Britney 4 president

Xpostfactoid's response to McCain's new Britney ad:

As old white males'
authority pales,
I view the change with tranquility.
Celebrities rule
and that's totally cool —
long live the nation's nubility.

My first pro-McCain post!

Obama makes a mis-step: at a campaign rally in Missouri, he warned everyone that "they" would try and raise fears about the fact that he “doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills.’’ McCain's attacks have been false, base and unprincipled (I had no idea until this election cycle that if your opponent said he wasn't going to raise taxes, you could simply say he was) but he hasn't played on racial fears. Obama's "they" could have been the 527s, but even so, it was an off-target remark and rightly stamped on by the McCain campaign. There. My first pro-McCain post. True argument-silencing, all-encompassing objectivity is within reach....

Best Songs of 2000: Beautiful Day by U2

1. Beautiful Day —U2

2. Yellow — Coldplay

3. Dancer in the Dark — Bjork

4. Too Young — Phoenix

5. It's Only Love That Gets You Through — Sade

6. The Shining – Badly Drawn Boy

7. Everything in its Right Place – Radiohead

8. Music — Madonna

9. Autumn Tactics — Chicane

10. Mystic Handyman — Scritti Politti

Best Songs of 2009

Best Songs of 2008

Best Songs of 2007

Best Songs of 2006

Best Songs of 2005

Best Songs of 2004

Best Songs of 2003

Best Songs of 2002

Best Songs of 2001

Best Albums of the Decade

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix — Phoenix
2. Parachutes — Coldplay
3. The Reminder — Feist
4. Poses — Rufus Wainwright
5. Discovery — Dafty Punk
6. For Emma, Forever Ago — Bon Iver
7. Hymns of the 49th Parallel — k d lang
8. Speak for Yourself — Imogen Heap
9. Under the Backlight — Rilo Kiley
10. Alright, Still — Lily Allen

The audacity of disagreement

From the NYT today:

.... But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones. “I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.

Obama? C'est mon copain!

Someone gets it right on the Eurobamaphiles:

To them Obama is more than a politician. He is a cultural figure, who has landed here with the impact Charles Lindbergh made when he flew the Atlantic alone more than 80 years ago.... What was similar about Obama and Lindbergh -- forgetting the flyer's later politics -- was that they physically embodied the future. The first solo flight across the Atlantic not only made the "Lone Eagle" the most famous man in the world, it was a symbol of new technology and eventually a smaller world, where diverse peoples would have to get to know each other. Barack Obama, in the eyes of Europeans, particularly younger Europeans grappling with diversity, represents the future. He represents a smaller world where more people look like him than look like Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. That is what makes him different, and that is why so many people who may not understand the language he speaks still cheer his words. They are actually, as Monsieur Kismoune said, cheering the man. And cheering the country that made a Barack Obama.

... particularly that last part. Most Europeans would be absolutely mystified by the debates here over Obama's perceived "foreignness", his lack of "Americanness" and so on. His foreignness stops the second you step off this continent. To outside eyes he could have originated from only one country on earth. The Lindburgh comparison is slightly more original anyway than the others this season,to Reagan, McGovern, Carter, Trudeau, Stevenson, Clinton, Bush jr, Bush sr, Nixon, Kerry, Gore, Kennedy...... The real question being what former president Obama hasn't been compared to. The answer being "anyone before 1963" which is where everyone's memories seem to stop.

Obama is the New...

Bush (43):
Wall Street Journal editorial board, 7/2/08.
L. Whitey Johnson, 7/10/08.

Kerry:
Steve Schmidt, 6/20/08.
Grover Norquist, 6/26/08.
Frank Newport, 5/7/08.
Hillary Clinton, 4/14/08.

Gore:
Hillary Clinton, 4/14/08.
Hugh Hewitt, 3/30/08.

(Bill) Clinton:
Paul Krugman, 6/30/08.
Abe Greenwald, 1/15/08.
Ron Fournier, 12/18/07.

Dole:
Mark Halperin, 2/28/08.

