The Strident Centrist Blog

Just asking.

Greg Sargent at TPMCafe calls bullshit on George Will’s pathetic column in today’s Washington Post castigating Senator-elect Jim Webb’s for his alleged incivility in his brief encounter with President Bush, which I blogged aobut yesterday. Here’s Will from his second paragraph:

When Bush asked Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq, “How’s your boy?” Webb replied, “I’d like to get them [sic] out of Iraq.” When the president again asked “How’s your boy?” Webb replied, “That’s between me and my boy.”

And here’s Sargent, quoting Will’s own pulpit, the Washington Post as to how the encounter actually went down:

“How’s your boy?” Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Emphasis in the original (Sargent, not the WaPo original), highlighting the president’s arrogant response that led to Webb’s reply. Pathetic indeed.

This from today’s Washington Post (h/t to Glenn Greenwald, among others):

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia’s newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn’t long before Bush found him.

“How’s your boy?” Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said. “How’s your boy?”

“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Update:

Some background on this encounter from Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake:

As President Bush is well aware, a couple of weeks before this dinner the tank riding next to Jimmy’s in Iraq was under fire and three marines died.

My sources are telling me that the way President Bush approached Webb with his tone, it appeared he was asking the question of how Jimmy was doing in a mocking manner, while he was certainly aware of the tragedy that had hit his unit a few weeks earlier.

In the summer of 1914 Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, remarked that “The lights are going out all over Europe and I doubt we will see them go on again in our lifetime.”

Helena Cobban, a long-time journalist and observer of the Middle East, points to a blog post by “The Badger” at Missing Links that suggests a plausible single cause behind a recent spate of seemingly unrelated events, including the sudden resignation of State Department Counselor Phillip Zelikow and the frequent flyer mileage racked up in the last week by Bush, Cheney and Rice, among others. That cause, he suggests, is a forthcoming attack on Iran, with the tacit acquiescence of the Middle East Sunni powers.

According to Cobban that would explain Zelikow’s resignation, being an “intelligent realist” as she describes him. And Cheney and Rice are lining up the Sunnis. Here’s the Badger’s take on what we might expect if he is indeed right:

. . the 1991 war was accompanied by a promise to the Palestinians of an international conference to solve their problems (the Madrid Conference), which however produced nothing for them; and the 2003 attack was preceded by the famous Bush promise of a sovereign contiguous state for the Palestinians by 2005. In other words, these promises are attempts to rally Arab support ahead of major wars. While the two prior cases (1991 and 2003) involved support from both the Sunni-Arab regimes and the Shiite-Iranian regime, this time the situation is a little different. The pattern is going to be Sunni support for an attack on Shiite Iran. It’s hard to believe that a century after having acquiesced and even cooperated in the Ottoman-British dismemberment of Palestine and division of the rest of the region into British and French areas, the leaders of the Sunni Arab regimes still don’t seem to understand how the game works. What they are now doing is acquiescing in an attack on Iran, which will result, via Iranian counter-attacks, in untold destruction in the region. What this means ultimately is that the dissolution of Iraq into Sunni-versus-Shiite civil war will be generalized to the whole region.

Keep your gas tanks topped off, folks.

Larry Johnson has an important post up which is written by an unnamed associate who is on the Iraq Survey Group, the ad hoc outfit directed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton that is trying to come up with a rational alternative to the administration’s staying of the course. The writer is not very optimistic, as he or she notes in the opening paragraph, and suggests the group’s core proposal will be a regional conference. The big question is whether the players, and especially the USA and Israel, would arrive there with minds open sufficiently to get something productive done. As demonstrated in these teaser paragraphs, the writer is truly alarmed:

This strategy would undeniably present a huge political challenges to both the United States and Israel, in particular. Nevertheless, I believe the strongest and most forward-looking members if the Baker-Hamilton Commission, acutely aware of the immensity of these obstacles, but acting in full recognition of the absence of any other available course of action that could lead to satisfactory resolution of the Iraq imbroglio, are prepared to recommend that effort.

To underline my own recognition of the difficulties we are talking about, let me try enumerating some of them. There is, let me repeat, no simple or easy way to escape the looming catastrophe that was set in motion by the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The situation is so dire that the “impossible” has become an urgent necessity.

Emphasis in the original.

Predicting is perhaps too strong a word. Hoping against hope is probably more like it. In any case, Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake repeats in its entirety a Daily Kos post by Steve Gilliard on April 10, 2003, about the indicators of an incipient civil war, even then barely a month after the invasion. You can read the original here, or the FDL repeat here. The latter comes with all the FDL comments. Here are some excerpts:

The looting of hospitals is a bad sign. Taking things from a hospital, which is designed to help people, is not only mere greed. It is the suggestion that there is no respect for civil authority. Most people will loot a store or a government office, but a hospital? That’s more than just greed.

There are reports of both according to the BBC in Basra and I can expect the same in Baghdad. That’s the trigger to building home arsenals and then developing local militias. People will protect their families from harm. And this is where charsimatic leadership starts. The former Iran-Iraq War vet who beats a looter with his bare hands then becomes the local hero, starts gathering men around, and acquires a base of power. . . Sound familiar? That’s how the Taliban started in Afghanistan.

