Us vs Them

The 3rd Rock From the Sun

Heather Mallick (Oct 30, Globe & Mail Subscription) nails it for the 95% of the World's population that does not live in the United States:

"Eight or nine people in the Pentagon, ultra-ideologues with a thing about Iraq, somehow managed to take over the U.S. government, with their president being a stupid man who truly believes he can bring democracy to every nation in the world by means of bombing. Spare us from the true believers......

.....The first lash that would accompany a Bush victory was initially mentioned on the British talkboards, but it is only now occurring to Americans that the rest of the world had to this point politely distinguished between them and their dreadful president. The world rather favoured American culture (thank you, Bruce Springsteen) and indeed its individual citizens. But if Bush wins, then Americans are as one in the eyes of the world. You found out what he’s really like and you still re-elected him; you’re it....."

Ms. Mallick then details how panicked Democrats will be forced to consider cross-border anti-draft child protection, health and sanity measures which would be very prudent of them, particularly if the status quo North and South of the 49th holds such that we remain Us and they remain Them.

Gazetteers like us, however, who try to pay attention to things like borders and co-ordinates, are not so certain that that status quo, or even the border itself, will hold.

After all, US ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci spoke in Kelowna BC just last night about how the latest Bin Laden tape demonstrates that the two countries must form a UFNA to prevent the end of the world as we know it.

The UFNA is not one of those old world acronyms from Johnny Lydon's 'Anarchy in the UK'.

Instead, it is a Canadian 5th columnists wet dream - United Fortress North America.

****

If you don't remember Mr. Cellucci you should because he's the very same BushCo accolyte who told Us that very bad things would happen to our security and our economy because we didn't join the coalition of the unwilling and help to kill 100, 000 Iraqis for no good reason at all.

Luckily, we had a government that resisted the clarion call to naked aggression way back then.

But now?

Well, just hours before Mr. Celluci's announcement, which was made in the riding of the Shrubbery's intellectual equivalent, Stockwell Day, our current Prime Minister announced that the OBL video proved how much work we have to do together with the U.S. to erase the Terrorist scourge from the world forever.

Kind of makes you wonder if ours is a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown as We prepare to become Them.

Schreck on Surrey

49° 07' North; 123° 06' West

David Schreck has a similarly themed, but much more nuanced, take on the Surrey-Panorama by-election as we do.

However, one additional bit that we missed is the fact that, despite the conventional wisdom spouted by BC's cuckolded mainstream media, a Lieberal loss was not a foregone conclusion:

"....Anyone who looks at the map of electoral districts can see that the new constituency of Surrey-Panorama Ridge consists of neighbourhoods that traditionally vote against the NDP.

The Campbell Liberals will try to minimize the damage by talking about how long it has been since a BC government has won a by-election, but what would they say if they lost a by-election in West Vancouver? Surrey-Panorama Ridge is little different...."

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Update: Reader, and Giant '98 addict, LC let us know that Will McMartin also pointed out that S-P should have been a shoo-in for the SS GordoC while he was on Michael Smyth's Thursday night's post-game show.

The Gauleiters of Florida

28° 36' North; 80° 30' West

There is a scene in the faux astronaut hagiography 'The Right Stuff' when Dennis Quaid's character, Gordon 'Hot Dog' Cooper, is asked, "Who's the best you ever saw?"

Cooper/Quaid goes pensive for a moment as he thinks of Chuck Yeager. Then the 'I-Ain't-Spam-In-A-Can', shite-eating grin reappears on his face and he answers, "Me".

Now, I'm pretty sure that if you asked the hot shots of the Political Blogosphere the same question you'd likely get the same answer from most.

But in that moment when they were thinking about who really had the right stuff, a lot of them would be probably be thinking of a guy named Billmon.

****

Billmon was a rarity in that he banged the Blogosphere like a gong without ever letting it rub up too hard against his fulltime pseudo-straight journo job, or vice versa.

He also had a nose for history, both military and political, as well as a twisted sense of Brechtian humour that separated him from the herd.

As such, the great majority of the 1600 or so posts he wrote between Spring of 2003 and the Summer of 2004 were worth two, or three, or maybe even six reads.

