The “Potty Problem”

I’m going to assume that anyone reading this knows the general thrust of the “trans bathroom bill” laws showing up around the country, and the issues people in the GLBTQ and allied communities have with them.  (If you don’t, please look up the details.)  There is, unfortunately, a lot of misunderstanding on both sides of this issue.

While the people driving the “trans bathroom bills” are doing so out of malice — rile up the base, shore up support, bring in donations, etc., all in the name of gathering more power — the people on the ground generally aren’t evil.

They just aren’t educated.

I don’t mean that they are stupid.  I mean that they don’t know what the issues and implications are.  Just like with the various gay right issues of the past 20+ years, where we found that the more gay and lesbian people they knew, the more favorable they were to gay rights, these people don’t have any real experience with trans people.

For most of us who are GLBTQ or allied, no matter where we currently fall on the trans acceptance and awareness scale, it has been a progression to get there.  None of us sprang from Zeus’ head with a fully formed knowledge of and process for dealing with trans issues.  We discovered, we learned, we grew… we evolved.  And we still are evolving — I know I am.

For most of these people, their awareness of “trans” is Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Caitlyn Jenner.  They have no mental separation of sex from gender from orientation — to these people, those are pretty much all one and the same.  They can’t (yet) grasp the reasons why someone would not be comfortable in their assigned gender, why someone would want to transition (much less what that means).  They still believe that being gay is a choice, so they certainly can’t grasp gender subtleties.

A lot of people have pushed up the idea of “Do they want Buck Angel in the women’s room?”  No, they don’t, but that’s because he passes.  Completely.  They don’t see him as female at all, and thus it would not be an issue.  In fact, they have almost no concept of FTM because they don’t see such people as anything but “male".

(Let’s be clear on the idea of genital checks: that has come from our side of the fence.  They say it will be enforced, but it’s us that have suggested that mechanism.  They don’t know how to enforce it other than the silent threat imposed by making it a law.)

Their concern — the one that has been pushed at them by those driving the issue — is MTF trans people.  And back to Ru Paul’s Drag Race, their main image of transwomen is over-the-top drag queens.  (Again, when they don’t know any better, drag and trans are the same thing.)  If they look beyond the glammed up big drag, or a “rich enough to afford what it takes to look good” transwoman like Jenner, they see less refined drag.  They see men in women’s clothes who don’t pass well as women, who wouldn’t convince many people that they are female.  (And those drag queens don’t intend to do that, but these people don’t understand that, of course.)  Or they see butch-appearing women who, to their view are about the same — unable to pass with standard gender norms, ans thus suspect.

So now we have image the undereducated masses have for the trans bathroom issue: men badly dressed as women, saying they are female and using the women’s restroom.  And since these people are obviously not actually women, then their reason for using the women’s room would be… what?  Nothing good, to be sure!  And that’s where things go directly into the toilet (so to speak): such men must be wanting to be there to peek at, scare, molest, or even rape innocent real women or girls.  And that’s not acceptable, obviously.

So how do we fight back about this?  Same way as with the gay rights issues — we challenge them in court, forcing them to come up with increasingly stupid sounding rationalizations for their fears, and we come at it from the other side with gradual, continual education and awareness.  And we need to realize that this is going to take time — years, even.  It will be faster than the gay rights fights (that road has at least been traveled before), but it’s still not going to be solved immediately.

Bury the Bone: Clarence Thomas vs. Anita Hill

According to this news piece, October 2011 is the 20th anniversary of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.

Although I remember the hearings going on, my one real memory of the event comes from a couple weeks or a month later.  Walking in the hall at work one day, one of the Human Resources people called me into her cubicle and gave me an apologetic “talking to”.  Apparently, a month before, I had been wearing a t-shirt I bought in Tijuana in September, which carried an image of two dogs fucking, labelled “Bury the Bone” (much like this one, down to the color scheme), and someone complained.

