"Subverting all of the values to which they give lip service." Elaine Pagels is a theological historian and author I have admired for years. Her perspective on the political motives of religious ideas and rhetoric was always fascinating, but never more so than at this moment in America. It was thrilling to find this interview about Christianity and politics at www.edge.org that I will not excerpt because I would just end up copying and pasting the whole thing.

Don't miss it.

Link via Arts & Letters Daily.

{ 9:06 AM }

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The spoils of war, the profits of Halliburton, and the art of "finger quotes." Dick Cheney's alma mater shows a tidy quarterly net profit of $26 million (compared to a year ago when it lost $498 million), according to the Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd):

Revenue climbed to $3.6 billion from $3.24 billion a year earlier, which the company said is largely attributable to projects at its engineering and construction group, including "government services work in the Middle East."

The benign-sounding latter phrase translates roughly to "a unilateral invasion championed by former Halliburton CEO and present US vice president Dick Cheney and waged on false pretexts of nonexistent Iraqi WMD programs, involving the ongoing deaths and injuries of dozens if not hundreds of American mothers and fathers in the Reserves who had offered to serve one weekend a month for the legitimate defense of this nation, but have since learned otherwise about the true nature of their work, which involves serving as an American taxpayer-subsidized slave labor force for Halliburton."

{ 7:19 AM }

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"...some of the research being done is unusual, it's different, it's new, it's got -- there may be people who see this as cutting edge and maybe beyond certain limits that they're comfortable with."

That's Lawrence Di Rita, Special Assistant to the SecDef, speaking yesterday on the termination of the Policy Analysis Market, characterizing some of the research DARPA performs to support initiatives like the Total Information Awareness program.

The Policy Analysis Market was planned to be the Blogshares of Middle Eastern politics, a fantasy marketplace for wagering on assassinations and the like. Here's MSNBC's report.

This is the sort of uncomfortable research American taxpayers are now funding via DARPA (on five-count Iran-Contra felon Poindexter's watch, no less).

Laughably, this effort was purported to have some counterterrorism value. In another case of poor timing (is Rove napping?), its termination arrived within hours of cutting the air marshal and airport screening programs, simultaneously with renewed Al-Qaeda hijacking threats.

The new Homeland Security Department, indicative of the Bush administration's hopelessly ineffectual approach to counterterrorism, is the butt of an extraordinarily expensive national joke that simply isn't funny anymore.

Transcript via Cryptome.

{ 10:08 AM }

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Tom Hanks + Mujahideen = Yet Another Oscar. All-American actor Tom Hanks is preparing to play East Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson in a film adaptation of Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (Houston Chronicle):

Can Tom Hanks, who has handled a Southern drawl effectively in several films, master the distinctive East Texas twang? We're going to find out when he portrays flamboyant Rep. Charlie Wilson of Lufkin in a film based on the book Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History.

Author George Crile, a 60 Minutes producer, reports that Hanks' production company has just teamed with Universal Studios to buy movie rights to the book. Hanks has committed to the lead role. He will play the East Texas congressman who led efforts to provide money and weapons to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s in their battle against the Soviet Union.

This screamingly made-for-the-silver-screen story is not without its dark side, although the book reportedly soft pedals it, according to Molly Ivins:

One thing I especially like about Crile's treatment of all this splendid material is his almost tender portrait of Wilson himself, warts and all. Charlie is awfully easy to caricature or dismiss, though I think he is not quite as exceptional as Crile does. Brilliantly talented alcoholics are rather common in Texas public life, including Bob Bullock, Ann Richards, Oscar Mauzy, Warren Burnett, etc. I believe I am safe in claiming that at one time almost half the Texas Senate consisted of drunks. But Wilson was never the cartoon figure he liked to play. For one thing, most of those gorgeous women who worked for him over the years, known as Charlie's Angels, of course, were smart as hell.

[...]

