The Strident Centrist Blog

The Badger assesses the adequacy of US press and blog coverage of the goings-on in Iraq, and finds it wanting:

There are at least six story-lines that are woven into the English-language coverage of Iraq, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. They are the following:

(1) The “US withdrawal: victory for the left” story (Helena Cobban)
(2) The “Victory for the middle-class Shiites” story (Juan Cole)
(3) The “Sunnis fight back” story (Arabic language only)
(4) The “Augmented catastrophe” story (Arabic language only)
(5) The “Indomitable American perseverance” story (IraqSlogger)
(6) The “No real American defeat, but a civil war” story (James D. Fearon, Foreign Affairs magazine)

. . .

In terms of English-language coverage, there is no meat in the sandwich. Eventual stability under Shiite rule (Cole) and definitive US withdrawal (Cobban), while they are very nice ideas, they mean not paying any attention to the next phase of the US-runs-Iraq story, once Bush “runs out of patience” with Maliki. For Cole, it is unthinkable that the SCIRI establishment would be in any meaningful way dislodged from its current position, and for Cobban, it is politically incorrect to discuss any new government, coup-generated or otherwise, that isn’t based on the idea of a definitive US withdrawal. So their story ends with this (probably illusory) US withdrawal/Shiite-led stability.

Instead of continuing the story of American involvement in Iraq and the Mideast along the lines of the Arabic-language coverage, with careful attention to the Arab and American efforts to create a Sunni “moderate alliance” against an alleged Shiite threat, the risks involved in that, and what it means for Iraq, that story is for all intents and purposes abandoned, and in its place we have a return to the comic-book tales of public-spirited Americans fighting evil, under the heading of civil war in Iraq.

Following up on my earlier post today that linked to Dan Froomkin’s thoughts on today’s trial events, here’s a link to M.T. (Marcy) Wheeler’s after-action review. She (aka Emptywheel) has been the main “live-blogger” covering the trial wall-to-wall from the media room in the courthouse for Firedoglake, and has been following the Valerie Plame affair intensely at the blog The Next Hurrah since it first broke. It’s a long post, but fascinating in its coverage of the mind games played by the lawyers in their efforts to get their opponents out of their grooves. As Marcy sees it, Fitzgerald, with set-up help from his colleague Peter Zeidenberg, won today’s contest going away. But then she is intensely pro-prosecution and, as they say, the jury is still out.

By getting under Ted Wells’ skin, Zeidenberg managed to do two things. First, he exposed to the jury what Ted Wells looks like when his emotions are real, rather than a schtick adopted in the service of the client. And critically, he goaded the Defense into using 20 minutes of their alloted time defending themselves, rather than Libby. And for the rest of their closing, they were racing to catch up. Wells was flipping through PowerPoint slides just glossing over the content. He announced he was taking time from Jeffress, who apparently looked up with a forced smile to hide his anger. As Wells went over his time, Jeffress more openly seethed. Then he, too, went over his alloted time.

By goading Wells into a response, Zeidenberg sowed real animosity between Libby’ defense lawyers, whose each clearly believed only he could save the day (IMO, Jeffress might have been able to do so, but not Wells).

All this came to a head with Wells’ last words. You see, Wells really does have a schtick, one that the journalists who have seen him before all recognize. He finishes the rational part of his case. Then he spends the last 20 minutes or so summoning rage for his client. He brings all the emotion summoned for his client to a crescendo. And then he weeps, demonstrating clearly to the jury how deeply he believes that his client has been wronged.

. . .

Because Wells reacted to Zeidenberg’s barbs, he showed the jury true emotion that made all his elaborate schtick–the thing that Wells does best, normally–look like an act.

There’s a lot more to this fascinating read.

Shelly Batts at Retrospectacle points us to the Beer Microscopy Project at Florida State. Was The Onion story true, that FSU is bowing to pressure from alumni and students and has begun phasing out all academic operations?

For Dan Froomkin, of the Washington Post’s White House Watch, the most compelling part of the closing arguments in the Libby trial yesterday was when prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald pulled away the shroud and tied the means of Libby’s actions to the end of protecting Vice President Cheney’s involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame.

“What is this case about?” special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald asked in his rebuttal to the defense’s closing arguments yesterday in the Scooter Libby perjury trial.

“Is it about something bigger?”

And while Fitzgerald never directly answered that second question, he at long last made it quite clear that the depth of Vice President Cheney’s role in the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative is one of the central mysteries that Libby’s alleged lies prevented investigators from resolving.

“There is a cloud over the vice president . . . And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice,” Fitzgerald said.

“There is a cloud over the White House. Don’t you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?” Fitzgerald asked the jury.

