born live love die

The Washington Post editorial board is peopled with a bunch of lying bastards.

No, Mr. Obama, or so he would have you believe, is forgoing the money because he is so committed to public financing. Really, it hurts him more than it hurts Fred Wertheimer.

Pardon the sarcasm.

No, we don’t pardon the sarcasm.

Mr. McCain played games with taking federal matching funds for the primaries until it turned out he didn’t need them

No, he committed fraud, and nothing will be done about it because there aren’t enough people on the Federal Elections Commission board to do anything about it, a condition fostered by President Bush.

The Republicans are laundering money through the Republican National Committee, bypassing the $2300 individual limit on contributions.  Obama is raising his money in small money donations.  The Federal Election Commission is broken and Obama shouldn’t fall on the sword so helpfully held by the Republicans to show that it is broken.

After McCain made a speech in front of a green backdrop, Stephen Colbert turned it into a green screen challenge. Here’s one of my faves:

Justice is a funny concept.  Many times, people refer to justice, but what they want is revenge.  If you read the Oresteia, you know that one of the fundamental transitions made by Western civil society was the adoption of the rule of law over the rule of revenge.  Under the rule of revenge, children of privelege were often immune to calls for justice.  Justice was meted out by those with power to those without.

But when I read about Roman Polanski, I have a hard time not wondering if there is something wrong with this whole rule of law thing.  Like this:

In its coverage, the British Telegraph said “the legal shenanigans surrounding the case have continued in California,” citing the supposed requirement that the trial be televised. And the paper argued that Polanski, meanwhile, has “lived a blameless, hard-working life in exile in France.” Meanwhile, Polanki has expressed the view that he is innocent, that Americans are “prudish,” and that he has “suffered enough.”

Suffered enough?  For what?  Oh yeah, for drugging a 13 year old girl with quaaludes and sodomizing her.  That is some kind of suffering.

I try to be a good pacifist.  I try to turn the other cheek and follow the dictum that it is easier to catch bees with sugar than with vinegar.  But Polanski has been saying that he has suffered enough for almost as long as he has been out of the country.  We’re prudes?  Really?

How about this?  Polanski can come back to the States after he has been drugged and sodomized once for each time that he said that he has suffered enough.  The whole episode will be filmed and then televised on pay-per-view cable.  He would be surprised by the number of people who would tune in to watch it and the label of prudish with regard to the States would be put to bed for good.  We may be hypocrites, but we’re no prudes, as any visit to a Craig’s List will demonstrate.

Noted from recent articles about the impending crush of gay marriages in California:

A UCLA study issued last week estimated that half of California’s more than 100,000 same-sex couples will get married over the next three years, and an additional 68,000 out-of-state couples will travel here to exchange vows. The study estimated that over that period, gay weddings will generate some 2,200 jobs and $64 million in badly needed tax revenue for the state, which is ailing financially.

Some of those states south of the Mason-Dixon line could have used the revenue.  They missed the window  of opportunity for it.

In this corner, weighing in two tons, the champion, the great ghost of Tim Russert.

In the challenger’s corner, weighing in at two ounces, who cares.

Enough already.  He was a rich, well connected Washington insider, not Mother Teresa’s long lost brother.

Dana Milbank has the goods:

As 18 elected Democrats filed into the party’s conference room for the show of force, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, evidently not realizing the microphone was picking up his words, took a swipe at Sen. Chuck Schumer, the loquacious leader of the Senate Democrats’ campaign effort.

“Wait until Schumer stops talking,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested to Dean.

“That’ll be a long wait,” Dean replied. Then began the meeting.

One of the things I like about Howard Dean is that he appears to not suffer fools.   Picking politics as an occupation is a odd choice for someone of that disposition, but I’m okay with it.

You go, Dr. Dean.

NY Times sub-headline:

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign was suffused in overconfidence, riven by acrimony and weighted by emotional baggage.

Gee, ya think?

I stumbled across something while perusing the ‘net. Here was the chain:

1. Pat Buchanan was on Colbert talking about his new book and he makes the provocative claim that all the West had to do to defuse WWII was give Danzig to Hitler, or something like that. Buchanan is always talking out his fourth point of contact, if you know what I mean.
2. Danzig? Gdansk? What’s the history. Wikipedia came to my rescue and I started looking up information about Prussia. Some of the Germanic territories on the East that were lost to Poland made interesting reading. Silesia was very Lutheran, having converted from Catholicism. The centers of Lutheranism were Brandenburg and Saxony. It is interesting that the Protestant part of Germany ended up in East Germany.
3. The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, otherwise known as Stasi, was the most successful of the intelligence agencies of the Warsaw Pact countries. It is thought that about one in eight adult East Germans was an informer at some level. It was also very successful in collecting information in other countries. They had a lot of people in West Germany and developed strong resources in the Scandanavian countries.
4. When the government in East Germany fell, the intelligence organizations tried to destroy their files. They were partially successful. Many documents were shredded, but there are programs underway to use computers and imaging software to reassemble the shredded documents.

