The blithe idiocy of the Bush administration

A little Friday outrage, courtesy of your secretary of state:

Heckled during a visit to Washington’s closest ally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday the United States has made thousands of mistakes but is pursuing worthy goals in Iraq.

“I know we’ve made tactical errors, thousands of them I’m sure,” Rice said at a foreign policy gathering, but history will judge whether the larger aims and decisions were correct.

Also:

“I’m quite certain that there are going to be dissertations written about the mistakes of the Bush administration, and I will probably even oversee some of them when I go back to Stanford,” Rice said.

Shorter Condi: “I’ll be all snug and sinecured in an ivory tower by the time you finish counting all the dead. Oh, I’m sure.”

Technorati Tags: Condoleezza Rice, Iraq

Apparently, it’s Talk Amongst Yourselves Day

Because I’ve been too busy to even look at a keyboard. More hilarity will ensue as soon as time allows. I gua-ran-tee it.

The return of the disappeared

Jill Carroll is safe and sound. The recovery of the kidnapped Christian Science Monitor journalist, previously missing for three months, puts a coda to a situation that you almost had to assume would end badly.

I don’t generally write about hostage situations - there are folks aplenty who do that - but I mention Carroll here because such a positive ending is rare, and because the vagueness of the entire kidnapping - the unknown nature of the kidnappers, the apparent abandonment of their demands - leaves unanswered questions. Small wonder that the story is so hazy, as the narrative actually begins with her paper’s successful appeal for a news blackout regarding the kidnapping. The media’s reticence to speak is understandable in the face of such an appeal, especially from collegues. Now that Carroll is safely returned, however, perhaps people with information on the matter will be more forthcoming.

Yeah, I know. I remember a time when good news was something to be simply celebrated. But that was a long, long time ago.

Technorati Tags: Jill Carroll

The “It’s Clinton’s fault” defense (an Iraq variation)

George Bush and his cronies know the drill: when things aren’t going well, blame the last guy in power. So after years of practice faulting the previous officeholder regarding American woes ranging from the economy to national defense, Bush now has no trouble taking a similar tack when it comes to Iraq:

President Bush said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government. [...]

Bush said that Saddam was a tyrant and used violence to exacerbate sectarian divisions to keep himself in power, and that as a result, deep tensions persist to this day.

Of course, this is the same war president who couldn’t see the danger of those same festering “sectarian divisions” from a hundred miles away:

He predicted it “was unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups” - an opinion with which Mr Blair agreed.

So much for this cover story.

Forget foresight: In conveniently forgetting his culpability in not seeing sectarian danger in Iraq, Bush demonstrates that he doesn’t even have 20/20 hindsight.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, George Bush

What the Sam Hill?, or Mark Trail fights eminent domain

In the March 13 CQ Weekly (paid subscription required for most mortals), Chris Wilson relates the delightful story of the latest opponent of land-grabbing developers: Mark Trail! The heroic but usually boring and damned-near-ageless fictional naturalist finds himself facing the wanton use of eminent domain:

The trouble starts when an unscrupulous gambling magnate, Sam Hill, sets out to build a new road to his casino in Trail’s beloved Lost Forest. After conferring with an area road commissioner, Hill contrives to claim eminent domain privileges on bogus grounds and seize the land outright.

Reading this prompts tears of nostalgia. Damned if this doesn’t remind me of my recently-ousted alderman.

More - and funnier - on the Trail tilt against rampant development at the Reason staff’s Hit and Run. Use the SF Chronicle’s site to catch up on all the frantic four-color action.

Technorati Tags: Mark Trail, Eminent Domain, Kelo v. New London

Rice opens door to talk show host rehiring…but host remains fired (correction)

Some of what should have happened regarding the dismissal of KTRS on-air personality Dave Lenihan actually did happen: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accepted Lenihan’s profuse apology (WaPo link defunct) for inadvertently using the word ‘coon’ while discussing her, and station chief Tim Dorsey took advantage of the reprieve from on high to rescind his firing of the embattled host - a firing that should never have happened in the first place and which helped inflate a verbal accident into a nationally-reported incident. NOTE: Lenihan was not rehired by Dorsey, as I erroneously posted earlier. Lenihan’s slot has been filled by McGraw Milhaven, another previously fired KTRS announcer.

“My understanding is that he apologized, said he didn’t mean it,” Rice told “Fox News Sunday.” “I accept that because we all say things from time to time that we shouldn’t say or didn’t mean to say.”

The statement - made on the Bush administration’s favorite news outlet, FOX - was very gracious of Dr. Rice, even if she rather shamelessly used the occasion to equate a verbal gaffe with bloody violence and political stumbling in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for Lenihan, the still-unemployed host now gets to walk the rocky trail of public redemption starting with a trip to the woodshed: a “visit” with Harold Crumpton, president of St. Louis’ NAACP chapter. He may find himself onstage on Oprah Winfrey’s show before it’s all said and done (and if he does, remember that you read it here first), but it is to be hoped that the grace demonstrated by Rice will guide future discussions of Lenihan’s slip of the lip.

As for Dorsey: I’m no media expert, so I’m not sure how much weight to give to suggestions that the KTRS chief used this incident as cheap publicity for his station. It’s clear enough, however, that his shoot-from-the-hip dismissal of Lenihan before the mic was even cold did a lot to aggravate the situation, and showed fairly poor judgment. Lenihan’s not the only one who needs to learn a lesson here.

Bandwidth woes

Apologies for the unexpected downtime here at Waveflux. Too many people bellying up to the ol’ bandwidth table, apparently. We’ll have to do something about that.