In retrospect, that was a (very) inappropriate shirt to wear to work.  I happened to be wearing it that day as well, I think, which was what caused the HR person to talk to me.  (I was 24 and trying to be brazenly out, I guess.  Or I just wasn't thinking, take your pick.)  After that, I was much more sensitive to the messaging what I wore would send — not that I refrained from shirts with gay imagery and messaging, just that I gave more thought to it and refrained from wearing some of them to work.

But the complaint that the HR person was responding to — which she had not acted on for at least a couple weeks, meaning she didn’t think it was very significant — was not about the content of the shirt.  Rather, it was about the political intent: someone had thought I had work it as commentary on the Thomas/Hill hearings.

Bizarre!
 

Do Your Religion and Politics Extend to Your Pets?

Coming into work today, I was following a bus with an ad from the Humane Society (or maybe the SPCA) featuring a cat nursing a scad of kittens, labelled “Spay Me”, with a subtitle saying that family planning isn’t just for humans.

(It was totally LOLCat-able.  Photoshop the mama cat’s eyes a little bigger and add a word balloon saying “Please.  And soon.”)

It reminded me of a thought that came up a few weeks ago:

Do pro-lifers spay and neuter?

Spaying and neutering pets has long been a standard concept put forward by animal and pet groups.  I don’t think I have ever heard anyone take a stance against it, making it one of the (in theory) most non-controversial pieces of social messaging out there.

(I despise using the term “fixed”, though.  The pets are not broken.  You can argue that it is “fixed” as in “stabilized”, but few people think of that definition first.  It’s like using “catholic” when you mean “broad” or “universal”: everyone will have to work past the religious meaning to get at what you really mean, so why make them work that hard?  Unless you’re writing poetry, of course; you’re supposed to make people work hard to figure out what the fuck you really mean with poetry.  [Kidding.]  [No, I’m not.])

But with pro-life/anti-abortion people, though: for the extreme among them, any mention of “family planning” seems to inflame them.  And what is spaying/neutering, really, but abortion in advance?

I don’t know.  There is undoubtedly a theological difference between a fetus (post-conception) and an egg and sperm which don’t get together, but what about when it is the work of man keeping them from getting together?  The political philosophy is generally opposed to condoms and other birth control methods as well, under the belief that man blocking God’s will is wrong.  So following that logic, forced sterilization of a human — preventing the possibility of conception — should also be wrong.  (Presumably there are levels of wrong: abortion is worse than birth control, which I guess should be about parallel to sterilization, so long as you ignore the invasive/permanentness of it.)

(Hmm: is getting a vasectomy a sin?)

So back to the pets: if you’re opposed to birth control and to forced sterilization in humans, does that religio-political philosophy extend to your pets?  Should you be opposed to spay and neuter services because they are a form of birth control?  Or are they somehow okay because pets are dumb animals/lower lifeforms/unable to control themselves/creatures with no souls/whatever?

Talking about this with a co-worker, he did say he knew a pro-life couple who doesn’t spay/neuter their pets, so apparently some people follow this through at all levels, but they apparently keep pretty quiet about it.  (It’s hard to imagine people out picketing the Humane Society in opposition to spay/neuter services, isn’t it?)

Of course, we can flip this whole thing around from the right end of the spectrum to the left end: cats and dogs are carnivores, or carni-omnivores at best.  If you’ve decided to be vegetarian or vegan, do you require that of/force that on your pet as well?  (Myself, I can’t imagine a cat being happy with tofu and brown rice with a side of stewed lentils, instead of tuna.)
 

What Were They Thinking? — One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This showed up on the front page of the Sunday edition of Wisconsin State Journal, just a couple days before election day.

Curious color selections, since it’s usually blue associated with Democrats (donkeys) and red with Republicans (elephants).  I can’t find the original image at iStockPhoto, but I expect that the newspaper added the animal images and didn’t think through the implications.

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Updated on November 4, 2010

This article at Language Log has interesting details on red state/blue state, and links to this more in-depth one.

Basically, the television networks alternated which party had red or blue between 1976 and 1996, which lead to the Republicans being assigned blue five times out of six.  The current color-to-party linking (and the “red state/blue state” terms) only dates to 2000.

