Infospigot: The Chronicles

Our semi-elected president, bless his heart, has released a campaign ad that pats us all on the back for ridding Iraq and Afghanistan of their resident evildoers and making it possible for both nations to send teams to Iraq. Well, the surprisingly successul Iraqi soccer team’s got a message for Mr. Flight Suit: Take your ad and shove it. As reported it by Sports Illustrated online:

[Midfielder Salih] Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements.

In those spots, the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a narrator says, “At this Olympics there will be two more free nations — and two fewer terrorist regimes.”

“Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign,” Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. “He can find another way to advertise himself.”

Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush’s TV advertisement. “How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?” Manajid told me. “He has committed so many crimes.”

Iraq: blue state or red state?

Retiring Rep. Doug Bereuter, a Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, comes out with a stunner: A letter to constituents announcing he now believes the war in Iraq was unjustified and he wouldn’t vote again to support the war.

From the Lincoln Journal Star:

Bereuter pointed to a list of negative consequences arising from the war.

“The cost in casualties is already large and growing,” he said, “and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible.

“From the beginning of the conflict, it was doubtful that we for long would be seen as liberators, but instead increasingly as an occupying force.

“Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess, and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world.”

This guy’s showing a lot more guts on the issue than Mr. Vietnam Valor Guy, John Kerry. Meantime, GOP damage control kicks in: Fellow House Republicans are saying Bereuter’s just getting even for not getting better committee assignments.

I admit I failed in my civic duty earlier in Alan Keyes’s career and never paid attention to who he was or what he was saying when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination. But now that I am reading about what he says and does, I think I finally get where he’s coming from: He’s nuts. The latest exhibit: His unhinged revelation, explicated Tuesday on CNN’s “Crossfire,” that the September 11th terrorist attacks were God’s way of telling us we’d better end abortion.

A couple of blogs are wholly or mostly devoted right now to chasing Keyes and keeping track of his latest certifiable utterances. I commend to your attention:

Archpundit
Truth About Keyes

Good stuff. Funny stuff. Which makes me wonder whether Keyes’s master plan is something everybody has missed: To put The Onion out of business by disintermediating absurdity.

First, the record needs to be corrected. Earlier I called Illinois’s new Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate Alan “I’m Movin’ to Peoria” Keyes. Turns out he’s actually Alan “I’m Movin’ to Calumet City” Keyes. The candidate says his swankless new address — he’s taken the upstairs unit in a two-flat in a tough neighborhood — will put him in touch with the day-to-day realities of people in his barely adopted state. Good on ‘im. Hope someone out there is keeping track of how much time he actually spends in his new digs.

Second, and more important: I want to be the first in the highly exclusive Internet pundit corps to congratulate Keyes for rewriting the history of slavery. Turns out it’s not a black thing, and we can all understand it.

Last night, I read the transcript of Keyes’s interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air” show. During his appearance, Keyes revealed that the key issue in the Illinois Senate race is — surprise! — the right of unborn Illinoisans to pursue life, liberty, and Huggies. And he talked all about how important it is for candidates to make rational arguments for their positions instead of resorting to name-calling and unsupported assertions. He’s so high-minded it makes you woozy.

Then he was asked about his statement that Barack Obama has taken “the slaveholder’s position” on the abortion issue.

The interviewer suggested that Keyes had introduced race into the campaign by using the slave rhetoric. Oh, no! Keyes said. Nothing could by further from the truth:

“One of the things I learned–because I had slave ancestors, and I, as I said, have deeply looked at, and thought about, meditated on the injustice involved in slavery. Slavery is not a racial issue. It’s an issue of human justice! And that means that when someone is enslaved, in violation of the fundamental premise of human dignity, we are turning our backs on our decent humanity.

OK, he’s right about one thing: Enslaving others demonstrates a “disregard for decent humanity.” But saying race wasn’t a factor in the American slave experience — because when he used the word slaveholder, I think he was thinking of Scarlett O’Hara’s pop, of slavery down yonder, not the ancient Roman guy who owned Russell Crowe in “Gladiator” — is like saying, “Murder’s not about violence! It’s about not caring for your fellow man.”

Of course race was a factor — the central factor — in American slavery. If you’ve got any doubt about the history Keyes is trying to wriggle out of, check out the Supreme Court’s excruciatingly rational argument in the Dred Scott decision. The court concluded that blacks, slave or free, could never be citizens. This “unfortunate” race was “separated from the white by indelible marks.” The decision defended the view, which it imputed to our founding white male parents, that blacks were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings”:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

You’ve got to love that term “beings.”

So, slavery: Yes, a failure of decent humanity. But race is written all over it, and those ancestors Keyes talks about could have told him all about it.

Just this, from Monday’s New York Times (you need to be registered to read it online): The FBI is going around the country questioning dissidents — now there’s a precise term — about possible violence planned during anti-Bush demonstrations at the Republican Convention in New York City later this month. Of course, the FBI is the first to reassure us that it would never act like … like, well, the FBI.