And, while he was no way gone lefty, many of those posts were directed squarely against BushCo and the Rovians.

Another interesting thing about his site was the way Billmon's well researched longform posts attracted an interesting and argumentative, but mostly respectful, group of posters that made the threads themselves almost as interesting as the screeds that started them.

By way of comparison check out anything on, oh say, Atrios, and compare the amusing, but ultimately trivial, dreck that floods the threads there to something like this.

But something that good that was operating non-stop, high up in the rafters without a net could not last forever.

Billmon's balance began to wobble back in the Spring when he mentioned the strain of keeping tabs on 500 comments per thread - one of the things that kept posters on their toes was the fact that they knew the Barkeeper (the site was called 'The Whiskey Bar' - more Brecht) was actually paying attention and that he would jump into the fray at a moment's notice, sometimes to contribute, sometimes to scold.

Clearly, Billmon had a great admiration for Seymour Hersh, and while he gave the original Abu Ghraib relevations great play you could see that they also gave him great pause.

Because, while the initial revelations were an indictment of BushCo, as a thinking person who still believed in all that could be good in an implied American exceptionalism, Billmon could not bring himself, at least in the beginning, to believe that the entire system was rotten to the core.

As a result, he really let fly at any and all posters who suggested that it was. Kate Storm, who we wrote about last week, was one of the ones that got hit in the cross-fire.

****

But then the revelations kept on coming, day after day, until the White House torture memos and the dead ghost prisoner wrapped in saran wrap finally came to light.

To his credit, Billmon changed his tune and let the posters go. But he himself started to slip when it became clear that most of the American ruling class, the So-Called-Liberal-Media, and a good chunk of the electorate just didn't give a damn.

And then he really lost his footing when he was forced to watch Colin Powell, up close and personal, soil himself, his State Department, and his country over and over again during a speech at a Davos meeting in Jordan.

After that Billmon shut off the comments, and a few weeks later he stepped off the highwire for good.

****

Well, almost for good.

First, there was a short, viscious rant on the OpEd page of the LA Times that was followed by a weird, HST-inspired, Mojo-Rising image on his site that came down almost as fast as it went up.

And now it looks like he's climbed the ladder to roof and has stepped out into the void once more.

This time around he pulls no punches, directly comparing the BushCo Loyalty oath that is being administered all over the U.S., and especially in swing states like Florida, to similar bouts of fascist flim-flammery that were so prevalent in pre-war Germany.

But what really scares him now is not so much the fact that the Rovians have stooped to this level of play acting, but rather the fact that the rank and file is lapping it up.

So, the question for us 'still feeling superior' Canadians is, if BushCo wins and the Anschluss comes, will we roll over and play the lapdog too?

Seem far fetched?

Maybe.

But don't forget that, in response to Kerry's use of Bruce Springsteen and a message of Hope this weekend, BushCo has brought in an Austrian poseur with big biceps and a message of Annhilation/Termination.

End times indeed.

Bend Over and Say Aaaaaahhhh.....

48° 39' West; 123° 26' West

......For John Ashcroft.

In fact, you might as well beat the rush and start sending the Singin' American Attorney General your Medical Records right now.

Because, regardless the fact that the Lieberals spent little time, and even less discussion, on their amendment to the Privacy Act earlier this week, their own Privacy Commissioner, David Loukidelis says:

"...once information is sent across borders, it's difficult, if not impossible, to control. He notes that under the USA Patriot Act , the U.S. government can demand access to a wide range of personal, confidential information."

This is no longer just a local, made in British Columbia story. Due to the larger implications, even Reuters has picked it up:

...."It is also an issue for the private sector, and will have to be addressed by all jurisdictions across Canada and at the international level," Loukidelis wrote in the 151-page study that drew submissions from around the world.

Loukidelis said the extraterritorial reach of the Patriot Act should raise privacy concerns in other countries. The controversy arose when British Columbia signed a tentative agreement in March to turn its medical record-keeping operations over to the Canadian unit of U.S. information technology firm Maximus Inc. Under Canada's universal health care system, the provinces administer medical services....