Many files related to activities in Finland and Sweden. Finland had long been a sore in the side of Russia. Russia went to war with Finland in 1941 and lost. During the Cold War, Russia sought greater control over internal events in Finland. They funded a variety of programs aimed at either destabilizing the goverment or at least providing the handles by which to propel the Finnish government. None of that worked in Finland. While Russia was not able to bring Finland into their explicit sphere of influence, they had a lot of control.

So intimate was the relationship between the Finnish establishment and Moscow that, under Urho Kekkonen, president of Finland from 1956 to 1982, the Soviet Politburo had a de facto veto over membership of the cabinet in Helsinki. Those regarded as anti-Soviet found their careers blighted.

The files of Stasi that related to Finland were made classified in Finland. The files are available in Germany, but classified in Finland. This issue has caused a certain amount of unrest; how much is hard to say because it hasn’t been in the press in the States. For example, there has been no mention of this in the New York Times.

But here is a English language publication with news about Sweden:

A Swedish politician has called for security service Säpo to publish the names of Swedes who collaborated with the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police.
Arguing the need for more public debate, Moderate Party member of parliament Hans Wallmark has tabled a parliamentary motion imploring Säpo to open up its archives.

“We know that there were Swedes who ran around gossiping to the East Germans. It is important that Sweden has a debate about this in order to achieve reconciliation,” Wallmark told The Local.

“The situation is comparable to discussions after the Second World War about people who helped the Nazis,” he added.

According to Wallmark, opening the files would benefit both former Stasi spies and their victims.

“Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, it is important to open the archive out of consideration for the people who worked for the Stasi. They will then have a chance to explain themselves before they are written about in the history books in 50 years time,” said Wallmark.

Säpo has so far been reluctant to divulge information about the handful of Swedes it knows spied for the Stasi. In August, spokesman Jakob Larsson told The Local that Säpo would not release the names “partly on national security grounds, partly in the interests of our organization and partly out of consideration to the individuals.”

Hans Wallmark accepted that the expiry date for prosecution had long since elapsed. But he also argued that Sweden had a moral imperative to confront its recent past.

Telling the truth is always good for those who have been lied to, and bad for those who did the lying. I’m sure there are people who want to know if they were spied on by East Germany. And the people who did the spying probably want to remain hidden.

But why was East Germany so good at it? Was it because Western countries wanted to trade with them? Sweden recognized the East German, or DDR, government in 1972. That opened up trade and travel between the countries. Businessmen, traveling in East Germany, would surely be open to talking about people back home in exchange for business. And when the amount of information is so small, it seems inconsequential. The scope of the operation was such that the assembling of each small tile of information led to a very large mosaic about Western strategic and tactical systems and abilities.

Genghis Khan used the same system against the West. He detained and hosted merchants from Western cities and ran an active intelligence operation against the countries and cities he was about to attack. He had accurate maps and force dispositions at his disposal.  The great Mongol general, Subotai, used this information to sweep to the gates of Europe 1241. Only the death of Genghis Khan and Subotai’s obedience to Mongol custom that he return for the funeral saved Europe.

This will be interesting to watch in the near future as Finland and Sweden work through this artifact of the Cold War.

Spencer Ackermann, writing about a new Condi Rice biography has this to say about Bush:

Underestimated. It’s true that Bush has been consistently regarded as being a poor human being for much of his life. But after two unwon wars, a drowned city, a collapsing econo — oh, just go down the list, it feels so tired just rehashing all this — you kind of have to say he was estimated rather accurately.

Yeah, that’s about right.

Cheryl Rofer is guest blogging at Kevin Drum’s house.  I think this is as good as it can be written:

Hillary whipped out the gender card again last night. “What does Hillary want?” she asked, evoking Freud’s plaint.

In hanging on, she fuels stereotypes of women: don’t know how to play the game, bitchy and ungracious. It’s the softer stereotypes she has eschewed. Those who need the stereotypes will find them, either way.

Any of us who have done anything with our lives have faced these apparent no-win tradeoffs. The stakes are higher, and the sexism more unrelenting, the higher you go.

But trading on the stereotypes and the sexism others display has its limits as a strategy. It too easily sounds like whining, itself a stereotype.

Hillary’s speech last night was spin. Don’t say the forbidden words (Obama has the delegate count); pretend that you’re the winner and your voters are being disenfranchised. Sometime in the last decade or so, spin became a substitute for reality.

There’s a tactic that was once used in politics: seize the high ground. Spin is a corruption of that: seize what appears to be the high ground. Or: make what you’ve managed to seize appear to be the high ground.

But there’s a real high ground, made up of grace and generosity, accepting reality. Most of us can see it unless we’re blinded by the glare of chutzpah. It raises one’s own status, along with the tenor of the conversation. It’s available to women and men, both.

We can hope that Hillary will seize the high ground this week.

We can hope, but there is little to show for the hoping that we have done thus far.