not drowning, wavering

WHORET

* the world would undoubtedly be safer and generally better off without saddam in power, if we had a safer and better alternative.

* nice cspan howardzinn interview (1hr) here rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/iraq/iraq_wj011405_zinn.rm - hilites include callers asking 'are u a communist?' and spluttering 'you're unamerican' repeatedly, and 'which country did u fite for in ww2?' - but apart from all that, zinn is still zinn. jons also recently did an interview with him.

* one thing i heard in the zinn/cspan interview was some woman saying 'u sound like my husband, but im a repug and i love pres bush' or some such - and it struck me - can u imagine being in such a marriage? we kinda hear about blue/red staters - but can u imagine what that would be like? seriously. imagine what that does for your marriage, or your sex life, or whatever. how could u ever talk to her reasonably again? or watch teeve together? we hear a lot about the divide - imagine if your wife said that. imagine if she watched hannity and used that to 'prove' her point. abstinence works. we usually think about idiots and non-idiots - and 'my stupid repug brothers' and such - imagine if that was within a single relship! the mind boggles. how do u negotiate that shit together? gwb: marriage wrecker. oh, the ironing.

AMDOM
* back to sibel story "AP) - Evidence and other witnesses support complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage" - i love the AP: 'who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage' - seriously. 'who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage'. how many rewrites do u have to do before u come up with something like that? it is so obviously contrived - yet we see the same thing *all* the time, across many 'journos'. is there an invisible hand that does it all? is there a memo that goes out? the discipline is *in-cred-ible*. thousands of articles, yet we virtually never see any cracks. how do they do it? i really havent got a clue. lets look at the full sentence again: "Evidence and other witnesses support complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage" - its really a fucking quality piece of work. i like to think that i have certain skills in this area as well - i kinda reckon i have a good feel for words and messages, and have pretty fine antennae for crafting a statement, shaving words here and there as required - not that u ever see it here - but in a corporate setting or whatever where i have a *purpose* - ie where i am trying to convey a certain issue whilst tiptoe-ing around other issues - but the key thing obviously is that you have to really understand the terrain - what u are trying to emphasize and de-emphasize and all that, and what things u can say, and what is true, and what is mostly true, and what u can get away with and reality and all the rest. but when we see these words - support and complaints and fired and shoddy and alleged and contract and possible all strung together - not to mention their order - then its *impossible* to believe that the journo isnt intentionally minimising the story. and if that is true, then the order must come from somewhere - either implicitly or explicitly. and if that is true, then the journo *must* explicitly know that something is amiss. and not just this journo - but all of them. and not just the sibel story, but all of them. which is truly astonishing. i mean, its one thing to have dodgy headlines, or stories buried deep in a paper - thats an editorial gatekeeper issue - but for every journo to agonise over sentences to the point that they can create works of art like the one quoted is almost unfathomable - yet as far as i can tell, we have specific evidence of what hillary called a 'vast rightwingconspiracy' - 'vast' being the operative word. the journo here knew what was required, and obviously went to extreme lengths to satisfy the requirement - its really fucking difficult to put together a sentence like that - and u have to be perfectly clear on what the brief is. the mechanisms for communicating the brief is a complete mystery to me though. i mean, we had the memos in 'outfoxed' which were somewhat damaging, but not much more than that, and they mostly pointed to emphasis - but this sibel reporter somehow knew *exactly* what the brief was, and delivered accordingly. none of this is new of course - im just amazed that they can do it continually, across many different stories, and get away with it. the message (in this case) 'from above' is obviously some version of 'discredit sibel / minimise allegations' - that message must obviously be transmitted through some medium or other - either specifically in writing, or forced rewrites, or something similar. and eventually some journo has gotta say 'ya know what - this is too much - something weird is going on' - most people will argue that the fact that this hasnt happened is proof of the absence of a conspiracy, and thats a very effective argument. but at the same time, it would take a million shakespearean monkeys on their keyboards to come up with that single sentence like the one im quoting here. id be very proud of it even if i had days to work on it, and a perfect brief. 'vast' indeed. seriously, if u were trying to write that lead, what would it be? "Espionage at FBI: whistleblower vindicated"? or "Evidence and other witnesses support complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage"? again, this is only one of a thousand examples - how the fuck do they keep a lid on it? i must be missing something. (mind u, i read the report 'by the senior oversight official at the Justice Department' and she sounds like a total pain in the ass - but thats not the point - (and of course the report was released on a friday)) http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBRWGYJY3E.html

* surprisingly, the wsj/blog quotes were all bullshit - heres the wsj interviewer bolloxing her own reporters for making shit up http://www.blogforamerica.com/archives/005807.html#872865

* btw - the blogosphere and the media is kinda alight with 'we didnt find wmd' stories, (as i often like to tout) i havent joined this party cos its simply a false construction - firstly, its not that 'we didnt find any', its that there werent any, and secondly, we always knew that to be the case. this was apparent before the invasion, and before powells un presentation. the only surprising thing to me is that 'we' didnt plant them (i hate doing the quote 'we' thing) and that is really surprising. really surprising. im still not convinced that 'we' wont yet do it - and 'find' them in syria or somewhere. its almost inconceivable to me that they didnt have a 'vindication' story - so my main fear is that they are just keeping their powder dry. they must have really big cajones.

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war makes me mad, sad, bad. tsunamis makes me sad.
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