Trump Declares Unwise and Illegal War with Iran

Donald Trump claims that the U.S. has bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, effectively declaring a war without the congressional authorization required by the Constitution. Israel had already started bombing Iran (leading to Iranian counterstrikes), and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump for his support. There's much more to come, but The Guardian and the Associated Press have some early coverage. Trump's move sadly isn't surprising, but it's unwise, illegal, and deeply concerning.

The BBC has a good recap (and ABC a shorter one) of the nuclear deal brokered with Iran by the U.S. and other nations back in 2015 (during the Obama administration). The deal stayed in place until Trump undermined it during his first administration. The deal was working, although if you do a Web search, it's interesting that many of the results are conservative organizations claiming that it was a disaster.

As with the Iraq War started in 2003 by the George W. Bush administration, this war was not necessary. And only Congress has the right to declare war, even if that's often been ignored in actual practice for U.S. military attacks for decades now.

Trump posted about the attacks today:

Notice the all-caps "NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!" and the bizarre, business correspondence thank you directly after bragging about dropping bombs (and starting a war). This reads like a child punching someone and then screaming he can't be hit back, not to mention something straight out of George Orwell's novel, 1984:

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

Bred for Circuses

Conservatives and Republicans can win few arguments honestly on the merits; most of their policies are awful for the vast majority of Americans and benefit only a select few, typically the rich and powerful. Conservative positions tend to be unpopular, too. Rather than change their policies, conservatives choose to lie constantly and shamelessly, and to stoke the worst impulses of their base. Key to these dynamics is ignoring matters of truth and fact, as well as any serious discussion of greater principles about how our country should work. Instead, they try to reduce everything to my team against your team, us against them. The Republican Party is aided in this by a large block of rabid, authoritarian conservatives and a propaganda network eager to feed the faithful the latest two minutes hate, 24/7. Outsized media personas play a critical role in this strategy. ("Conservative" and "Republican" are pretty interchangeable in this post, but for more on that, see the first link above.)

Conservatives and Republicans are also aided, however, by shallow political coverage by mainstream media outlets that far too often withhold essential context from their audiences by refusing to fact check or call out lies, by pretending policy doesn't matter, by pretending both major American political parties are basically the same and both sides are equally to blame for our political problems, and that any deeper look is pointless and/or partisan. Shallow coverage is cheaper to produce and avoids offending some viewers (while aggravating others), and is also seen as neutral and savvy by some reporters. Unfortunately, it's lousy for informing citizens and thus bad for democracy. Propaganda typically demonizes the perceived opposition unfairly, whereas shallow political coverage is loath to call out even clear wrongdoing or hypocrisy by one party. Thus both lying and gutlessness reduce the national political discourse to superficial, bad sports coverage of two competing political teams and to treating important matters as mere entertainment, a sitcom, a circus.

We've seen all these dynamics play out in the impeachment hearings on Donald Trump, related press conferences and media coverage of all of it. During the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, several observers noted that Republicans seemed less interested in making coherent arguments or convincing the general populace of their cause than creating video clips for Fox News to run for the conservative base. After the hearings moved from the intelligence committee chaired by Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) to the judiciary committee, Republicans pulled the stunt of putting Schiff on a milk carton poster, saying he was missing because he rejected their call to appear as a witness. (Republicans also asked to call the anonymous whistleblower yet again.) Schiff rejected the request, instead pointing to the intelligence committee's 300-page report and the evidence it covered, and added:

There is nothing to testify about. I think if the President or his allies in the Senate persist it means they are not serious about what they are doing. What would I offer in terms of testimony, that I heard Dr. [Fiona] Hill in open hearing say such and such? That is not pertinent. The only reason for them to go through with this is to mollify the President and that is not a good reason to try to call a member of Congress as a witness.

Trump has repeatedly, angrily expressed a desire to prosecute Schiff for paraphrasing him, but has run into the small problems that that's not illegal and Trump is not a dictator. Judiciary chair Jerold Nadler (D-NY) unsurprisingly sided with Schiff about testifying, and in his letter to Republicans, Nadler cited the "independent evidence" for the conclusions of the report and issues initially raised by the whistleblower. Nadler also reiterated for the umpteenth time concerns about witness intimidation and threats of retaliation by Trump and other conservatives against the whistleblower. As for the report itself, Professor Heather Cox Richardson, who's delivered excellent analysis on the impeachment hearings and related stories, offered up a nice summary on 12/3/19:

The big news today was that the House Intelligence Committee released its report on its investigation into the Ukraine scandal that is at the heart of the impeachment case against Trump. Although the report was long, it had two very clear points: the facts against Trump prove that he solicited a bribe—wording designed to show that the scandal meets the Constitution’s threshold for impeachment—and that Trump obstructed justice in his attempts to stonewall Congress and intimidate witnesses. Obstruction of justice is a crime; it is what took Nixon down in 1974.

The report lays out that the Ukraine scandal is at heart an attempt to rig the 2020 election and destroy our democracy with the help of a foreign country. It points out that this is a pattern for Trump, who benefited from Russian aid in 2016 and who has openly called for help from China as well as Ukraine before the upcoming election. The report notes that Trump’s call with Zelensky took place the day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified in public, apparently convincing Trump he was no longer in danger of being nabbed for working with Russia in 2016, and was willing to try a similar scheme again.

The report also notes that the Founders worried about precisely this behavior, and that if it is not checked, democracy is over. The House Intelligence Committee report is a remarkably clear, concise, and powerful document.

For their part, the White House ignored all the facts and relied instead on disinformation. . . .

These are grave matters, but Republicans do not want to discuss the facts and principles driving all serious discussions of impeachment. Likewise, Republicans showed little interest that intelligence committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA), who led the Trump defense in the first set of impeachment hearings, allegedly was part of the Ukraine scandal himself to some degree. As of late November, Republicans had offered at least 22 excuses for Trump (or by another count, 64), many of them contradictory. This blunderbuss technique is a reliable sign of bullshitting and bad faith. Similarly, the Republicans' competing impeachment report "is a series of red herrings." (As of this writing, the House has impeached Trump, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has vowed to coordinate with the White House during any trial in the Senate, further suggestion that the fix is in and the Republican-majority Senate will not convict Trump, regardless of the merits of the charges.) Meanwhile, Trump's unhinged letter to Nancy Pelosi frames the entire impeachment process as driven by a personal vendetta against Trump, not the serious matter of upholding core principles of the U.S. Constitution that it is. Trump's conceit is that Schiff, Pelosi, and every single person who's said something critical of him, given factual evidence harmful to him or moved to curtail his power simply dislikes him personally versus, say, being motivated to uphold the rule of law and think of the good of the country and other higher principles. Trump and the Republicans cannot win an honest, substantive discussion. So they need to reduce everything to: Their guy doesn't like our guy. Just because he's our guy. Fight for our guy. Fight for the team. Attack the enemy.

These dynamics are not remotely new, even if they've become more prevalent not just in politician's arguments but in the political coverage itself. Back in 2006, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg discussed the theatricality of political commentary, even comparing the choice of political talk show figures to sitcom casting. This was back when Ann Coulter was arguably at the nadir of her awfulness, selling shock value and viciousness, and getting plenty of coverage from mainstream media outlets in addition to her usual support from Fox News and other conservative entities. What Nunberg describes as political "smut" overlaps with behavior we might now call trolling, and Coulter was one of the most successful practitioners at the time:

Take Ann Coulter's recent description of the 9/11 widows as self-obsessed witches who were enjoying their husbands' deaths. As calumnies go, it doesn't have a patch on the things people were saying in the 1864 election, when the Democrats called Lincoln a leering buffoon, and Horace Greeley accused the Democrats of stealing the votes of dead Union soldiers. But it's only in the current age that remarks like those could turn someone into a media celebrity who's invited to appear on Jay Leno and the Today Show to repeat her choicest remarks for the delectation or outrage of their viewers.

