Last Wednesday, at the anti-Bush demonstration during the President’s visit to Mainz, Germany: This demonstrator’s “subtle” statement about murderous, and militaristic foreign policy allegedly exhibited by a well known remaining superpower that “everyone, except ‘us'” (whoever us may be) allegedly participated in, is, ironically, just as subtly contradicted by a portrait of a certain Mr. Kruger printed on his jacket…
Archiv der Kategorie: US Politics
More Texan-friendliness.
I had heard of http://www.sorryeverybody.com/gallery/single/se24.jpg/ before, but I had not seen the site until today. As opposed to the reason for its existence, it is really good fun. And in light of this blog’s recently re-discovered Texan-friendliness, I just had to reassure the lady above that while Europeans are religiously deprived and accordingly morally depraved, we are also, as prominently pointed out by Robert Kagan, generally rather too quiet and peaceful. Moreover, while many of us would love to, we have been taught by history not to play around with long-distance missiles just for fun…
Mary Hodder is right
to state that not all blogs that are inactive are abandoned.
Take this one for example. See, I haven’t updated my proto diary for a month now and not even written anything over on afoe but that doesn’t imply I have given up blogging much as I haven’t stopped reading in the meantime.
I have taken breaks from blogging before over the last two years (although I have to agree that the inactive intervals have become more frequent) and I am rather sure I will do so again in the future.
However – and I am saying this particularly to the handful of faithful readers of my personal blog – should I ever stop writing here for good, I would certainly inform you about it.
And thus, gentle readers, begins the third year in the young and exciting life of www.almostadiary.de. I’m starting off with a teaser… tomorrow I will regale you with a rough pre-demo of a little song I’ve written about a certain guy from Texas whose analytical skills have already been the subject of a certain number of posts on this blog. Until then, if you haven’t yet, please go and watch this clip about rural campaigning in the US, brought to you by the only reliable US news source, Comedy Central’s Daily Show with John Stewart…
Oh, and this is what I wrote two years ago, on August 19, 2002:
Is the bottom line really chapter 32, in part VIII of volume one?
Oxford’s Niall Ferguson thinks that Marx’s thoughts about crisis prone capitalism should be given more attention in light of the not so recently past days of “CEOcracy” and increased income inequality in the US. But today, Ferguson claims, the class struggle is not waged between workers and owners but between ordinary shareholders and their CEO and controlling oligarchs, so the Marxian acculmulation theory could have a point. In the end, he somewhat loses track and the article becomes more of a summary of recent estimates of American growth prospects. And he never tells us what the consequences could be if the analogy were correct.
But anyway. Could it be true? Could Marx be headed for big comeback in the digital age? I am very sceptical. Alhtough I do think that he has created a scary seductive beast whose feared return will likely scare this planet for some decades to come.
Pretty Good.
The George W Bush Don’t Worry, be Happy List by Tim Dunlop.
Oh, and did I mention I composed a song called “George W Blues”…. well, it’s not actually blues, it’s got more of a Texan country feel in the latest version. It’s about a dyslexic boy whose dad once read to him from Machiavelli and then told him he would become a great leader, if only he learnt how to read…
If Michael Moore won’t produce it, I’ll post it here sometime.
America’s Echo Chamber
I remember a discussion among several a-list bloggers about “blogs as echo chambers” earlier this year. While I largely agreed with the theory that blogs can become echo chambers – a public sphere simply reflecting and reinforcing opinions already held by readers and writers mutually self-selecting each other for the precise reason of not being confronted with world-view-challenging opinions – I am also quite confident that this risk is particularly important in America – still the dominant part of the world’s blogosphere.
I suppose it would be impossible for blogs to entirely escape the general echo chamber that the American public sphere seems to have become given the apparent progressive ideological division of the country. If you’re not sure what I am talking about, take a look at some of the headlines about the 9/11 commissions interim report about the alleged connections of Saddam Hussein government officials with Al-Qaeda.