You’d swear it was older than that, wouldn’t you?

See No Gay, Hear No Gay, Kick Out No Gay

A couple years ago, I was listening to talk radio and heard the most bizarre statement from one caller:

Gays should be able to serve in the military.  “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is a bad policy because it hurts people and gets rid of people with skills the military needs.  But we shouldn’t repeal it, because the policy is working.

That’s a paraphrase of what she said, but the gist is intact.

This was conservative talk radio, I think, and/or it was at the very end of the show, so the caller’s viewpoint was not challenged.  But you have to wonder what this woman’s definition of “working” is, how she can mesh those contradictory ideas.

(Sure, the rocks in the bottom of my dishwasher break all the glasses and chip the plates, but I’m not going to remove them, because by God, the stuff comes out clean!)
 

What Were They Thinking? — The Sound of Silence

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This billboard looms over Denny Way at the foot of Capitol Hill — presumably just about the most liberal part of the city — asking people to honk if they disagree with the (so-called) liberal media.  If you must learn more about their cause, go to tellthetruth2010.org.

It’s amazingly quiet there at 6:00 pm, with a multi-block line of cars waiting to get on the freeway.  Quiet enough that you wonder if they wasted their dollars.

(Hmm, maybe the billboard’s presence has an unintended side-effect, convincing irate drivers to not user their horns, lest others think they are reacting to the billboard.)


 

Taking Aim at Target

I don’t really have anything to say about the Target donation debacle.

For those who came in late: after the Supreme Court loosened restrictions on corporate giving to political candidates, Target gave $150,000 to a Minnesota candidate ostensibly because of his pro-business policies, but without paying heed to his anti-union and anti-gay stances.  Target has issued an apology, which gay groups don’t accept as authentic, but has refused to either rescind the donation or make a matching one to gay groups, which tends to reinforce why people don’t accept the apology as more than boilerplate.

Actually, I do have one thing to say about the deal: Best Buy donated $100,000 as well, and no one is paying any attention to them in this.  Shouldn’t 40% of the attention be going there, since 40% of the money came from them?

Nonetheless, I found it ironic that Target ads ended up on the Seattle Times webpage for the story dealing with the donation and its backlash.
 

The Truth Behind the Politics

Mark Evanier writes:

Sometimes, I don’t think most Republican leaders hate Obama so much as they just hate not being in power… and don’t see any other weapon at their disposal than to keep on fanning the rages of the Rush/Glenn Beck/birther mob.

Amen!
 

Selection 2004: Making Lemonade

• Even in Mississippi, at least 14% of people thought that preventing gay marriage via constitutional amendment was a really stupid idea.
   
• Pete Coors lost.
   
• Seattle’s monorail is back on track, and we’ll clean up Hanford, and we won’t have video slots in every bar and convenience store (and Tim Eynman lost again), and we won’t have a sales tax increase to pay for an undefined education “trust fund”.

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Updated on May 31, 2011

The monorail later got repealed again and has not resurrected.  But we do now have Light Rail from downtown to the airport, and they will be extending that to the University of Washington and (we hope) up the East Side to Bellevue.  And a trolley from downtown to South Lake Union (and the old monorail from downtown to the Seattle Center).  And they are now starting on a streetcar from Pioneer Square (and past Light Rail in the International District) to Capitol Hill, due to be done in late 2012.
 

Selection 2004: The Great Debate (#4)

Admission up front: I am biased against Bush, in favor of Kerry.  Admission out back: I’m not overly thrilled with Kerry.

I again listened to most of the debate, all but maybe three questions worth, but did not see any of it.  Nothing surprising, although phrases like “flip-flop”, “I have a plan”, “It’s just not credible”, and “You can run, but you can’t hide” were mercifully absent (or at least less prominent) in this debate.

• Is there anything which can’t be solved by Pell Grants, Mr. Bush?
   