I feel ten thousand years old

I passed a trio of college students on the sidewalk a few minutes ago. Two boys, one girl, engaged in an animated discussion. The subject: the difference between teasing and flirting.

Heard in passing:

A tease is like when you expect that it might lead to something…

And on they walked into the rest of their lives, buoyed by youth as if by the air itself, smiling and laughing all the way.

Freudian what?, or Sometimes a gaffe is just a gaffe

Here’s a story. It’s true (excepting any names involved).Many years ago - close to a couple of decades, I’m afraid - my girlfriend and I had enlisted the help of two or three friends in muscling a couch up a narrow staircase. We’d removed the iron railing but the passage remained difficult to negotiate, and the couch was as heavy as sin. One of the friends helping out was a coworker of mine, a ruggedly attractive girl we’ll call Alice who had delighted me that day by wearing a rather insubstantial t-shirt. She took up a position opposite me as we wrestled with the couch. After a few minutes of struggle - the kind of labor that makes folks perspire and clothing alternately cling and droop - I called for a break in the action. Specifically, I looked up into the inviting hollow formed by the collar of Alice’s shirt and said, “Let’s take a breast.”

Well.

No one spoke. Alice gave me quite the dirty look. So did my girlfriend. So did everybody, so far as I can recall.

Incidentally, Alice now goes by Alex, thanks to the wonders of modern science. Make of that what you will.

Here’s another story. Same parameters apply.

This happened only a decade ago, more or less. A friend we’ll call Scott and I had been drafted by our bookstore employer into providing literary entertainment at St. Louis’ alcohol-free, family-friendly, come-hang-out-in-our-eerily-vacant-downtown New Year’s Eve event, First Night. We were charged with reading from - of all the written works in the world - Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A little light reading for your holiday fun. There were three sections to the story and only two of us to read it. We decided that I would lead off with all of the first installment, Scott would read the entirety of the third section, and we’d together abridge the middle portion to save time. We would have taken my car, but it was not located where I remembered parking it; I figured that either I had parked somewhere else in a liquor-induced haze, or the car had been towed by local officials for parking violations. Either possibility was as likely as the other, and there was nothing for it at the time. We took Scott’s car.

Scott and I were to read in a room at the convention center, where we found a fairly sizable collection of mannered white folks, middle-aged or older, just the kind of people you’d imagine would want to listen to Kafka on New Year’s Eve. I approached the podium, smiled in generous welcome at the audience, and began to read from Joachim Neugroschel’s translation of the Kafka classic. This is the first line of the story as I read it: “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous virgin.”

Well.

My audience of mannered white folks, middle-aged or older, burst into hearty and thoroughly unmannered laughter - all except one older woman with black-rimmed glasses, who gave me a look to rival the one I’d received from Alice some ten years before. I smiled again, this time in rueful and earnest acknowledgement, and went on to complete my reading assignment without further error. After the reading, the woman with glasses sought me out and complimented me on the job I’d done. It was very nice of her, all things considered.

So.

The notion of the Freudian slip - “an error in human action, speech or memory that is believed to be caused by the subconscious mind,” or more popularly “a slip-of-the-tongue that reveals the speaker’s true meaning or intention” - is so ingrained in our culture that anyone who makes a verbal gaffe is as good as guilty, in the eyes of others, of covert motives. It’s the kind of dime-store psychology, “common sense” analysis, that is correct often enough that people assume it’s always correct - and that’s remarkably lazy thinking. I’ll readily admit to ulterior thoughts in the case of Alice, the couch, and the t-shirt. On the other hand, I’ll strenously deny that anything was roiling in my subconscious mind during the Kafka reading except my missing car (which turned out to be stolen, and thanks much for asking). The assumptions we make about other people’s verbal slips are reflexive and unthinking, yet we treat them as facts.

I think of this today because of this story out of St. Louis, which is making the rounds even as we speak (links defunct):

KTRS host is fired over racial slur

Jake Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A local radio personality was kicked off the air Wednesday after using a racial slur when talking about U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Dave Lenihan, who was in his second week as a morning show host on KTRS (550 AM), was fired almost immediately after saying “coon” while describing why Rice would fit well as commissioner of the National Football League.

“She’s been chancellor at Stanford. I mean she’s just got the patent resume of somebody that’s got some serious skill,” Lenihan said, according to a recording provided by KTRS. “She loves football. She’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. . . .”

“‘A big coon?’ Oh my god,” Lenihan said during the morning broadcast. “I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. OK? I didn’t mean that. That was just a slip of the tongue.”

I heard this replayed on the air this morning. Lenihan sounded at the end like a man struck by the terrible realization of his own mortality - as well he might have, since he was summarily fired before lunch. Station chief Tim Dorsey wasted no time, and showed no mercy.

“I don’t know what is in Mr. Lenihan’s mind. I know what I heard,” Dorsey said.

Dorsey knows what he heard. But he doesn’t care about what it meant…or didn’t mean.

Now make of that what you will.

Addendum: And then there’s the question so obvious and obligatory that you hate, hate to ask it: What if Lenihan had been ‘black while gaffing,’ as it were?

It’s possible that a black person might have made that particular verbal error.

And it’s possible that he would have quit himself in distress…though perhaps not.

But would he have been fired?

Technorati Tags: Condoleezza Rice, Dave Lenihan, Radio

Radio silence

I should have a lot to say - people with weblogs always do - but today I honestly don’t. So, well, there you are.

Next Page »