Oral History of the Bush White House | MetaFilter

Oral History of the Bush White House | MetaFilter

This was an amazing comment on the blue in MetaFilter. It was favorited by 130 people and I couldn't agree more.

I remember the moment I realized America has split into two countries, with two sets of facts, and how manipulative those facts were. I was at a party thrown by this older woman, an occasional actress in the Omaha theater community, who was conservative, and so was her family. And we got to talking about the Iraq war, which was about a year old at the time. Of course, no weapons of mass destruction had been found, because there were never any, but they were adamant that Saddam had moved the weapons by train into Libya, or something. There was no evidence of this, but they assured me that they knew this to be a fact, because some very high level military general had said so.

At some point I mentioned that Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, had made the case that there were no weapons of mass destruction, even before we went to war. I had seen him speak, and he had mapped out how you keeps tabs on a country, and how you make sure they don't have weapons, and he pointed out that weapons of mass destruction don't magically appear. You have to buy certain things to make them, and there are only a small number of places that make those things, as you can keep tabs on those places, and what they are shipping, and who they are shipping to. According to him, it was impossible for Saddamn Hussein to have a program of weapons of mass destruction, because it was impossible for him to get the elements required to build such weapons. He said that Saddam was a braggart, and we should ignore him if he makes claims to having such weapons, because such claims are politically motivated. He also pointed out that inspections have worked, they effectively disarmed Hussein, and there was no reason to abandon them in favor of war.

As I discussed this, I saw the actress's face turn hard with anger. "Scott Ritter?" she asked. "The pederast?"

It took me several hours worth of digging around to figure out what she was talking about. Ritter had been arrested in 2001 a sting operation for arranging to meet with police officers posing as under-aged girls. He was never charged and the arrest records were sealed. This fact was not widely known, probably because he wasn't charged and it wasn't especially relevant to whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

But this woman had a different pipeline of information that I did, and believed it to be as true -- or, generally, truer -- than the broad array of sources I was using, which I culled from researching things on the Web. It was an extensive whisper campaign that somehow was bypassing mainstream media and saying, oh, there are weapons of mass destruction, don't believe the Washington Post. The weapons are in Syria. Oh, don't believe Scott Ritter. He's a pederast.

And suddenly it seemed like this was America. A huge segment of the population had walked away from facts in favor of politically motivated spin, which they saw as truer than facts, and they had their own system for passing the facts on to each other that bypassed, not only the mainstream press, but also any sort of vetting system, where it could be determined whether something was true or not, or even relevant. That was Bush's real legacy. It's not just that the mainstream press sort of collapsed and didn't do their jobs -- to an extent this is true, but there was a lot of fact checking and exposure of misbehavior and all the other things the press is true. But I found myself in a time when people didn't care about the truth. They actively walked away from it. I mean, there have always been cranks who see the world through a cracked lens and you just can't talk to them, but suddenly half of America was a crank.

It's honestly made me afraid of ideologies, even my own. I don't want an ideologue in office. I want someone for whom the truth is more important than ideology, and for whom effective management is more important than a politically motivated agenda. I'm a liberal, but I am completely aware that lefties are capable of the same sort of blind self-delusion that the conservatives engaged in for the past eight years, of rejecting reality because it doesn't jibe with their notions of how things work. I suspect it is a very human experience, and you need people at the top who are willing to say, look, these may not be the facts that we want to hear, but they are the facts, and we have to address them as such. Bush and Co. have steadfastly refused to be those leaders, and that may me the greatest failure of their administration.

Karina's Kitchen- Recipes from a Gluten-Free Goddess: A Vegan Pumpkin Pie Worthy of Thanksgiving

Karina's Kitchen- Recipes from a Gluten-Free Goddess: A Vegan Pumpkin Pie Worthy of Thanksgiving



I made this today with a couple of substitutions. I used soy milk instead of hemp milk, because that's what I had. I used 1 tablespoon of egg instead of egg replacer.

My pie turned out darker than the one in the picture. (Maybe I used a darker brown sugar?) The texture was great. It set up into a silky custard. The skin of the custard was a nice texture too, but a bit dry in relation to the soft insides. The next time I try this, I will use Susie Linquist's modification of using two eggs instead of 1 tablespoon of egg replacer.

What conservatives fear most in the first 100 days | BlogHer

What conservatives fear most in the first 100 days | BlogHer

This blog post was a bizarre diatribe against Barack Obama. It quoted lots of other blogs, but had virtually no content. It supposedly talked about what conservatives were worried about, but there's little more than innuendo in it.

The article criticizes Obama's proposals for change in education by saying that "his past, as usual, doesn't hold up under scrutiny." WTF? What does this have to do with anything?

Another blogger thinks that taxpayers should not be funding abortion, and the article implies that this is a possibility due to the bail out of Wall St. and the auto industry. WTF?

Some one else criticizes Obama for not immediately finding a new church in D.C. and going to the gym on Sunday mornings instead.

At last, a concrete concern about Obama being likely to pass "already-drafted bills on the assault weapons band and ammunition registration." Ah, yes, those second amendment rights must be protected, with guns.

And finally, a concern about "the possibility of a massive tax hike to rival those of Bill Clinton's tax increases - the biggest in our nation's history." Excuse me? He did not. And a tax hike would only be undoing the tax cuts that Bush put in place that the country could not afford in the first place. Besides, how are you going to be paying for all that lovely national defense?

I guess if you're determined to be a fear monger, you can succeed without facts and without having your brain in gear.