• “No litmus test on judges” as the answer to whether you’ll try to overturn Roe v. Wade?  We’ll take that dodge as a “Yes,” since you didn’t say no.  Not that anything but “Yes” could be expected, given the Republican platform plank this year seeking a Constitutional amendment outlawing all abortions.  (And Bush has already said he does have a litmus test: strict Constitutional interpretation.  Flip-flop much, Mr. President?)
   
• Speaking of Dodge City, what kind of an answer was that on the Minimum Wage?  For a 25 year-old single mother working at Taco Bell, education (and Pell Grants) are not the answer.  A 40% pay hike from $5-something an hour to $7-something an hour, that will help.  (Not that education isn’t important, but that pays off 2, 5, 10 years down the line, and it doesn’t do shit for those who are below the poverty line now.)
   
• Kerry is being painted as not just a liberal, but a liberal from Massachusetts.  I’m inclined to interpret that as code for “He supports gay marriage,” despite Kerry’s protests to the contrary.  Same-sex civil marriage is the most prominent recent event pushing Massachusetts into the hearts and minds of Americans.
   
• In one question, Kerry made a reference to there being two education systems in this country, one for the haves and one for the have nots.  (Or something similar to that.)  While that mostly plays to Edwards’s “Two Americas” speech, it also may be code for Kerry not supporting Charter Schools, since such are usually painted as either a benefit only for better-off families, or as a method for publicly funding religious-oriented schools.

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Updated on May 18, 2011
 

Selection 2004: The Great Debate (#3)

Admission up front: I am biased against Bush, in favor of Kerry.  Admission out back: I’m not overly thrilled with Kerry.

I didn’t get to see or hear all but about 10 minutes of the second debate.  The third one, I listened to about half of it — on the computer at work and in the car — and then saw the last 20+ minutes of it.

A few items that I haven’t seen noted enough:

• Bush did better with this debate, or at least he did “less badly”.  If my estimation of him didn’ fall as far after this debate as after the first one, does then mean he did well?
   
• Yes, it begins to sound repetitive that John Kerry “has a plan.”  But you know, at least he does have one.  Does Bush?
   
• The first thing out of Bush’s mouth about what he’s done for the environment is to limit emissions on off-road diesel engines.  Oh, that’s way up there among high-priority items.
   
• On one of the last questions (on mistakes, I think) — asked by the gray-haired woman in glasses — Bush was talking directly to her (or at her?), and she had this terrific shell-shocked look on her face, like she was thinking “I wish he’d leave me alone, and God, I hope he doesn’t get re-elected.”
   
• I don’t think either candidate did well on the controversy questions — stem-cell research, tax dollars for abortion, Supreme Court appointments — but Bush certainly fumbled his way verbally through the minefield much more so than Kerry did.
   
• Bush is still on the repetition track: “It’s just not credible.”  (With little other than repetition to prove the lack of credibility, of course.)

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Updated on October 14, 2004

Updated on May 11, 2011
 

Selection 2004: The Great Debate (#1)

By now, you’ve read all the pundits about the debate, with the liberals all saying Kerry won and the conservatives mostly saying it was a tie (because they couldn’t say Bush lost, of course).

I listened to the debate on the radio.  The main effect this has is that you hear what the candidates say and how they say it; you are not distracted by what they are wearing or the gestures they make, nor in how a given network displays the debate, focusing on one candidate or the other at critical times.  (On the flip side, you don’t get to see the gestures they make, whether they look at the camera or the moderator, or how they visually project themselves.  Andrew Sullivan’s blog (archives only go back to 2006, unfortunately) had an e-mail from a viewer who saw mostly the reverse of me: he saw the debate with the sound off, and so could focus exclusively on the visuals.)

A few items that I haven’t seen noted enough:

• Bush sounded uncertain in the debate.  Kerry would hit an answer or a rebuttal hard out of the gate, but Bush tended to spend (waste) the first 10 seconds or so with false starts and the like.  Not only did this cause him to have less time for his answers, but it made him sound unprepared, annoyed, and flustered.  Not a good image to project.
   
