The Great American Derangement

Matt Taibbi has a new book :

The Big Story Is That Things Have Gotten Better

Updated at 8:15 p.m. EDT, April 10, 2008

Fighting in Sadr City has subsided dramatically, but violence still took the lives of 68 Iraqis across Iraq. Almost half of them were found in a mass grave. […]

A mass grave containing 33 bodies was found in Mahmudiyah. The bodies were found together in a house and appear to have been dead for over a year.[…]

In Baghdad, a U.S. airstrike left five dead and four injured in Sadr City in one attack; two boys were among the dead. Another person was killed and four more were wounded in a second bombing. At least two other people were wounded during these or other air strikes. U.S. forces killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday. No casualties were reported after an IED blasted a U.S. patrol. Also, the Iraqi army blockade of Sadr City will end on Saturday.

In other incidents taking place in the capital, one person was killed and four were wounded during a bombing in a central neighborhood. A roadside bomb near al-Shabb Stadium wounded six people. Two police officers were injured during a bombing near Sheik Abdulqadir al-Gailani Shrine. Three people were wounded when shells blasted their home in Bayaa. Also, two dumped bodies were found.

Antiwar.com tallies the dead in Iraq daily so you don't have to. U.S. forces, it says, killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday, many of them by aerial bombardment. Even all these years after the first Gulf War, the U.S. is firing on Baghdad from the air, and hitting the predictable child or two.

Apparently the dead found in a mass grave in Mahmudiyah have been added to today's 35 freshly killed from all over Iraq to arrive at the figure of 68 dead for Thursday, although it's reported that the bodies of the 33 were in a house in Mahmudiyah for over a year, not alive all that time, but until today not notably dead. Perhaps this is just a preliminary assignment, until the proper date of death can be unearthed by whoever might be spared to find it.

The sound of the opening of the odd mass grave on a day much like any other desperate day in Iraq (just scroll down through antiwar.com's meticulous daily coverage of the carnage for proof enough) is that disquieting noise in the background you may hear behind the dulcet tones of John Burns and Dexter Filkins recorded last night on the Charlie Rose Show, by way of DavidKurtz at Talking Points Memo.

Rose on Rose

—via Quick Study

Obit

Never let it be said that there are no class divides in Irish America, or that the mutual contemptuousness of every class of Irish people for the other has not been successfully transplanted from the old country to its primarily urban and now suburban home in America.

Mark Wahlberg's Boston Irish character in Martin Scorsese's movie The Departed has naturally a deep contempt for the Boston Irish character played by Matt Damon for precisely these reasons, and expresses his natural contempt with succinct force from the first, as people of his station so often will.

When I first came to regard William Buckley, courtesy of his television program Firing Line and appearances on other talk shows of the time, I recognized in myself the upwelling of the sort of contempt for the man proper to my class of Irish Americans toward a man of his, and carried that contempt with me down all the years till now.

I say farewell to William F. Buckley, Jr., and to my contempt for him as well, satisfied that it no longer has its proper target. I reserve the right to my contempt for what he's left, however.

A brief politics

Personally I'd prefer the politics of the magic sky fairy sprinkling the sparkling dust on everyone that calls all to a more commonly humane sort of humanity, a politics of instantaneous solutions to all the human bother in this world. That would be my preference, something quick and utterly agreeable. Ah, well.

In the realm of the politics of likelihoods, John Holbo at Crooked Timber asks if Hillary Clinton would be a suitable running mate for Barack Obama, and receives a largely negative response in comments, ranging from the mild demurrer to the thunderous denunciation of the idea.

It's early January, and in less than a month the Democratic Party's nominee will have been decided, the person chosen to replace George Bush as President of the United States. An inordinate number of states have decided for some obscure reason to push their primaries forward this election year, front-loading the primary season and making it likely that a pretty decisive number of delegates will be in the hand of one of the candidate months and months before the Democratic Convention, let alone the election in November.

After February 5, the balance of the primary season up until the Democratic Convention will reveal the play of the real and actual politics of the momentous transfer of power the United States is bent on this year.

How News Breaks

Chris Matthews speaking at a bash celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Hardball, declared he wanted to make some news with his remarks, and went on to chide the Bush Administration for trying to influence the editorial content of his show, something that had never happened under Clinton.

"They've finally been caught in their criminality," Matthews said, although what exactly led to this conclusive apprehension on the part of Matthews he left unstated, allowing the listener to assume any one of the most recent examples of the Administration's depredations for whatever Matthews meant by that. And in fact, this is a nefarious crew, the Bush Administration, with a laundry list of possible referents.



He was speaking before a crowd of people including Alan Greenspan, Ted Kennedy, his pundit colleagues Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert and a bunch of MNBC/MSNBC brass, according to examiner.com.

I think a lot of people caught on about this Administration's criminality from the very first, making Matthews's use of the word "finally" seem past due from him, coming from someone who's expected to be up on news from Washington and all.

Everyone already knows about the assaults on Social Security and on science and about Katrina and torture and the spying in on everyone everywhere in defense against fearful terror.

Somehow Matthews didn't catch that part until now, or saw no reason to share his insight long after instances of malign behavior in all these various venues had permanently convinced a vast majority of Americans that the President was a wrongheaded dolt whose polices must no longer be entertained. In public polls, Bush's raw approval rating has remained in the low thirties for more than a year now for all the reasons people have for disapproving of the bad job he's doing so willfully. Matthews, inchoate before his pundit peers, finally comes around.

Today President Bush said once again, "…we don't torture."

This is political speech, and protected under the First Amendment. He's the President, and he can say anything he wants and there's really nothing to do for it. It's in the Constitution.

He can say over and over again for all the reasons it would be politic to do so, including self-incrimination, that the United States doesn't engage in torture, and of course that's allowed. It is not by any measure true, howevermuch the definition of torture is worked over in the back rooms of the Justice Department and the White House to suit Bush's usage.

Chris Matthews may or may not report that the President gave a strong defense of the Administration's detention policies today; somebody will, if only on Fox News.

"We stick to U.S. law and international obligations," the President said, selecting his words.



There is an ocean of news of criminal torture breaking against the rock-ribbed shore of political speech pronounced by Bush today. But then again, maybe Chris Matthews was talking about something else.