Thou shalt not cuddle a wild panda, even one in captivity

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Panda attacks man in Chinese zoo

Liu, a student at a university in Guilin, thought a panda at the local zoo looked so cute that he had to cuddle it. So he ignored signs and scaled a two-metre fence to enter Yang Yang's enclosure. The frightened panda rewarded Liu's efforts with serious bites to his arms and legs.

IMHO, Liu is lucky not to be rewarded with a Darwin Award. A panda is a wild animal. Cuddling a panda, even one that is captive in a zoo, is Not a Good Idea.

Natalie Dee Blogs about her premature baby

I read a story today on Natalie Dee's blog about her really awful pregnancy and delivery. She had developed pre-eclampsia at 33 weeks and was induced a week later. There's a fair bit of cursing in the post, so those with tender eyes should avert their gazes.

My favourite part of the post is the following paragraph and the accompanying photo:

"Yes, they decided it would be OK to give me a 4 pound baby to take care of. Pretty terrifying. Try to get any sleep at all when you have a baby smaller than a mens' tennis shoe making snorting noises next to you all night. I challenge you to not freak out and have to check every ten seconds that she has not died of smallness."

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace : Rolling Stone

I hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace until my cousin asked for Consider the Lobster in our Secret Santa gift exchange a few years back. Since Wallace was a professor at Claremont College, which is not that far away, I decided to use the professor connection to get he book autographed. I never met Wallace, only chatted with him on the phone, but he was very nice.

I still haven't read Infinite Jest, but my interest in Wallace was definitely piqued. I was saddened to hear of his death earlier this year.

There was a very nice essay in Rolling Stone,
The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, that talked about about his decades-long struggle with depression. His story is beautiful and sad.

My favorite parts of the essay are when it talks about how difficult it is to write. I know the feeling.

"Wallace told Costello about a woman he had become involved with. 'He said, 'She gets mad at me because I never want to leave the house.' 'Honey, let's go to the mall.' 'No, I want to write.' 'But you never do write.' 'But I don't know if I'm going to write. So I have to be here in case it happens.' This went on for years.'"

I am so familiar with this experience. I have spent many hours trapped at my desk playing some useless game like solitaire or slitherlink, not wanting to write, but having to write all the same.

(His friend,) Mark Costello was also worried. "Work got very hard. He didn't get these gifts from God anymore, he didn't get these six-week periods where he got exactly the 120 pages he needed. So he found distraction in other places." He would get engaged, then unengaged. He would call friends: "Next weekend, Saturday, you gotta be in Rochester, Minnesota, I'm getting married." But then it would be Sunday, or the next week, and he'd have called it off.


I know this practice of serial obsessions. When I have spent too many hours trapped behind a computer, I start to fantasize about other doing other things and start having absurd obsessions. I went through a phase when I was shopping for a horse, or planning to get a tattoo in Kyoto, Japan, or becoming a yoga instructor. If I weren't so trapped, I would never consider such things. But I was, and so I did. And so did David Foster Wallace. And perhaps in some twisted way, it helped the writing too.

The Future of Progressive Islam? Part II

The last post on this topic ended with questions about the interface between Islam and the non-Muslim world, typified by post-Enlightenment Western European culture. This culture has come to dominate the world, due in part to accidents of history, economic success, and the innovation that has come from multiculturalism.

A program from Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge entitled "East Meets West: Encountering Islam" and "East Meets West: A Culture in the Crossroads" has stories on how some individual Muslims are bridging the cultures. Among those featured are Kumail Nanjiani, Tariq Ramadan, Lupe Fiasco, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Kumail Nanjani is a standup comedian living in Chicago who was born and raised in Pakistan. He has left Islam, but he began questioning the religion as a child. He was told that every missed prayer, in hell the punishment would be a mountain thrown on your back. He took this literally and began to wonder.

Why my back? If it were a mountain, it wouldn't matter if it were on my back. How big is this mountain? Could it be just a plateau? I could take a plateau. And how would this mountain end up on my back? Would there be a giant who threw the mountain at me? Overhand or shot put style? If there were a giant who was strong enough to throw mountains, why wouldn't he punch me? That would really hurt.

These questions naturally led to other ones and more things that didn't make sense. Nanjani gave his parents a DVD of his show. They had known previously that he had left Islam, but the video finally convinced them. On the one hand, they were happy to know that he wasn't an angry former Muslim. On the other hand, they were perplexed because he still seemed like a moral, caring person and couldn't understand how someone with those values could not be Muslim.

Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss-born philosopher who travels throughout the Islamic world trying to build bridges between European Muslims and conservative clerics. In the show he describes himself as:

I'm Swiss by nationality, European by culture, Egyptian by memory, universalist by principle, and Muslim, of course, by religion. These are five dimensions of my identities, but over all I am universality by principle.

Like Martin Luther, he is appealing to clerics to go back to the basics and use the Quar'an and Mohammad's life as the starting point for Muslim theology. This approach, he argues, would lead to a more dignified, simplified Islam, one that makes it easier for Muslims to participate in a modern world by providing a means for them to make decisions about how to live. In other words, to ask and answer one's own questions using primary sources, rather than following directives from an imam. He has advocated for a moratorium on stoning, death penalty, and corporal punishment in Islam. While he is personally against these punishments, Ramadan was asking for a moratorium to open a dialogue with Muslim scholars and clerics worldwide.

Speaking of advice, I heard on the BBC World Service on Saturday morning that one could telephone a call center in Abu Dabi, UAE to obtain advice on religious issues. If I recall correctly, this service is organized by the government of the emirate. They employ an esteemed panel and there is an elaborate process for arriving at the final advice, or fatwa. I couldn't find the story on the BBC web site, but there is an article on the Gulf News web site.

This brings us to Dubai, one of the emirates in the UAE, which will be the topic of my next post.