• Bush had a couple of major flubs, most notably the bit where he conflated 9/11 with Iraq as the attacker.  It’s bad enough that he continues to project this misconception, but it gave Kerry an automatic attack point.  (Bush lobbed the ball up and didn’t defend against a spike.)  Bush’s handlers should have planned for this and directed Bush to never, ever make that sort of a comment, knowing the damning response it would get.  Either Bush’s handlers are overconfident, or Bush ignored their advice. That’s potentially fatal.
   
• As I understand it, the focus of this debate — Foreign Policy — was chosen by the Bush campaign.  It is the arena where Bush is supposedly strongest, and if that were true, choosing to do that debate first and giving Kerry a major smackdown would have been very good for Bush.  But that distinctly did not happen.  If this was Bush on his strongest topic, how will he do when discussing domestic issues?  (But Kerry needs to be sure he doesn’t get overconfident by the results of this debate.  I suspect that’s what Bush did.)

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Updated on May 10, 2011
 

Selection 2004: Thongs, Sandals, and Pool Slippers

I’m not especially concerned about Kerry’s alleged “flip-flops”.  By and large, the claims of such boil down to two things: change and context.

First is the idea that politicians are not allowed to change their position on issues over time.  Kerry spent nearly 20 years in the United States Senate.  Think about the ways the world (and American society) has changed in the past twenty years.  Think about the ways you have changed in that time.  (Myself, I’ve gone from 18, a single virgin, and on my way into college to be a Physics major, to being 38, a kinky gay leatherman with a partner and two step-children, and a home-owning software tester.)  I see my own attitudes having changed over that period, reflecting both the changing mores of society and my personal educational and economic growth.  I have no problem believing that a politician might have held some views twenty years ago — and made votes on behalf of his constituents’ needs at the time — but would vote differently today due to those views or the needs of those constituents having shifted over the decades.

Second is that complaints about such “flip-flops” are taken largely out of context.  In isolation, it may appear that Kerry voted one way at one time, but the opposite way later on.  But with many of these votes, you have to go a level deeper.  What was it that drove his vote?  Odds are that the details are not identical.  Was one vote on procedural grounds?  Was another to curtail a budget out of control?  Was there an unrelated rider amendment attached to the bill, making it more important to stop the rider than to pass the main bill?

But the ultimate reason I’m not concerned about “flip-flops” from Kerry is because Clinton — perhaps the best overall President we’ve had in my lifetime — was himself accused of “waffling”.  (You may recall that a waffle was used as Clinton’s stand-in in the Doonesbury strips of the time.)  In fact, even “flip-flop” was used on Clinton, such as from an article I read once from The Daily Texan (no archives there, and the original reprinted link I had is defunct).  If they want to put Kerry’s governing style in the same class as Clinton’s, hey, no problem.

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Updated on April 20, 2011
 

Selection 2004: Primary-ly Geared to Generate Lawsuits

Washington state has a new Primary Election system this year, as mandated by a court decision.  We used to have a “blanket primary”, where anyone could vote for any candidate — a Democrat in this race, a Republican in that one, and so forth.  In our new system — the so-called “Montana” style (or semi-open) — voters must select a single party and then vote only for people running under that party.  (Everyone gets to vote in the “Non-Partisan” races, like for Judge — we call them non-partisan because there’s no explicit political party listed, but we all know every one of the candidates has a political agenda of his or her own which may color how they perform once in office.)  The winner from each of the main parties (Democrat, Republican, and Libertarian), plus any minor party candidates, ends up on the General Election ballot come November.

Needless to say, a lot of people are angry about this, because it changes how they have been able to vote in the past.  I certainly understand that, because I, too, liked that freedom.  But people miss an important fact there, the purpose of this sort of a Primary Election:

The Primary Election is not intended to winnow the field down to just two candidates.  (At least not in most states.  Some use the “Louisiana” style, which does just that: if the top two vote getters happen to be from the same party, those two end up in the General Election.)  Instead, the Primary Election’s purpose is to choose the candidate from each party.  To that end, the parties are right in wanting only Democrats to vote for Democrat candidates, and only Republicans to vote for Republicans.  Or at least Democrats-for-the-moment: if you are willing to vote only for Democrats, they’ll (grudgingly) take you, no matter what party your official registration is with (if any).