Coulter's celebrity is a good measure of what has become of political discussion. You'd scarcely describe her as a political thinker, no more than you'd describe Simon Cowell as an critic of the arts. But like Cowell, she has an unerring gift for media theatrics. It isn't just her penchant for making snarky or outrageous remarks. Plenty of people do that without being invited onto the Today Show, and in fact Coulter doesn't get a lot of national attention for her run-of-the-mill ruminations about giving rat poison to Justice Stevens or fragging John Murtha. But the remark about the 9/11 widows was irresistible for its brazen and gratuitous tastelessness and the obvious pleasure Coulter took in consternation she created.

Is Coulter is sincere about the things she says? That's a silly question, like asking whether schoolchildren are sincere in the taunts they throw at each other across the school yard. But that doesn't make her a satirist, as her defenders like to claim -- usually with the implication that her literal-minded liberal critics don't get the joke.

Satire depicts things as grotesque in order to make them seem ridiculous -- what Stephen Colbert does in his Bill O'Reilly persona or Christopher Buckley does with the pointed caricatures of Thank You For Smoking. But Coulter isn't actually sending anybody up -- not herself, certainly, and not the targets of her remarks. Her fans may enjoy hearing her talk about poisoning Justice Stevens or say that it's a pity Timothy McVeigh didn't park his truck next to the New York Times building. But that's not because the remarks make either Stevens or New York Times seem particularly ridiculous. It's because Coulter seems to be able to get away with unbridled aggression by presenting it as mere mischief, leaving her critics looking prim and humorless. ("Perhaps her book should have been called 'Heartless,'" said Hillary Clinton after Coulter's remarks about the widows, inviting the response, "Oh lighten up, girl.")

That rhetorical maneuver doesn't really have a name, but it's a close relative of what we think of as smut. In the strict sense, of course, smut is the leering innuendo that veils sexual aggression. But in a broader sense, smut can be any kind of malice that pretends to be mere naughtiness. It might be a leering vulgarity, a racial epithet, or simply a venomous insult -- what makes it smut is that it's tricked out as humor, so that if anyone claims to be offended you can answer indignantly, "Can't you take a joke?"

In that broad sense, smut can sometimes be innocuous fun. It's a staple of sitcoms, in what you could think of as a Wooo! moment. That's the moment when a character who's comically malicious or catty (think Betty White, Rhea Perlman, Joseph Marcell) makes a remark that's just offensive or risqué enough to brush the limits of taste, and the studio audience reacts by saying "Woooo!!"

The political talk shows traffic in these moments, too -- not surprising, considering how much those shows owe to the classic sitcom. When you think of the most successful practitioners of the genre, whether Coulter, O'Reilly, or James Carville, there isn't a one of them who couldn't be the model for a recurring character on Cheers or Drew Carey -- the waspish virago, the bombastic blowhard, the sly yokel.

And as on the sitcoms, the drama of the political talk show is character-driven rather than plot-driven. Watching O'Reilly or Hannity and Colmes, you can't help recalling the bickering on All in the Family, where politics was always just a pretext for the clash of personalities. It doesn't matter whether the ostensible issue is the massacre at Haditha or an increase in wild bachelorette parties; it's going to be reduced to grist for the eternal squabble between liberals and conservatives -- not as adherents of opposing political philosophies, but more as distinctive political genders. ("Who are these parents who allow their kids to sleep with Michael Jackson?," Alan Colmes asked a couple of years back, and Sean Hannity answered, "Liberals.")

Coulter and Trump share a great deal in terms of a bullying style, but also in their knack for nabbing mainstream coverage and validation, in large part by crafting a character to sell, a media persona. (Coulter thankfully gets less attention these days. Incidentally, Coulter has criticized Trump for not building a border wall and not being harsh enough on immigration, but says she will vote for him anyway. My most in-depth post on Coulter is this one, although some links are broken.) Coulter, like many conservative political commentators, has always been light on substance or outright rejects it. Instead, the key selling point for such figures has always been viciousness and 'owning the libs,' to the delight of their audience. Coulter is now a less popular conservative belligerent than, say, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Tomi Lahren and perennial ragemonger Rush Limbaugh (among others), but currently, they're all eclipsed by the biggest conservative troll of them all, Donald Trump.

As we've covered before, Trump's main selling point to the conservative base is spite; he promises to hurt the people they fear and dislike. He's a bigot, and racism and bigotry form a key part of his appeal to his fans. The recording of him bragging about sexual assault did not sink his presidential campaign and at least 25 women have accused him of sexual misconduct. Trump constantly lies; as of October 2019, he'd told at least 13,435 false or misleading claims over 993 days. In 2016 shortly after being elected, Trump paid $25 million to settle fraud cases against Trump University, a business that one of its own employees described as "a fraudulent scheme." Trump also recently paid a $2 million settlement for using charity funds supposedly going to military veterans for personal use instead, including buying a portrait of himself. (Grifting runs in the family; son Eric Trump's charity misused funds meant to go to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which predominantly serves kids with cancer.) Imagine the conservative outrage if Barack Obama or really any Democrat had done a fraction of this, yet most of them give Trump a pass.

Trump's image as a successful businessman is an utter fiction constructed by Trump himself, aided by his late father and by fawning media coverage. He's not a business genius, or even a competent businessman – he just plays one on TV. As The New York Times reported in 2016:

[Trump's] casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders. . . .

All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.

In 2018, The New York Times further reported that rather than being largely a self-made man, Trump inherited at least $413 million from his father, and his entire family has enriched itself with possibly illegal schemes. In 2019, the Times reported that Trump lost over a billion dollars over a decade, losing more money than any other individual in the United States in that time period while simultaneously selling himself as a great dealmaker. Trump's retorts to these reports were unconvincing; as The New Yorker's John Cassidy put it, Trump stands revealed as the biggest loser. Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank further undermine any claims of actual business acumen versus his ability to scam lenders. Trump may not actually be a billionaire and almost certainly has less money than he pretends, but nonetheless, he'd have more money if he had simply invested in the stock market than attempted all his deals. (As people have joked, Trump has lost money selling booze, steaks and gambling to Americans. Who does that?)

Conservatives sure love their macho daddy figures, from those fake cowboys, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, to that fake, successful businessman, Donald Trump. The book The Art of the Deal played a critical role in selling the myth of Trump, but its deeply regretful ghostwriter Tony Schwartz has explained how he made Trump appear far more thoughtful, competent and ethical than he actually is. The Art of the Deal in turn helped Trump get an even larger vehicle for mythmaking, the NBC TV show, The Apprentice. As The New Yorker article "How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump As an Icon of American Success" explains:

"The Apprentice" portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake," [producer Jonathon] Braun told me. "He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king." Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, "We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise."

(For more on the mythic Trump created on The Apprentice, see The New Yorker again, The New York Times, Fortune and People's piece on Fisher Stevens' documentary on Trump, The Confidence Man.)

Donald Trump is probably one of the worst businessmen in human history and also possibly the most successful con man. His image as a great businessman and dealmaker is a complete fraud. About the only authentic things about him are his vanity, bigotry, greed, proud ignorance and spite. Yet the conservative base loves him and congressional Republicans loyally defend him despite any misgivings.

