American Bandstand

The White House is now fully engaged with Richard Clarke and his 9/11 commission testimony, because Clarke has asserted now that if Condileeza Rice had done her job, 9/11 might have been prevented. It's a loaded statement for such a simple assertion, and I think there are two ways to read it.

If your reading of Clarke hinges on prevent then Clarke probably comes across as spurious. I was talking with a friend the other night and we were discussing how Clarke sounds a bit like the guy that comes back in time to tell you that you have to stop SkyNet by blowing up a batch of microchips or terrible things will happen. Then when the Terminators show up, he's right there to tell you that he told you so. (Point-scoring tangent: President Bush, as it happened, responded to the Terminators by going after Judge Dredd.) It's not satisfactory to say that there was one thing or two things that needed to be done to prevent a cataclysmic terrorist attack, of course, though we can identify perhaps one or two such things in hindsight.

It's better, but less indicting, to say that there was a general policy stance that might have prevented the attack. This is the other read I get from Clarke's testimony, when he talks about Condileeza Rice's job: There were all these instances where the Bush administration should have been considering, in broad terms, the problem of terrorism. This question about policy is really important because it tells us what the Bush administration is willing to do with the information it has at hand—where its priorities were. The Clinton administration had neither the mandate nor apparently the inclination to chase down terrorists. The Bush administration followed suit, but also saw the much-noted "spike" in terror alerts in mid-2001. That spike ought to have resulted in a direction a bit more concrete than commissioning an anti-terror task under Dick Cheney only for it to never convene.

Quite bizarrely, the administration seems to be defending itself against charges that they missed those points of prevention, rather than asserting that they were following a sufficient policy of prevention (though they weren't). Rumsfeld said in testimony that it's not clear that killing Osama bin Laden would have prevented 9/11, since bin Laden would become a martyr—isn't that absurd? First, clearly, whatever the administration did, they did not prevent 9/11, so elsewhere-scenarios can't have worse outcomes. Second, killing bin Laden after 9/11 would install him in the goddamned constellations as far as his followers are concerned—that's no reason not to take the bastard out. It ought to be okay for Rumsfeld to say that the Bush team, like Clinton's, probably couldn't have done whacked ObL if they wanted to, but instead Rumsfeld's taking the stand to tell us that whatever they didn't do wouldn't have worked.

This whole exercise of assigning blame is edging toward a solely political pursuit—certainly, when Madeleine Albight told the 9/11 commission that the Clinton administration did everything it could have to prevent terrorism, I was disappointed. Clarke going after Rice isn't going to be palatable for many people. But as far as politics goes it seems that this is what it took to get the Bush administration to address some of these questions. For the record I'm ready to dig into this Iraq war with the same fine-toothed comb, since there's plenty of warranted blame to go around. Furthermore, the Gulf War II skirts all the points-of-prevention crap since we initiated it and gets right down to the policy question, on which the Bush administration is mind-bogglingly wrong.

UPDATE: For the record, I don't think killing ObL would have prevented 9/11 unless it were done on Clinton's watch. By the start of the Bush administration's watch, I think that the al Qaeda scheme/executioners had metastasized in America.


In the meantime, I'll have to settle for watching Dick Clarke's non-stop blamathon.
posted by kriston at 10:48 AM........

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Brought to You by the District of Columbia and My Complete Inability to Follow Directions

I'm down at DC's Tax and Revenue Customer Service office to sort out an income tax issue—I sent a copy instead of an original record of what little I made in 2003—so I expect that I'll be here until Friday morning. For a city with no potable water, they've set up a host of computers with fast internet, so it's a good time to catch up on some webloggage.

I'm seeing a lot of commentary recently regarding Tom Daschle and his efforts to frame the political debate surrounding September 11th. His statement today is a strong dressing-down of the Bush administration for its failures in waging the war against terror. Setting aside the substantive issues at hand for the moment—the big elephant in the room known as Richard Clarke—let's talk about Daschle. A while back, Marc posed some good questions about Mr. Daschle and why his hold on his Senate seat is as tentative as my hold over a balanced checking account. Marc observes, "I imagine it's hard for SD voters to actually feel like Daschle is as responsive to them as he is to the Democrats." No kidding. We've seen Daschle waffle before on important legislation in order to coo at his constituency—the "partial-birth" abortion ban comes to mind—and though that's not really cause for alarm, you'd like to believe that the Democratic Minority Leader comes from a real Democratic bastion and is unencumbered by the day-to-day voting calculus. Though you don't want Ted Kennedy leading the Senate Dems, I thought John Kerry was an ideal candidate for the job, betting that Daschle wasn't long for this world and that Kerry had picked up steam from the primary campaign process. (We know how both of those precictions turned out.)