Part of the goal here is to prevent “spoilers”.  You may not care who gets the nod from your favorite party (or it may be in the bag), but you may feel that one candidate in the opposition party has a greater chance of beating out your party, so you might want to throw your vote to his in-party opponent in order to get the less “dangerous” candidate into the General Election.  Needless to say, the political parties don’t like such “spoilers”.  One way around them is to set things up so that you can still vote as a “spoiler”, but you have to be one across the board: if you want to vote for anyone from that other party, you can only vote for that party.  (Or you can still cross party lines and have your ballot invalidated.)

And that’s what my big concern is with this election.

There are two balloting methods going on.  In most of the state, voters will declare which party they intend to vote for, are given the ballot for that party (all three ballots have the non-partisan section attached), and away they go to vote.  There are two downsides to this: first, each precinct has to have enough ballots for every registered voter (although at best half will actually vote) to vote in any party, even Libertarian (which is apt to actually get maybe 5%, tops); this triplication can be expensive.  Second, this presumably means publicly declaring your party intention to people who could be your friends (or enemies) and who might be taken aback at a party affiliation (even if only temporary) which does not match their own; I’m sure there are ways to avoid such declaration, though.

But for six counties — Snohomish, King, Pierce, Kitsap, Klickitat, and Chelan, which contain large Washington cities such as Everett, Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, Bremerton, and Wenatchee — there is none of this triple ballot stuff.  Each person gets a single ballot, marks a preferred party, and votes accordingly.  But if there is any crossing of party lines (intentional or accidental), including marking the wrong party and then voting consistently beyond that, those votes are invalidated:

[Secretary of State Sam] Reed expects a number of ballots will be tainted, with voters neglecting to mark their party preference or trying to vote for candidates of more than one party. Those votes won’t count.

Above excerpt from the Seattle Times.  According to the Official Local Voters’ Pamphlet, only votes which don’t conform to the party selection are discounted, rather than the entire ballot.

This thing is bound to be as problematic as the Butterfly Ballot was in Florida in 2000.  In the other counties, there’s no question about keeping to the selected party, but in several of the largest cities in the state — and in the strongest Democratic areas, if that’s important — ballots which can be expected to cause confusion are being used, in the name of saving money.  (Which I’m all for, mind you!)  But you have to admit, things look a little suspicious.

If there are any close races from those counties, you can expect lawsuits up the butt and new buzz phrases to drive “hanging chad” out of the vocabulary.  The state had better plan on recording all the invalid votes in order to provide statistics to refute those lawsuits, and have backup plans in place for handling recounts.

Fortunately (perhaps), Initiative 872 comes along in November, and if it passes (which is considered likely), will move us to a “Louisiana” style primary (the old “blanket primary” was deemed unconstitutional).  Of course, the political parties are campaigning against it, “saying it would deprive voters of party choice and could disenfranchise those who back minor-party candidates.”  (The first part is also known as “It would take away some of our power.”  The second part is truer, but if you can’t make Top Two in September, hon, you ain’t gonna make it in November, either.)

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Updated on April 14, 2011

Initiative 872 passed.  The political parties sued.  The Ninth Circuit Court declared it unconstitutional in 2005.  Finally, the US Supreme Court upheld the initiative in 2008.

The net effect being that now the purpose of the primary is to narrow the field of candidates to two.

Selection 2004: Undecided

Is there really anyone “undecided” left in this country when it comes to who they are going to vote for in November?  Myself, I’ve been pretty well decided since, oh, December 2000: Anybody But Bush.  Firmly so since this campaign started, anyway, once we knew for sure that only a Democrat opponent would have a chance of winning and that such could be no worse than Bush.

But what about other people?  Are any of them truly “Undecided”, or is that a myth?  As I think about, they are probably real, but not in the way the term is usually batted around.