F.B.I. officials, mindful of the bureau’s abuses in the 1960’s and 1970’s monitoring political dissidents like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., say they are confident their agents have not crossed that line in the lead-up to the conventions.

“The F.B.I. isn’t in the business of chilling anyone’s First Amendment rights,” said Joe Parris, a bureau spokesman in Washington. “But criminal behavior isn’t covered by the First Amendment. What we’re concerned about are injuries to convention participants, injuries to citizens, injuries to police and first responders.”

Watching out for threats is swell. I don’t know anyone who’s a fan of seeing other people getting blown to pieces. But here, the FBI is putting Americans fulfilling their responsibility to protest the government’s lapses on the same side of the fence as real enemies of the state.

Over- and underappreciated San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll had a decent piece today on the Bush administration’s war rhetoric. For contrast, he used Winston Churchill’s stirring yet reflective account of a British assault on Sudanese forces outside Khartoum in 1898:

“The Dervish host was scattered and destroyed. Their end, however, only anticipates that of the victors, for Time, which laughs at Science, as Science laughs at Valor, will in due course contemptuously brush both combatants away.”

In big type, Carroll asks: Is there anyone in politics today who could construct sentences like that?” Fair question, in that Churchill shows here and elsewhere it’s possible to write beautifully while in the service of abominable causes like our misbegotten Iraq campout. Unfair question, because we’re talking about one of the language’s finest prose stylists ever.

But whether the question’s ridiculous or not, I had an answer: Yes, James McGreevy. His address yesterday announcing he’s “a gay American” and resigning as governor of New Jersey because of an extramarital affair with another man was uncommonly courageous and, at moments, beautifully wrought:

In this, the 47th year of my life, it is arguably too late to have this discussion. But it is here, and it is now. At a point in every person’s life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.

The whole speech is well above the usual political doggerel. He attempts to lift the whole affaiir above politics and into the realm of deep personal quest. Of course, this might be another example of someone offering nice phrases in an abominable cause.

Yesterday, it was clear McGreevy wasn’t explaining one significant detail: What had driven him to make his announcement now? Late last night and today we got the answer: He was about to be exposed in a sexual harassment lawsuit that is either a) the action brought by a former aide seeking justice or b) the handiwork of a spurned aide who hoped to blackmail his former lover. That’ll all be sorted out, maybe even in public.

What’s interesting today, though, is looking back at past stories concerning McGreevy’s special friend, Golan Cipel. McGreevy hired him as a homeland security adviser, moved him out of that job into an undefined position of “counselor” when questions arose about his security qualifications, then got rid of him altogether when questions about what he was doing to merit a $110,000 a year salary wouldn’t go away.

But even a cursory glance at Cipel’s past is bound to raise more questions about his relationship with McGreevy after he left his state job. Here’s what a real quick Google search — not investigative reporting — turns up.

A Web site called New Jersey Capital Report (it’s produced by a rather Republican-sounding PR/lobbying firm called Capital Public Affairs, so yeah, have your grain of salt ready) ran a column (called McGreevy Watch) the day Cipel left state employment two years ago that reported Cipel had landed a job with a lobbying firm that apparently had close ties to the governor. About six weeks, later, McGreevy Watch reported that Cipel continued to be McGreevy’s (unpaid) adviser on Jewish affairs and that he had already moved from his first lobbyist’s job to another, having been hired into another firm by a man described as McGreevy’s best friend.

With that and other details floating around, McGreevy’s not going to come out of this looking as noble as he did yesterday.

The Weather Channel is in the midst of its always-odd storm coverage as Hurricane Charley approaches Florida’s Gulf Coast. TWC is famous for sending its people out onto the beaches and showing them getting whipped by rain and blowing sand and tossed around by gusting winds. The effect is so familiar that it’s kind of campy and makes the whole scene seem like a damp but wondrous carnival, not some potentially deadly blast of nature. (My favorite place for storm information, which is pretty straightforward but very complete: The Weather Underground’s Tropical Weather page.)

Meantime, how has blogging changed storm reporting? Well, through Technorati I did find a Florida meteorologist who’s making a game attempt to keep up with the storm online: “Heavy rain is now falling into southwest Florida as bands of Charley move through the area. There are still many people out and about, but traffic continues to decrease. Most businesses including grocery stores and restaurants are now closed. So far, winds are not too gusty but they are expected to increase shortly.”

Traffic continues to decrease. Can you say “drama in real life”? (Non-snide point of curiosity: What happens when he loses his Net connectivity?)

But what does the great blogging public, the non-weather-expert types, make of the approaching menace? We take you now to the tale of an apparent teenager chased all the way across the state by the storm:

“I was having a great time in Marco Island till’ we had to evacuate [Hurricane Charlie] I absolutley it here in Ft. Lauderdale [thats wer i had to evacuate to] But there is pretty good shopping l0l0l…..i miz mii h.h.h.h. sisters at home l0l0l deb nd jen well gotta go shopping!”

The terror is palpable.