George H. W. Bush:
David Brooks, 5/19/08.
New York Sun editorial board, 4/18/08
YouTube, 4/6/08:

The jujitsu of agreement

Obama has just unleashed the most devestating weapon in his arsenal. McCain went on CNN and admitted that 16 months might be a "good timetable" for withdrawal from Iraq. Obama immediately responded, "The fact that John McCain now thinks that it's possible for us to execute a phased withdrawal — I think that's a positive thing and if the administration believes that as well, then I will be fully supportive." No accusation of flip-flopping. No sarcasm. No 'nice you could join us.' Just gentlemanly agreement. The two candidates are now just millimetres apart on Iraq. McCain can of course disagree that they agree. But he risks looking, well, disagreeable, in the process.

How do I know what I know?

A great post from Nick Hornby on the subject of global warming:

I’m pretty sure, for example, that global warming is happening, and that we are in serious trouble; but if one of those cranky people who deny it all sat me down and started shouting at me, I would have very little to come back at him with, if it got down to facts and figures. Climate-change sceptics, for example, believe that ice-cores indicate a pattern of temperature and CO2 increases every one hundred thousand years or so, but that C02 levels have always gone up after the temperature rise, not before. Is that right? I don’t know – how could I? How could any of us who are not climate scientists? Nor do I know whether it’s helpful, or indeed what it might prove, for that matter. Most scientists, as far as I can work out, seem to believe that it’s true but irrelevant. I am a father, an adult, a writer, so I should have a view, right? But I have an ‘O’-level in biology.

This raises an issue that has long plagued me since I began this blog, namely: how little of what I know to be true is actually provable. Once you've given ground to the idea that some scientists might be wrong, or that some history books might be biased, or that the news misquotes people, it's amazing how little you are left holding. The sun rises in the East, love is all that matters, and WALL-E is the best film I've seen all year: that's about it for me.

The rest of the stuff in my head is all on loan from others, much of it on trust and some of it gathering dust. So-and-so turned out to be reputable on that subject, this book didn't let me down there, that guy sounds like he's lying.....

Actually that last is probably the most effective way of getting at the truth. So with climate change for instance, it's easier to disbelieve the skeptics, because I can discern clear motive as to why they might want it so (the consequences are costly, its bothersome, why oh why must I care about ice caps, etc etc). The people promoting climate change, however, have very little incentive to make up a scary scientific theory promising imminent global doom. It's as much of a pain in their behinds as it is in everyone else's.

It's Occam's Razor: the simplest theory wins. I can't personally prove the holocaust happened. But the theory required to explain why, if it didn't happen, everyone appears to believe it did, would be so massive and complicated and backed-up on itself — each explanation requiring its own counter-explanation — that you would wake up every morning feeling like Oliver Stone. Maybe that's what many of my beliefs come down. I just don't want to wake up feeling like Oliver Stone every morning.

And lo it came to pass...

From The Times

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the
Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child's very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares....

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him.

And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”

Ich bein ein Americain

From the New Republic:

"In Berlin, hundreds of thousands will cheer a projection rather than a flesh-and-blood Obama on Thursday. After Inauguration Day, alas, Europe and the world will not face a Dreamworks president, but the leader of a superpower.... This vast power differential is what Germans and Europeans don't quite fathom in their infatuation with Obama. Their problem was not Mr. Bush, but Mr. Big — America as Behemoth Among the Nations, unwilling to succumb to the dictates of goodness that animate post-heroic, post-imperial, and post-sovereign Europe."

I couldn't disagree more, not that disillusion will eventually set in: of course it will. But make no mistake, it is Bush Europeans dislike, not America. Europeans are waiting to fall back in love with this country again. That is what his candidacy represents: not an imposition of European values but a restoration of American ones.

Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom - indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us - what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

What he said, in essence, was not "I am a Berliner," but, ich bein ein Americain and was cheered and applauded for doing so by 200,000 people, waving American flags. A year ago, this was inconceivable. The audience may have been more important than the speech.

