing it, so there might be a teensy bit of wiggle room here.

In the interview, Ms. Hilton, according to the AP, "told the magazine she has had sex with only two men during her lifetime."

All those who believe that statement raise your hand.

I thought so.

Actually, she might be telling the truth there, because later on in the article it becomes pretty clear where Ms. Hilton's true ardor lies.

"Hilton also told the magazine she collects $500,000 in fees just to show up at parties and other events from Las Vegas to Tokyo. Her best-paying gig, she said, was a recent Austrian appearance.

"I had to say `hi' and tell them why I loved Austria so much," she is quoted as saying.

And why does she like Austria? "Because they pay me $1 million to wave at crowds!""

It seems that it's not such a bad thing being the biggest and most pathetic joke on the planet, as long as you can get rich (or, I should say, even richer) doing it.

Her parents must be so proud...

Tom Moran

The Lesson of Lamont

There are two news items about the Lieberman/Lamont Senate race in Connecticut that are interesting enough to contrast and compare.

The first is an editorial in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

"How did Lieberman go from the Democratic national ticket to trailing a primary opponent who quit his nearly all-white country club just before entering the race? In a word: Iraq.

Antiwar activists in the blogosphere and in Democratic Party councils seem intent on purging from the party anyone who doesn't share their viewpoint and rhetoric on this fiasco of a war.

Lieberman has no divine right to be a senator from Connecticut, a truth that seems only lately to have dawned on him. Iraq is as urgent an issue as there is, and if primary voters want a candidate who is more aligned with antiwar views, they have every right.

What's lamentable about the campaign against Lieberman is that it has gone beyond a debate on Iraq to an attack on the very ideas of bipartisan compromise and divergent voices within a party.

If that point of view triumphs in the Democratic Party, it will court permanent minority status."

The trouble with this editorial is that Lieberman was not a bipartisan Democrat. He was a rubber stamp for a criminal administration. And it is in part because Democrats like Joe Lieberman did not stand up to this president that the Iraq war became the fiasco that it is today.

And since when has this administration, and this Republican dominated Congress, been at all interested in bipartisanship and compromise? The idea is a joke to them. They'll use puppets like Lieberman to their advantage when it's convenient, but in general they just push through their agenda any way they can (as with the recess appointment of John Bolton to the UN and all the so-called "signing statements" that Bush has made regarding legislation that he has no intention of upholding) and to hell with anyone who disagrees with them.

So for the Enquirer to say that Democrats repudiating Lieberman is the death of bipartisanship in Washington is disingenuous at best and at worst deeply stupid.

I have to say, though, that I love all this hand-wringing over the terrifying power of the "blogosphere" and the dreaded "antiwar activists." What are they so afraid of? People who have blogs are just people with opinions who have found a new and exponentially more effective means of disseminating them. That's the way it's supposed to be in a democracy. Ideas and power shouldn't flow from the top down --they're supposed to come from the bottom up. Blogs are the essence of democracy: they represent one person's free, unfettered opinion, untainted by any special interest. That's so terrifying?

I guess if you have a vested interest in the status quo, it is.

The second piece of hand-wringing comes from the Washington Post:

"A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses."

The story of Tuesday, assuming that Lieberman loses (which he may not -- according to various news reports there are an awful lot of stealth activists trying to get out the vote for Lieberman who are actually Republicans), is not about bloggers or "antiwar activists" but about one man with the money to take on an entrenched politician when the entire political establishment told him not to, and who had the guts to put his money where his mouth was.

If Ned Lamont wins on Tuesday it will be his victory, and no one else's.

The Post piece goes on to say:

"An upset by Lamont would affect the political calculations of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who like Lieberman supported giving Bush authority to wage the Iraq war, and could excite interest in a comeback by former vice president Al Gore, who warned in 2002 that the war could be a grave strategic error. For at least the next year, any Democrat hoping to play on the 2008 stage would need to reckon with the implications of Lieberman's repudiation."

This is true. If Lieberman loses on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton will have to do some serious thinking about how to position herself in the Democratic Party in a post-Lieberman environment. Will she have to (or, better yet, be able to) tack left to appease party activists in Iowa and New Hampshire without seeming like a flip-flopper or an opportunist? She has the time to reinvent herself yet again -- but will it stick with the people she needs to win over to get the nomination?

The Post piece continues:

"Republicans are already seeking to exploit a possible victory by Lamont as a sign that Democrats are moving too far to the left on national security issues. "They want retreat -- under the guise of 'reducing the U.S. footprint in Iraq,' " William Kristol writes in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard."