• I suspect that anyone who voted Democrat in 2000 — and most who voted Green (Nader) — is in the “No question” camp.  Polls indicate that there are a number of people who voted for Bush last time who are at least questioning it this time.  So some “Undecideds” are actually “Undecided whether they will vote for Bush again.”
• I’m on record as being less than thrilled with Kerry as a nominee (although no worse than I was with Gore in 2000), but I know that I will swallow and vote for him anyway, as the candidate who will do my pet issues the least harm, and because not voting for him is 1/2 a vote for someone who will do those issues some harm.  I’m sure, however, that there are people who genuinely can’t stand either Kerry or Bush, who think that neither one is good for the country, and thus they are “Undecided whether they will vote for either guy.”
• As we all know, there are many who are apathetic about the entire thing.  This is especially the younger crowd, the ones who are old enough to be cynical without being wise, or who simply don’t care.  These are “Undecided whether they will bother to vote at all.”
• Everyone likes to be a winner, or at least on the winning side.  Look at sports fans, who are gleefully happy if “their team” wins (even when they don’t live where that team is based).  I’m sure there are people out there who just want to say they voted for the winner (or maybe gripe because their candidate didn’t win; sometimes they want griping rights more than a winning candidate, because they know they’ll never be happy with whomever wins).  And thus they are “Undecided which way they will throw their vote until the last minute, when they can see who is apt to be the winner.”

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Updated on April 4, 2011
 

Conflicted about the Conflict: We Would Have Invaded Anyway

This week, the Butler Review was released in the United Kingdom, reiterating what has been coming out in the United States recently: that the intelligence agencies had reservations about weapon stockpiles, that Saddam Hussein was not an immediate threat, and that Blair (and Bush) pushed forward regardless.  On BBC Radio’s “World Service” program yesterday was an interview on the subject with Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons.

The original airing of the program doesn’t appear to be available any more.  It was 4:24 minutes long; the important part started at 3:30 and covered the last minute of the interview.  Fortunately, I transcribed some of that part…

(Symons) The crunch issue is, “If we knew then what we know now, would the decision over what we did in Iraq be the same?” and the answer to that is “Yes.”  Because as the Butler Report makes clear, Saddam had had chemical and biological weapons, he had had a nuclear weapons program, he had concealed them, he had used these weapons in the past.

(BBC Interviewer) If we’d known that there were no stockpiles, no weapons of mass destruction, we’d have invaded anyway?

(Symons) I think that the threat that was posed to us at the time was a threat that we could not have simply passed by.  Because the fact is that at the time, we were getting all these reports, not only about the belief that Saddam could be building up these stockpiles, but of course, as well, it was the coming together, as the Prime Minister made very clear in his statement, of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the terrorist threat.

[Online program ends here.]

In other words, “Yes.”  If we had known at the time that there were no weapons of mass destruction, we (or at least the United Kingdom, and I think it’s safe to say the United States by extension, since the UK wouldn’t have done it without us) would have invaded Iraq anyway.

In short, the war was about deposing Saddam.  And nothing else.

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Updated on March 10, 2011
 

Selection 2004: Ho Hum 2

Kerry/Edwards as the Democratic ticket.  Completely predictable.  Boring.  I continue with the same feeling of impending void: I will vote for Kerry/Edwards, not because I’m enthused by them (nor because I’m a registered Democrat and always vote the party line, since I’m not and I don’t), but because I can’t vote for Bush/Cheney and because I (we) can’t afford to not vote.

On the flip side, Edwards probably truly is the best choice.  Not because he gives a North/South balance to the ticket, or because his “humble beginnings” offset Kerry’s “privilege”, but because he minimizes exposure.  The only thing that the Republicans seem to have to throw at Edwards right now is a relative lack of experience, which is exactly what Bush himself ran on four years ago, as a candidate who had held only one elected office before running for President.  Edwards is no less experienced than Bush was, and in fact has private successes prior to office, which the current President cannot claim.