A joke at Nuremberg

I've just got back from Martha's Vineyard interviewing Budd Schulberg, the Oscar-winning writer of On The Waterfront. He's 95 now and frail, but his memory is excellent. He told me a great story about the Nuremberg Trials, where Schulberg was in charge of martialling the photographic evidence. Of all the defendents, Goering fascinated him most, he said. A very smart man whom the psychologists described as "a genius", Goering sat silently for the most part, taking notes on the case being made against him. At one point, an intelligence transcript was read aloud which detailed Goering's reaction to the invasion of Poland: elated, on top of the world, he cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the beginnings of the Third Reich. Hearing this in court, the captive Goering suddenly started laughing.

The rest of the court sat stunned for a few seconds and then, they, too, began to laugh. Not at Goering. With him. "He surprised everyone, you see," said Schulberg. "They weren't expecting him to show a sense of humour. An admission of his own hubris..... It was an extraordinary moment."

Achtung Obama!

Conservative bloggers are up in arms about the new flyer for Obama's speech in Berlin, printed in German. "This is pretty extraordinary. A candidate for the American Presidency is using flyers printed in German to turn people out for his campaign rally in Berlin on Thursday.... I'm surprised at this lapse in judgment in an otherwise well-oiled and professional Obama campaign."

What does they expect him to use? Swedish? Ancient Mongol? Foreign diplomacy is so much harder when practised in a tongue alien to all the parties concerned, as President Bush demonstrated when he addressed the Italian Prime Minister in Spanish ("hey Amigo!") at the recent G8 conference. Maybe Bush has spoiled everybody. We've grown so accustomed to the panting mayhem that accompanies his every overseas trip that the idea of addressing a flyer to Germans, in German, strikes us as a reprehensible lapse.

Sticks and stones

Comparing press treatment of David Addington — the white house lawyer who drafted the memos authorising the CIA's use of torture — and Mr Khadr, the 16-year-old Canadian whose videotaped interrogation recently went public, the Wall Street Journal finds little daylight.

While the operative for al Qaeda is humanized, the counsel for the vice president is demonized.... Reasonable people can disagree with David, and many did. But the aim here is not reasonable debate. The aim is to close debate by shouting accusations so often that they become accepted..... And thus the Washington Post column on David's congressional testimony, where he is described "hunched" and said to have "barked," "growled" and "snarled" -- language you would use to describe an animal."

It's a tribute to our society that even amid a terrible war we are capable of seeing the humanity of an enemy raised and trained to hate and kill us. Some of us are still waiting for that same presumption of humanity to be extended to the good men and women doing their imperfect best to keep us safe.

The writer has two things confused: the dehumanising effect of verbs such as "snarled" and "growled", which seek to compare Mr Addington to a dog; and the actual treatment he authorised, which involves leashing and chaining and beating prisoners with electrical cable until they begged to be allowed to commit suicide — in other words, actually treating people like dogs. The difference between a verb and three-inch thick electrical cable is worthy of note, I think, particularly when applied to the soles of one's feet.

The year the superhero died

Hilzoy grapples with the constitional implications of The Dark Knight:

Batman acts outside of the law, but does so for what he – in his and our minds – believe is the greater good. When the movie starts, though, we learn that there are new copycat Batmans, trying out the vigilante’s hat for themselves. And what’s to stop them? After all, Batman doesn’t have any real legitimacy. Why does he get to dress up as a bat, while others can’t?

While these imitation Batmans are fairly harmless, the Joker is a far different story (Ledger/Nolan’s Joker, to be precise). The Joker – like Batman – is acting for his own reasons. And like Batman, he acts outside of the law. In short, the Joker is the ultimate logical implication of “the Batman” taken to its most extreme.

From here, you can see the connection to the problems with the unitary executive and Yoo-ism in all their glory. These people broke the law, but did it for subjectively good reasons (or let’s assume they did). Except for the US Attorney scandal, there’s no evidence that they’ve been breaking the law (torturing, spying, etc.) for naked political reasons.

But once the legitimacy threshold is crossed, it’s hard to see how Jokers won’t eventually arise. After all, if we can break the law to beat terrorists, why can’t we break the law if we’re convinced (really firmly convinced in our heads) that electing Democrats or Republicans will destroy the country?

Unbounded executive authority will inevitably be abused – and that’s frankly the main reason why we should be punishing people. We need to halt it before it gets out of hand, as it inevitably will – indeed, as it already has.

The movie wrestles with all this – although sometimes in a cheesy heavy-handed way. Batman for instance has problems constraining himself to acting “good.” And that’s, ultimately, what’s interesting about the movie – its rather dark implication that Batman causes more harm than good.

The movie is good — for the first hour and a half at least — with a glassy beauty and slow-building stealth that showed Nolan to be a keen student of Michael Mann's Heat. The score, in particular, is wonderful — building rhymically in the build-up to action and then cutting out altogether for the action itself: all you hear is the pelt of the bullets and the crunch of the bazookas. And they finally junked the batmobile for a fantastic new bike. I never got the batmobile. Who wants to see a superhero all couped up in an armor-plated car? Every time has to do something heroic he has to stop, park, undo his seatbelt, get out and then, if he's not too late, get stuck in. Not that Batman performs all that many heroic acts in the new moviel; at one point he even saves the wrong person. Together with Hancock, it adds to the sense that this is the summer of zero-sum heroism. It's the year the superhero died. Or at least sufferd a prolonged attack of doubt about the efficacy of unilateral action and the limits of unchecked executive power.

Euphemism of the day

The US and Iraq have agreed to set a "general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals" pertaining to the "reduction of US combat forces in Iraq," said the White House on Friday.

Just as long as it's not a time-table for withdrawal. What I love about these euphemisms is that at some point, an actual person sat down and come up with them. Someone had to go, nope, there's no way we can admit to doing the one thing we've been vilifying for years, so why don't we say something else. Temporal Vanishing Point? Date-based Attenuation Trajectory? Time Horizon for Aspirational Goals. Yes, that's it. 'Time horizon' is genius, by the way, since horizons retreat as quickly as you can advance towards them. Much like euphemisms.

(The pic is a sunset as viewed from Mars)

Bad intelligence

From Jane Mayer's The Dark Side:—

• Ibn al-Shaykn al-Libi, a top Qaeda commander, was rendered to Libya, where he was tortured for several months. He gave up false information about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda and his WMDs. Paul Pillar, the senior national intelligence officer said his testimony was "was just so confusing, it was James Joycean." It was nevertheless used by President Bush in the run-up to war with Iraq and by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations. "They were killing me," Al-Libi said later. "I had to tell them something.

• Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen of Australia, was tortured for three weeks in Pakistan — hung from the ceiling by his arms while standing on a cylindrical drum that was then electrified. He confessed multiple times to being a member of Al Qaeda, then released without charge in 2005, after The Washington Post established his innocence.

• Mahed Arar, a Canadian telecommunications engineer was rendered to Syria, where he was whipped with two-inch thick electrical cables, and beaten on and off, for a year. "Not even animals could withstand it," he said. "You become like an animal." He confessed to having trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, even though he had never been to the country. He was released without charge in October 2003. "I was ready to do anything to get out of that place, at any cost," he said.

• Abu Zubayda, the first suspect to be waterboarded on the orders of the president, was also locked in a tiny coffin for hours at a time, kept naked in a cage at night, doused and subjected to freezing temperatures, and thrust headfirst into concrete walls. After a few months, he was reduced to masturbating furiously in his cage "like a monkey in a zoo," said one CIA officer. "I guess he was bored, and mad." He repeatedly confessed to dozens of imaginary plots to blow up American banks, supermarkets, malls, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge and various nucelar power plants. Teams of federal agents were dispatched to each, only to find them intact.

Again and again, in Mayer's book, you read the same story: the FBI starts its interrogations, winning trust, getting them to talk, and they get great information. Then the CIA take over, and the detainees start spouting Finnegans Wake to make the pain stop. Nobody knows the information is false until years later; for the moment, they have instant results.

Terminal uniqueness

I'm half way through Jane Mayer's heart-sickening book The Dark Side — and intend to blog more on it when I'm finished — but my first thought is that if there is a single thread which facilitated the abuse and torture of detainees, it is the belief that September 11th was historically unique. Again and again, you hear it said by the Program's architects: everything changed after 9/11, it was a "new type" of war, a "new type" of enemy, the gloves were off, etc. That is how everyone in the book sounds — as if America were the first nation in history to suffer terrorist attack or civilian slaughter.

This is not to rob 9/11 of its horrifying power but every historical atrocity was seen as unique, unprecendented, from the French terror to the Holocaust to the Stalinist purges. And yet Cheney's men operated in a kind of historical vacuum. "It seemed to me odd that the actors weren't more troubled by what they were doing," said Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the United States Navy. "I wondered if they were even familiar with the Nuremberg trials — or with the laws of war."

As Mayer points out, America had in the past faced other mortal enemies, equally if not more threatening, without endangering its moral authority by resorting to state-sanctioned torture. "In previous conflicts, the US has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the [Geneva] conventions," said William Taft, Colin Powell's attorney. "I have no doubt that we can do so here, where only a relative handful of persons is concerned."

During the revolutionary war, Washington and the Continental army were regarded by the British as "illegal combatants" undeserving of the protections afforded usual soldiers; Washington insisted, contrarily, that British prisoners be treated "with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of us copying the Brutal British army."

In October of 2001, a British intelligence officer told Tyler Drumhelle, Chief of CIA's Clandestine Operations in Europe. "You need to learn from our history." He brought up the IRA. "We decided to turn the terrorist's tactics back on them. For a time, it worked. It stopped the immediate attacks. But watch out. Its dangerous. I makes you the bad guys. And when it gets to court — and in your society, just like ours, it will — every one of those guys will get off."

Which is what will probably happen with all but a handful of the detainees. Because Cheney acted in the certainty that the period in history he happened to find himself in was without precedent. It seems such an innocent claim on its surface — surely suffering grants us special status? makes us different? — were it not that its consequences are always so pernicious. It was this sense of absolute uniqueness that allowed the administration to treat its detainees as less than human. The converse — a recognition that suffering is pretty much the only constant in human affairs — has always shown us the way out. How do you undo the patient painstaking infliction of damage? With patient, painstaking books like The Dark Side.

Among the revelations:—

• "A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
• "The [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
• "The International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. The Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"
  

McCain vs Obama on Iraq

The majority of Americans still believe McCain would make a better commander-in-chief than Obama, and yet listening to McCain talk about Iraq, just a few minutes after Obama's speech on the subject, is like listening to a child trying to score points of its parent. Obama was mature, nuanced, over-arching, confident in his grasp of detail, grave, impressive. McCain was kicking at shins, haggling over battlefield strategy — 'I was right about the surge where Obama was wrong,' etc. No-one, particularly Obama, ever doubted for a second that if you poured America's military resources into another country, you could suppress that country's levels of civic strife. What you would be creating, on the other hand, is a country that is wholly dependent on another for its long-term stability. That is what Obama opposes: indefinite occupation. And yet McCain continues to cast it in terms of a "war" between two nation states, any withdrawal from which would constitute "surrender". "I know how to win wars, I know how to win wars," he kept repeating. (which ones?) He's playing a dangerous and manipulative game with national pride. We are not at war with Iraq. They are technically our allies; and they are now on the point of asking us to leave. Either he is talking down to his audience (he was in a town hall), or he really believes this stuff. As with Bush, it little matters, in the end.

Sean back home

"All I could think was how wonderful life is, and how I had never really appreciated it - and that now that I could, it was too late and it was all over. In my mind, I would be getting my boys out of bed in the morning. At night, I would bathe them. I'd wash their foreheads and their limbs and behind their ears and kiss them goodnight. I would try to will them to feel me and feel my love for them. I would say out loud 'Daddy lives in your heart' and 'Daddy is at your side' - but the one thing I couldn't bring myself to say is 'I promise I will be home' because in my heart I didn't think I would be able to keep that promise. That was out of my hands" — Sean Langan, on his three-month imprisonment by the Taliban. Now released, he has returned home to his wife and two sons.

Long Dark Knight of the soul

"As you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss... Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself — trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one"
— the two Davids (Denby and Edelstein), on Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight

I fear we've got a lot more of this stuff coming our way. Let's be clear: Ledger did not die for his art. He died of acute intoxication from the effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. None of them lethal on their own but dangerous when combined. In other words, an overdose of the most heartbreakingly mundane kind: on prescription painkillers, by accident. Please spare us the critical rhapsodies about his "scary", "heroic", "unsettling" tap dances on the edge of the abyss.

New Lily Allen song

A new demo from Lily Allen, surprised to find herself a healthy relationship — "even though its moving forward / There's just the right amount of awkward". S'wonderful.

The New Yorker f**ks up (ironically)

Yes, yes, its a satirical cartoon. Its the New Yorker. They don't mean it. It's ironic. Everyone gets that. The point is that right now, that image is on every news channel, in every paper, on every blog and in thousands of emails, winging their way around the country. And each time that image changes hands, the irony rubs off a little more. Let's see how much of its satirical intent survives once it's on a t-shirt. Irony is useless against the smears because they, took, are insincere. Very few people actually believe that Obama is a terrorist/Muslim/BlackPanther/Radical/Whatever. Not in the same way they believe the sun is going to come up in the East tomorrow. Not in a way they would bet their children's lives on. It's simply the insult they lob when asked why they won't vote for him. (It's easier than saying "because he's black.") That's why even denials of the rumors — even ironic portrayals of the rumors on the cover of smart magazines — do nothing but propagate them. I hate to court the charge of humorlessness but I think The New Yorker have fucked up.

"Every time you put an alcoholic in the White House..."

“.....Every time you put an alcoholic in the white house, the same thing happens. Our foreign policy turns to shit and we start spying on one another. Same thing happened with Nixon. Spent the entire Arab-Isreali war bombed out of his head on Chateau Margaux. Your man — Heath was it? — rang him up to try and avert nuclear catastrophe, Kissinger had to get on the line and tell him the president was in no state to speak but would call him in the morning.”

“But Bush isn’t drinking now is he?” I asked.

“In a way it would better for everyone if he was. At least then the beast inside of him would be fed and watered. It would be happy. It wouldn’t have to go looking for fresh fights.”

“You mean the war in Iraq? You think that’s got something to do with all of this?"

He nodded. “Oh yes. Iraq is a classic addict’s endgame: damned if you stayed, damned if you go, so all that left is simply to hang on, and wish it would all simply go away. Did you see him on TV the other day pleading with the American people: ‘this time it’ll be different, this time I’ll quit, just let me have a few more troops, and then we can leave, I promise.’ He’ll never quit. He can’t. He’s an alcoholic.....”

— Douglas Kelsey & Patrick Miller, In The Rooms (2009)

Best Songs of 2003: I Don't Know What It Is by Rufus Wainwright

1. I Don't Know What It Is — Rufus Wainwright

2. A Thousand Beautiful Things — Annie Lennox

3. Hey Ya! — Outkast

4. Hockey Skates — Kathleen Edwards

5. Crazy in Love — Beyonce

6. Pulling Our Weight — the Radio Dept.

7. Si, Paloma — Sun Kil Moon

8. Golden — My Morning Jacket

9. Sexual High — Going Home Productions

10. Move Your Feet — Junior Senior

• Best Songs of 2009
• Best Songs of 2008
• Best Songs of 2007
• Best Songs of 2006
• Best Songs of 2005
• Best Songs of 2004
• Best Songs of 2002
• Best Songs of 2001
• Best Songs of 2000

Quote Of The Day

"They were killing me. I had to tell them something" — Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the accused Qaeda commander whose confession, under torture, gave President Bush his information about Saddam's biological and chemical WMD, and the non-existent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. According to a Senate report al-Libi "knew nothing about the subject and didn't understand he term biological." It was, however, al-Libi's information that persuaded Colin Powell to give his famous testimony before the UN. 

Best Songs of 2002: I Wish I Was The Moon by Neko Case

1. I Wish I Was The Moon — Neko Case

2. Every Time You Say Goodbye (Live) — Alison Krauss and Union Station

3. A Thousand Miles — Vanessa Carlton

4. Clocks — Coldplay

5. This is How it Goes — Aimee Mann

6. Pushy — Lemon Jelly

7. Remind Me — Royksopp

8. Do You Realize? — The Flaming Lips

9. Let Go — Frou Frou

10. With Arms Outstretched – Rilo Kiley

• Best Songs of 2009
• Best Songs of 2008
• Best Songs of 2007
• Best Songs of 2006
• Best Songs of 2005
• Best Songs of 2004
• Best Songs of 2003
• Best Songs of 2001
• Best Songs of 2000

Tracking shots be damned

Why is is that every director who wants to put their artistic signature on a movie — the indelible stamp that bears his creative DNA and no other fool's — always chooses exactly the same thing? It's always a bloody tracking shot. Andrew Sullivan's recent gallery of famous tracking shots has been great: maybe the best way to enjoy these things. Everybody holds them up as God's gift to cinema, undeniable proof that an auteur is in the house, and so on, but all I think when I'm watching one is, "I'm watching a tracking shot." Yes, I feel admiration, but my admiration jolts me out of the movie. That's a pretty big drawback, in my book — artistry be damned. Which is why the best ones are to be found in the first five minutes, or during the credits (Boogie Nights, A Touch Of Evil, The Player), where they can happily draw attention to themselves, advertise their creator's genius, etc, without ruining the film. (The world's worst offender, by several ions: the Dunkirk tracking shot in Atonement).

Writing a novel

I am about halfway through the 12th draft — or thereabouts — of writing a novel. Whoever knew that writing fiction was such a long-distance slog? I thought that creative writing had to be about the lightning strike of inspiration, with much clutching of the forehead, pacing and gnashing of teeth. Instead it has turned out to be exactly like mowing the lawn: you go up one side, pivot, and come back the way you came. Then you repeat the exercise. Actually the thing it's most like is one of those electrons (?) that shoot across your TV screen, first one row, then the next, putting in a blob of light here, a blob of light there, until a picture begins to emerge. Except slower. And with occasional breaks to stand back from the screen and squint at the snow, to see if there's anything there. In this metaphor, note, the electron inside the TV is also watching the TV, which suggests that I should steer clear of ever writing poetry, or fixing televisions.

No more baby nation

I think some of his disgust with Bush's middle-east misadventure comes down to his disapproval of bad parenting. And it lends extra urgency to his current desire to show the Iraqis some tough love, to take the training wheels off, in order to more properly see what we have given birth to. It seems appropriate that America may be about to exchange one leader with lingering father issues for another who has cleared his up. As Obama says in closing, "I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle."

Best Songs of 2001: Digital Love by Daft Punk

1. Digital Love — Daft Punk

2. Poses — Rufus Wainwright

3. New Slang – The Shins

4. Love Letter — Nick Cave

5. Someone to Call My Lover — Janet Jackson

6. Flame Turns Blue — David Gray

7. Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescarelos

8. Cowboy Dreams — Prefab Sprout

9. Nature Boy — David Bowie

10. La Cienega Just Smiled — Ryan Adams

• Best Songs of 2009
• Best Songs of 2008
• Best Songs of 2007
• Best Songs of 2006
• Best Songs of 2005
• Best Songs of 2004
• Best Songs of 2003
• Best Songs of 2002
• Best Songs of 2000

Will you look at Texas?

Better opinions than mine say that Obama cannot win Texas — or rather that's is not worth the money he would have to pour into it. Still, of all Hillary's so-called firewall states, Texas was the one he cracked. I wondered at the time whether there wasn't a certain amount of Bush-shame at work in the state. Obama is spending money there, has a significant ground operation in place, and recently told the NYT “A place that I’ve come to love, which I did not expect until this campaign, is Texas. I ended up loving Texas." Supposedly, he's got his eye on helping out Democrat in the senate race. Hmm.