Bill Kristol, it would seem, never met a war he didn't like -- provided, of course, that he didn't have to fight it himself. First he agitates for war in Iraq, and now that that's turned out to be a total debacle, he wants us to take on Iran. What's next, Bill? Should we attack North Korea and its million man army? Any more countries you feel like invading?

The disgusting hypocrisy of the neo-neanderthal chickenhawks notwithstanding, the fact is that there is no good solution to the problem of Iraq. As I've said before in this blog, we're screwed if we leave and we're screwed if we stay. But what is patently obvious to anyone with a brain (a category that does not, in my opinion, include Bill Kristol) is that the people who got us into this mess are not the people who should be entrusted with the responsibility of getting us out.

After all, you don't ask an arsonist to head the team of firefighters to put out the blaze they started.

The lesson of Lamont is that "staying the course" is an excuse and a crutch, not a strategy. The future needs some new and hard thinking, and it's entirely possible if not likely that said thinking will have to be done by new people.

People who aren't the ones responsible for the mess we're in now. Like Joe Lieberman.

Tom Moran

Do the Right Thing

What will Joe Lieberman do?

The Connecticut primary is three days away. On Tuesday, voters will decide between Senator Joe Lieberman and his upstart rival Ned Lamont, who was a complete political novice a few months ago but who is currently leading Lieberman in the polls by double digits.

What will Lieberman do if he loses?

The Senator has said that if he loses the primary he will run as an independent, but one of his Senate colleagues thinks that is unlikely.

New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, in a live radio interview that was reported on the website of NBC's Connecticut affiliate and by USA Today, has said that if Lieberman loses by a wide margin on Tuesday, he would "take a look at what reality is" and most likely decide not to run as an independent.

Lautenberg is not basing this on any conversation he might have had with the Connecticut Senator. This is merely his personal hunch. But I can only hope he's right.

For Lieberman to run as an independent would mean that he would consider holding on to office more important than anything else. And if he's going to do that, why bother with running as an independent? He might as well switch parties altogether and become a Republican. After all, Republicans don't give a shit about the rules -- I'm sure they could find a way to get him on the November ballot as the standard bearer for their party.

But I don't think Lieberman wants to be remembered as a sore loser who only cares about the power and perquisites of office. The fact is that Senator Lieberman is a lifelong Democrat, and he should give some thought to his party and to the voters of Connecticut. If those voters decide that they no longer want him in the Senate, if they give him what Winston Churchill (who was voted out of office in 1945) once called "the order of the boot," then he should accept that judgment as gracefully as possible and support the winner of the Democratic primary.

I hope that the Senator can have that much class, and that he doesn't disappoint me. Let's hope that, if the vote doesn't go his way on Tuesday, Senator Lieberman does the right thing.

Tom Moran

Holy Joe Throws a Hail Mary

It may have taken him 44 months, but Senator Joe Lieberman has finally, at long last, found something to criticize about President Bush and the conduct of the War in Iraq.

Senator Lieberman is quoted by the New York Daily News as saying that, "I supported our war in Iraq but I have always questioned the way it was being executed. This administration took far too many shortcuts. We continue to suffer the consequences, as do the Iraqi people."

He's always questioned the way it was being executed?

Always? Really?

Could this be a Road-to-Damascus moment for Senator Lieberman? Could he have finally seen the light?

Or could Ned Lamont's expanding lead in the polls have a little something to do with it? Bloomberg.com is reporting that Lamont's lead has grown to 13 points -- a Quinnipiac University poll has Lamont at 54 percent to Lieberman's 41 percent.

That's a lot of ground to make up in a week. Could Lieberman be getting desperate?

And if Lieberman gets clobbered in the primary (as I believe he will), what effect will that have on Senator Hillary Clinton's plans to run for President in 2008 as a moderate, Lieberman-esque centrist on the war -- regardless of whether or not Senator Lieberman actually wins the general election?

After all, if Senator Clinton loses the Democratic nomination, running as an Independent isn't exactly an option.

Is it?

Tom Moran

Things You Wish Weren't Happening

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a press conference the other day, and in that press conference he was asked the following question (quotes come from the transcript in the Washington Post):

QUESTION: And the question, Mr. Secretary, after your most recent visit and this spike in violence, do you believe that Iraq is closer than ever to the brink of civil war?

RUMSFELD: "Closer than ever." Clearly, there's sectarian violence. People are being killed. Sunnis are killing Shia; Shia are killing Sunnis. Kurds seem not to be involved. It's unfortunate. And they need a reconciliation process. The prime minister is pushing for a reconciliation process.