It will start small. Assassinations, maybe a shoot out or two in a distant province away from direct US control. Maybe a US official or an exile. Then the killings move to mob-style violence, car bombs, gunfights, kidnappings, murders. As the pace of the killings grow, you start to see organized formations. Maybe 1000 men, maybe 1500. They start to use heavier weapons, rockets, mortars, machine guns in their internecine battles. Neighborhoods, then towns, start to fall into disorder. Local militas now control the area. These areas start to spread. Instead of the looting and raping you see now, you see nothing but order. You don’t steal a loaf of bread in these areas. People who do, get killed, publicly.

Reaping the whirlwind.

While we’re on the subject of Firedoglake.com, their regular late evening poster, “TRex”, has quite a way with the visual metaphor, even if it’s a bit on the scatological side at times. His post from last night is worth the read if only for this:

The Iraq Study Group is merely going to be another exercise is delusional bullshit. It will be Conservative Yoga, that rarified practice in which the participants have dedicated years of their lives to learning how to tie themselves into intricate ethical and semantic knots while simultaneously blowing smoke up their own assholes.

PZ Myers points the way to this post on Newsbusters, a conservative blog, that, believe it or not, suggests that The Colbert Report is actually satire! The effrontry!

Even more hilarious than the post are the comments.

A two-part series by W Joseph Stroupe appeared in the Asia Times Online earlier this week about the growing threat to the US’s access to foreign oil sources, a threat that is being spearheaded by Russia with the tacit support of the rising economies of east and south Asia. Part I of the series gives some background on the evolution of the international petrol market since World War II. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War oil embargo of 1973 the US and Britain, with the help of their oil and trading companies, pushed through the replacement of what had been a mercantilist system of long term contract sales by state or quasi-state producing entities with the open market that has dominated the oil trade for the past several decades. In Part II the author describes how Russia under Putin has has identified how now, as the world begins to bump up against supply constraints, the classic, liberal market has become the West’s and the USA’s, Achilles heel. And with the help of other Asian producers as well as China and other fast-growing consumers they are moving to exploit it, with ominous implications for the West.

To rock the US colossus forcefully out of its position of global dominance and credibly threaten to inflict economic and geopolitical “catastrophe” on the West, Russia and its strategic partners need not exceed, nor individually even remotely match, US economic, political or military strength in a conventional head-to-head contest of might.

Instead, they need only to exert effectively their mounting energy-based strengths against US vulnerabilities in that same sphere, not in a conventional head-on confrontation but instead by going after the Achilles’ heel by employing a clever asymmetrical end-run strategy around the US. This targets the foundations of the current US-dominated liberal global oil-market order, a strategy that leaves the US giant with significantly reduced secure access to, and control over, global strategic resources.

Once that goal is accomplished, without ever a conventional confrontation with the US giant, then the US economy can be effectively and powerfully held hostage to the political and economic aspirations of Russia and the rising East.

Between threats like this and global warming, it would behoove us to accelerate work on alternative energy sources macht shnell.

Once again, I’ll try to pick up where I left off. The last night of our weekend at Lutsen the better half started feeling some discomfort at the site of an old surgical incision. (Or more accurately, at the site of four previous surgical incisions.) By Monday it was apparent that it was an emerging hernia, but she wanted to wait to see the doctor because come December 1 she goes on to Mecicare and off of the relatively high-deductible insurance she’d been carrying. The latter was what she’d had since the COBRA expired following the demise of her long-time employer in 2002. (That’s a long story of greed, arrogance, stupidity and managerial amorality in and of itself. But I digress.) By Tuesday it was apparent it couldn’t wait, and that evening she was under the knife. Fortunately the hour and a half of surgery went well and today she came home. The surgeon has strongly admonished her, however, that given her past history she must be exceptionally careful about lifting for the rest of her life. Even then, there’s a significant risk of reinjury.

I feel like I should write something about the dysfunctional healthcare financing system in this country but right now I don’t feel like it. It’s been a long couple of days and I’m tired. Anyway, that’s my excuse for not blogging for a few days.

We’re back after a long weekend on the North Shore of Lake Superior at the Lutsen Resort, where our son and his fiance plan to get married next summer. We were there with the happy couple and her parents to do a final casing of the place and put the finishing touches, insofar as one can nine months in advance, on the plans. All in all a successful weekend in fine company.

I know the resort environs well, having worked there for a couple of months 43 years ago. I was still churning around in circles not knowing what I wanted to do in life after Plans A & B had fallen apart, had lost my draft deferments and was wating for Lewis B. Hershey to catch up with me, which he finally did in late November. (For those of you too young to know, Hershey was the long-time head of the Selective Service System, aka The Draft.) It was a good time, that beautifu fall shortly before the world changed, again. Most of the working time was spent clearing trees and underbrush for ski runs and lift rights of way. During the evenings I sat on the rocks and watched the ever-fascinating lake and then at dusk went to my room and read.

In the 1880s the ancestors of the Nelson family that owned the resort at that time had obtained many square miles of forest land on the lake and inland for several miles for the price of nominal back taxes. Back then the only access from the “civilized” world back in Duluth was by boat. George Jr., the grandson of the founder, was running the place when I was working there, although his parents were still keeping a sharp eye over his shoulder. He had learned to ski as a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II, and came back from Europe determined to turn the forested highlands into a top-drawer ski area to complement its brisk summer and fall color trade. Back then in 1963 it seemed to be a bootstrap operation from the financial standpooint, but several decades ago the Nelson’s sold the ski area to a consortium with a lot more resources, and the area has indeed become a magnet for both downhill and cross country skiers. Later the family sold the lakeside resort as well, after the heir apparent, George III, died in his 30s. Fortunately, the new owners have retained many of the best features of the original, while updating where needed.