Category Archives: Politics: US

The clever people at moveon.org have released the finalists in their Bush in 30 seconds contest. Entrants were asked to make a 30-second anti-Bush TV commercial.

Although impressive in many ways, overall the entries were ultimately somewhat disappointing. I think many made basic errors of playing to the choir rather than to the unconverted, and in particular would seem shrill to many voters.

Below I set out my biases going into ranking the entries, and then my (somewhat contrary) conclusion as to which one is the best.

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I've just started reading Talk Left, and mostly I like it, but I disagree strongly with the recent suggestion there that concern over the likely breaking and entering into the Democrats' Judiciary Committee computer files is just a “pointless distraction” from the selection of judges, or that the hack was politics as usual. I think that's too close to Republican spin ('ignore our crimes but your politics are treason', cf. Today's Political Vocabulary Lesson.) Also, there's reason to believe that this is a more general phenomenon that started with the breakin to the Democratic computer files on the Intelligence committee, see Second Data Point on Theft of Democratic Memos. If there is any sort of organized Republican hacking campaign into democratic Senate files, that deserves to found out and exposed and prosecuted. Hacking into private files is not — should not be — politics as usual.

And the Democrats ought to get gnu PGP ASAP.

Am I the only one who found it odd that in a long article devoted to the rise of Asian-Americans in politics, In One Suburb, Local Politics With Asian Roots, the New York Times's Patricia Leigh Brown never uses either of the words “Republican” or “Democratic”?

Col. David Hackworth (ret) writes in Saddam in the Slammer, so why are we on Orange?,

Even I – and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week – was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq – about the number of warriors in a line tank division.

We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we’ve lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA!

This is indeed a staggering statistic. The breakdown isn't much better:

Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military's Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries.

Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire.

Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:

Orthopedic surgery – 3,907

General surgery – 1,995

Internal medicine – 1,291

Psychiatric – 1,167

Neurology – 1,002

Gynecological – 491

Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can’t be confirmed – Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal.

Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because “in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once.”

The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it’s safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the USA.

Although I enjoyed Hackworth's book, About Face, I thought it seriously glossed over the reasons he got into trouble in Vietnam, and have always been suspicious about the “legend in his own mind” aspect of his writing. Despite all that, I have to admit he's been one of the most diligent reporters of the Iraq War — he actually gets facts.

Please read this account of the latest GWB “Press Conference,” Cage Match – Matt Taibbi [link fixed]. I submit that it makes the case strongly for my modest and practical proposal for improving White House press conferences.

When I was a kid, I thought the New York Times was the epitome of journalism. I've learned better. By law school, I was receptive to Charles L. Black Jr.'s warning that “The New York Times is a slim reed” for the support of justice and good causes. But here's one where the NYT editorial board gets it right. OK, it's at least 2 years after everyone else figured this out….

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