There are a couple of other things that are -- oh, how would you characterize it? -- things you wish weren't happening. There's some movement of Shia out of Sunni areas and Sunnis out of Shia areas, to some extent. There undoubtedly are some people who are leaving the country and going to safer places because of the violence.

Does that constitute a civil war? I guess you can decide for your yourself. And we can all go to the dictionary and decide what you want to call something. But it seems to me that it is not a classic civil war at this stage.

It certainly isn't like our Civil War. It isn't like the civil war in a number of other countries.

Is it a high level of sectarian violence? Yes, it is. And are people being killed? Yes. And is it unfortunate? Yes. And is the government doing basically the right things? I think so.

I love that part about how it "isn't like our Civil War." You're right, Donny -- they're not walking across an open field in formation, like Pickett's Charge at Gettyburg, so I guess the two conflicts don't have anything in common.

And yet...

"Sunnis are killing Shia; Shia are killing Sunnis."

But that's "sectarian violence." That's not a "civil war." After all, do you see Robert E. Lee anywhere in Iraq today? Yeah, you see? I thought so.

Of course, while Rumsfeld continues with his pointless (and patently offensive) quibbling, people are getting slaughtered in Iraq.

I'd like you to consider the words of a young woman who lives in Iraq and whose blog is called "Baghdad Burning":

"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today. I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape."

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?

Tom Moran

Miami After Castro

Democracy could be the big winner if, as Miami's Cuban exile population fervently hopes, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro finally bites the dust.

Of course, it won't be Cuba that will be the beneficiary if Castro dies -- it'll be America.

You see, Cuban exiles in Miami have spent more than four decades bitching and moaning about Castro. They don't consider themselves to be Americans so much as displaced Cubans waiting to return to their native country, and all they do is vote for the most right-wing politicians they can find and pray for the day when they can finally go back home to Cuba.

Well, here's their chance. If Castro dies, I say they should all get on a boat and get the fuck back to Cuba. Sort of like the 1980 Mariel boatlift in reverse. Let them put their money, and their bodies, where their mouths are.

The funny thing is, of course, that the vast majority of them won't do it. They've bitched about it ever since 1959, but when the opportunity presents itself to go back to a ruined Cuba and help to rebuild the country and put it back together again, how much would you like to bet that most of them will prefer to remain in Miami and bitch and moan about whoever comes into power after Fidel?

But if they actually do what they've always said they've wanted to do, it'll be the best thing to happen to Florida since Ponce de León. Now maybe we'll have a fair election in that state.

Tom Moran

Note: It seems that I'm a little ahead of the curve on this story. Reuters is reporting that "The White House on Wednesday urged Cubans on the communist-ruled island and exiles living in south Florida not to begin a mass migration spurred by Cuban leader Fidel Castro's health problems." I think this is hilarious. Why the hell would people who have lived and suffered through the length of Castro's regime only want to leave the country when he dies? They wouldn't, of course -- this message was intended solely for the Cuban exile community. And we all know why that is, of course. Without the fanatical support of the right-wing nut-bag Cuban exiles, the Republicans are in real trouble at the Florida polls in November. And every November after that.

Temporary Democrats for Lamont

The New York Times is reporting that, with one week to go before the crucial Democratic primary between Senator Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont, a record number of voters have changed their afilliation to Democrat in order, apparently, to vote in the primary.

"In the last three months, 6,715 voters have changed their registration from unaffiliated to Democrat, the secretary of state said on Monday, noting that the number was unusually large. Nearly 5,000 voters changed affiliation in July alone, nearly 10 times the number in May.

Unaffiliated voters can continue changing their registration until noon on the day before the primary. Unaffiliated voters are nearly 45 percent of the electorate, making them a larger group than either the Democrats or Republicans, according to the secretary of the state, Susan Bysiewicz. About 702,000 of the state’s 2.1 million voters, or about a third, are registered Democrats. "

So what does this mean? Is it a last-minute surge for Lieberman? Or are all these formerly unaffiliated voters becoming temporary Democrats in order to boost Ned Lamont and send Joe Lieberman a message?

And if they become Democrats solely for the primary, will they change their affiliation yet again to become unaffiliated after the primary?

And does it matter? Senator Lieberman has made the primary a moot point -- a symbolic vote at best, since he's stated that, should he lose next week's primary (as seems possible if not likely), he's going to run as an independent. In other words, he's planning on ignoring the will of the voters of his own party and will do whatever he has to do, ethical or unethical, to retain power.

Wow -- Joe Lieberman really is a Republican, isn't he?

Tom Moran