There was something interesting on The Rachel Maddow Show last night. The Washington editor from The Atlantic, Steve Clemons, was on the show to explain how he believed the government is correct that Syria has been using chemical weapons. He said that in the past he’s been skeptical of government claims. And I don’t doubt that he is sincere. According to him, he was against the Iraq War and the “surge” in Afghanistan. But I’m not convinced in this case.

This really struck me at the end of the interview. Rachel Maddow said to cap it, “Steve Clemons… somebody who is well connected and very candid.” That is part of the problem, isn’t it? After all, Judith Miller was well connected in the run up to the Iraq War. All that being well connected does in these situations is make you vulnerable to a coordinated propaganda campaign from Washington. And there doesn’t even have to be any intent to deceive. Conventional wisdom in Washington is no more likely to be right than anywhere else.

Look: if I had to take a stand on this matter, I’d say it was a toss up. So there’s a good chance that Syria did it. And there’s a good chance they didn’t. And there’s a chance that it isn’t a chemical attack at all. Remember yellow rain? What I do know is that our track record of rushing into war is not good. And even when the cause is just, our interventions do a great deal of harm.

Maddow seems to be pretty much on board. She ended the segment by saying, “It is remarkable hearing what Steve said there about how the overall strategic idea here is about reestablishing that international normal—that international allergy—on weapons of mass destruction while the UN weapons inspectors are there in that country, that we would act before we heard from them what they found is very conflicting direction.” In other words: it’s deja vu all over again.

It’s interesting that there are those of us who are always skeptical. And then there are those who are always ready to go to war. But in the middle are those who just go with our last adventure. In this case, the waters are muddy because Libya worked out reasonably well, but most people still look back to Iraq and Afghanistan. But if it turns out that Syria is indeed using chemical weapons against its people, the next time the onus will be entirely on us skeptics. And we will be off and running after another “bloody good war.”

Afterword

I don’t mean to suggest that this intervention will turn out well. But if Syria is using chemical weapons, people will throw it in my face the next time I counsel caution. And it won’t matter if the intervention is a total fiasco. This could be the start of World War III, and afterwards the hawks would be saying, “But: chemical weapons!” By tradition, the Trojan War sparked the destruction of the great Greek city states of that time. “They raped our queen, we raped their city, and we were right…” Brilliant!

My colleague Richard Barry over at The Reaction brought my attention to a little speech that Ashton Kutcher gave last week at the Teen Choice Awards. He told the teens (and all of us, really, because Kutcher is just that kind of a guy), “I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a steppingstone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job.” I’m so inspired that I want to drop an anvil on my foot.

Richard brings up the speech because the conservative media are all a twitter that Kutcher is making a “conservative” statement. As he notes, it is anything but. Hard work is not a partisan issue. But I would go further than that. If anything, hard work is a liberal issue. The conservative movement may talk the talk but it doesn’t walk the walk. It is all about depriving opportunity from the poor and giving huge handouts to the rich who are never allowed to fail. See, for example, TARP.

But I see Kutcher’s statement in a less positive light. He had advantages that many others do not—and I’m not even talking about his boyish good looks. He was brought up in a middle class household when that meant something. It certainly wasn’t a perfect childhood, but I suspect that Kutcher has put the most negative light on it. His brother did have health problems and his parents did finally divorce when he was in his late teens. But it wasn’t a dysfunctional household by any means. What’s more, he did not suffer economically.

During his senior year of high school, Kutcher burglarized that high school with the express intention of stealing money. He was caught. But the authorities didn’t exactly throw the book at him. He was given probation. I generally think that a young black man would have gotten something more. Regardless, it did not stop Kutcher from being able to go off to college. Although he claimed that the burglary straightened him out, once in college he was back to his wild ways. The only job we can see that he did was some summer work that it looks like his mother got him. He then didn’t go on to graduate college. Instead, he won a modeling competition and went pro.

What exactly it is that Mr. Kutcher has to teach teens about the value of hard work is not clear to me. Did he not quit some temp waiting job until he got his modeling contract? It is not surprising when stars think their lives have been solely the result of hard work. But in his specific case, it seems odd. After all, he paternal twin brother Michael had a heart transplant when he was just 13 years old. That ought to make it pretty clear that he’s at least lucky in that way. And that ought to make him realize that he was born with that face. And if it hadn’t been for that, he’d be lucky to be working at some Procter & Gamble factory right now.

On this day in 1728, the Swiss mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert was born. He proved that Pi was an irrational number. Joseph-Michel, the older of the Montgolfier Brothers was born in 1740. They invented the hot air balloon. The “Father of Modern Chemistry” Antoine Lavoisier was born in 1743. Playwright Zona Gale was born in 1874. The great painter Rufino Tamayo was born in 1899. It is hard to describe his style, but his work reminds me of Paul Klee—only better.

Novelist Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. Mother Teresa was born in 1910. Cartoonist Brant Parker was born in 1920. He created and drew The Wizard of Id—which wasn’t bad. Film director Pyotr Todorovsky was born in 1925. Jazz musician Peter Appleyard was born in 1928 and only died last month. Here he is doing “Tangerine” (it’s really good):

Politician Geraldine Ferraro was born in 1935. The voice of movie trailers, the man who brought you, “In a world where…” Don LaFontaine was born in 1940.

Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground is 63 today. The less I say about her, the better. I’ve already gotten a lot of grief when I wrote about her before. Puzzle master Will Shortz is 61.

Saxophonist Branford Marsalis is 53. I remember hearing that when Jay Leno first asked him to be the house band for the Tonight Show, Marsalis turned him down. When he told the band about it, they made him go back and take the offer. I can see how this was. Marsalis was the star of the show; for him, the touring was probably nice. But the guys in the band liked the idea of a good paying gig where they could go home every night. Anyway, Marsalis didn’t last long. I don’t think he liked Leno much. I can’t blame him.

Very funny actor Melissa McCarthy is 43. And both Macaulay Culkin and the new Jame T Kirk, Chris Pine, are 33.

The day, however, belongs to the great singer and guitarist Leon Redbone who is 64 today. Look, I don’t have any particular reason for giving the day to him. I just really like his work. His voice is great, but mostly I like the old songs that he sings. Here he is doing “Lazy River” and “Mr. Jelly Roll Baker”:

Happy birthday Leon Redbone!

Speaking of how presidents and pundits keep spinning us into war, I just fond this from February: Norman Solomon had a debate with Lawrence Wilkerson on the tenth anniversary of Colin Powell’s infamous UN speech on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. I knew it would be good. Wilkerson is some kind of liberal hero now because he admits that he and Powell totally screwed up on that speech and more generally in the Bush White House. My position is different. I’m glad that both men admit that they were wrong, but that is hardly enough to turn them into heroes.

In the debate, Solomon is ruthless. And frankly, Wilkerson deserves it. Most of his apology really comes down to, “We were wrong, but who could have known?! No one knew!” Well, that’s not true. I, for one, knew. And then he claims that he didn’t know at the time that Bush and Cheney were hell bent on going to war. I don’t buy that for a second. A person would have to be clueless to not know what his superiors were doing. What’s more, in Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke makes clear that Powell knew what the administration was all about even on 9/11.

Of course, Wilkerson couldn’t justify the worst thing he and Powell did if he didn’t claim that they had no idea that Bush was determined to go to war. Right before the speech, CIA director George Tenet shows up with the smoking gun: a senior al-Qaeda member admitted that Iraq was training the group in the use of chemical weapons. Even under the best of circumstances, you’d have to say, “Really?!” Outside of a movie, any reasonable person would be skeptical. But not Wilkerson-Powell! They just slammed that bit of “evidence” into the speech and ran with it.

Solomon didn’t even talk about any of this. His main point was that lots of people thought the case for war was trumped up. And Wilkerson is either disingenuous or stupid. Regardless, he isn’t a person we should be celebrating.

The debate descended into a lot of them shouting at each other. But it is nice to see someone in the military called on his shit for once. And Wilkerson’s response was fairly weak. Basically, he claimed that no one on the inside could have known anything. At one point he complained that Solomon is in the wrong because his group never met with Powell’s staff. Solomon seemed taken aback by this. It doesn’t seem credible that Powell’s office would have met with Solomon’s group; they would have dismissed it as a knee-jerk anti-war group. Regardless, just look at all the good that was done by the groups they did listen to.

So John Kerry wants to get medieval on Syria’s ass. Isn’t this the guy who was so prominent in Vietnam Veterans Against the War after he came home from Vietnam? Look: I’m not accusing him of hypocrisy. No. I’m accusing him of being a human. And an American human at that.

According to the Washington Post, “Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Monday that Syria’s use of chemical weapons is ‘undeniable,’ and that ‘this international norm cannot be violated without consequences.'”

Where have I heard this kind of thing before? Oh, I know: during the lead up to the Iraq War! Remember when Colin Power told the United Nations, “We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam’s numerous palace complexes”? You see: we knew that Saddam had WMD! Because we always know whatever is convenient to justify doing what we want to do.

But here’s the thing about Kerry: I’m sure he believes what he’s saying just like he believed that Vietnam was a bad idea 43 years ago. Because wars always sound like a great idea going in. And they always ends as at best a mixed blessing. Mostly, people look back on wars and wonder why we got into them in the first place.

None of this is to take away from the human tragedy that is going on in Syria. But my problem is we don’t act with any idea of improving the situation. What it seems like to me is that there are certain powerful people in the government who really want to go to war in Syria. They’ve been pushing a long time. And now that there is some indication that Syria has used chemical weapons, the rush is on.

The problem, of course, is what Digby just published, The Crying Wolf Syndrome. We are not so good at making decisions during stressful times like this. So the facts don’t matter. We follow the path that is being pushed hardest. And those who are pushing the hardest are those who want to go to war.

It may turn out that Syria is using chemical weapons against its people. It may turn out that they aren’t. But I feel we will almost certainly decide before we know. And then we will be attacking to be attacking—with little thought to what the final resolution will be. Except, of course, for everyone saying, “Why did we even go to war there?”

You know it is a good day when it is exactly 483 years since the birth of Ivan the Terrible. Was he really so terrible? Overall, he seems to have been good for Russia. Of course, in a fit of rage, he did kill his brilliant son (and heir apparent), leaving the throne to his mentally retarded son. So it’s a mixed bag, especially if you are (1) brilliant and (2) a son.

Dutch astronomer Philippe van Lansberge who just couldn’t accept that the planets moved in ellipses was born in 1561. The great English horse painter George Stubbs was born in 1724. Recently, one of this paintings sold for $36 million. I don’t think much of him generally and I really don’t think much of that particular painting. Pioneer writer Bret Harte was born in 1836. Mathematician Helmut Hasse was born in 1898.

Modern composer Stefan Wolpe was born in 1902. Oh, yes: I could provide you with an example of his work. But would you click? Would you perform even that small act of clicking the play button to hear the music? I’m sure you wouldn’t after I told you that his music is “difficult” and “ugly” and “something that makes twelve tone composition sound like Tchaikovsky.” So I won’t even try. Just go look him up yourself you ungrateful readers! (No, seriously: you won’t like his work. I guarantee it!)

Michael Rennie was there The Day the Earth Stood Still. Am I right?! Based upon that, it must have been after this day in 1909, because that was when he was born. I’m not a fan. But I do love this song:

Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 and only died last year. Actor Van Johnson was born in 1916. The great American racist George Wallace was born in 1919.

Game show host Monty Hall is 92 today. The Monty Hall Problem was one of the first things I wrote about on this site. Actor Sean Connery is 83. Regis Philbin is 82. The great jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter is 80. Here he is with his quartet doing “Footprints”:

Comedy writer Marshall Brickman is 72. Her is a clip from his funny (but troubled) film Simon:

Novelist Martin Amis is 64. So is one of the worst human beings in the world, Gene Simmons. Elvis Costello is 59. Here he is at the White House doing “Penny Lane”:

Film director Tim Burton is 55. Here is the entire original short Frankenweenie:

And actor Tom Hollander is 46.

The day, however, belongs to Leonard Bernstein who was born on this day in 1918. He makes me think of the line from Citizen Kane, “You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” During a time where he couldn’t have been so famous, he might have been one of the greatest composers of the century. As it was, the next line from that bit of Citizen Kane comes to mind, “I think I did pretty well under the circumstances.” The music he wrote for West Side Story is probably the best for any musical ever. I’m not that fond of him as a conductor, but I think he is a lot better than most people say. But his greatest legacy will likely be as an educator. I remember a series of short films he made that were really important to me as a kid. I especially like this one about Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. I like that he takes the romance out of the composition process and shows that it is mostly just hard work. (This is doubtless true of Mozart as well, but he did all of that work in his head.)

Happy birthday Leonard Bernstein!

The Independent published a remarkable story on Friday that hasn’t gotten much coverage, Exclusive: UK’s Secret Mid-East Internet Surveillance Base Is Revealed in Edward Snowden Leaks. If you have heard about, it has probably only confused you. The biggest news has been that Edward Snowden released a statement saying that he never spoke to The Independent. But if you read the actual article, you will see that this is irrelevant. The article doesn’t indicate that Snowden has been in communication with them. And that’s what makes it such a remarkable piece of “journalism.”

Based on the article’s headline, you might get the impression that this is an important revelation. But read it more carefully and you’ll see what is really being said: “There is information in the Snowden files that could cost lives!” Although the article never mentioned the detention of David Miranda, that is what it is all about. The article is making the case that it was right to detain him because he had (or could have had) this kind of “dangerous” information. So after the initial revelations were revealed at the top of the story, it continued:

The implication is, “We here at The Independent can be trusted, but should this kind of information be allowed in the hands of that loose cannon Glenn Greenwald?” The whole thing smacks of what has long been the conservative take on the First Amendment, “You can say anything you like—so long as you don’t!” To me, this is taking the whole “journalists against journalism” war to a new level. Now we learn that leaks are perfectly fine so long as they aren’t in the hands of someone who will use them like Julian Assange or Glenn Greenwald or Bart Gellman. We can trust Jeffrey Toobin with our leaks. Therefore: freedom of the press!

What Greenwald suggests is that The Independent article is just an NSA/GCHQ operation. It is hard not to think that is exactly right. I’m sure that the NSA now knows what files Snowden took—at least generally if not specifically. What’s more, after taking Miranda’s computer away, it is very possible the GCHQ got the information from there. So someone from the United Kingdom’s government goes to The Independent and says, “Here’s a document we know that Edward Snowden leaked. This is the kind of the harm that could be done if this fell into the wrong hands.” And thus the story is written. I don’t blame the reporters at The Independent; it’s a good story. The problem is that the story they wrote is pure propaganda and speculation. No one has argued that there weren’t potentially dangerous documents in the leak. That’s why Snowden gave them to reputable journalists rather than just dumping them on the internet.

The story surrounding The Independent report is very important. It shows that the surveillance system is engaged in a propaganda campaign. But unlike previous campaigns, this one is fairly subtle. It mixes facts with unjustified fear for a toxic mixture of authoritarianism. Look for more of this in the United States press.

Dean Baker is like Jesus Christ, suffering for the sins of the press. In this specific case: he reads the Washington Post so the rest of us don’t have to. Unfortunately, after he brought this most recent “reporting” outrage to my attention, I was forced to read it myself. The article was the Post’s lead story this morning and even the title is amazing, After Six Budget Showdowns, Big Government Is Mostly Unchanged. But the summary of the article sounds downright reasonable, “The Post’s David Fahrenthold examines the amount of federal spending, workers, rules and buildings over the years.” Okay! Let’s get started!

From the first sentence it is terrible. In addition to the cynical tone, Fahrenthold doesn’t seem to understand even the most basic notions of finance or politics. I’m just going to focus on the first four paragraphs and leave the rest to Baker. (I’m only willing to suffer so much.)

What really stands out to me is the word “whopping.” That’s a highly charged word that doesn’t belong in a reasonable discussion of the budget. After all, what does it even mean? Is that an unreasonable amount of money for the government to spend given what it does? Fahrenthold doesn’t say. It is just a Really Big Number to scare the prols with.

Note also that his numbers are presented to confuse. First, they aren’t inflation adjusted. If they were, the 2010 number would be $3.63 trillion, so the total budget would have gone down by 5% in those two years. Of course no one but political hacks who are trying to deceive present budget numbers even simply in inflation adjusted numbers. It is necessary to look at the federal budget as it compares to the size of the economy. Just on the simplest level, the population keeps growing.

Dean Baker presents the math that Fahrenthold didn’t. And you can see why he didn’t: it doesn’t make the case that he wants to make. As Baker notes:

That’s a decline of 12% in government spending. In other words: it is a lot of money. But Fahrenthold and the Post don’t want to talk about that because they have a political ax to grind. Note also the conservative framing: this is only about total spending. We are bringing in a lot more money in tax revenues than we were three years ago. So the deficit has been reduced far more than even this. Apparently this doesn’t matter over on 15th Street. They just think the government is too big and so they are going to “report” that.

I’m also really taken by his claim that government spending “helped bring on a tea party uprising.” That’s just not true. The Tea Party members were not concerned at all when the government was bailing out the banks. It was only when a far smaller amount of money was going to homeowners that the Tea Party movement started. What’s more, it is outrageous to claim that it was the budget deficit that gave the Republicans control of the House. Much of that was just fundamentals. After 2006 and 2008, there were Democrats in places that were overwhelmingly Republican. That couldn’t last. But more than that, the Republicans won because the economy continued to suck and seniors were convinced Obama was coming after their Medicare.

I highly recommend reading all of Dean Baker’s article. He gets more into weeds. The truth is that the Washington Post has long been obsessed with the budget deficit and they use it to call for the gutting of the entitlement programs. The whole thing is just despicable. It is not journalism; it is scare tactics with a political agenda. This is why we call the paper Fox on 15th Street.

Over at the website for Up with Steve Kornacki, MSNBC put up a number of videos featuring Martin Luther King Jr. The following video with him on Meet the Press is amazing. In many ways, this bit of television is exactly what we would see today. King gets a number of probing and even offensive questions. We never see that from the press when they interview powerful people, but it is still quite common when anyone who questions the status quo is interviewed. What’s impressive is how calm and well spoken King is. When Lawrence E. Spivak asks, “Former president Truman is an old friend of the negro, I believe. Isn’t this an indication that the sit-in strikes are doing the negro race more harm than good?” My natural reaction would be to pull out a baseball bat and see just how many teeth I could knock out with one swing. But King—almost 20 years years younger than I am now am—is much more controlled and brilliantly responds, “Following his past record, it seems to me that Mr. Truman wouldn’t have faced such a situation because there wouldn’t have been a segregated store in the beginning if he were running it.” Watch, please:

In the second clip, you can better see what whites hated about King. And here I’m not talking about just the explicitly racist whites. This is what is generally forgotten with King the Legend that exists in the modern mind. Here is a man that is not going to bought off. He continues to push his cause. Listening to conservatives, King would be totally happy today because the government isn’t explicitly targeting blacks. Of course, that’s ridiculous. After all, what are these new voter ID laws but poll taxes by another name? Even still, King was not exclusively or even primarily interested in government racism. And as I’ve argued, all this discussion of racism being over and racism against whites being the real problem is the Son of the Bride of Jim Crow.

In the following segment, May Craig gets to go after King with what I think of as schoolgirl arguments, “It’s always wrong to break the law!” Such arguments are hard to counter, given that the person making them understands ethics about as well as a child. But King does a good job. But the best is saved for last. Frank Van Der Linden comes to the rescue of bigots everywhere by asking if King isn’t disqualified to talk about anything given that he’s a known Marxist. Then he follows up with his fears of miscegenation. Can’t have them negroes marrying our white women! It is a thing to behold:

In the third segment, King gets to address the miscegenation argument. He answers the question well, but it is clear that he thinks the whole issue is nonsense. But it must have been embarrassing for Van Der Linden, who only died back in 2011, to watch himself forever immortalized as the bigot he most certainly was.

Most of the this segment involves Spivak arguing that King and his movement should just be dong things differently. “Wouldn’t you be on stronger ground…” he says repeatedly. But notice what nonsense this is. This is the kind of apologetics that we get on the surveillance issue with Jeffrey Toobin. Sure, we agree with you, but couldn’t you just do less? It ends with another question from the clearest racist on the panel, Van Der Linden. He asks King how many white people are members of his church. Somehow, in Van Der Linden’s mind, it is King’s responsibility to force whites to join his congregation. Maybe I’m wrong to call Van Der Linden a racist, although I certain think he was. But he provided King with his best answers as he did with this question. Check it out:

I think that this interview does a better job of demonstrating who King was than any speech. You can see most clearly his incredible intelligence, knowledge, and resolve. It is a tough interview—one that few modern politicians would be able to withstand. And King is triumphant at every moment and generally. It is a beautiful thing to see and a testament to his greatness.

Afterword

There is one humorous moment in the interview. May Craig asks if King has heard of Harlem restaurants that refuse to serve whites. Although I have little doubt that this is racist disinformation, King easily bats the issue aside. He says that of course it would be an injustice. As of course it would. But I have little doubt there was no fact beneath the question.