One cannot, in this account, help siding with Charlie and his sidekick, Gust Avrakotos, "the blue-collar James Bond," against all the stuffed shirts, wusses and pompous [CIA] bureaucrats who worried about silly stuff like breaking the law and setting off World War III. Far be it from me to side with the grown-ups -- makes me happy just to think about the hot fantods Charlie and Gust must have produced amongst the mopes at the State Department.

On the other hand, dismissing "blowback" from CIA operations should not be done out-of-hand. It seems to me that even the CIA's "successes," like returning the Shah to Iran and the 1954 Guatemalan coup, produced hideous results. There was good reason to be anti-anti-communist during the Cold War. In this case, we are left with the unfortunate fact that Wilson's War armed a bunch of people who are now shooting at us. While Crile does not neglect that delicate topic entirely, his treatment of it is slight and defensive.

Wouldn't it be great if Tom Hanks chose not to portray a colorful, happy-go-lucky, aw-shucks Texas-via-Hollywood Charlie Wilson and decided not to gloss over the immense difficulties (ahem, 9/11) that the real Charlie Wilson helped to bring upon us? Couldn't he color the role with some darkness, some "grown-up" quality that in fact matches the reality of the situation as it has developed over the last twenty years? Wouldn't it be more interesting not to spoon-feed another Forrest Gump oversimplification of history to a media-anesthetized public?

Tom Hanks already has his archetypal home-spun roles and Academy Awards — hopefully he realizes that he need not contribute to the national stupor.

{ 12:16 PM }

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It's about the oil, Chapter 97. Executive Order 13303 is an evil document with a lot of implications that Tom Paine wrote about yesterday...

...if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco touch Iraqi oil, it will be immune from legal proceedings in the United States. Anything that could go, and elsewhere has gone, awry with U.S. corporate oil operations will be immune to judgment: a massive tanker accident; an explosion at an oil refinery; the employment of slave labor to build a pipeline; murder of locals by corporate security; the release of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The president, with a stroke of the pen, signed away the rights of Saddam's victims, creditors and of the next true Iraqi government to be compensated through legal action. Bush's order unilaterally declares Iraqi oil to be the unassailable province of U.S. corporations.

...and we first noticed it way back in May.

{ 8:41 AM }

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"I'm thinking of my future, and you're not in the picture." That tawdry, thieving presidential brother and his nasty divorce! Compassionate conservative Neil Bush and former president Poppy are having a good old time pushing Sharon Bush into the back alley dumpster (Houston Chronicle):

She wonders whether Neil, 48, was unfaithful to her throughout their marriage as he has admitted he was at the end. She wonders whether Neil is the father of the baby born to Maria Andrews, the 40-year-old Houston woman he is dating. Sharon wonders why he used e-mail to tell her he was leaving and why he told her by phone months later, "You better move on with your life or you'll find yourself in a back alley."

[...]

At one point, Sharon says, she tried to talk to her former father-in-law, and he changed the subject. "He said, 'Come and see the new hot tub.' Like, let's go play with the new toys."

Sharon wants Neil back. "I told him, 'Don't leave and scar the children. Give me a weekend to try to fix things.' "

Neil was not interested in so much as a walk around the block, Sharon says. "He told me, 'I'm thinking of my future, and you're not in the picture.' "

[...]

"Once I called my mother-in-law for help," Sharon says. "She told me, 'Neilsie will talk to me. You talk to your own mother.' "

Blah blah blah "Nielsie." Nielsie! That's a name fit for a poodle or a schnauzer or a gerbil — hardly a respectable name for the banking criminal son of a hot-tubbing former president. The child born to Friend of Mom and Other Woman Maria Andrews may someday find out that his real father's name is... Nielsie.

Unwittingly, Neil's words to his wife may actually describe brother George's feelings for his fellow countrymen. "I'm thinking of my future, and you're not in the picture" is an extremely succinct summary of the Dubya political agenda.

We've looked at the Neil-Sharon soap opera many times before, with the gleeful voyeurism that only the internet can provide.

{ 11:54 AM }

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