I'm always disappointed to see Daschle two-face on the substantive issues. At the same time, regarding Marc's point, I doubt that South Dakotans are unaware of the prestige—and pork—that Daschle brings into the state. Whereas Sugarland doesn't really need Tom DeLay to get by what with Texas's political weight and ability to draw money, making it just a big plus that he's unseemly powerful, SD definitely benefits from Daschle's clout, more so than they might under a rookie senator who happened to toe all the religious/conservative social lines. Moreover Daschle does exactly that from time to time.

I see more reason for Dems to complain than SDns but ample reason for both to be generally satisfied. From time to time Amy Sullivan sings Daschle's praises so you may want to stroll through her archives if you'd like to hear someone really testify.


Forgive me: In drafting this post I almost used some variation on "drinking the Kool-Aid," and that's terrible writing.
posted by kriston at 4:09 PM........

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The Utility of PETA

Setting aside the often theatric extent to which they pursue their agenda, I have to admit that PETA serves a useful function. Tonight while flipping between channels that run The Simpsons I came across a public-access special on animal abuse within circuses, including a video capturing one elephant handler training another with instructions that were tantamount to torturing the pitiful creatures. It turns out that OSHA cracked down on Hawthorn Corporation, the firm that employed the handlers in question (and trains elephants and other animals for circuses), and Hawthorn Co. plead guilty to 19 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act in order to settle. The investigation began when OSHA charged Hawthorn Corporation of failing to protect its employees—human employees—from contracting tuberculosis from diseased animals.

Normally, I'm as willing to disparage PETA as the next person, but I hate circuses, and would shut them all down myself. I hate circuses more than theatrics, extremist advocacy, or naked girls in hot leopard bodypaint. PETA puts the full-court press out for some useless causes, but they make for a useful (read: rabid) watchdog organization for several good causes (read: closing circuses, putting girls in spots).


If you don't buy the animal-abuse line, realize that circuses employ clowns, and I think you'll stand with me in opposition.
posted by kriston at 11:31 PM........

Monday, March 22, 2004

Fun with Fundrace

Tyler Green comes up with a few art stars' recorded political contributions, courtesy of fundrace.org:

Larry Gagosian: $2000 to Bush, $1000 to Lieberman
Barbara Gladstone: $1000 to Clark
Sol Lewitt: $2000 to Dean
David Salle: $1000 to Kerry
Larry Rinder: $250 to Clark
Eli Broad: $2000 to Kerry, Lieberman and Clark, $1000 to Dean

Let's see, Larry Gagosian, tax evasion scandal, shady dealings with Imclone, Bush contributions... sounds about right. Glad to hear about Barbara Gladstone, though.


Fundrace ought to suffice for free time for the day.
posted by kriston at 11:50 AM........

The Pritzker

Heard that someone from TNR (Martin Filler, maybe?) spoke on NPR this morning about the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was awarded to Iraqi-born British citizen Zaha Hadid. It's the first time ever the award has been granted to a woman, the same woman who executed the first American museum designed by a woman in 2003: The Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, in Cincinatti. I was told that the TNR writer was disparaging the Pritzker committee for awarding an architect with so small a body of work on record. I don't have strong feelings about this but I'm leaning toward the belief that giving less-experienced but promising architects such a prominent slot on the world stage is eventually good for architecture, which seems to me clogged at the top by a select few firms. I suppose that might be bad for the stature of the Pritzker if some of these draft picks didn't pan out, but so it goes.

As for Ms. Hadid, her work (and now this prize) emphasize how much more appropriate she would be as a choice for the city of Washington, DC, than Frank Gehry. If you know DC and you've glanced at the Rosenthal CAC you can imagine how the Rosenthal itself would be a better fit for the Corcoran Gallery of Art than Gehry's Corcoran design, and I'm sure that Hadid would be willing to incorporate something of DC itself into a flexible design. Sure, fine, like everybody else we'll have a Gehry mark, but I'd be more interested if DC were incubating new architects and shaping new architecture.


Thanks for checking back after a long break.
posted by kriston at 11:34 AM........

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