Random Thoughts

Remember that horrible Blackwater shooting in Iraq where guards mowed down 17 unarmed Iraqis in a crowded square?  Well a judge has thrown the case out because the State Department personnel who first interviewed the guards promised them immunity in exchange for their testimony, despite the fact that they had no authority to do so.  Bottom line:  this is why you don’t fight wars with mercenaries.

If you knew the kind of people who go to work for Blackwater it would horrify you that we send we give them guns and send them into foreign countries with no legal mechanism in place for punishing misconduct.

According to James Fallows, an Atlantic correspondent who’s been in China for the past three or four news, Fox News has a striking resemblance to the Chinese media propaganda machine:

I didn’t see anything on Fox from mid-2006 through mid-2009; for better or worse, it’s not carried in China. (The English TV news channels you can get there are BBC, CNN International, CNBC, sometimes Bloomberg.) I have seen it since coming back this summer. And in a way, I realize that I had been seeing it all along: except for more modern production values, it’s the closest thing America offers to what it’s like to be exposed to the Chinese government’s 24/7 internal propaganda machine. When I saw the clip below from Media Matters, as highlighted by Andrew Sullivan, I thought: make it a little more boring, put it in Mandarin, and substitute “splittists” etc for the people Fox is talking about (maybe the Dalai Lama in place of Van Jones), and I could be right back in Beijing.

Are Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC comparably relentless and “biased”? Of course they are. But no one pretends their shows are “real” news operations or are “fair and balanced.” And certainly they have become what they are as a market and political response to Fox’s success. Indeed, the general polarization and spectacle-mindedness of the news ecology in part is homage to what Fox has figured out as a business and political model.

Frederic Mitterrand, the French culture minister who created a row by vociferously protesting the arrest of Roman Polanski, apparently has a penchant for young boys. The source? A book he wrote:

In his 2005 book The Bad Life, he wrote: “I got into the habit of paying for boys,” saying his attraction to young male prostitutes was not dimmed despite knowing “the sordid details of this traffic”.

“All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excited me enormously… the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys put me in a state of desire.”

Until a few days ago, I was under the delusion that the civilized world unanimously recognized the rape of a 13 year old child as a crime worthy of punishment.  Then along came the overdue arrest of Roman Polanski.  Financial penalties, when avoided, compound with interest over time; apparently many seem to believe that the opposite should be true for criminal penalties, that fleeing from justice should be rewarded, at least as long as you’re rich enough and perhaps enough of a “genius.”

For those unfamiliar with the case, let’s recap:  Polanski brought a 13 year old girl in on the false pretense of a modeling shoot, he fed her champagne and Quaaludes (a barbiturate that acts as an aphrodisiac and a sedative), and then had anal intercourse with her.  And here’s what he had to say several years later:

If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

Was there judicial misconduct?  Maybe.  Has the victim said she forgives him?  Yes.  Does any of this matter?  No.  There is no doubt as to his guilt and he has already pled guilty.  Furthermore, victims don’t prosecute criminals:  criminals are prosecuted by the state on behalf of the people of the state, in accordance with public policy designed to advance the public good.  In this case, the law exists to protect children.

For those who are still tempted to forgive Polanski, I’d close by asking you to have a conversation with a 13 year old.  Set aside the images of sassy young teenagers you see on TV (played by actors many years older) – these are children in 7th or 8th grade, and they are not capable of intelligently making a choice in cases like this (especially when they have been drugged).

The piece is unnecessarily sympathetic to the Administration’s case, but it’s still encouraging to see the Times come out against their union buddies.

President Obama, at the behest of the United Steelworkers union, will be adding a 35 percent tariff on tires imported from China.

The basic idea behind trade is that certain countries are better at certain things; international trade allows each country to specialize in what it’s best at.  Alternately — and this is what we’re choosing here — you can prop up industries where your nation is non-competitive instead of trying to spread into industries where you have a competitive advantage.

Here’s a great quote from the article:

Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who had pressed for the tariffs, also praised the decision.

