I Wonder If Harry Reid Has Told Obama This Story

This is an interesting story from Harry Reid's autobiography The Good Fight:

...on the evening of Kennedy's death, I sat with Congressman Baring of Nevada as he nursed his drink. And I was shattered. Then Baring said something that I will never forget. He was a conservative Democrat, reactionary actually, one of those guys for whom there was a Communist behind every bush. Fluoride was a Communist plot. And Kennedy, too, had been leading us down the path to Communism, Baring told me. It was probably a good thing that he was murdered.

I don't know anything about the Kennedy assassination, and I probably never will unless I live to be 10,000 years old and have some spare time. But I do think the standard left-wing position—that it would have made no sense for right-wing elements in the government to kill Kennedy, because he was pretty right-wing himself—is wrong. Making sense has nothing to do with it. There was a big section of the U.S. elite in 1963 that was genuinely insane. For them, if you didn't want to reinstitute actual slavery and then launch a sneak nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, you might as well have been named Vladimir Lenin. And they haven't changed that much since.

(I learned about Reid's story from this, which is interesting on its own.)

—Jonathan Schwarz

Headline Nostalgia

I remember that in November, 1988, Time or Newsweek had an article about John F. Kennedy being shot with the headline, "25 Years Ago, America's Head Was Blown Open."

In any case, I'm amazed that for four and a half decades the powers-that-be in America have been able to cover up the truth, which is that JFK committed suicide.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Did Rumsfeld Tour KGB Torture Museum to Pick Up Useful Tips?

Where has the CIA tortured people? ABC has just reported that one place was Lithuania:

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

But here's the lighter side of the CIA-Lithuania torture story, which ABC didn't mention: Donald Rumsfeld visited Vilnius in 2005, where he took the time to tour the KGB torture museum there. Then the U.S. embassy in Vilnius released an "Open Letter to People of Lithuania" from Rumsfeld:

I also had the chance to spend an enjoyable and educational Sunday morning walking through your historic, old town district and visiting the KGB museum. The museum was a stark reminder of the importance of preserving our liberty at all costs...

"Enjoyable and educational." Yes, sounds about right.

—Jonathan Schwarz

American Academia, Bastion of Disinterested Inquiry

Elizabeth Warren seems pretty great, doesn't she? Given the financial industry came very close to creating another Great Depression, we could really use someone in a position of power whose main concern is the well-being of the middle class.

OR COULD WE?!? Here's some guy named Thomas Cooley to explain why we're so wrong:

She suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission in a 2007 article in the magazine Democracy. President Barack Obama proposed it to Congress in June as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Warren won’t discuss whether she may be a candidate to lead the authority, which would have the power to regulate $13.7 trillion of debt products. A Warren nomination would tell banks that Obama is determined to force reduced checking-account fees and limit lender claims in mortgage advertising, among other measures the industry opposes, said Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“She is an ideological crusader,” Cooley said in an interview. "She is a person who will stir up a lot of trouble.” In a column in Forbes magazine, Cooley accused her of "waging a self-righteous holy war."

Thomas Cooley...where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah:

NYU Stern announced today that alumnus John Paulson (BS ’78), founder and chairman of hedge fund Paulson & Co., Inc., has given a gift of $20 million to NYU Stern. John Paulson’s gift will endow two faculty chairs – the Alan Greenspan Chair in Economics and the John A. Paulson Professor of Finance and Alternative Investments...

"We are extremely grateful for John’s support,” said Thomas F. Cooley, dean of NYU Stern. “His generous gift will not only further strengthen Stern’s research capability...it will also help us provide our students with a modernized learning environment..."

Mr. Paulson is a leading financier and founder of New York-based Paulson & Co., one of the largest alternative asset managers in the world.

John Paulson (no relation to Hank) famously made $4 billion dollars for himself (and $20 billion for his hedge fund) betting against the mortgage market, Lehman Brothers, etc. (He also hired Alan Greenspan as a consultant in early 2008, so presumably Greenspan has personally made a lot of money off the financial panic.)

Anyway, when you've made $4 billion thanks to lack of regulation, I'm sure it's worth spending 0.5% of that to buy a yappy little poodle to whizz all over the shoes of anyone who advocates regulation.

(For an example of another particularly well-behaved New York City poodle, see here.)

—Jonathan Schwarz

New Tomdispatch

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The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give
(But Won't)
By Tom Engelhardt

Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. No one in Washington -- no less President Obama -- ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely to do so any time soon. It's common knowledge that a president -- but above all a Democratic president -- who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat.

This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do, however, know something about what could happen to a president who escalated a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who "lost" that country to the communists (as Harry Truman had supposedly "lost" China). And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey who -- incapable of rejecting Johnson's war policy -- lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with honor" formula for downsizing the war.

Still, we have no evidence about how American voters would deal with a president who didn't take the Johnson approach to a losing war. The only example might be John F. Kennedy, who reputedly pushed back against escalatory advice over Vietnam, and certainly did so against his military high command during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In both cases, however, he acted in private, offering quite a different face to the world.

The rest.

—Jonathan Schwarz

New Tomdispatch

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Paying Off the Warlords
Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption
By Pratap Chatterjee

Kabul, Afghanistan -- Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Among the dozens of businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well connected companies -- Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid -- that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country's new vice president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim.

Some of the trucks are on their way to two power stations in the northern part of the capital: a recently refurbished, if inefficient, plant that has served Kabul for a little more than a quarter of a century, and a brand new facility scheduled for completion next year and built with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Afghan political analysts observe that Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid are striking examples of the multimillion-dollar business conglomerates, financed by American as well as Afghan tax dollars and connected to powerful political figures, that have, since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, emerged as part of a pervasive culture of corruption here.

The rest.

—Jonathan Schwarz

God's Plan

Here's a crucial insight from Sarah Palin's new book:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

This is exactly why I eat people.

P.S. According to Wikipedia, this is actually John Cleese's joke. I hope that's true, given that when describing Palin's candidacy last year Cleese said "Monty Python could have written this."

UPDATE: Weaver points out this joke was made long ago by Flanders and Swann, which I should have known considering I listened to "At the Drop of the Hat" 1,000+ time growing up. Also, I see the cannibalism joke had already been made several other places today. This whole thing is a fiasco.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Dolchstosslegende IV: A New Beginning

Great choice of words, U.S. defense official:

A U.S. defense official said the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, feels he was "stabbed in the back" by Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Three months ago, Eikenberry supported McChrystal's request for more troops, but last week it was revealed he sent a classified cable opposing it until Karzai shows that he can be trusted.

What we really need to win in Afghanistan and worldwide is simply to apply our will. Let's make a black and white documentary about that.

Stab!

[T]he stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies...

The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, "As an English general has very truly said, the German army was 'stabbed in the back.'"

Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim was disingenuous. The "English general" in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal Erich von Ludendorff—the force behind Hindenburg—was characterizing the German army's alleged lack of support from its civilian government.

"Ludendorff's eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone," wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. "'Stabbed in the back?' he repeated. 'Yes, that's it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.'"

—Jonathan Schwarz