Category: Current Affairs

Interesting historical footnote from The Writer’s Almanac, which notes that Sept. 26 is the anniversary of the first televised presidential debate, Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960. I vaguely remember Mom and Dad watching the debates on TV, though I have a clearer memory of other parts of the ’60 campaign, such as the Democratic Convention on TV from Los Angeles, Mom being a Democratic precinct captain, the giant Kennedy poster in our front windown, and Mom and Dad taking us to shake Kennedy signs at a Nixon rally in Park Forest the weekend before the election (though here’s another reason to love the Web: here’s a transcript of his prepared remarks, delivered Oct. 29 — or 10 days before the election instead of the weekend preceding the vote. More on that memory later, I suppose).

Anyway, after 1960, debates weren’t held again until 1976. It’s not terribly surprising if you think about it: Nixon was running in two of the following three elections; in ’68, he probably didn’t want any part of an exchange that had proved so disastrous in his previous run; in ’72, he simply didn’t need to debate. Interesting that an event that has become a fixture — though obviously flawed and less and less useful as it devolves into a piece of spin theater — took so long to catch on after the 1960 experiment.

To dabble for a moment in dark speculations: I just got done watching Jeb Bush doing his “OK, everyone, another hurricane is coming” thing on TV. Every time I hear him, I wonder: Between the two brothers, why is he not the Chosen One? He sounds smarter and more thoughtful than his brother; Jeb, logical thought, and the English language do not appear to be irreconcilable entities. After giving his statement in English, he flipped over into Spanish; though he was speaking from a statement, it appeared he was making some extemporaneous remarks, too. That’s always impressive to an English-only type like me.

Anyway, I’m sure not hoping that we have to contend with a third Bush in the White House. But given what the ordinary person like myself can see (and maybe I have to start reading the Bush family histories out there), it seems rather extraordinary that the seemingly more limited of the siblings made it to the top. Or made it to the top first, at least.

By way of my brother John, a good online piece from Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey refuting complaints that critics of the Iraqi war are guilty of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

“To be sure, the State Department did its homework in 2002 with the ‘Future of Iraq Project‘ (my link, not Dickey’s) and came up with some answers. But the Pentagon threw away the studies and effectively banned anyone who had worked on them (meaning just about anyone who knew anything about Iraq) from participating in the ‘transition.’

“This was the real intelligence failure in Iraq—the willful blindness of an administration that did not want to discuss the risks ahead. Didn’t even want to know them. To have talked too much about such things might have made the American public and the American Congress as cautious about this war as the warriors were. It might have given some inkling why most Europeans and our Arab allies and Asians and Africans and Latin Americas were skeptical about the whole venture. Did they hate democracy? No. They hated occupation. They knew its humiliations and its risks.”

… against Cat Stevens. Or Yusuf Islam. Or whatever he wants to be called. Allah be praised that our terrorist trackers realized the singer was on a Washington-bound airliner and diverted it to Maine before he could run amok in our capital. Terrorist trackers up there in the woods questioned Stevens/Islam, and now they’re deporting him, Allah be praised.

Why? Praise Allah, now that’s a story.

I just love the way the Associated Press describes the grounds for sending the guy’s plane elsewhere, detaining him, then ordering him out of the country:

“… [A] government official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Islam was placed on a watch list after multiple intelligence sources in recent weeks indicated the peace activist may have associations with potential terrorists.”

Got that? He may be linked to potential terrorists. Making allowances for a possibly clumsy rendition of what the anonymous government official said, it’d be nice to get the specifics out into broad daylight, because just about anyone may be linked to potential terrorists.

The anonymous official also indicates that this information was reported recently. But the AP story goes on to cite suggestions and whispers dating back to 1988 that Stevens/Islam donated money that wound up in the hands of Hamas and a sheikh convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Stevens/Islam denies ever knowingly giving money to terrorist groups, the AP story notes, adding that he’s been donating royalties from one recent CD release to a 9/11 victims fund.

Again: It’d be nice for the government, which saw fit to disrupt the liberty of an entire planeload of passengers, to put its cards on the table: Exactly who is saying what about this guy, and what’s the evidence they’ve got against him? Of course, asking for such elementary respect for civil liberties these days — from a bunch of people who proved impotent to spot or stop a squad of real killers three years ago and who ultimately responded to that attack by fabricating a case for an irrelevant but ruinous war — is probably a bit much.

And the special Emmy for best free-form news comedy goes to … CNN, for its continuing coverage of Hurricane Ivan. The network’s guy in Mobile was on this morning, jabbering and/or gibbering about the monster storm headed straight for him. Rough transcript: “Florida Governor Jeb Bush was wearing a button saying., ‘I’ve survived damn near everything.’ And after Ivan, after Frances, and after Charley, this region has taken a full frontal.”

Huh? Full frontal? As in lobotomy?

Thankfully, the pre-Ivan terror report was pre-empted by breaking-news of live coverage of Martha Stewart announcing she’s going to begin her jail sentence as soon as possible, even though she’ll miss her pets (she actually said that) and even though this means she’ll this means she’ll be in stir for Halloween. Martha, we hardly knew ye!

Walking east on Lunt Avenue from Dad’s place over to Sheridan Road, up here on Chicago’s far North Side, I see someone’s taken over a little stretch of sidewalk for their very own anti-Bush campaign. They’ve scrawled “Today’s Reason Not to Vote for Bush” in blue chalk, and every day (apparently; I’ve walked past the spot two days, and the reason looks like it’s changed daily) they offer a new presidential provocation. Last Friday, it was Dick Cheney. Today, Bush “ignored Geneva Convention” (the former is pithy and visceral, the latter requires a little too much thought, especially on an unseasonably warm, humid day like today.

A new approach to getting people to vote: Turn the registration process into a sweepstakes. It’s called Vote or Not, and it was launched over the weekend by the two guys who made a bundle from the Hot or Not vanity/dating site a few years back. Register to vote, or prove you’re already registered, and you become eligible for a $100,000 cash prize. Just wrote a piece about it for Wired News (online tomorrow, I think here). They have some interesting things to say about why they did it, and they convinced me they have a kind of nontraditional view of the political system.

Update: A big wrinkle in the plan: The rules of the contest were altered so that voter registration is not required. In other words, any U.S. citizen 18 or over can enter. The reason: a section of the federal Voting Rights Act that, among other things, makes it illegal to offer or accept payment for registering to vote. Neither of the Vote or Not guys, James and Jim, are especially anxious to create new case law on this provision.