This raises two questions. First, did Fitz offer Libby a plea bargain somewhere in this process, and if so what did he offer him? And will we ever know? Secondly, if Libby is convicted, will the prosecution then try again to get some cooperation out of Libby prior to sentencing? I don’t know lawyering well enough to even know whether negotiations at that point are even kosher. Another question: if he’s convicted on more than one count, could consecutive versus concurrent sentences be a part of those negotiations?

There is a “Truth In Advertising” problem on my part, however. On further examination of the AuthImage plug-in, it became apparent that it had not been tested with version 2.0 of WordPress, which is what is running Stridentcentrist.com. So I sniffed through the plug-in piles and found ” Math Comment Span”, an extension that requires the comment poster to answer a simple arithmetic problem before the comment will be accepted. Hopefully this will cut down the spam deluge around here. Enjoy!

“Riverbend”, the perceptive and articulate young woman who blogs from Baghdad, posts for the first time in almost two months, this time about an Iraqi rape victim who had the courage to go public on TV. Although the perpetrators in this case were from the Iraqi security forces, she sees them as having been enabled by the occupation. Here are her closing paragraphs:

And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

If any of you readers have tried to submit comments to posts recently and have not seen them be displayed, here’s why. Apparently the most faithful surfers to my blog are comment spamming bots. Every day I get scores, and sometimes hundreds, of automatically-generated comments saying something like “Nice blog you’ve got here” followed forthwith by pitches for diet pills, stock offers, penis enlargement scams, etc. Since the comment function has been set to “Moderate All” from the get-go, I have to personally review the submissions and decide whether or not to let them through. As this has increasingly become an exercise in scaning through mountains of span chaff in search of the occasional kernel of genuine comment wheat, I’ve become less and less dedicated to the effort. In fact, while distracted by complications in my family life during the last couple of months of last year and extending into January, I’ve largely gotten out of the habit. And so, I am beginning the transition to Comment Plan B.

Which is, unmoderated comments, but with a wrinkle. The latter will be provided by a plug-in added to the blog engine, WordPress, that displays a word wrinkled up in a graphic image that you, the commenter-wannabe, have to enter correctly in order for your prospective comment to be accepted. The idea is that the bots will be unable to decipher the word in the image, and thus be frustrated in their attempts to robo-post, whereas the meat-space human with a brain has the wherewithal to interpret and enter it correctly. If you read other blogs with any frequency and diversity, you’ve probably run across this technology before. The plug-in is called AuthImage and tonight or tomorrow morning I am going to install it. Or at least try.

Which brings me to the core purpose of this post. I am what my dad used to call the “chief cook and bottle washer” around here, meaning that this is a one person operation and thus by necessity I’m a jack-of-all-trades. I not only drive, but maintain the vehicle and add any desirable performance enhancements. And considering that the latter functions requires skills that I’m only marginally familiar with, it’s entirely possible that I could screw this up and be off the air for a while. So, please be patient while I dive in to this. I’ll let you know how it comes out and hopefully you’ll soon be able to post your own comments.

Josh Marshall’s TPM operation has been all over the story that CBS News broke last Friday about one Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari of Ardsley, NY (aka Michael Mixon), who was arrested for allegedly trying to send $152K to the Middle East to fund terrorist training in Afghanistan. First Josh and friends uncovered the fact that Alishtari is a big GOP donor, so big that he was named “‘National Republican Congressional Committee [New York State] Businessman of the Year’ in 2002 and 2003″. But now their latest find is that this “Businessman of the Year” crap is just that. It’s part of a Republican telemarketing fund-raising scam that the Republicans have been running for years, and at least 1,900 people have apparently been given this “award.” The whole thing is hilarious! Maybe the alleged perp tried to send the geld because he was pissed at having been scammed.

This is powerful! The Portugal-based news magazine Grande Reportagem has been running their “Flag Campaign” for two years now, in which they present troubling statistics about a country in a pastiche of its national flag. The designs are to a large extent the work of a Brazil-born 25 year old, one Icaro Doria. Scroll to the bottom to see the latest flag, pertaining to the USA and Iraq.

Hat tip to Prometheus6 and TheThink.

Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation, writing in the International Herald Tribune a couple of months back, starts from Sir Nicholas Stern’s observation that climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”, and considers what that might mean for the future , not to mention America’s place in the views of future historians:

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report’s recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

. . .

Underlying Western free-market democracy, and its American form in particular, is the belief that this system is of permanent value to mankind: a “New Order of the Ages,” as the motto on the U.S. Great Seal has it. It is not supposed to serve only the short- term and selfish interests of existing Western populations. If our system is indeed no more than that, then it will pass from history even more utterly than Confucian China — and will deserve to do so.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.