He said in a statement, “If American workers and manufacturers are going to compete in the global market, they need to have a government that uses trade enforcement tools.”

Allow me to translate:  “Because American companies and workers are inherently inferior to foreign companies and foreign workers, they require a crutch from their government.”

Thanks guys!  Now not only will my tires cost more, but China will likely impose retaliatory tariffs that target an industry where we do have a competitive advantage.  Those guys, of course, don’t deserve protection because they didn’t pay their congressman enough money.

Fast on the heals of President Obama’s relations-thawing trip to Russia came this startling statement from the Vice President:

The reality is the Russians are where they are.  They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

Now don’t get me wrong:  the Russians continue to be dangerous.  Russia is one of the few countries in the world where officials will lie to your face, telling you stories that are demonstrably false.  As the Economist pointed out a few months ago, the US looms much larger in the Russian mind than vice versa.  As such, the Russians often play a zero sum game where it seems that in order for them to feel like they’ve won, you have to loose.

All that being said, President Obama has just expended considerable political capital on thawing relations with the Russians and trying to bring them on board with several initials that are in our national interest.  For the Vice President to sharply undercut this hard works so quickly seems… at the very least a little strange.  But then the Vice President is notorious for making, shall we say, “inopportune” remarks.

Not every truth needs to be aired publicly, especially when you’re an elected official.

I’ve been following with great interest the recent goings-on in Iran because I see it as one of the most hopeful major events in recent memory.  Here we have a country whose government is the number one state sponsor of terror, whose president denies the Holocaust while vaguely threatening to unleash one on Israel, and the people of this country have finally indicated that they’ve had enough and are ready to toss the government on onto the street.

The cable networks were extremely slow to pick up this story — I guess the fall of the regime that is the No1 state sponsor of terror was simply less important than who broke up with who in Hollywood.  In any case, the best reporting on this — that I can find — is being done by Andrew Sullivan.  Most of the time I strongly disagree with his politics, but here he is doing a great job of aggregating information from all over to give you a picture of what’s going on.

Recently the New York Times ran a headline that said Iran Leader’s Warning Puts More Pressure on Obama (hopefully they’ve changed the headline by the time you click through).  Now folks, my response to this is WTF.  What can the president of the United States, a country known within Iran as The Great Satan, possibly say to make this situation better?  Are we going to send in troops?  No.  Would Obama throwing his support behind the opposition leader destroy Mousavi and allow Khamenei and Amadinajab to paint him as an American stooge? Yes.

Image if, after Bush v. Gore, protestors has taken to the streets.  Now imagine you read a French newspaper whose lead headline reads “Protests Put Pressure on Chirac to Intervene.”  Wouldn’t you be thinking WTF how is this any of their business? Of course you would.  And if we interject ourselves into the Iranian debate, the folks in Iran will be thinking the exact same thing.

The journalists who are bringing to the world, at risk to their own life, details of the events occuring are doing great work.  They should keep up their efforts.  For the government of the United States to interject itself, however, is entirely inappropriate.  When it comes to someone else’s election, we are simpy not center of the world.

The New York Times reports:

United States Navy personnel rescued the captain of an American cargo ship on Sunday by killing three Somali pirates who had been holding him hostage for four days, government officials said.

…

Just after dark on Sunday, snipers on the U.S.S. Bainbridge saw that one of the pirates was pointing an automatic rifle at Captain Phillips, and that the captors’ heads and shoulders were exposed from the capsule-like lifeboat. President Obama had previously authorized the use of force if the commander on the scene believed the captain’s life was in danger, so they fired, Admiral Gortney said.

It’s all pretty murky what happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the on-scene commander chose to interpret if “the captain’s life was in danger” as “if you have a really good shot.”

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the captured pirate — the whole legal side of this piracy thing has been making everyone’s head hurt.  Hopefully this case sets some meaningful precedent on how we deal with pirates in the future.

Someone please explain to these people that the purpose of marching is simply to get from point A to point B: