It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

The 2005 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. Dan McKay of Fargo, North Dakota had the winner:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Here are two personal favorites.

The runner-up in the entire contest by Mitsy Rae of Danbury Nebraska:

When Detective Riggs was called to investigate the theft of a trainload of Native American fish broth concentrate bound for market, he solved the case almost immediately, being that the trail of clues led straight to the trainmaster, who had both the locomotive and the Hopi tuna tea.

And the winner of the Detective Category by Kari A. Stiller of College Station, Texas:

Patricia wrote out the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night' exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of 'He's Just Not That Into You' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she'd always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

Frank Rich Gets It Right

For the second week in a row Frank Rich points out the clear pattern of behavior in the White House and what it means about Alberto Gonzales. Read here. What was it Sir Walter Scott said? "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive"

"When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must 'preserve all materials' relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18�-minute tape gap. 'Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence,' said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months."

Rove's Last Stand

This was stolen from Billmon.

Howard Dean and The Western Platform

Jerome over at MyDD has an interesting post on Howard Dean's travels to Western States.

Here's Dean in Utah:

"I'm tired of Republicans telling us we're pro-abortion. I served on the board of Planned Parenthood for five years. I don't know anybody who's pro-abortion," he said. "Most people in this country would like to see the abortion rate go down. That includes Democrats and Republicans. The difference between the parties is that we believe a woman makes that decision about her health care -- and they believe Tom Delay makes it."

This is vintage Dean and he goes on to talk about winning with a "western platform." Kos conveniently provides a definition of this western platform:

A "Western platform" is the future of the Democratic Party, and one that I embrace to my very core -- fiscal and personal responsibility, rugged individualism, freedom to live one's life without government intrusion into the doctor's office or the bedroom. The intersection of libertarianism, good government, and economic populism.

Paul Krugman and Frank Rich

In the last three days Paul Krugman and Frank Rich of the New York Times have elegantly exposed the patterns of the current administration. On Friday, Krugman noted in this column that now "there is no such thing as political truth" and "the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity (9/11, what else?) began while ground zero was still smoldering." The pattern is that the Bush administration exploited 9/11 for political gain, lied to the American people to start a misguided war and desperately smeared anyone who pointed out the deception.

In Frank Rich's column in tomorrow's Sunday New York Times, he first describes Karl Rove's known pattern of smearing politicians and their wives. But the bad guy is not so much Rove as "the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair." The exposed pattern is the same: the Bush administration exploited 9/11 for political gain, lied to the American people to start a misguided war and desperately smeared anyone who pointed out the deception.

Here's Krugman.

"I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.

But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.

Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering."

Read it all here.

Here's Frank Rick:

"WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught."

snip

This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair."

Read it all here.

How We Can Prevail - Is Bush Listening?

Zakaria gets it right in this Newsweek Article. "To realize victory, we have to understand this struggle is more complex than we have been led to believe. Simple slogans telling us we fight terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to fight them here, are just that: slogans, not comprehensive policies. In fact, as London shows, terrorists can fight in two places at the same time. Or three. Or 10. And the great danger, of course, is that they can fight with dangerous weapons. The calculus of terror would change irrevocably if one of these splinter groups were ever to get its hands on nuclear materials or biological pathogens. So far the Bush administration has not given this danger the priority it urgently requires.

The broader shift that needs to take place, however, is a better definition of victory. America's political leaders continue to give their citizens the impression that victory means ensuring that there will be no other attack on American soil as long as we go on the offense abroad, get perfect intelligence, buy fancy new technologies at home, screen visas and lock some people up. But all these tough tactics and all the intelligence in the world will not change the fact that in today's open societies, terrorism is easy to carry out. The British authorities, perhaps the world's best at combating terror, admit they had no warning about last week's attack. The American response to the London bombs has been a perfect example of U.S. grandstanding. We immediately raised the alert level, scaring Americans, with no specific information about terror attacks in America. Why? Because were something to happen here, politicians and bureaucrats want to be able to say, 'Don't blame us, we told you.'

Real victory is not about preventing all attacks everywhere. No one can guarantee that. It's really about preventing the worst kinds of attacks, and responding well to others. And on this score, America remains woefully unprepared. 'The British attacks failed because Britain has excellent response systems and its people are well prepared on how to respond. America has neither advantage today,' says Stephen Flynn, a homeland-security expert and author of 'America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism.' 'We need good education and training for transit workers and citizens, good communication mechanisms among government agencies and the people, and most important, a good public-health infrastructure.' We have little of this today. In the years after 9/11 we have wasted much time, effort and money on other priorities rather than engaging in the massive investment in the systems of response that we need. Our leaders remain unwilling to speak honestly about the world we live in and to help people develop the mentality of response that is essential to prevailing."

Birhan Woldu - The Face of Famine

At the Live 8 concert for "make poverty history" in London, Bob Geldorf introduced a radiant Birhan Woldu, once the "face of famine." Read about her here.

"Tigray province in the high, remote North is the ancient spiritual home of Ethiopia, mesmerizing in its rugged, isolated, hard beauty.

It is in this deeply traditional society that Birhan Woldu lives. She is known locally as a pious, shy young woman close to her family and father, Ato Woldu.

She has never sought attention. But her strange fate has become legend as the 'miracle girl' who defied death in the Great 1984 Famine.

In 2002, she told me: 'I don't remember it, and I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad I didn't see my people die in that terrible time. It is past. I don't see it the way adults see it, and I'm glad I did not see it.'

But in my memory it is never past. Down these roads in Tigray I did see the very worst of that famine for weeks on end, and will never forget.

It seemed a vision of the end of the world - the refugees in search of food, seven million near starvation. There were close to a million that would die, most of them children.

There was a civil war on, as well, so it was hard to get to the famine zone. For a while our crew was alone there to record sadness that seemed bottomless and, I feared, endless, so surrounded were we by death.

We saw children like one boy about to die and followed the tiny corpses to makeshift morgues, first 100 dead a day in one camp. Then more corpses each passing day.

Then around 9:30 one morning, in the last week of October 1984, we arrived at a Catholic feeding centre that was overwhelmed with parents bringing in sick and starving children.

With cameraman Phillippe Billard, we began moving along the wall, talking to mothers. Producer Tony Burman snapped still pictures.

By chance, in one wide shot I only noticed recently can be seen the first picture of three-year-old Birhan Woldu, cradled in her father Ato's arms. This is just minutes before we spotted her.

As they reached the wall I noticed her slumping to the pavement and called a nurse but it seemed too late.

I had no sense this would later become the legendary face of famine."