Mainstream media outlets have often struggled to cover Trump, as well as conservative and Republican perfidy in general. In contrast to some of the excellent investigative journalism mentioned above, daily news coverage of political clashes often descends to a "he said, she said" level. For example, Dan Froomkin's piece criticizing a New York Times article on impeachment is aptly titled, "In the war on truth, the press can't be an innocent bystander." Fact-checking and calling out liars is essential, but often doesn't occur. Likewise, as we've mentioned before, "coverage on the 2016 presidential race almost entirely ignored policy issues and focused on shallow issues with false balance." Such coverage decisions help candidates with bad positions, slim policy portfolios or a habit of lying. False equivalencies and "both siderism" also remain persistent scourges to good journalism, but rather than delve into that here, I'll once again link past posts by digby, driftglass, alicublog, Balloon Juice, LGM and my own archives.

Consider entertainment programming – and news sold as entertainment – and the picture grows even worse. NBC created The Apprentice and played a central role in creating the myth of Trump that enabled him not only to run for president but win. NBC also let Trump host Saturday Night Live even after cutting ties with him over bigoted comments. And NBC and other mainstream outlets have long validated Trump and earlier toxic figures such as Ann Coulter. Trump received more than $5.9 billion of free media coverage during the election, over twice the amount received by Hillary Clinton. In 2016, then-CBS chairman Les Moonves made some infamous remarks about the "circus":

Donald Trump’s candidacy might not be making America great, CBS Chairman Les Moonves said Monday, but it’s great for his company.

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump's presidential bid.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," Moonves said, noting, "[t]here's a lot of money in the marketplace."

The 2016 campaign is a "circus," he remarked, but "Donald's place in this election is a good thing."

Moonves' later claim that he was joking was unconvincing. Trump was a horrible candidate who frequently behaved vilely, but he was a showman, so CBS, NBC, and other outlets gave Trump tons of coverage, some negative, but not really that critical, and certainly not substantive, given their scant discussion of policy. They rejected sound editorial judgment and shamefully if predictably chose short-term profits over a sense of civic duty to meaningfully inform their audiences, especially because they thought Clinton would win and their behavior could not affect the election. But it most certainly did.

Worse than the mainstream outlets, though, are propaganda outlets, most notably Fox News. Fox News has always scored poorly in terms of factual accuracy, but it's moved beyond being a conservative news outlet to being outright propaganda, comfortable to flat-out lie. The same is true of Republicans in government, and the two work closely together. See, for example, Jane Mayer in The New Yorker on "The Making of the Fox News White House" and Greg Sargent in The Washington Post on how "McConnell’s awful Hannity interview shows power of Fox News’s disinformation." In a similar vein, The Post reported, "A Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the FBI investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign rebutted conservatives’ accusations that top FBI officials were driven by political bias to illegally spy on Trump advisers but also found broad and “serious performance failures” requiring major changes." Attorney General William Barr, a Republican party loyalist, has undercut his own department and directly contradicted key findings of the report, as covered in Sargent's piece, "William Barr’s deceptions are more dangerous than you think" and Wonkette's "Just When You Thought You Couldn't Respect Bill Barr Any Less." Wired covered Barr and much more in "Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security." Digby's commented on similar dynamics in "The Nonsense Ecosystem" (adopting a phrase from Daniel Dale) and many other posts. Fox News and the entire right-wing media ecosystem pose a serious and growing problem to democracy. As several people have noted, if Nixon had had Fox News, he might not have been impeached.

Authoritarian conservatism plays a pivotal role in making the propaganda work; Fox News and similar outlets cater to an audience eager to hate their scapegoats du jour. In 2016, then-candidate Trump bragged that "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." He considered it praise for his supporters' loyalty; it was instead an accurate and chilling description of unquestioning obedience and authoritarianism (and Trump's megalomania). One of Trump's lawyers has actually argued in court that as president, Trump could indeed shoot someone in 5th Avenue and get away with it (shades of Bush lawyer John Yoo). The transcript of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Zelensky is damning, especially with the added context that has been provided by later reporting and the impeachment hearings. Yet Trump and his allies have shouted to "READ THE TRANSCRIPT!" as if it exonerates him. Trump even held a rally where supporters were wearing t-shirts (presumably distributed by Trump's team) saying "READ THE TRANSCRIPT!" Naturally, as The Daily Show discovered in a great segment covering a later rally, most Trump supporters have not read the transcript and were not familiar with the key takeaways, even though some said – without irony or self-awareness – that reading the transcript, not being a sheep and being an independent thinker were all important. They simply believe what they're told, and do so gladly it's from the right authority figures, whether that's Trump himself, Fox News talking heads or other conservative figures. It's completely Orwellian; they will eagerly believe that black is white and insist that their chosen political team is always in the right. (Who are you going to believe, Trump and Fox News or your lying eyes?)

Trump was clearly unfit for office before the election and has provided overwhelming evidence of his unfitness since. The misdeeds for which he's being impeached may not even be the worst things he's done (and who knows what else will come out), but they're certainly sufficient grounds for removing him from office. The conservative base, Republican voters and congressional Republicans simply do not care. Nearly 90% of self-described Republicans voted for Trump in 2016, and assuming he's still in office by the time of the 2020 election, similar percentages will likely vote for him again, despite any disapproval they express. As of this writing, Trump has been impeached but the articles of impeachment have not been sent to the Senate. The Democratic presidential candidate for 2020 has not been chosen and the presidential election has not occurred. Despite some uncertainties about the year(s) ahead, we can make some reasonable predictions, among them that conservatives and Republicans will not behave honorably and it would be folly to expect otherwise.

Conservatives tend to be bullies with power and whiners without it. They've constructed alternative realities with alternative facts, where they can believe what they want and feel simultaneously persecuted (and thus righteously aggrieved) and superior. Some religious conservatives (ostensibly Christian) will even cite ancient Roman persecution of Christians, that they were thrown to lions in the arena. There's some truth but mostly myth to that tale, but regardless, some religious conservatives will apocalyptically invoke the image as a future reality should "socialism" take hold (via a Bernie Sanders presidency, for instance). The truth is that conservatives thrill for combat with their chosen foes, and that they'd just choose new scapegoats if they ever succeeded in eliminating the old ones. They don't believe in treating others as they would like be treated, and certainly don't believe in turning the other cheek. They are pro-spectacle, anti-substance, pro-circus; authoritarian conservatives are particularly bred for circuses. They don't truly object to the idea of throwing people to the lions; they just want the power to choose the victims.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

Knowing the Difference

Here's a tale told in three videos. We'll start with some recent town hall furor captured by TPM (via Sadly, No):

I know that years down the road, I don’t want my children coming to me and asking me, ‘Mom, why didn’t you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don’t know, toilet paper or anything?’ I don’t want to have to tell them I didn’t do anything. As a normal citizen, the most I feel like I can do is come to this town hall meeting.

“The country is slowly being ripped apart,” said Katy Abram, who identified herself as someone who didn’t care about politics until the last few years. “It scares the life out of me.”

Abram was one of 30 people selected to ask a question to Specter. When she got up, she said, in part, “It’s not about health care … It’s about the systematic dismantling of this country … I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country. I want to restore this country to what it was under the Constitution.”

First they came for the grandmothers, and I did not speak up, for I did not have a grandmother. Then they came for the toilet paper… Those French-loving Democrats start by winning elections, then impose death panels, internment camps, and bidets.

Lawrence O'Donnell had the same woman, Katy Abram, on Hardball (via Brilliant at Breakfast):

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

On the one hand, they way she talks about war – war, ya know, where people die and little things like that - makes me feel like pounding my head repeatedly against the wall. On the other, I will give her some credit for occasionally admitting that on some matters - well, many - she just doesn't know. She's not an informed citizen, nor has she tried to become informed, and she sure as hell should not be running the country. But Bill Kristol, John Bolton and the gang would never admit that they didn't know what the hell they were talking about, nor are they typically honest about their agendas. (Jezebel has an interesting take on Abram, too, and includes The Daily Show's clip on her.)

Lawrence O'Donnell deals with Abram fairly gently while trying to engage her on the basis for her views, and I think that's the most effective approach, especially since she's not belligerent. In a one-on-one situation with real people versus professional hacks, that seems like the way to go. It's also not a bad idea on the national level. As it turns out, O'Donnell worked with a guy named Aaron Sorkin who wrote a relevant scene:



The bully pulpit is powerful, and using it is a good idea given such a vile misinformation campaign against health care reform. The Sorkin scene expresses a yearning for an informed citizenry. It'd be nice if that could prevail over the loons who think they're in Red Dawn but acting like they're in The Lord of the Flies (or the mob in The Ox-Bow Incident, or The Manchurian Candidate, or…).

Real life is generally more complex than fiction, of course. Steve Benen has a very good post on five basic types of opponents to health care reform. The hacks and zealots aren't reachable, but others are. There are legitimate debates to be had about health care on top of that, and keeping pressure on Grassley, Baucus, Enzi and others is important. Yet currently, it seems like a big fight just to get the public discussion back to the realm of basic sanity. That's not accidental. But having more informed, interested, basically sane people at town hall events would help.

Firedoglake has a search engine for town hall events and a widget for passing the information on.


Update: Via the Hullabaloo comment thread and others, here's the Daily Howler take and a Daily Kos diary on Abram. Make your own call. For what it's worth, I'm less interested in Abram specifically and more concerned generally about the group Benen calls "The Dupes" in his breakdown, the people "who stand to benefit from reform, but are skeptical because they don't know who's telling the truth and who isn't." To my mind, that's a huge problem on a host of issues, although it sure ain't the only one.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

 

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2008

("If inferior people have 4 children while higher-quality people have 2, this is what will happen." [1])

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day (the similar Yom HaShoah falls on May 2 this year). The 2006 entry covered book and film recommendations (feel free to pass on any more), while the 2007 entry centered on the poetry of Charlotte Delbo. (In December, we also tackled Holocaust denial.)

Dave Neiwert has helpfully compiled all his posts on Jonah Goldberg's Newspeak tract, Liberal Fascism, with more on the way. Considering Goldberg's goal of "muddying the waters" on fascism, and considering that the mainstream media and Goldberg's fellow conservatives haven't eviscerated, debunked and mocked him and his work as they should, it seems especially important to recollect the truth.

This year, I wanted to take a look at the Nazi's T4 "euthanasia" program, which, starting in the summer of 1939, focused on killing the mentally and physically disabled. Taking its name from the building where the program's offices resided, T4 was in many ways a precursor of the larger scale death camps and "the Final Solution." T4 in turn grew out of a program of forced sterilization for those deemed "incurable" or otherwise undesirable. It's a chilling example of an attempt to earn radical ideas mainstream acceptance through gradual steps. (The Overton Window relates to this.) This post is by no means definitive, but may still be useful.

The Wiki entries for "Action T4" and Nazi Eugenics aren't bad for a basic framework. The lecture page for "Eugenics and Euthanasia" by Professor Harold Marcuse of UCSB provides a good overview, as does the article "Euthanasia in the Third Reich: Lessons for Today?" by J. A. Emerson Vermaat for Ethics & Medicine. A number of books focus on the subject, including "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," and that's without even delving into the eugenics and sterilization movements of Sweden, Great Britain, America and other countries. The film Europa, Europa has a memorable, funny scene on these issues. I'll also recommend once again Conspiracy, a superbly cast film about the Wannsee Conference, where the details of the Final Solution were disseminated.

Best of all on the T4 program may be a 45-min 1993 Discovery Channel piece, Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich, that I've mentioned before. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be commercially available currently (but at some point in the future, perhaps I can post clips). The special, apparently repackaged from the U.K.'s Channel Four, focuses on a half-dozen propaganda films made by the Nazis to sell murder of the "unfit."

Most estimates I've read put the number of people the Nazis sterilized at roughly 350,000, while estimates of the T4 victims murdered range from 75,000 to 250,000. Selling Murder interviews Klara Nowak, who was labeled as schizophrenic (she wasn't) and offered the choice of sterilization or confinement in a mental home. She chose the former, and although she went on to become a successful nurse, was tormented by the consequences of the Nazi policy, lamenting her lack of children and grandchildren. Perhaps most chilling is that the decision to force this on her was made by her town's "Public Health" officer, who did not even bother to examine her. (On that aspect, I can't help but think of some of the current abuses of our justice system.)

As the Nazis pushed from a policy of sterilization to one of murder (first with children and later with adults), they made a strategic effort to sell this to party members, to those that were to conduct the killing, and to the general public. Hitler decreed that the short film Victims of the Past (Opfer der Vergangenheit,1937) be shown in every movie theater in Germany. As the narrator for Selling Murder observes:

The film claims that disabled people have been allowed to survive thanks by modern medicines, in defiance of the laws of natural selection. Theirs lives are depicted as unproductive and meaningless.

The film also warns, in alarmist fashion, about the threat of a horde of mentally disabled people in the next fifty years if something isn't done immediately. You can see an excerpt below:



[Update: the original video was yanked, but the replacement above seems more complete anyway.]

Victims of the Past officially pushed for sterilization, but its even more ominous agenda is hard to miss. A subsequent film less widely distributed, The Inheritance (Das Erbe), pushed more directly for murder, or in Nazi terms, "mercy killings." Many of the films feature Social Darwinist rhetoric about the strong and the weak. In The Inheritance (Das Erbe), the oh-so wise doctors show a female nurse nature footage of a cat preying on a sick bird, animals fighting, and so on, while the narrator speaks of the dominance of the strong over the "weak" and the need to dispose of the "sick." The nurse happily exclaims the key point: "So animals pursue proper racial policy?" The film also features the requisite disturbing footage of physically and mentally disabled patients in asylums, the other "sick" who must be eliminated.

In these films, as at the Hadamar Clinic, one of the six asylums where the T4 killings were carried out, such phrases as "Existence without life" (Dasein ohne Leben ), "Life unworthy of Life" (lebensunwertes Leben) and "mercy killing" were commonly employed. At Hadamar and the other clinics, the infamous method later used at Auschwitz and other death camps was first employed: telling the victims they were to receive a shower, locking them in, gassing them with carbon monoxide (Zyklon B was used later in the death camps), and then cremating the bodies. At Hadamar, as at many similar sites, a peephole was provided for the doctors and guards.

The Nazis weren't able to keep all of this secret, however, and some prominent critics such as Bishop Galen denounced them publicly (Hitler was apparently furious, but Galen was too well-known to eliminate outright). This was one reason of many for the "Final Solution," deporting victims to the east and Poland, where there was less German scrutiny. Meanwhile, as a former guard explains in Selling Murder, at the Hadamar Clinic they shifted to more subtle methods. The most common was to administer a lethal sedative, and then report that the patient had died of the "flu."


("A Nazi chart incorporating Gergor Mendel's laws of heredity, part of efforts to show how "racially mixed" parents produced "inferior" offspring." [2])

The Nazis destroyed some of the films they made lest they be used in evidence against them, including an actual "snuff" film, showing a single victim, seen through the gas chamber peephole, succumbing to the deadly gas. However, for two of the destroyed films, the makers of Selling Murder found the original scripts and directors' notes, and some of the original footage. The original footage is mostly of physically and mentally disabled patients, the more shocking looking, the better. Some of this footage was shot on asylum grounds outdoors (as in the Victims of the Past clip above), but a fair amount was shot in a studio, with harsh lighting from below in the style of a horror film, to make the patients appear especially grotesque and frightening.

One of the most interesting sections of Selling Murder is their reconstruction of the short film Dasein ohne Leben (Existence without Life) from the director's detailed notes. The film centers on a professor lecturing his young, Aryan students (if anything, the reconstruction is more restrained than most other Nazi films). It was made for those doctors, nurses and guards who would actually implement T4 and perform the killings. The film stresses that it's expensive to keep these disabled people alive, and caring for them is a great indignity to the doctors and nurses who could otherwise lead a "normal" life. The professor ends with an impassioned speech to his students about how, if he were struck down with such a horrible, crippling mental disease, he'd end his own life — and that the majority of parents of "incurables" feel the same way about their children. Thus, the film equates an adult choosing to end his or her own life, with which many viewers could sympathize, with state-sanctioned murder. It's a deliberate blurring the Nazis would continue to use.

The Nazis destroyed another film, Mentally Ill (Geisteskrank), but the script, notes and most of the raw footage remained. It also was made to sell the concept of killing to those charged with implementing T4. The Selling Murder team also reconstructed this film. As the narrator remarks, "Marked top secret, it seeks to portray mass murder in a humane and compassionate light, and as the result of careful scientific deliberation." For me, the most striking passage from the Nazi script is (emphasis mine):

Every reasonable person would prefer death to such an existence, and would not condemn any incurable patient who sought deliverance through death. Our National Socialist state, taking into account the purpose and value of human life, has adopted measures by which those afflicted of an incurable mental illness, can be relieved of their terrible suffering and hellish existence, by a humane and gentle death.

Because we value human life, we must kill these people. Wow. Orwellian Newspeak is often a bit more subtle, but not necessarily more evil.



(A still from the film I Accuse (Ich klage an, 1941))

The most advanced Nazi propaganda film for the T4 program was I Accuse (Ich klage an (1941), a feature film apparently seen by about 15 million viewers. Based on a novel by a man working in the T4 program, the film was directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, well-regarded at the time. Mathias Wieman, one of the three stars in the central love triangle, was apparently well-known for reading a Nativity play at Christmas, and the other two actors had similarly morally upright images.

The Vermaat article linked earlier provides a good synopsis:

Hanna, the beautiful young wife of professor Thomas Heyt, is suffering from multiple sclerosis. Her husband, the newly appointed director of the Anatomical Institute of Munich University, knows that there is little hope for his wife. Hanna first asks her personal physician and family friend Bernhard Lang to end her life should the moment of unbearable suffering occur. Lang refuses and says: ‘I am your best friend, but I am also a doctor, and as such I am a servant of life. Life must be preserved at any cost.’

Hanna then approaches her husband Thomas in a very emotional way: ‘You must help me. I want to remain your Hanna till the very end, I don’t want to become somebody else who is deaf, blind, and idiotic. I wouldn’t endure that. Thomas, if you really love me, promise that you will deliver me from this beforehand.’

Hanna’s medical condition rapidly deteriorates. Thomas and Bernhard realize she has only a few weeks to live. One day they are together at Hanna’s bedside. Hanna kindly asks Bernhard to leave the room. She wants to be alone with Thomas. Bernhard goes to the piano in the living room where he starts to play. While the piano music can be heard in the bedroom Thomas fetches a bottle containing a sedative and poors a fatal dose into Hannna’s glass. Before passing away Hanna says, ‘I feel so happy, I wish I were dead.’ Thomas replies, ‘Death is coming, Hanna.’ Hanna responds, ‘I love you, Thomas.’ ‘I love you, too, Hanna,’ says Thomas.

Bernhard is furious when Thomas informs him what has happened. Domestic servant Bertha then accuses Thomas of murdering his wife and takes him to court. At issue is: can a doctor be allowed to cause the death of a terminally ill patient after that person explicitly requested him to do so? One of the witnesses is Bernhard. He says that he initially also opposed Hanna’s request, but now he sees things from a different perspective. ‘Thomas, you are not a murderer!’ he says loud and clear in the courtroom. Thomas himself then accuses (‘I accuse!’) those doctors and judges who by adhering to strict rules fail to serve the people. ‘Try me! Whatever the outcome, your judgment will be a signal to all those who are in the same position like me! Yes, I confess: I did kill my incurably ill wife, but it was at her request.’

From a propagandistic point of view the film was a success. The Gestapo, the secret state police, reported that the film received much attention in the whole Reich. A Dutch woman living in Düsseldorf at the time told me in an interview: ‘All my colleagues were impressed by the film. They suddenly understood the dilemma of a doctor who is confronted with an incurable disease.’

[Update: Here's some footage from the film. The film's in German, and the narrator's speaking in Italian, but this will give you a taste of its imagery and style:



End update.]

The film was nominated for, and won, a few honors. There are two key aspects that Selling Murder adds to the above synopsis, however. The first is that the courtroom scenes that end the film were an attempt by the Nazis to convince the public of the need to change the laws, to allow the state to kill those it deemed "incurable." While the Nazis had been perpetrating such murders since the summer of 1939, that was not officially occurring. The second key aspect is that the film has a subplot, involving a severely disabled child. Dr. Berhard Lang had earlier saved the child's life, but now the parents want him to perform a "mercy killing" on it. Dr. Lang at first refuses, but after visiting the child again and seeing its dread condition, agrees. Interestingly, the Nazis at the T4 headquarters wanted to include actual footage of a severely deformed child, but the director Liebeneiner felt it would be too shocking.

Yet again, the Nazis sought to equate doctor-assisted suicide, voluntarily chosen, with the systematic murder of those the State deemed undesirable. All the Nazi films try to provoke a strong emotional reaction, then move in with an authoritative message on the course of action that must be taken. I Accuse may be the most interesting because it's the most subtle and effective, but the other films are carefully tuned propaganda pieces as well, more blatant at times, but often quite crafty. The propaganda campaign against the general public to sell the T4 program was evidently not entirely successful, but these "killing films of the Third Reich" do clearly show that the Nazis pursued a deliberate strategy to sell a terrible, inhumane idea. Meanwhile, the methods of mass killing employed during the T4 program were put to horrific use on a larger scale in the death camps. Along with the systematic stripping of the civil rights of Germans, especially Jews, the T4 program played an essential role in the historical slippery slope of increasing Nazi power and greater and greater atrocities.

Discussing the Nazis can be problematic, since any modern comparisons can be overblown. However, eliminationist attitudes are very real, as is the far more common (and sadly acceptable) aggressive defense of inequality by some political groups. Defining what's actually fascist, versus proto-fascist, versus simply bad and dangerous, can be important. Regardless, Holocaust Remembrance Day is primarily about remembering history, those dread events and their many victims, but it can also be an opportunity to stop to think about current political rhetoric, policies and their potential consequences.

[Update: This short documentary clip gives a very interesting and relevant look at Joseph Goebbels' love of Hollywood films and his attitudes on propaganda via film.]


("This poster reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazines of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP." (about 1938)" [3])

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

How to Hear a True War Story

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)


Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam vet and award-winning science fiction writer, told the following story in the introduction to a 1986 sci-fi anthology:

A friend of mine in Vietnam took a sniper’s bullet in the back but his life was saved, at least for the time being, by his inability to spell: the bullet lodged in the dictionary he kept in his rucksack to help with letters home. The incident was written up in the Pacific Stars and Stripes, but somehow the dictionary had become a Bible; it was over his heart, not his spine; and the bullet had stopped on the world “peace.”

I love this story, which I view as three stories in one. The first story is what really happened. The second is the fictitious story. And the third story is about how and why someone decided the first story should be changed.

Veterans will likely appreciate the true story of Haldeman’s buddy. Some of them might take the fatalistic view, but regardless, the story’s ironic, and captures the absurdity of war — poor spelling and dumb luck saved the guy. Other people clearly prefer the second story. For them, it might be hopeful, but it also posits the existence of a God and an order to the universe, even in war. It feels like a reward for faith and trusting some higher power. Personally, I’ve always loved the third story the most, because I feel it encompasses both of the others, and I’m fascinated by the mindset that feels the need to essentially improve on the truth. (When I’ve told someone the "first" story, then told them it was re-written, it doesn’t take much prodding for them to guess the book became the Bible.)

Last year's Letters From Iwo Jima was a stronger film than its complimentary film, Flags of Our Fathers, but both tried to tell true war stories. Flags of Our Fathers especially mirrors Haldeman's tale. Examining the truth and mythology behind the famous photo at Iwo Jima, Flags... tried to tell all “three" stories. Whether it's a war, a specific event, or a film or story about an event, some people definitely prefer that second story to the first, true one.

Haldeman’s tale touches on the nature of truth and storytelling. It’s a theme woven throughout the work of another Vietnam vet, Tim O’Brien. In his extraordinary collection of interrelated short stories, The Things They Carried, he has a piece called “How to Tell a Real War Story.” It relates several striking tales. O’Brien writes:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Throughout the story and the book, O’Brien struggles to convey all the complexities and contradictions of war — and the unwillingness of people back home to really listen to the true stories. Near the end of the piece, he writes:

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen — and maybe it did, anything’s possible — even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everyone dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

That’s a true story that never happened.

There are at least three reasons why civilians don’t hear true war stories. The obvious, first reason is that some don’t want to. The second reason is they don’t have the experience to understand them. The third reason, most pernicious, is that other people don’t want the greater public to hear true war stories.

The Washington Post has an excellent section called "In Their Own Words." The Post compiles its news on Iraq and Afghanistan, profiles several active duty military personnel, interviews returning vets, and shows "Faces of all the Fallen," all the servicemen and women killed to date in the present conflicts. One of their best pieces, "Back From Iraq," from May 2006, delves into those first and second reasons civilians don't hear true war stories and the complex relationship between war veterans and their old lives:

After three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war. The Washington Post interviewed 100 of them -- many of whom were still in the service, others who weren't -- to hear about what their war was like and how the transition home has been.

Their answers were as varied as their experiences. But a constant theme through the interviews was that the American public is largely unaffected by the war, and, despite round-the-clock television and Internet exposure, doesn't understand what it's like.

You can't understand unless you were there.

It's a timeless refrain sounded by generation after generation of soldiers returning from combat. But what sets Iraq war veterans apart is not just the kind of war they are fighting but the mood of the country they are coming home to. It is not a United States unified behind the war effort, such as in World War II. There's no rationing, no sacrifice, no Rosie the Riveter urging, "We Can Do it!" Nor is it the country that protested Vietnam and derided many vets as baby killers.

The United States that Iraq veterans are returning to is relatively indifferent, many said. One that without fear of a draft seems more interested in the progression of "American Idol" than the bombings in Baghdad. Sure, there are the homecoming parades, the yellow-ribbon bumper stickers, the pats on the back -- they continue as troops arrive back home.

But for many vets, those moments of gratitude were short-lived or limited to close friends and family. Soon they were joined by bitter impressions of a society that seems to forget that it is living through the country's largest combat operation in more than 30 years.

When Army Reserve Warrant Officer Mark Rollings got home to Wylie, Tex., he didn't expect anyone to treat him any differently because he was a vet. But he couldn't help but notice that the only one to say anything about the newly installed Purple Heart license plate on his Chevy Blazer was the kid who changed his oil at the Wal-Mart.

"For having a global war on terrorism," he said, "everything looks like business as usual to me."

Vets don't always know what to share and what not to. Civilians often don't know what to say beyond a certain depth:

The questions people ask about the war usually don't probe too far, the sort that can be satisfied with rote responses that keep the truth at a safe distance.

But sometimes, people push. What was it like?

"You just try to give a softball answer," said Garett Reppenhagen, who has been out of the Army for a year. "Yeah, it was horrible -- whatever. Or you don't answer the question. You say it was hot. You don't tell them what it's like to kill a man or to have one of your buddies blown up. You just don't go there."

But if they were not sated by the polite demurral and continued to press, he would go there, sparing no detail. Then he'd look up and see an expression that made him think they didn't really want to know after all.

"The look on their face: This is not the light conversation I want to hear at a party," he said.

Sometimes people would say maddening things, antagonistic things, even if they had never set foot in Iraq or been in combat. They didn't have to leave their spouses, miss the births of their children or see their best friend blown to pieces.

Civilians. After the war, they seemed so different, no matter how many war movies or how much CNN they had watched.

Sometimes, they'd ask something so crazy there just wasn't any way to respond, such as when a friend asked Monika Dyrcakz, "Did you go clubbing in Iraq?"

"Some people have no idea," she said.

Sometimes they said: I support the troops but not the war. Or: Do you think we should be over there?

Which is such a dumb question, Tanner, the Army captain, would think. Soldiers don't make those decisions. They do what they're told. They bitch and moan, sure. But when the call comes, they pack their bags and go, knowing they may not come back.

But Tanner doesn't say all that. Instead, he responds this way: "Oh, so you were over there? Because you said, ' We .' Because, I mean, I know I was over there."

Still, a complete understanding is much less vital than a kind attitude:

People may not understand the war, but that doesn't mean they're not grateful, said Master Sgt. Shawn Peno of the Air National Guard. "The support, the comments," he said, "that's real."

Truly understanding may be impossible, but trying to understand and a willingness to connect and be supportive remain important. Given the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder, it's all the more crucial:

Col. Charles W. Hoge, chief psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, recently told Congress that 10 to 15 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq have post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have symptoms of PTSD, depression or anxiety. The rates are higher for reservists, a distinction that appears to emerge months after troops return home.

Wentworth, who has taken calls from panicked wives and distraught Marines, said: "There's no timeline for anybody to get over this. You look at Vietnam vets -- some of these guys didn't have problems until they retired from their civilian careers. And all of a sudden 20, 30 years later, it all came back to haunt them."

Support for a human being doesn't necessarily have anything to do with supporting a military mission, which brings us to the third reason civilians don't always hear true war stories. Throughout history, there have always been those that don't want them to. Consider the words of White House Press Secretary Tony Snow last November that:

You can’t say, ‘I support the troops, but I hate the cause,’ because that’s why they signed up. And you’ve got men and women who are risking their lives for what they consider a noble cause, which is not only defeating al Qaeda and defeating terrorists abroad, but also creating conditions that are going to allow people in that part of the world to brush aside terror as an unnecessary distraction to building a better life through free and democratic society.”

Snow's comments sharply contrast those of Captain Tanner above, who pointed out that most of the troops don't have any choice in what their mission will be. Steve Benen remarked on Snow's assertion:
-

It’s almost amazing in the scope of its demagoguery, isn’t it?

Think about the implications. Every man and woman who volunteers to wear the uniform necessarily supports the mission to which they’ve been sent. As such, it’s necessarily true that if you criticize a war, you’re criticizing servicemen and women.

Consider Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) accusing CNN of being "the publicist for an enemy propaganda film" and then continuing to defend his statements when appearing on CNN's The Situation Room, even though he still hadn't actually seen the full segment in question. Hunter closed the segment by saying:

I think that -- I think the question I asked when I saw this, Wolf, is, does CNN want America to win this thing?

And, if I was a platoon leader there, as I once was, and I had a -- and I had a news organization which had shown, had -- had taken film from the enemy, showing them killing one of my soldiers, and they asked if they could be embedded in my platoon, my answer would be no.

I go back to the -- to the -- the days of guys like Joe Rosenthal, who filmed the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and Ernie Pyle, who was a soldier's reporter, the guys who were on our side -- even though they reported the rough and the tough of the war, they were on our side.

You can't be on both sides. And I would say, if I was that platoon leader, I would say, absolutely not. Take CNN out of there. You can't be on both sides.

The irony of Hunter invoking the Iwo Jima image is especially rich, given that Flags of Our Fathers had just opened wide and challenges Hunter's arguments. He doubtless knew the film was out, and knew the flag-raising image it centered on, which is why he mentioned it. But he probably hadn't seen it, either.

Consider also political operative Lynn Cheney defending torture and echoing some of Hunter's most inflammatory and ludicrous charges:

CHENEY: Well, right, but what is CNN doing running terrorist tapes of terrorists shooting Americans? I mean, I saw Duncan Hunter ask you a very good question and you didn’t answer it. Do you want us to win?

BLITZER: The answer is, of course, we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that. Do you think we want terrorists to win?

CHENEY: Then why are you running terrorist propaganda?

BLITZER: With all due respect — with all due respect, this is not terrorist propaganda.

CHENEY: Oh, Wolf.

BLITZER: This is reporting the news.

Before airing the original video, CNN discussed the matter with one of their military analysts, Retired Brigadier General David Grange, and blacked out the actual sniper shots. CNN also contacted the Pentagon to allow them to comment on the footage, and in the segment they interview a trooper in the field about sniper attacks. The goal was to tell an important aspect of being stationed in Iraq without showing a snuff film and without being overly sensational about it. A visceral reaction to footage such as this is only natural. I found the segment disturbing, but valuable. Isn't it important to know what the troops are going through and what they're facing? Someone else might feel similarly disturbed, but feel angry at CNN as well. The press is fallible, of course, and asking, "Why did they air this?" is fair. However, accusing CNN of essentially being traitors is over the top.

It'd be nice to ignore politics in discussing the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the situation of our troops in the field, and the care of our vets returning home. However, that too would be telling a false war story. Life and death, war and peace should be beyond politics, but sadly, they're not, and probably rarely have been. There's certainly place for honest disagreement about war in general and our current occupations. Yet Hunter's "You can't be on both sides" line is not a plea for more blunt coverage. If anything, our media coverage of Iraq underplays how bad things are. Given this, and the extreme, demagogic nature of Hunter and Cheney's language, even if they care about the troops, it certainly seems their main concern is that accurate reporting will diminish support for a war of choice started and supported by their party. Theirs seems to be a calculated outrage in the same vein as other fear-mongering. It wasn't long ago that George Bush and Dick Cheney were claiming we were winning in Iraq, and they still claim things are improving. To do so, they often contradict their own military's analysis. Given this situation, a near refusal by the key political officials to even try to describe what's actually going on, it's really rather silly to complain about the media's coverage. That's not to mention the record number of journalists who have been killed or injured during these conflicts. Serious discussion of the challenges of media coverage is always welcome, but attempts to shut down coverage are not. The truth is not partisan, nor should it be treated as such.

Shutting down inquiry and giving simplistic and misleading assessments is repellent, but there's also outright fabrication. Jessica Lynch is the most blatant, infamous example of rewriting a war story for public consumption in recent memory. The sad story of Pat Tillman and the cover-up surrounding his untimely and avoidable death also springs to mind. Many members of the press do a fine job, but many of the media's most prestigious outlets were nothing short of embarrassing in their eager gullibility over the Pentagon's manufactured Lynch story (and local news stations plunged to new lows, perhaps only recently surpassed with non-stop Anna Nicole coverage). The rightwingers who first lauded Tillman and then turned on him and his family also puts the lie to their "support the troops" rhetoric. "Support the troops who don't question us" would be more accurate. What's important, telling the true story or what's effective for one's cause? It's essential that the first, real version of a war story gets told properly, and that the second, officially sanctioned version, about Bibles and hearts and peace, isn't the only one out there.

It's important to note that the stupidity and venality of the Pentagon, the administration, the press, war supporters or war opponents do nothing to diminish the honor of troops in the field (a dynamic considered in more detail here). It's also important to remember that military personnel possess a wide range of political leanings and opinions. Some are certainly unhappy with media coverage of Iraq, some support Bush, and some also support Bush's current policy. Others support the idea of military service but don't support the current Iraq occupation any longer. The crackdown on military blogging and diverse military voices is discouraging, but "milbloggers" have vowed to continue, as well they should. It'd be a shame to be deprived of powerful pieces such as "Did we do everything we could?" (via House of the Rising Sons). Other outlets, such as The Sandbox, from Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau, also allow a place for troopers to speak out.

In a similar vein, Operation Homecoming is an extraordinary project aiding understanding of what war and coming home entails. As their website explains:

The first book of its kind, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Random House; September 12, 2006) is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to inspire U.S. Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen and their families to write down and share their personal wartime experiences.

In addition to the book, there's a 15-CD set of readings. National Public Radio has a good piece on it. For Veteran's Day 2006, Dan Froomkin provided a key excerpt from an Operation Homecoming piece titled "The Circle," by Sergeant Sharon D. Allen:

The camp is under red-lens light discipline, which means we can't use an unfiltered flashlight. It severely lessens our evening entertainment options. So, soon after we arrived, we began our strange nightly gatherings. You won't find it on any schedule, but you can set your watch by it. As the sun nudges the horizon and the gravel cools, some of us give up our battle with the ambient light and surrender our reading until the morning. Others collect up their poker winnings or grumble about their losses. And we all drag our chairs and cigarettes and joylessly warm water out to the gravel and talk. We call it "the circle." In the Army there is an incredibly varied cross section of society, and we are a diverse group. We have a couple kids straight out of high school, who'd either joined to get a little excitement out of life or to get a leg up on it so that they could go to college. We have older guys, who've already put in their time. They tend to be either jaded or genial, both in reaction to the accumulated bullshit slung at most soldiers who've been in the service for years. We have everyone from idealists to realists to fatalists, more than a few who began at one end of the spectrum and eventually meandered their way to the other.

I always find it amusing when people talk about "the military" vote, perspective, or whatever. My company has 170-some soldiers, and 170-some opinions. We might have more invested in foreign policy than people back home, but that doesn't mean we all agree on exactly what those policies should be. Two of the guys, Jeff and Sam, are brothers serving together here but in different platoons. They are both slightly to the left of extremely conservative, yet also very anti-Iraq war. Their father threatened to cut off his own head and send it in to Al-jazeera if his sons aren't returned home soon.

Jake is one of my best friends out here, and one of the most infuriating people I've ever known. Jake's a former Marine who comes from a Marine family and whose biggest regret is that this isn't "a real war," something on the scale of World War II or Vietnam. I usually point out to him that we didn't lose many people in the first few years of Vietnam, either. And then I say something about how I'm really [expletive deleted by washingtonpost.com] sorry that not enough of us have died for him to consider this a real war. If I had met Jake in a bar in the States and he had said half the bullshit he says here, well, we definitely would not have become friends. But he's here, too, so I guess he's entitled to his opinion. His son, Joey, will be joining us when he gets out of Basic. I wonder if his opinion will change then.

In the circle, we talk for hours not only about the reasons for this war, but for the previous one, too, and if we were ever justified in coming to this part of the world in the first place. At least in Desert Storm, some members of the circle argue, Iraq was the aggressor. Also, the whole world seemed to support us. Several of the soldiers in my platoon are former Marines and more than a few had been in the Gulf War. Desert Storm, they say, was to keep Iraq from taking over Kuwait. Naked aggression that had to be stopped. Simple as that.

Others shoot back that even so, we have no right to get involved in a situation that was a fiscal, not physical, threat, to us. Now we're trying to change an entire culture? And aren't we being naive or arrogant to think that we will make any long-term difference here, anyway? Tempers can get heated, and on some days, it probably isn't a good idea that we are all armed. Unfortunately, two of the guys, Jeff and Jake, are too big for me to punch.

One night we started arguing the hierarchy of evil world leaders, and where Saddam stood on that list. There are obviously worse men, so why Iraq? Why now? For every Saddam, there are ten more vicious dictators, and we can't get rid of them all. Of course, then we had to delve into Saddam's motivations, and if he's really such a bad guy. For the record, I was on the "yes, he's an inexcusable piece of shit" side of this argument.

Jake, of course, wonders if the country is really less dangerous now than under Hussein. He doesn't think there would be suicide bombers and IEDs littering the roads without our impetus. Haven't we made everything worse? the question is inevitably asked.

You mean worse than when hundreds of thousands of people were executed, gassed, and tortured? the inevitable answer comes.

At least there wasn't so much random violence and bloodshed.

No, under Hussein it was all well-organized violence and bloodshed. People were scared to death to say the wrong thing.

Well, now they're scared to death to walk outside without getting blown up.

If we leave, this place will erupt into a civil war.

It probably will anyway. And it'll be our fault for lighting the fuse. . . .

And around and around we go.

[…]

Jeff and others don't think we're here to build a democracy or "make the world safer from terrorism." This led to a heated discussion about Bush's motivations. Halliburton, retribution (for Hussein's attempted assassination of Bush's dad), oil -- they all came up. I refuse to believe that we're only here for oil. A logical, removed argument could outline the reality that Americans do consume oil and need a friendly government in charge of reserves. But Canada and Mexico have oil, and it'd be a hell of a lot easier to invade them.

If we're here for humanitarian reasons, Jeff asked, then why didn't we go into Rwanda?

Yeah, but there's no oil in Bosnia or Kosovo either, someone countered. And we went in there.

I cannot believe that Bush or Cheney are risking hundreds of thousands of American lives so they or their friends can make a little money. Rumor has it they're both pretty well off anyway. Jeff rarely allows any benefit of the doubt when it comes to Bush. I don't think Jeff could say a good word about Bush with a gun to his head -- and some of us have, trust me, entertained the thought.

It gets pretty exhausting after a while. Things would be a lot less complicated if our government was totally innocent and Saddam's was totally guilty. Or if we hadn't been so buddy-buddy with him all those years before Desert Storm.

And speaking of old friends, someone asked if they thought we'd ever find Osama bin Laden. That was the whole point, right -- 9/11? There's hardly ever any mention in the news or by politicians about Afghanistan, and it's like the troops over there have been forgotten.

This last point we could all agree on. Maybe those of us in Iraq would be forgotten too, or worse. The public supported Vietnam for the first few years, too, then it changed. We don't know how we're going to be treated when we get home, but I think most people realize that you can be for the troops even if you're against the war.

Everyone says they are supporting us, but sometimes it seems that civilians have no idea about who soldiers really are. This, too, we all agreed on, that people back home have no concept of what troops go through. We're not robotic killing machines. We're regular Americans, just doing our jobs. This war has really tapped the National Guard, so the average soldier out here could be your mechanic or your plumber. Maybe your dentist. Or the girl at the cash register. I think we're all pretty proud of what we do, and, at heart, we're all patriotic. But we're not brainwashed, and we have differing opinions. And we realize that there wasn't only one reason for starting this war.

At least certainly not one obvious reason.

Because I honestly believe if there had been, in one of our endless discussions in the circle, we would have found it.

Allen's piece presents a military of diverse opinions in a shared situation. It also possesses a complexity missing from ready-for-consumption tales such as the Pentagon's version of the Jessica Lynch story. There's no reason the thoughtfulness Sergeant Allen supplies couldn't be provided by public officials or average political talk shows, but of course most of them don't. Simplistic bullshit is often preferable to nuance and complex truths. Perhaps one rule of thumb for a true war story is, if it goes down too easy, if it doesn't provoke thought, it might not be real. As Tim O'Brien observed, "A true war story is never moral… it does not instruct, nor encourage virtue…"

Having served in the military or being a combat veteran does not automatically mean someone will be a wise leader or politician. Still, it certainly counts to know what it's like. It definitely would benefit us if more politicians had a grasp of what war entails when considering military action. The same is true of the public.

The popularity of pieces such as The New York Times' "Iraq War Ends Silently for One American Soldier" and Time magazine's "The Secret Letter From Iraq" suggest the public does want to understand, even if their attention drifts or their understanding is imperfect. National Public Radio and other outlets continue to cover important war stories, such as the struggle to obtain mental health care in the military, which still tends to view such issues as a lack of character on the part of the soldier or marine (hat tip to Mike Finnigan).

Of course, what the hell do I know? I haven't seen combat. I haven't been over in Iraq. I do know people serving over there. I do worry about them. I do have a former colleague whose husband was killed over there, and I feel for her every time I think of it. We all experience loss, but to lose a loved one to violence is something especially horrific. I might have read a fair amount of history books, biographies and newspapers and spoken with a fair amount of vets over the years, but of course others have a much more direct perspective than I do. Others have suffered and will suffer more.

I do feel it's important to try to pay attention, though. There's a saying that one death is a tragedy, but a hundred deaths is a statistic. It's sadly all too easy to lose perspective on the human costs of war, whether or not one feels the cause is justified or necessary. The folks I know currently over there don't like to talk about it much. I never bring up politics with them. Supporting the troops has nothing to do with their or my political leanings. It's important, I think, to try to know what's going on and to be willing to listen if and when they're ready. Not every returning vet wants to talk right away, but they should be able to talk to somebody, whether it's their friends, family or a compassionate stranger. In cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and similar situations, returning vets and active duty personnel definitely need someone to talk to. There has to be at least one person willing to hear a true war story.

It's ironic that on Memorial Day so many military personnel need to work while most Americans get the day off. It's be nice if somehow we could reverse that. It's an entirely impractical suggestion, of course, but it's good to honor that spirit when possible, regardless of one's feelings about the current occupations, any future or past conflicts, or war in general. To expand on an earlier section of the "Back From Iraq" piece:

Coming home was like one big party.

They were welcomed with parades, with family members waving signs and flags and waiting with open arms. World War II vets greeted them at the airport, making sure to shake all of their hands. Thanking them. There were firetrucks on the tarmac, their lights twirling, a celebratory fountain spraying from their hoses.

"People cheering, handing me their cellphones and telling me to call my family," Army Capt. Fred Tanner remembered. "Random people coming up and shaking my hand."

Greg Seely came home on leave in October 2004 with 200 fellow soldiers. They were walking through the Atlanta airport, when, one by one, travelers dropped their bags and started clapping. Soon there was a spontaneous crescendo. The applause of strangers. A moment he will never forget.

"The media talked so much about how the American people don't support us," he said. "But they do."

People may not understand the war, but that doesn't mean they're not grateful, said Master Sgt. Shawn Peno of the Air National Guard. "The support, the comments," he said, "that's real."

They met generals and were thanked by congressmen. Some even shook hands with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and President Bush. Waitresses and gas station attendants refused their money.

Army Reservist Chris Bain threw out the first pitch of the Little League World Series.

On the airplane home, wearing his Navy uniform, Clint Davis sat in the same row as a 5-year-old boy who got out his crayons and drew a picture of the American flag. "It says, 'Thank you for fighting for our country,' " Davis said. "I'll hang it up on my refrigerator till I die."