Reflections  

The decline and fall of everything — It is said that every generation, upon reaching middle age, begins to think the world is going to hell and society is falling apart.

Who would have thought that we'd be the generation that was correct? — Ross Levatter

Europa über Alles — A British newspaper reports that European Commission President Romano Prodi claimed an Olympic victory for the European Union, adding that EU athletes might all perform under the EU flag at Beijing in 2008. By piling up all the gold medals won by European nations, the EU came out as the big winner with 82 gold medals, absolutely trouncing the United States, which won only 35.

I'm watching for Mr. Prodi to merge all their separate European seats at the United Nations into one. Or perhaps the United States should be allowed 50 seats, one for each sovereign state. — Tim Slagle

Suits of armor, medieval and modern — During the late Middle Ages knights and dukes and other members of the feudal aristocracy had suits of armor. They didn't wear them into battle, because they were so heavy and cumbersome that the warrior who wore one wouldn't have been able to move. They were reserved for display, for ceremonial occasions and ancestral halls. Even in tournaments a jouster had to be lifted up onto his horse with pulleys or lowered from a platform because his armor was so ponderous and immobilizing. It didn't matter. Suits of armor conferred prestige. They were symbols of invulnerability. During troubled and dangerous times, well-off people go in for useless but ostentatious, overawing elaborations of defensive prowess and impenetrability.

Today, for instance, we have SUVs. They're huge, heavy, and cumbersome, and they don't make their owners safer because they overturn easily and are harder than ordinary cars to maneuver and stop. It doesn't matter. They're suits of armor, symbols of invulnerability.

So is the Bush administration. Its cumbersome, heavy-handed, lead-footed foreign policy hasn't made the country any safer. It's made it less safe, because the immobilizing obsession with Iraq meant that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda escaped being encircled and finished off in Afghanistan, as American troops and resources and intelligence units were reserved for or transferred to Iraq, where the occupation has created new Islamic fundamentalist enemies and recruited new members for the old ones. It doesn't matter. Bush's unwieldy, rigid, ironclad, crusading apparatus, his boasting and "Mission Accomplished" posturing, are for display only. The point is to look invulnerable, not to be able to maneuver and change direction. It's impressive and useless, just as suits of armor were impressive and useless.

That's why Bush seems (in mid-September, when this is being written) likely to defeat Kerry, who offers roughly the same dead-weight, dead-ahead, dead-end strategy in Iraq, but in a muffled, muddled version that's like the suit without the armor, an immobilizing straitjacket of cautious hesitation and clumsy self-contradiction. Bush's invincible and inflexible obliviousness seems better suited to our armor-suited national mood. — Eric Kenning

Joint Efforts — eattle voters last September approved Initiative 75, making adult possession and use of small amounts of marijuana the "lowest law enforcement priority" for the city. I have anecdotal evidence that the police are taking that to heart — a little good news to make campaign season almost bearable.

A friend of mine attended the Seattle Hempfest on Aug. 21Ð22. The organizers of such events must formally prohibit smoking marijuana there, but, of course, many attendees smoke anyway. My friend emailed me about the experience a couple of weeks later:

"The police had a great relationship with the attendees. Just about everyone was smoking — pipes, bongs, joints, etc. — the police ignored it. It was the first time I actually felt like the police were there to protect and to serve. They were there to make sure nobody took advantage of us in our stoned state, and they also made sure no other drugs except pot were used." — Patrick Quealy

May the nobler Yalie win — Burke's Peerage, the British keeper of all things aristocratic and royal, has predicted that John Kerry will win the election in November because he has more royal connections then Dubya. The Bushes are no slouches when it comes to royal connections, having more than Al Gore and claiming kinship with Britain's Queen Elizabeth, as well as Henry III and Charles II. Through his mother, Rosemary Forbes, however, Kerry is supposedly related to all the royal houses of Europe, as well as Ivan the Terrible of Russia, the Shahs of Persia — and Henry II, Henry III, and Richard the Lionhearted of England.

Harold Brooks-Baker, director of Burke's, claims that in the last 42 elections the "candidate with the most royal genes and chromosomes has always won the November presidential elections." And you thought we threw out the kings in 1776. — Alan W. Bock

Dan Rather = George Bush? — On Sept. 8, CBS News made public various letters it claimed were written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, George W. Bush's commanding officer in the National Guard, that proved that Bush had shirked his duties in the Guard.

The authenticity of the documents was challenged within a few hours, and during the next few days, evidence mounted that more or less proved that the documents were faked: the documents themselves seem to have been produced using Microsoft Word, which hadn't been invented yet; the documents appeared to have been produced by a typewriter or printer that hadn't been invented yet; Col. Killian's wife (he died in 1984) claimed that her husband didn't type and didn't produce them, a fact later verified by his secretary; the officer who Col. Killian's letter claims had pressured him to "sugar coat" Bush's record had died a year and a half before the letters were allegedly written; and the experts who CBS claim authenticated the documents deny having done so. None of this stopped CBS (mostly in the person of Dan Rather, who had broken the story) from standing by its story as the evidence undermining it piled up.

In sum, CBS published a story of extremely questionable accuracy after making little effort to verify it and enthusiastically defended its authenticity even after the documents had been mostly discredited. CBS News in general and Dan Rather in particular have harbored a long-time antipathy toward George Bush, and it seems overwhelmingly likely that this provided them the motivation to run with the story, not only without their customary due diligence, but even after their own experts questioned the authenticity of the evidence.

This is a familiar story. It is an all-too-common human weakness to subject evidence that supports one's beliefs to less scrutiny than evidence that runs contrary to one's beliefs, or even to accept very shaky evidence in support of one's beliefs. News organizations are supposed to know better. They are supposed to check everything thoroughly. As Rather himself once said, "You trust your mother, but you cut the cards." Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, deserve to be fired in disgrace. And if CBS News wants to regain its credibility, they will be.

Most Americans are familiar with another such case, one that has far more expensive consequences than CBS' extreme negligence regarding the authenticity of these documents. It is a case that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

I refer, of course, to the "evidence" that the Bush administration put together to support its contention that Saddam Hussein was a terrorist threat to America and had been involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The evidence that Saddam was a terrorist who posed a credible threat to America was, of course, Bush's charge that he possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction and the means of deploying them. This was questioned at the time, but it was impossible for critics to challenge the evidence successfully because Bush kept it secret on national security grounds. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq without any deployment of WMDs by Iraq all but proved that Iraq had no deployable WMDs, and the fact that the subsequent 18 months of searching for WMDs produced no more evidence than O.J. Simpson's search for the "real killers" of his ex-wife left the Bush administration in a situation where it had little choice but to admit that it was wrong.

The evidence for Saddam's involvement with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was even less credible. All the intelligence proved was that some low-level people associated with Saddam had had some contact with some low-level people associated with al Qaeda. Hell, I have a friend who has had contact with Donald Rumsfeld, whose underlings tortured prisoners in Iraq. Does that implicate me in that torture?

Why did Bush believe, as he claims he did, in the authenticity of the evidence against Saddam? As I argued in these pages, Bush's prejudice against Saddam, which amounted to outright hatred, not only motivated him to believe any evidence against Saddam that he was offered, it also motivated his minions in the intelligence community to do the same in order to advance their careers. Knowing this, he ought to have been especially critical of such evidence. But of course, he really wanted to invade Iraq, and he was in no mood to question any rationale anyone offered for doing so.

What's interesting is that Bush and CBS have responded in the same way. They defended the authenticity of their evidence even as evidence undermining it accumulated. When the evidence against them became so massive that further defense was laughable, both abandoned their claim that their evidence was authentic, but stuck by their conclusion. Bush admitted that he had been "fooled" by bad intelligence, but maintained that the conclusion the phony evidence supported — that Saddam was a bad guy whom we ought to take out — was nevertheless true. Likewise, Dan Rather all but admitted that the evidence was fake, but held that the underlying story — that Bush had not served nobly in the National Guard — was nevertheless true.

In a rational world, George Bush would be fired from his job, just as Dan Rather should be fired from his. Unfortunately, the situation is not so simple. The only way to fire George Bush is to elect John Kerry in his place — and not only did Kerry support Bush in his war, but Kerry continues to insist that even if he had known at the time that the evidence was faked, he'd still have supported the invasion.

Such is how democracy works in the world's greatest country. — R.W. Bradford

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