Eclecticism

Author Kurt Vonnegut (whom I really need to go re-read, it’s been years) has some good comments on the current brouhaha in In These Times:

Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.

(Via MeFi)

Looking one direction:

The US intends to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.

It is based on a strategy known as “Shock and Awe,” conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 GulfWar.

“There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,” a Pentagon official told America’s CBS News after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.”

“You’re sitting in Baghdad and, all of a sudden, you’re the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out,” Mr Ullman said. “You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power and water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.”

And looking the other direction:

Facing its most chronic shortage in oil stocks for 27 years, the US has this month turned to an unlikely source of help — Iraq.

Weeks before a prospective invasion of Iraq, the oil-rich state has doubled its exports of oil to America, helping US refineries cope with a debilitating strike in Venezuela.

The trade, though bizarre given current Pentagon plans to launch around 300 cruise missiles a day on Iraq, is legal under the terms of UN’s oil for food programme.

But for opponents of war, it shows the unspoken aim of military action in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest proven reserves – some 112 billion barrels, and at least another 100bn of unproven reserves, according to the US Department of Energy. Iraqi oil is comparatively simple to extract – less than \$1 per barrel, compared with \$6 a barrel in Russia. Soon, US and British forces could be securing the source of that oil as a priority in the war strategy. The Iraqi fields south of Basra produce prized ‘sweet crudes’ that are simpler to refine.

On Friday, Pentagon sources said US military planners ‘have crafted strategies that will allow us to secure and protect those fields as rapidly as possible in order to then preserve those prior to destruction’.

(Via Long Story, Short Pier)

Some good stuff is starting to pop up around the ‘net regarding Bush’s State of the Union address last night.

I’m referring, of course, to the claim — repeated yet again in the president’s speech — that his tax cut plan offers an “average” tax break of over \$1000. “Ninety-two million Americans,” Bush told us with a straight face, “will keep this year an average of almost \$1,100 more of their own money.”

This average is a convenient fiction; it’s a statistic that exists only because the enormous benefits accruing to the dividend-owning super-rich skew the “average” — and camouflage the fact that the cuts most middle class taxpayers will receive under Bush’s proposal are piddling. The few rich taxpayers with mega-breaks are statistical “outliers”; if you used a median rather than an average you’d end up with a far lower number — one much closer to what most of us would actually get under Bush’s plan.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked at this late date that Bush and his administration would continue to use blatantly misleading “facts” to sell their policies; it’s been their economic approach from day one. Still, it’s appalling. And the very consistency of Bush’s willingness to twist simple facts in demonstrably manipulative and sometimes outright deceitful ways has a more pernicious effect than simply discrediting his policies: It leaves us with the sense that the man is deeply untrustworthy.

— Scott Rosenberg, You do the math (Via Robert Scoble)

What Bush said of Saddam’s disarmament record could equally be said of Bush’s domestic record. He has given no evidence of progress. He must have much to hide.

— William Saletan, A reveille, not a record (Via Tom Negrino)

President Bush did his best to scare the bejesus out of his audience Tuesday to make his case for war. And afterward, he was probably the only person to get a good night’s sleep.

— Salon’s wrapup: State of the Union: Frightened

My favorite so far: Microsoft Word’s automatic summary of the State of the Union address: “”Many hospitals tell people, ‘You’ve got AIDS America and the world will not be blackmailed if Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities.”” (Via d kitty)

What the White House thinks about you: You are simple. Parsing the speech reveals that in his 5,366-word speech, the average sentence was 18 words in length. Some might make the case that perhaps Bush isn’t good with long sentences, and we’ll admit the possibility. So you and the President are very simple people with limited attention spans.

— The Raven, Simple Minds (Via Scott Rosenberg)

Shelley Powers (Burningbird) also has a very good breakdown of the key issues, and touches on some of the issues I didn’t have much background information on, such as Bush’s health care plans:

Rather than extend Medicare and Medicaid with a prescription drug plan, the President instead wants to give seniors who need help with prescription drugs the opportunities to go into HMOs. I would suggest you find a senior and you ask them why they would prefer not to go into an HMO.

HMOs operate at a profit. To make this profit, they control costs in many ways, including restricting access to physicians and rewarding physicians for keeping costs down. These plans discourage long-term treatments, and categorize many procedures as ‘experimental’ and therefore not covered. In addition, its more cost effective to treat as many patients as possible with nurse practitioners rather than with doctors directly. NPs aren’t paid as much.

This works contrary to the needs of the elderly, who prefer and need to go to their own physicians, rather than being seen by a nurse practitioner or a different doctor on every visit. In addition, the elderly can require long-term expensive care as well as medical procedures that may be fairly new, or still undergoing research. Alzheimer’s treatments come to mind when I say the latter. HMOs work best with younger, relatively healthy families who suffer from the usual bumps and bruises, flus, and maybe an occasional heart attack or broken bone. HMOs do not work well with the elderly.

— Shelley Powers, Thoughts on the State of the Union