Updated on July 8, 2004
 

Reagan Redux

In the aftermath of the Reagan funeral, I’m reminded of my all-time favorite episode of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County strip, where Opus is talking to his mirror, commenting on politicians (paraphrased, since I don’t have the original cartoon handy):

“A statesman is a dead politician.”

“That’s what this country needs: more statesmen!”

(Oddly, for how well-regarded Bloom County was, this is one of only two strips which I can really recall dialog from.  The characters (Steve Dallas, Opus, Bill the Cat, Milo, Oliver Wendell Jones and the Banana 3000 computer) and the scenarios (elections, the anxiety closet, etc.) are all well recalled, but danged if I can remember many individual strips.  The other one I remember was during Steve Dallas’ effort to win the Mr. USA competition, with Opus yelling out “Mr. Rhode Island is stuffing his shorts!”)

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Updated on February 9, 2011
 

Who’s the Leader of the Club?

Rusty’s teenage daughter, Sarah, lives with us, and along with her, we’ve got her albino corn snake, Dragon.  Every three weeks or so, we get Dragon three white mice for food.  Every couple months, Dragon sheds his skin, and during the days leading up to that, he is lethargic and moody and doesn’t want to eat, and his eyes cloud up.

Needless to say, sometimes “food” and “won’t eat” overlap.  Like this past week.

At first, we feared he was sick, because he didn’t eat the mice and wouldn’t even really pay attention to them.  But we finally realized that he was getting ready to shed his skin.  This left us with the question of what to do with the mice.

We could just let them starve to death, but I said this was even crueler than waiting for Dragon to eat them.  We could smother them and put them out of their misery, but that would be wasteful, as we would just have to get more mice in a few days.  The pet store wouldn’t take them back.  Rusty was worried that if they didn’t get eaten soon, they would make babies, and then we would have dozens of the things.  So we decided to leave them in Dragon’s tank, feed them, and wait.  They got to dine on lettuce, cheese, and Basic 4 breakfast cereal (which they really liked).

In the meantime, my cat, Dumaka, sat on the edge of the dresser — or even on top of the cage — and watched the mice.  You could just hear the gears turning in her little head: “Hey, if he won’t eat them, give them to me!  I know what to do with them!”

Two days ago, Dragon buried himself under the wood chips, presumably to start to shed.  And last night, he was out on top, with some shed remnants and clear eyes.

But he still wouldn’t eat the mice.  In fact, Rusty and I watched as he slithered along the back edge of the tank and one of the mice climbed up on his back — even onto his head — and was carried along for the ride, like one of those people-mover conveyor belts at the airport.  (It was kind of funny to see, actually.)

I decided that something had to be done.  The best way to get a pot to boil, a train to arrive, or something else to happen is to do something else, something which will get interrupted by what you wanted to happen in the first place.  So what we had to do was get attached to the mice, turn them into pets.  Then they would surely die!  And the first step in the process of making them pets — well, other than feeding them — was to give them names.  So we did…

George, Dick, and Donald.

(You figure it out.  No sense wasting good names on them if we wanted to get rid of them.)

This morning, Dragon was curled up at the top of the tree in his tank, no mice to be seen.

[Weblog title reference: From the theme song to The Mickey Mouse Club.]

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Updated on January 27, 2011
 

Conflicted about the Conflict: Say Cheese!

I heard an interesting call on talk radio this morning, pertaining to the events and photos from Abu Ghraib prison.

The gist of it was this: at least back in the Viet Nam era, soldiers were put through some training (called “SEAR”, I think he said) regarding what might happen if they were captured by the enemy.  The first thing that happened in this training was that they were stripped naked.  Then they were physically beaten. Then they suffered other humiliating experiences intended to “break” them (or since this was training, to help them prevent being broken).

Not that it excuses the atrocities here, but if this sort of training is taken to heart, then it also does the reverse and trains people in what to do when being put in charge of prisoners of war.

Understanding the causes of events like this is the best way to prevent them from recurring.

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Updated on January 25, 2011

SERE Training: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape