An Open Letter to Edward F. Feighan

You may not remember this, but in 1989, when I was a freshman in college, I interned in your Washington office. I did what most interns do -- answering constituent mail, researching simple issues and maybe tagging along to a committee meeting -- and so I didn't have much daily contact with you. But one afternoon, you asked me to accompany you to a committee meeting because the staff member who would ordinarily have gone was tied up on something else.

After the meeting, we got a late lunch in the Longworth Building cafeteria (your treat, which I thought was nice, since I was working gratis), and as we sat in the mostly-empty cafeteria, you asked me about my goals, my interests, all the things that you'd ask a young, idealistic college student. At one point, we got to talking about campaigning, and you commented on how it had gotten to be impossible to govern in this country because anything unpopular that you did could be distorted into an attack ad during the next campaign. You specifically raised the Willie Horton ad as an example of the unfair, inflammatory tactics that put politicians constantly on the defensive and unwilling to take any risks doing what needs to be done in this country.

Two things made a lasting impression on me: first, that a Congressman took the time to talk to me, a lowly intern who didn't even live in his district, and second, that you couched your objection not in terms of politics and politicians, but in terms of shortchanging the country. It sounded very wise. Being an impressionable 19-year-old, I was, well, impressed and thought I had found, if not a political hero, at least one of the good guys.

I realize now that you were just posturing and trying to sound high-minded to impress an intern. I'm just embarrased that I fell for it.

Now, it turns out that you're one of them -- the scorch-the-earth, circular-firing-squad old guard who fight to preserve the status quo, even when it's corrupt and broken. I have seen the ads that your group has put out, and although your website says you're talking about all of the "various candidates for President", the three ads on the site all seem to attack Howard Dean. Strange that all of the other candidates seem to have gotten a pass.

Congressman, I have watched each of the ads, and I have to say that I agree with your assessment 14 years ago -- attack ads do distort, inflame and scare voters and honest politicians into inaction. I just didn't think you'd stoop to sponsoring them. Shame on you.

So I thought you should know that I will be taking the official House photographer's picture of you with your arm around the interns off my wall at home, where it has proudly hung all these years. It probably won't mean anything to you, but it does to me. Part of me is disgusted, and part of me is just sad about how that works.

And by the way, just to prove that I won't be made inactive by fear or distortion, I have decided to donate $25 to the Dean campaign -- $19 in honor of how old I was then, and $6 to cover the cost of my lunch.

Very truly yours,
Daniel M. Labovitz

Ugh. I was looking up a story on Charlie Rangel's comment about cabs to Harvard being misdirected to Harlem, as reported in the New York Daily News. So I Google "Rangel Harlem Harvard" and click on the link to nydailynews.com. The page comes up with two sponsored links: Dean For America and Dean McGovern '04. Disgusted, I decided to check out who is sponsoring "Dean McGovern '04". Turns out there's no identifying information on the website. So, as a public service, allow me to tell you who is behind it (information is based on the results of a Whois search at Network Solutions:

William Hubicki
7 Linden Avenue
Troy, New York 12180

New Hampshire Public Radio did a brief report on Mr. Hubicki and his partner. [link] It turns out that Mr. Hubicki is a Republican who wants Dean to be the Democratic nominee so that, supposedly, President Bush can beat him in a landslide. I guess the best news is that Mr. Hubicki's site isn't making them much money.

How much to fly from Baltimore to the USS Abraham Lincoln?

Today, I received an email that floored me. American Airlines is running a program in which you can donate frequent flyer miles to "Operation Hero", which provides free tickets to soldiers who are on emergency and R&R leave from Iraq.

It turns out that under something called the "Iraqi Freedom Rest and Relaxation Program", if you're on leave to visit family, or attend a funeral or whatnot, the military will fly you to one of three airports in the US -- Atlanta, Baltimore (BWI) or Dallas/Ft. Worth. If your final destination isn't one of those three cities, that's tough -- you have to pay your own way from there to wherever you are going.

As Tasha, who sent me the email, put it: You have got to be f-ing kidding me. I just learned that we send our troops to risk death in a foreign land, and then when we finally let them come home for a little while, we dump them at a gateway airport and make them cough up money to pay for their own tickets home. Some thank-you! It makes me feel even worse about the tax cut than I did before - the small bit of extra money I get back could have been used to buy a plane ticket for one of these heros.

And, just to prove how the tax cut is mythical, I am now being asked to voluntarily provide the plane ticket for the soldiers by donating my frequent flyer miles. Which, of course, I will do to some extent. So the tax cut benefits me exactly how???

So far, the Republicans have managed to cut military pay and Veterans Administration funding; have repeatedly extended the deployments of Reservists after telling them they were going home; rewritten the rules of Reserve tours of duty so that unlike regular troops, you can't be discharged from the Reserves until after your entire unit has been deactivated (even if your term has expired); and now make soldiers pay to get from a hub airport to where their families, whom they haven't seen in a long time, are. Yet the Republicans are the party of patriotism, military strength and family values? I don't see it.

Anyway, if you have American Advantage miles and would like to donate, here's a link.

Imagine, if you will...

Rod Serling couldn't have scripted it better.

A military force occupies an area that is populated by an indigenous people who don't speak the same language as the occupiers. The occupied are forced to endure burdensome conditions of occupation, including concertina razor wire around entire towns, checkpoints, long lines, identification cards, and guards who don't speak their language. And the occupiers similarly are facing a hostile population in which it's impossible to tell who might be trying to kill you and who is simply frustrated with the occupiers' intrusion.

There is a deep misunderstanding between the two sides. The occupiers put a sign on the concertina wire that reads "This fence is here for your protection. Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be shot." In the face of attacks on the occupation force, the occupiers have blown up the homes of suspected attackers, and have imprisoned members of their families. Says an occupation soldier, "You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face."

Meanwhile, the occupied feel ashamed and emasculated, which only feeds the rage. "This is absolutely humiliating," said Yasin Mustafa, a 39-year-old primary school teacher. "We are like birds in a cage." They complain that the restrictions on them make their lives impossible. According to one report, the village is locked down for 15 hours a day, meaning that residents are unable to go to the mosque for morning and evening prayers. They say the curfew does not allow them time to stand in the daylong lines for gasoline and get home before the gate closes for the night.

Sounds like the Israelis are in an untenable situation, right? Well here's the kicker. It's not Israelis occupying some town in the West Bank.

It's the US, occupying the town of Abu Hishma in Iraq, as described in yesterday's New York Times. [link]

Chillingly, the article quotes Lt. Colonel Nathan Sassaman, who is the battalion commander of the troops who are occupying the town. Here's his view of what his troops are supposed to be doing: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them."

Explain to me again that part about how we're bringing democratic values to the Middle East? Because clearly, I'm missing something...

You heard it here first

Almost a month ago, I debated with Bruce G. about a Zogby poll that was cited by Vice President Cheney as a positive sign that American action in Iraq is working. At the time, I disagreed with Cheney's assessment, and examined the poll results to show that Cheney was very far from "technically correct". In fact, in some cases, he was dead wrong. [link]

Now, you don't have to take my word for it. You can take the New Republic's word for it.

"Practically nothing Cheney said in his description of the poll -- and the situation in Iraq -- withstands scrutiny. When Iraqis were asked what model of government they wanted, a breakaway plurality of 49 percent desired a democracy guided by Islamic law. The next closest contender, with 24 percent, was a clerical-dominated Islamic state. A secular, democratic Iraq -- the closest choice to the U.S. model -- garnered only 21 percent support. Over 60 percent of Iraqis wanted the United States and Britain to leave Iraq in a year; among Sunnis, the figure rose to 70 percent. Worse, fully half of Iraqis said they expect the United States to hurt their country over the next five years. Only 36 percent voiced faith that it would help."

Well, I think I said it better, and I certainly said it earlier, but it's nice when someone else validates the contents of a post...

Soo-ee, Pig pig pig

You know that a Republican-controlled Congress must be out of control when even the conservatives are criticizing its pork-laden spending bills. [link]

The Heritage Foundation prepared a list of some of the estimated 10,000 pork-barrel projects that are included in the latest omnibus spending bill. The list includes some gems like this:

$270,000 for potato storage
$450,000 for trout genome mapping
$270,000 for sustainable olive production
$90,000 for olive fruitfly research
$200,000 for the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame
$16,000 for the National Distance Running Hall of Fame, Utica, NY
$150,000 for Rock School, Philadelphia, PA; and
$225,000 for the Hawaii statehood celebration

Here's the Heritage Foundation's list. [link] Enjoy.

The Other Side of the Propoganda War

Agence France Presse has a curious article about this past weekend's fighting in Samarra, in northern Iraq. As it was reported over the weekend, US forces were escorting a convoy delivering new Iraqi dinars to local banks when they came under fire from fadayeen Saddam insurgents. After a fierce firefight lasting three or more hours, American forces had killed 46 or more of the insurgents and had sent a strong message to the insurgent movement. [link]

According to Agence France, however, there is a little problem: no one seems to be able to account for the bodies of the dead insurgents. [link] Officials at the one hospital in Samarra say that they only have the bodies of a handful of civilians in their morgue, but nothing like 46 or more insurgent soldiers. Residents who were supposedly near the fighting -- a shopkeeper and an ambulance driver -- likewise say that they saw no bodies. Even the New York Times, which reported that "strewn across the rubble" were "dozens of bodies, apparently all Iraqi, many wearing the uniforms of fedayeen paramilitary fighters loyal to the overthrown Hussein government" attributed that description to an Army spokesman, not to the reporter's own observation.

The US forces, meanwhile, didn't do a body count -- apparently, the death toll was calculated from "reports on the ground" (whatever that means), interviews with soldiers and counting how many AK-47s and RPGs the army "engaged". As a result, the army claims that it "can tell just how many people are returning fire".

What's more, Army officials can't seem to agree on the number of dead (one report has 46 dead and another has 54 dead), or why there don't seem to be any bodies. The best they can come up with is "I don't know". One general, Brigadier Gen. Mark Kimmett, was quoted as saying (I'm paraphrasing) that perhaps the insurgents who were left took the bodies back to whatever base they came from. Others who were interviewed said that they didn't stick around to pick up bodies or that that the question should be put to the fedayeen Saddam. These are hardly answers that inspire confidence in the military version of this story.

General Kimmett's story is particularly troubling because the numbers involved don't add up. In one version of the story, apparently, 60 insurgents attacked, 46 were killed and 11 were captured. This would leave three people to retrieve 46 bodies, which hardly seems plausible. Another version had 80 attackers, of whom 54 ended up dead, 22 were wounded and 1 was captured. With 13 insurgents unaccounted for, this would make removal of bodies slightly more plausible, but still questionable since such an operation would require not just people who can lift the bodies, but also one or more vehicles and time to carry out the mission undetected.

Regardless of the numbers, however, Gen. Kimmett's assumption that the bodies were removed by the insurgents has troubling implications. For one thing, it suggests that (a) that the fedayeen Saddam are sufficiently organized to have standing orders to collect their dead and evacuate their wounded to a central location (where, presumably, there is medical treatment available that does not depend on the local hospital); (b) there is an insurgent base that the US hasn't identified; and (c) the fedayeen Saddam were able to collect 46 bodies and take them to said base without being detected. For another thing, it suggests that the insurgents are more organized and more entrenched than the Pentagon and the White House would have us believe.

I don't know exactly whom to believe here. Still, it's something to think about.