Remind me again, why is the SS Gordon Campbell outsourcing all of our record keeping?

And why is this not Orwellian?

Dodging Flying Porcelain

49° 07' North; 123° 06' West

Promising to twin the Port Mann Bridge was not enough....

A last minute lowering of the sales tax was not enough....

Criminalizing the poor was not enough.....

Bringing in the cabinet was not enough....

Having the Commander in Chief put down the martini shaker long enough to work the phones was not enough....

Non-stop hot air from the Ferret's $30 million Whirlitzer was not enough....

Having the Green Party suck off 10% the vote from the Left Side was not enough....

Because nothing could save Mary Polak, Kevin Falcon or the SS Gordon Campbell in the Surrey Panorama by-election last night.

Which is very good news indeed.

Just hope that nobody gets in an accident avoiding all those kitchen sinks littering the shoulders of the King George during this morning's commute.

The Independent Goes Deep

48° 39' West; 123° 26' West

He may not be Charley Varrick, or even Oscar Madison, but he does it his way and now he's on top of the heap.

That's right - Sean Holman the Public Eye Guy was the big winner at last night's Jack Webster Awards.

Even more important was the story he broke, the malfeasance of Doug Walls. It's the kind of story that an independent and free press is supposed to generate regularly.

Unfortunately, the closed and coddled shop that is the mainstream Media in British Columbia has generated few such stories in recent years.

Here's hoping for many more from Holman and his ilk.

Armagideon Times

40° 44' North; 73° 55' West

MoDo throws a haymaker.
(with apologies to Joe Strummer)

Won't Cry For Thee Sammytina

49° 13' North; 123° 06' West

Still waiting for that 'complete list' of KnoWards bagmen from Sam Sullivan.

In the meantime Sammy is crying poor.

Seems he spent $45,000 of his own money despite the fact that real estate middle man Bob Rennie was giving him free full page ads in the Vancouver Sun.

And now he's facing the possiblity of legal bills and a $5000 fine for continuing with the ad blitz on the day of the referendum.

Never one to be daunted by reality our Sam had this to say about his, and his cronies, possible criminal culpability.

....He said the threat of criminal charges is hanging over everyone's heads. "A lot of people are upset about it."

Frances Bula has the story.
(and for once it is not behind the CanWest SubFireWall....hmmm, have their advertisors noticed the huge drop in flow through web hits?)

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Update 8:30pm: Reader AG points out that perhaps 'never silent' Sammy doth protesteth too much. After all, didn't he meet with his high powered lawyers yesterday and hasn't he been all over the radio and TV bemoaning his poor, poor fate today? In other words, is it possible that Sammytina using his crocodile tears and his sure to be taken care of 'debt' as sympathy 'get of jail' free cards. After all, as AG point out, in addition to the fine there is a possibility of slam time if Sammy is found guilty.

Whacking the Ferret

48°42' North; 123°19' West

Gary Collins came out from behind his $30 million propaganda machine today and made the mistake of writing a letter to the Tyee taking Will McMartin to task for having the audacity to suggest that the SS Gordon Campbell has been sawing up the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder to use as decorative firewood in the mansion.

Clearly his Ferallness has been dealing with the cheerleaders and trained seals running the show over at CanWest for far too long because he forgot that David Beers will let his correspondents go.

And go McMartin did, creaming the Ferret with his past voting/non-voting record in the Ledge.

Makes for great journalism and sure got the posters going.

Worth checking out as a sister act to Rafe Mair kicking the crap out of George Abbott last week.

Riverbend Speaks

33°21' North; 44°25' East

The real story from Iraq:

".... I want Bush out of the White House at all costs. (And yes- who is *in* the White House *is* my business- Americans, you made it my business when you occupied my country last year) I’m too realistic to expect drastic change or anything phenomenal, but I don’t want Bush reelected because his reelection (or shall I call it his ‘reassignment’) will condone the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. It will say that this catastrophe in Iraq was worth its price in American and Iraqi lives. His reassignment to the White House will sanction all the bloodshed and terror we’ve been living for the last year and a half.