Words, words, words

It's been fun (my idea of fun anyway) to chart the migratory patterns of certain words over this election cycle. For more than a year, most of the nation has watched and responded to the same news events, featuring the same players, whose most frequent act is to talk, publically and at length. We've probably listened to more words, from the same people, than at any other time in American history. It's not surprising that some of those words have lodged in the heads of the media, or even snagged in the popular imagination.

Most of them have come from Obama. Slate keeps a running talling of what it calls Obamisms, most of them jokey portamantaus, but there have been other, more significant contributions to the lingua franca. After the debate in which Obama "rejected and denounced" Louis Farrakhan ("If the word 'reject' Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word 'denounce,' then I'm happy to concede the point and I would reject and denounce"), the airwaves were suddenly awash with people rejecting and denouncing one another.

A website called rejectanddenounce.org was even set up for people who wanted to reject and denounce whatever they liked — "Dexy's Midnight Runners," for instance, or "toothpaste on my pants before work." McCain "rejected and repudiated" reverend James Hagee, a more alliterative formulation repeated this week by Jesse's Jackson's son. "I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric."

Jackson Jr also called his father's rhetoric "divisive" — another Obama favorite, usually coupled with "distracting" to denote trivial non-substantive matters (“divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics”). He has used it to talk about everything from Jeremiah Wright ("these divisions that distract us from our common challenges and our common opportunities and move the country forward"), to Hillary Clinton ("the attacks and distortions that try to distract us from the issues that matter to people's lives") to gay marriage ("the heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians").

Much as it seems to double as a term signifying "stuff I don't want to talk about", it has a wonderfully stern, pre-TV, Lincolnesque feel to it. On his show, Steven Colbert put"distractions" on notice. Someone else put "distractions" on a t-shirt. It tells you something about Obama: it's the sort of word useful to someone with an intense, laser-like focus.

The latest Obamaism to catch on: his recent use of "refine" last week to talk about Iraq ("I'm sure I'll have more information and continue to refine my policy") which caused such a fuss. That word, too, seems to have worked its way under newscaster's skins. I just watched an MSNBC news reporter refer to the Democrats "refining, if you will" their energy plans. It's one of the more immediate side-effects of Obama's candidacy, whether he wins or loses: the nation's literacy levels have taken a small bump.

Not that it's all high-fallutin' refinement. As William Safire noted recently, of Obama's use of "gummed up" (“politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence"), "Here was a presidential candidate unafraid to use a slang verb with verve." Safire also admired his use of the word "bone-headed" to describe his dealings with Tony Rezko ( “I am the first one to acknowledge that it was a boneheaded move"). Wrote Safire: "Boneheaded was a perfect choice: not as condemnatory or self-flagellating as stupid, nor as dismissive as foolish, nor as formal as ignorant, nor carrying a secondary drug connotation as dopey, nor as frivolous as silly, nor as inapt as dumb."

Cut his nuts 'out' or 'off'?

Jesse Jackson's recent offer to cut off Barack Obama's nuts places an unusually prickly matter of journalistic etiquette before the American media. The Los Angeles Times went with: “crude language.” The AP mentioned “regretfully crude" language and "a slang reference to his wanting to cut off Obama's testicles." The New York Times, the guardians of 'all the news that's fit to print' put it with even more masterful aplomb: “Mr. Jackson made disparaging remarks, apparently including a crude reference to male genitalia.” Only The New York Post printed it in full, slapping it in a bold 50-point headline: JESSE JACKSON SAYS HE WANTS TO CUT OBAMA'S 'NUTS OUT'

Hang on — "out" or "off"? Reuters went with "out". Other went with "off." Tradition would suggest the latter. As George Stephanopolous said of Al Gore "He was good to me, but the threat was implicit: 'Don't even think about trying to shut me out; if it comes down to you or me, I'll cut your nuts off.'" Or as Al Haig, speaking to Richard Nixon, said of Mark Felt aka Deep Throat: "We've got to be careful as to when to cut his nuts off."

Cutting someone's nuts "out" on the other hand, is favored only by thugs and gangsters, according to the Post. The actual clip — finally aired on Fox news — revealed the good Reverend to be a traditionalist.