sneeze guard

1) Rumsfeld’s rhetoric

When asked if he enjoyed the ballet in some Eastern European country he had visited, he responded: “I’m from Chicago.” That made me nostalgic for some of the semi-tough, laconic white Chicago guys I met.

He wrote this in yesterday’s WSJ, which means he is either uninformed that the administration is currently mired in Rovegate or he just doesn’t give a fuck about the obvious cross-parallels:

As America adjusts to this new Information Age, I suggest the following notions as part of the discussion:

• First, government officials will need to communicate clearly and often. When a government official is found to have put out information that is not exactly correct or fully complete -- even in good faith -- it plays into the hands of our enemies, who seize on any fault to try to harm the American system.

• Second, a healthy culture of communication and transparency between government and the public needs to be established. Due to the ubiquitous sources of information and access, most things -- controversial or not -- become known eventually. But they become known unhelpfully when they dribble out piecemeal or in highly selective excerpts -- as opposed to being presented early, in full and with appropriate context.

This openness, however, does not obviate the necessity of protecting the secrecy of confidential information that, if revealed, could harm the security of the U.S. While I have long believed that too much material is classified across the federal government as a general rule, an increasingly cavalier attitude towards sensitive information in various quarters can put the lives of our troops at correspondingly increasing risk.

Maybe Rumsfeld seriously dislikes Karl Rove and sees him as the kind of scheming, duplicitous, slightly effeminate bottom feeder that gives stout, stern Chicago guys like himself a bad name. Anyway.

2) It seems as though those of us who noticed the basic logical conundrum of Over There in the Desert are vindicated. I have a friend at home, someone who does not follow politics, doesn’t really concern himself with what’s going on in world, plays a lot of sports, smokes a lot of pot, makes a lot of bets, is happy with his station in life, and in general is one of the most decent human beings I’ve ever met. A few months after the war had started, we stood on a porch smoking cigs in the cold. He turned to me and said, out of the blue, “I think the only time I would fight a war is if it happened right here” and he pointed to the town we grew up in. This seemed particularly relevant at the time, and whatever credence you give to these reports, it makes sense to think that defense of homeland, energized by religious zealotry and framed within the “Americans are Jews from a different continent” paranoia, would push otherwise inactive young angry men into action. It makes SO MUCH SENSE. “Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorism” because the people who say it from podiums and the people who they represent made a decision to make it a breeding ground. But I’m just another voice, preaching to one choir and condemned as someone not worthy of entering the church by the other. So that's that.

more to come later, including notes on a wedding and the vicissitudes of MPLS urban planning (the city with a saint for a twin is what MPLS is)