I’ve heard all the arguments. His supporters are a lot like him- they’ll admit no mistakes. They’ll admit no deceit, no idiocy, no manipulation, no squandering. It’s useless. Republicans who *don’t* support him, but feel obliged to vote for him, write long, apologetic emails that are meant, I assume, to salve their own conscience. They write telling me that he should be ‘reelected’ because he is the only man for the job at this point. True, he made some mistakes and he told a few fibs, they tell me- but he really means well and he intends to fix things and, above all, he has a plan.

Let me assure you Americans- he has NO PLAN. There is no plan for the mess we’re living in- unless he is cunningly using the Chaos Theory as a basis for his Iraq plan. Things in Iraq are a mess and there is the sense that the people in Washington don’t know what they’re doing, and their puppets in Iraq know even less. The name of the game now in Iraq is naked aggression- it hasn’t been about hearts and minds since complete areas began to revolt....."

Go read the entire thing.

It's opinionage and reportage from one Iraqi kid who pays attention, and it's better and more insightful than all the junk that 100 TV journos with 200 producers, 400 advancemen and 800 satellite uplinks could generate in 1000 years.

Single Vote Transferable

49°09' North; 123°55' West

It has nothing to do with Swift Boat Liars for Truth.

Instead, it appears to be an honest and unbiased attempt by the Citizen's Assembly to make Provincial voting in British Columbia more fair and representational.

But it's complicated.

The most balanced account so far, as usual, is from Paul Willcocks.

Cross Border Flu Profiteering

48°42' North; 123°19' West

Somehow, I don't think that this is what Tommy Douglas had in mind:

The Victoria Clipper is now offering flu shots for their passengers. This service costs $105 per person and includes:
· 1 round-trip cruise to Victoria
· 1 flu vaccine.
The vaccine will be given to Victoria Clipper passengers at the Belleville Terminal in Victoria once the passenger has been cleared by Canada Customs and Immigration.

Apparently, for the well-heeled at least,it's a great deal at twice the price:
.....Ed and Patty Dunn, both in their 70s, couldn't get flu shots from their usual clinic in Seattle.

The Dunns took the boat for the fun - and the flu shots. Patty Dunn added that she would lunch at Il Terrazzo, an upscale Italian restaurant in Victoria.

"We're boaters in our own right," Ed Dunn said. The couple takes their 52-foot power boat across the rough waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca often, so they're not bothered by the ironic twist to the flu cruise: passengers on the Clipper sometimes get seasick.....

But what about the folks that can't afford a '3 hr cruise', people like Vera Uhl:
...Verna Uhl, 68, lives in a senior mobile home park in Mountlake Terrace. She recently paid $359 for car repairs and won't be going to Canada for a flu shot, by land or by sea.

"I've decided if I get the flu, I get the flu," she said.

Going on the Clipper is just too expensive, she told The Herald of Everett. "Most people I know are in the same condition I am financially."...

Listen. For any of our American friends that live close to the border, just drive across and head for a walk-in clinic (we have them everywhere in our universal system...ironic huh). In most places you'll be able to get the vaccine for ~$30CDN which is still only about $25US, although that exchange rate is rising fast in our favour now that your man, Alan Greenspan, has decided to try and narrow the trade deficit by crushing your dollar.

And for those outside easy driving/bus distance, well, maybe we can convince Medicins sans Frontieres to send teams into the deep south to immunize the poor, the sick and the infirm.

Oh, wait a second.....that would be a public health initiative, and that's socialism, right.

What the heck was I thinking.

And besides, aren't those Frontieres guys French?

Delysid #1

GazettEditor's Note: This is the first in, hopefully, a long line of posts from a new member of the GlobePoking team, Delysid (delysid at spymac.com)
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38°53' North; 77°02' West

Is it just me, or is the palpable whiff of fascism hanging over the Bush campaign and the 2004 US election becoming more of a chilling stench as the days pass?

Two exhibits are offered for your perusal:

1) The first, from the Village Voice, about an anti-gay marriage protest would be merely head-shakingly disgusting if not for the fact that if Bush obtains a 2nd term, by hook or by crook (likely more of the latter), people just like these will be running the country.