Some might wonder why the Bush administration is not changing their talking points in light of the amount of evidence challenging its stance instead of thouroughly demonstrating once again that George W Bush might have a black and white world view except when it comes to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Maybe Richard Cheney told Mrs Bush to read Machiavelli’s “The Prince” to the President…
But whatever the reason, both men seem to know very well that to keep lying will not do more harm to their reputation than it has already. However, changing the tune now would certainly alienate those on their side of the American echo chamber, those who, for one reason or another, if only to avoid cognitive dissonance, still believe – or pretend to believe – that the administration was not lying all along.
Unfortunately, it is these people that President Bush needs come November, not those who believed he was bending the truth with or without a commission report.
Richard Clarke’s Testimony.
It’s hard to write something original with respect to Richard Clarke’s testimony before the 9-11 commission. There are simply too many fish in the pond analysing it.
But since I did watch a significant part of his testimony on CNN last night, I would nonetheless like to share my principal impression:
Colin Powell. The Sad Truth.
Colin Powell seems to be a man whose pride apparently gets in the way of seeing the world as it is. Recently, he contested a statement by the likely democratic nominee for President, J.F. Kerry, that he had been marginalised in the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
Yet as a list compiled by Brad DeLong amply demonstrates, this is exactly what happened.
But there is an item missing on the list that I find particularly telling about the way in which Mr Powell has been treated by his colleagues, and, in particular, by the President. Last May, when the White House tried to slowly improve relations with the allies it had seriously alienated with its pre-war behavior, Colin Powell was sent to Berlin for the first meeting with the German administration after the heydey of conflict in the UN security council in February 2003.
But while Colin Powell met with the Chancellor, the President had nothing better to do than embarrass the German government, but even more so his own Secretary of State, by “accidentally” running into a meeting of VP Cheney with Roland Koch, the truly conservative Primeminister of the German state of Hessen. Here is what I wrote about their meeting last May.
Of course, everybody got the message… as did Colin Powell.
Imaginary Foreign Leader Endorsement.
Imagine you’re a Presidential Candidate who has a war chest full of dollars but cannot call even one foreign leader by his full name. What do you do?
Quite right. You do what every leader of the free world would do in this situation: turn to ebay and get your very own imaginary endorsement…. (via Wonkette).
The Definition of “is”.
Oh, the Summer of 1998. One of the best times of my life. One of the worst times in the life of Bill Clinton… having to figure out in front of the entire world that truth depends to an enormous amount on “what the definition of “is” is. Ah, the beauty of a public epistemological argument.
An Ambigous Tour Of The Oval Office.
More people than usual are concerned about the quality of the administrational work done by elected officials these days. Domestic German examples abound and include the recent scandal surrounding the “world’s most advanced vehicle toll system”, which is so advanced it has to be protected by not deploying it; and, of course, by a 1700-pages contract that, with hindsight, should alarm Brussels because, to me, it looks like a bad example of how to grant hidden subventions to national industrial champions.
In the US, on top of all the credibility problems, the administration has to fight different, but equally embarrassing issues of quality management. With regard to the story of the day, a voodoo finance concept to save the (also demographically challenged) US social security (pension) system, Matthew Yglesias claims that the problem is inherent, that this Presidency is all about abiguity.
Note that the president’s habit of proposing not actual legislation, but rather vague “principles” that tell no one anything about anything is quite systemic. … People on the Hill have literally no idea what the president thinks about this or, really, any other issue. Apparently the White House staff doesn’t know either – the speechwriters just write stuff and the president says it and no one knows what anyone’s talking about.
I’ve always said that too many people are probably underestimating Mr Bush. And maybe that is still correct. But, then again, “maybe” may not be sufficient with respect to defining the political guidelines of the most important polity on the planet.
Let me invite you to the White House oval office for some first hand, apparently only slightly edited streaming evidence, provided by President Bush himself. It’s a document that is, in my opinion, rather illuminating about the character of his presidency. It is oscillating between moments of rather informed historic comment, Cowboy paintings and marvel Bushisms. It seems that indeed, the ambiguity we can witness on tv each day is not simply in policies or PR.
Seriously, what is one to think of a President who can in one moment rather precisely explain historical details and in the next moment go on to state that “these windows are magnificient – they let in the sunlight…” – in this strangely clumsy manner we had to witness so many times.
Well, I don’t know.