"....Fear was invoked by speaker after speaker. "There's a deep division in America," said former presidential candidate and right-wing activist Gary Bauer, to ecstatic cheers. "The winner gets our children, and the right to tell them what to believe about life and death, and love and sex, and freedom and slavery. We have been losing this war. We have had to drink time and time again from a bitter cup because our opponents control the courts. I have had enough. On this I will not surrender. On this we will stand and fight."

Now, of course, once the sucker punches like this have been applied the cornermen always jump into the ring, white towels flying, and start applying salve to the wounds:

"We are not gay-bashing. We are doing this because we love gays and we want them to have the best of life as well," said Chuck Colson, Nixon's chief counsel in the Watergate era and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries."

You may remember Chuck 'E's In Love'. When last we met him he was running the plumbers for Tricky Dick, blowing up liberal think tanks, putting together enemies lists, and screwing the screwheads like Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Newman and Bill Cosbie by sending the IRS after them. Chuck E was also one of the few of the Watergate conspirators who actually did hard time. In fact, Hunter Thompson considered Colson to be so unprincipled that he abandoned a well choreographed fantasmagorical late-night effort to kidnap Chuckie, tie him to the back of a rented white cadillac convertible, and drag him screaming down Pennsylvania in front of the White House because, 'the bastard would probably enjoy it'.

2) The second, a major New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind on Bush's faith-based presidency, is an absolute must-read, and has been making quite an impact stateside. If you read only one thing political before the US election read this, and more, from Suskind:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency."

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

So, there you have it, straight from the Horse's, whoops, Rovian's mouth...Reality doesn't Matter....

Ya right.

Go tell it to the dead people on all sides....or better yet, their families, friends and loved ones.

Freedom is Not Free - Especially on CableTV

33°39' North; 84° 26' West

Anybody who still thinks the term 'free press' is not a complete oxymoron in the United States was absolutely ecstatic about the fact that Jon Stewart, a comedian pretending to be a Newsman, went on CNN last week and beat the rhetorical and the literal crap out of Tucker Carlson.

Mr. Carlson is a Cable/Public TV switch-hitter. He is alse the preening little glob of smirk who aspires to be the next coming of a bow-tied George Will, but in reality owes his everything to the fact that his Dad, big Dick, is actually the former boss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a group that has swung so far right that it has totally castrated both NPR and PBS (beware the eyes of the Aspers, oh CBC).

But there are worse cases of former public broadcast talkingheads that have lost their marbles on cable-TV. One excellent example is Judy Woodruff who, in the inimitable words of Not-So Jersey James Wolcott, should be kept indoors by CNN because:

".... whenever the wind musses her hair, she loses her train of thought."

Wolcott also picks at the rotting carcasses of a gaggle of so-called objective, middle of the road pundits that includes Adam Nagorney, Howard Fineman, Charlie Rose and Chris Matthews.

This may seem like trivial and gratuitous media bashing, but it is not.

Why?

Because, struck dumb by the realization that they do not have a hope in hell of actually influencing real world events, the Rovians are going whole-hog with a last minute blitzkrieg to influence that very same gaggle of reality-challenged CableTV pundits, particularly those that are completely incapable of recognizing said reality even when it glistens, plain as day, on the monitors right in front of them.

Rovians - Spin This!

The Bunker - Lat/Long Unknown

Let's say you were a president who bet the farm on convincing the electorate that you are the war president, defender of the realm.

Now let's say you were a president who was warned, in advance, about a huge cache of conventional explosives in a country you were about to invade.

Now let's say you were a president whose secretary of defense, after he had been warned, did nothing to secure those weapons after you had invaded the country.

No let's say that insurgents/partisans stole all those unguarded explosives and started using them to blow-up your troops.

Would you be a president in trouble with the 'security and strength' side of the electorate?

Probably not, unless it was front page news in, oh say, the New York Times.

It's not even just the lies and naked agression anymore. Instead, it has become a matter of absolute and total incompetence. Clearly the only thing that the Rovians are good at are costumes on TV. Unfortunately, this is not a world run by caricatures straight out of the Village People.