Billy Sol Estes we’re proud of ya son.
Hey! Billy-Billy, Hey! Billy-Billy, Billy.
Ya had to be Texan to do what you done.
Hey! Billy-Billy, Hey! Billy-Billy Sol.

While other kids saved up their nickels and dimes
For ice cream, candy, and fudge.
Well Billy saved too and when he had enough,
He bought him a fed-er-al judge.

(“The Ballad of Billy Sol Estes” by Phil Ochs)

Face it friends, they just don’t make scandals like they used to.

For all of Bill Clinton’s antics in the oval office as well as his, shall we say, questionable business practices (wish I could deduct $25,000 in interest on a loan I never paid back), his kind of scandalizing was pretty routine; a little venality here, a little immorality there. In the end, it proved hardly enough to inspire a great folk artist like Phil Ochs to write a song in homage to the sheer brazenness and utter amorality of his rather mundane adventures.

No, Ochs needed scandalizing of truly titanic proportions. And in the last 100 years, there is only one man in or out of government that can claim the mantle of scandal magnet extraordinaire. That man was Billy Sol Estes.

Estes’s scandalizing wasn’t just shockingly corrupt. It was sublime in its evil excesses. Stealing, influence peddling, bribery, and even murder was connected to Estes and his cotton schemes. Using his influence gleaned from being a friend of Vice President Lyndon Johnson (how close a friend is debated to this day) Billy Sol Estes swaggered around Washington like a Texas Don, a cowboy mafioso who, the evidence tells us, bought at least 3 Department of Agriculture employees – perhaps even the Secretary at that time Orville Freeman – as well as throwing his weight around on the hill.

Here are some details courtesy of Wikpedia and are generally confirmed by other sources:

In the late 1950s the US Department of Agriculture began controlling the price of cotton, specifying quotas to farmers. This limited overall production and Estes’ businesses suffered. He responded by expanding into cotton production himself. Over the next few years he developed a massive fraud, claiming to grow and store cotton that never existed, then using the cotton as collateral for bank loans. During this same period he became involved in Texas state politics and made political contributions to US senator and later Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

On June 3, 1961, Estes’ local contact at the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, Henry Marshall, was found dead in his car (reportedly with five gunshot wounds) on a remote part of his own ranch. Attributing Marshall’s death to carbon monoxide poisoning brought about from a hose attached to the exhaust pipe of his car, local Justice of the Peace Lee Farmer ruled Marshall had killed himself and the body was buried without an autopsy. The suicide verdict was later overturned.

On April 4, 1962 Estes’ accountant, George Krutilek, was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Krutilek had been questioned by the FBI about Estes the day before.

As a result of these deaths and an investigation into his business practices, on April 5, 1962 Estes and several business associates were indicted by a federal grand jury on 57 counts of fraud. Estes was accused of swindling many investors, banks and the federal government out of at least twenty-four million dollars through false agricultural subsidy claims on cotton production and the use of non-existent supplies of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer as collateral for loans. Two of Estes’ associates, Harold Orr and Coleman Wade, were also indicted but died of carbon monoxide poisoning (apparent suicides) before they went to trial. Estes was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was eventually found guilty of additional federal charges and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Although never accused of killing anybody, it is rather strange that Ole Billy seemed to leave a trail of dead bodies from Texas to Washington.

Bill Sol was also rumored to have set up a “love nest” where Congressmen could come and relax, have their pick of some truly exotic beauties (including an East German spy that President Kennedy eventually dallied with), probably enjoying a little Texas barbecue washed down with copious amounts of bourbon and branch.

Evidently, no one could throw a party like Billy Sol.

I bring the adventures of Billy Sol Estes up because the corruption scandal involving disgraced Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham has taken a bizarre turn as the FBI is now apparently investigating “hospitality suites” set up at the Watergate Hotel by Cunningham accomplices, all the better to “entertain” Congressmen and their staffs. Indications are that the “entertainment” included prostitutes and could extend back 15 years, involving dozens of Congressmen.

I daresay that the spate of revelations in this matter has several members sweating, perhaps even leading to some belated apologia to their wives. The fact is, there have been rumors of several such operations around Washington for years. If true, I would think that others (if there are any others) would shut down pronto.

My understanding when I worked around the Hill was that lobbyists would rarely offer such “perks” to members in Washington. Rather, such offerings were made on junkets and other trips like speaking engagements and the like. The reason is becoming obvious to Mr. Cunningham’s associates; the chances of keeping a secret in Washington is directly proportionate to how juicy the information is and what the potential is for getting back at your enemies.

The news that Porter Goss may be caught up in this sex sting is both interesting and not surprising. Goss is rattling a lot of cages at the CIA, not to mention carrying out an aggressive campaign against leakers.

Now before you lefties have a knipshit, I have every reason to believe any investigation of Goss is probably genuine. What I question is the speculation regarding his “activities” being leaked at this time. Pretty damned convenient, no? In fact, if I were the suspicious sort, I’d mention that it’s damned peculiar timing and that the hint regarding his involvement (“including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post”) seems to be the only mention of someone specific being investigated in the whole operation.

Even Tim at Balloon Juice points to a possible alternative name; Goss’s #3 at the Agency:

Porter Goss inexplicably chose Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a close friend and business associate of MZM’s Brent Wilkes, as his #3 man in CIA with a portfolio including appropriations. That seems like quite a boon for a firm whose niche consisted of inappropriately influencing lawmakers towards awarding it black defense- and intelligence-related contracts. Where did Goss meet Foggo? The shortest path between the two passes through MZM’s Watergate bacchanialiae.

Sorry Tim, I’m not drinking that much kool-aid. Foggo oversaw CIA contracts in Iraq which is no small potatoes. It’s no more a surprise regarding Foggo’s upward mobility at the CIA than Mary McCarthy’s meteoric rise from analyst to NIO. Politics seems to trump smarts at the CIA even under Goss which is disappointing but hardly earthshattering news. And the fact that the CIA IG has been investigating Foggo and his ties to the dirty contractors since early March would seem to indicate that he is the target mentioned in the article not Goss.

If this scandal pans out, it should prove to be pretty sordid but hardly the stuff of legend. For that, we would need to resurrect the memory of old Billy Sol Estes and his Texas sized malfeasance. To date, we’re not even close on this one.

After I wrote my review of the film United 93 this morning, I was pretty drained emotionally. In fact, I didn’t think there would be anything that would be able to pique my interest and motivate me to write about for the rest of the day.

Good thing I happened to run across Slate’s Dana Steven’s review of the same film. There’s nothing like reading full blown, to the max idiocy to get the blood pumping to my brain and get my fingers itching to do a little keyboard solo on someone who exhibits as much jaw-dropping cluelessness as Stevens.

If you are one of those who saw United 93 and are keenly disappointed that Director Greengrass failed to turn his project into a 90 minute brief to prove the incompetence and evil of the Bush Administration, you would think Ms Stevens a genius rather than the pouting philistine that she appears to be. In truth, Stevens review is illustrative of a view quite prevalent on the left that, in essence, boils down to this: Things would have been different if you know who had been President.

The convoluted reasoning behind this notion rests with the hypotheses that 1) 9/11 was Bush’s fault; 2) the situation was made worse by the incompetence of the President; and 3) the government worked much better the previous 8 years and the gaffes, goofs, confusion, and panic were solely the result of the government going to hell and a handbasket during the 8 months of the Bush Administration.

Oversimplification?

I hope I don’t sound like a cynic with a heart of lead when I say that United 93, as grueling as it was to sit through, left me feeling curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful. At some point, Greengrass’ exquisite delicacy and tact toward all sides—the surviving families, the baffled air-traffic controllers, even the hijackers themselves—began to smack of political pussyfooting. What is Greengrass actually trying to say about 9/11? That it was a terrible day on which innocent people suffered and died? That the chaos and shock of that morning’s events (skillfully evoked via hand-held camera and real-time pacing) kept anyone, even the air-traffic controllers who watched the hijackings unfold, from understanding what was going on until it was too late?

First of all, yes Dana you “sound like a cynic with a heart of lead” since you asked. And that “political pussyfooting” (nice touch including the hijackers although one gets the impression you have more sympathy for them than you do the controllers) which we take to mean the director’s reluctance to assign “blame” was, of course, the entire rationale for the film. Sorry you missed it.

As politicized as the 9/11 Commission eventually became in its public sessions, the final report had much to say about why the entire United States government froze up into one massive ball of ice. Much of it was institutional. Some of it, like FAA protocols for dealing with hijackings were hopelessly inadequate to deal with what happened on 9/11. From the report:

“In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that:

• the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear;
• there would be time to address the problem through the appropriate FAA and NORAD chains of command; and
• hijacking would take the traditional form: that is, it would not be a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile.

On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen.” (emphasis mine)

“In every respect” would seem to take in the alternative history scenario of Bill Clinton to the rescue although people like Stevens never seem to let such mundane details like, you know, actual facts get in the way of a good anti-Bush rant.

One might ask why government was so unprepared for the disaster but this would bring up some royally uncomfortable verities about the way the United States snoozed its way through the entire 1990’s (George Bush #41 included), something Stevens and her ilk have no stomach for doing. It is much easier to simply blame it all on Bush with any alternate telling of the myth akin to breaking a commandment (that is, if lefties believed in such things).

Stevens’ complaints don’t end there:

United 93 is no Schindler’s List, relying on characterization and storytelling to draw viewers into identifying with an otherwise unimaginable horror. If anything, Greengrass’ agenda is an anti-identificatory one. If the Spielberg of Schindler’s List is a wheedling seducer, Greengrass is a chillingly precise archivist. He never cuts away to the families of the Flight 93 passengers, arriving home to listen to their heart-rending voicemail messages. He never visits the inside of the three planes that did crash into buildings that day; we’re aware of their fate only through the words of the air-traffic controllers, some clips of CNN news coverage, and one terrifying stock shot of the plane hitting the second tower. He barely even names the passengers—an hour into the movie, I still hadn’t figured out which one was Todd Beamer—and makes a point of stressing their utter unspecialness, their glazed stares and dull in-flight chatter. The suspense, such as it is, is purely negative—we know in advance what will happen to Flight 93, so the maddeningly slow burn of the film’s first hour (Businessmen heft suitcases! Flight attendants chat about condiments!) serves only to torment us with the anxiety of the inevitable.

Note to Dana: MAKE YOUR OWN GODDAMN MOVIE ABOUT FLIGHT #93 IF THAT’S THE WAY YOU FEEL ABOUT IT!

There is nothing more annoying than a “woulda, shoulda, coulda” critic who doesn’t possess an ounce of talent to actually make a film themselves but who is more than willing to tell a director how he should have made his. The movie Stevens is proposing Greengrass make is so far removed from the director’s vision that it makes her pouty, foot stomping tirade about what’s missing from U-93 sound like someone running their fingernails across a blackboard. Absolutely hopeless.

It’s fair game to criticize a director for an unfulfilled vision or a lazy vision, or even for having no vision at all. But to actually posit the notion that a critic’s judgement on what vision the director should have had as legitimate criticism smacks of pure politics to me.

And if that doesn’t convince you of the political motivations of Steven’s disguised critique of U-93, try this:

In the last five years, “9/11” has become a generic brand name for terrorism, its sky-high recognition quotient useful for ginning up support for any and all manner of belligerent causes. The closest this film ever comes to a political statement—and possibly the only laugh line in the movie—is the snappish question of a beleaguered official: “Do we have any communication with the president at all?” Greenglass may not want to come right out and say it, but the audience’s weary chuckle made it clear: As we slog into the fourth year of the war being waged in 9/11’s wake (and, at least in part, in its name), there’s still no satisfactory answer to that question.

Yes, “9/11” (the quote marks are a nice touch – as if only a few deluded souls care about it in any context at all) is very useful for “ginning up support” for “belligerent causes” – kinda like war except you and the other misanthropes on the left don’t really believe in that kind of nonsense. To you and your ideological brethren, what happened that day was more about skewering Bush than anything untoward that happened to the United States. It’s sickening.

As far as the “joke” about communications with the President, here’s more from the 9/11 Commission:

The NMCC learned of United 93’s hijacking at about 10:03.At this time the FAA had no contact with the military at the level of national command. The NMCC learned about United 93 from the White House. It, in turn, was informed by the Secret Service’s contacts with the FAA.225

NORAD had no information either. At 10:07, its representative on the air threat conference call stated that NORAD had “no indication of a hijack heading to DC at this time.”226

Repeatedly between 10:14 and 10:19, a lieutenant colonel at the White House relayed to the NMCC that the Vice President had confirmed fighters were cleared to engage inbound aircraft if they could verify that the aircraft was hijacked.227

The commander of NORAD, General Ralph Eberhart, was en route to the NORAD operations center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, when the shootdown order was communicated on the air threat conference call. He told us that by the time he arrived, the order had already been passed down NORAD’s chain of command.228

It is not clear how the shootdown order was communicated within NORAD. But we know that at 10:31, General Larry Arnold instructed his staff to broadcast the following over a NORAD instant messaging system: “10:31 Vice president has cleared to us to intercept tracks of interest and shoot them down if they do not respond per [General Arnold].”229

More inconvenient facts regarding what was happening in the government that day. The answer to the question “Do we have any communication with the President at all?” was a resounding yes. The coordination between NORAD and the FAA was, as shown earlier, entirely inadequate to deal with the situation. The audience chuckling is much more indicative of the success that Stevens and others have had in perpetrating the myth of Bush incompetence that day than what really happened, something that Greengrass wasn’t interested in portraying anyway.

Yes we should be upset with our government for the way 9/11 was handled. It was incompetent. It was negligent. It was without question a disaster. But the exact same thing would have happened regardless of who was President. To say otherwise isn’t speculative, it’s a deliberate falsification of what we know from history.

If Stevens didn’t like U-93 that is her right. But to turn a movie review into a diatribe against the Bush Administration only makes her look like an idiot who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

While the film United 93 has opened to generally good reviews, there appears to be some pouting among many critics that there was no “cathartic moment” of release and that the film offers viewers little more than a “thrill ride” with little in the way of context or judgement.

It is the nature of criticism to find fault although some critics fall so in love with the sound of their own cynical, scratchy voice that their critiques are little more than lame attempts at being contrary. Critics by and large are also a notoriously jaded lot and films that purport to show something as emotionally charged as September 11 almost by definition fail to live up to their expectations.

That said, here are a scattering of reviews from several different sources.

BRIAN LOWRY IN VARIETY

Taut, visceral and predictably gut-wrenching, “United 93,” Paul GreengrassPaul Greengrass’ already much-debated look at Sept. 11, trades in some emotional impact for authenticity, capturing the overwhelming sense of chaos surrounding that day’s harrowing events. The result is a tense, documentary-style drama that methodically builds a sense of dread despite the preordained outcome. While media attention has focused on reaction to the movie’s trailer, strong ratings for earlier Flight 93 TV projects suggest there will be considerable curiosity, morbid or otherwise, about “United 93” that should translate into robust box office.

KIRK HONEYCUTT,< em> HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

In years to come, United 93 may enter our mythology in ways unimaginable. But for now, we have a starting point. “United 93” is a sincere attempt to pull together the known facts and guesses at the emotional truths as best anyone can. Then, in the movie’s final moments, the impact of the heroism aboard United 93 becomes startlingly clear.

MANOHLA DARGIS, NEW YORK TIMES

In its vivid details and especially its narrative pacing, the account of the United 93 hijacking in the 9/11 report reads like a nail-biter, something cooked up by Sebastian Junger. Drawing on different sources, including the report and family members, Mr. Greengrass follows the same trajectory as the report, with most of the screen time devoted to the period between takeoff and the excruciating moments before the plane crashed. The film carries the standard caution that it is “a creative work based on fact,” yet Mr. Greengrass’s use of nonfiction tropes, like the jagged camerawork and the rushed, overlapping shards of naturalistic dialogue, invests his storytelling with a visceral, combat-zone verisimilitude. And yet at the same time, beat for beat, the whole thing plays out very much according to the Hollywood playbook.

LISA SCHWARZBAUM, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Movies are the perfect medium for this exercise in gratitude — they always have been, with the screen so big and the audience so huddled together. And the world has never felt more precarious, or the distinctions between the lucky and the unlucky more tenuous, than they did on the day the World Trade Center fell, the Pentagon was attacked, and one Boeing 757 crashed near Shanksville, Pa., diverted by doomed passengers who died yanking control away from their captors’ hands.

DAVID ANSEN, NEWSWEEK

“United 93” is a memorial built of shattering, indelible images. This is first-rate, visceral filmmaking, no question: taut, watchful, free of false histrionics, as observant of the fear in the young terrorists’ eyes as the hysteria in the passenger cabin, and smart enough to know this material doesn’t need to be sensationalized or sentimentalized. Wisely, Greengrass has avoided casting recognizable faces, and many of the flight controllers are played by the people who were actually on the job that day, including FAA national operations officer Ben Sliney. Though you know the outcome, you can’t help hoping (as you would at any thriller) that things will turn out differently, that the military will intervene, that the president will be found, that someone will define the rules of engagement.

ANN HORNADAY, WASHINGTON POST

Ambivalence seems to be a painfully inadequate, mewling response to the courage of United 93’s passengers who, according to Hemingway’s definition of the term, acted not in fearlessness but despite their fear. This is a film that demands a different vocabulary, one that conveys both misgivings about our need for these fetishistic cinematic rituals, and admiration for the discipline and dignity with which an artist has brought the incomprehensible into lucid and uncompromising focus.

“United 93” is a great movie, and I hated every minute of it.

RON ROSENBAUM, SLATE.COM

But is the fable of Flight 93 the recompense that it’s been built up to be? Does what happened on Flight 93 represent a triumph of the human spirit, a microcosmic model and portent of the ultimate victory of enlightenment civilization over theocratic savagery, as the prerelease publicity about the new film insists? Or is the story of United Flight 93 a different kind of portent, not “the DNA of our times,” but rather the RIP?

This review originally appears in The American Thinker

There is a moment in the film United 93 where director Paul Greengrass takes a small step backward from the unrelenting intimate universe into which he has boldly thrust the audience and allows a glimmer of the larger truth of September 11 to be revealed.

Having committed themselves to their heroic effort to take back the cockpit, the passengers are in position in the back of the plane, the larger, stronger men occupying the first three rows closest to the terrorists. Then, it hits you. The look on their faces as they steel themselves to make the attempt mirrors exactly the looks on the faces of the hijackers just prior to their attack as the terrorists also had to summon up the courage to carry out their dastardly deed.

Whether intended or not, Greengrass reveals the faces of men at war. And even though there are no grand, overarching truths about humanity, or good and evil, or the superiority of one set of beliefs over another in U-93 (there is a short scene toward the end of the film that shows both passengers and terrorists praying), the singular fact that “they” attacked us and “we” fought back cannot be denied, cannot be hidden despite the desperate attempt by some over the last 5 years to do so. We are at war.

And for those who insist that we are not, that the War on Terror is some gigantic plot of the Bush Administration to win elections, or seize power, or exercise some kind of monarchical control over the American people, United 93 at bottom, shows this kind of 9/10 thinking to be seriously deluded.

Indeed, there has been an attempt by many on the left to make war on the War on Terror itself, as if the enemy is not thousands of fanatical Muslims hell bent on killing Americans but rather a domestic ideology that seeks to prevent such a catastrophe. For at bottom, what many on the left seek to obscure is the simple necessity of acknowledging that a conflict exists in the first place. On an existential level, they can deny the reality of war by turning cause and effect on its head by justifying terrorism as a logical outgrowth of US policies in the Middle East or toward Muslims in general. It is this intellectual dishonesty that is successfully countered by U-93 in its brutally simple yet deeply emotional subtext; a reminder of what it was like to be an American that day.

There is no overt political context to the film which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. Its unflinching look at the failures of government on that day points no fingers, takes no names, assigns no blame. Instead, the almost documentary nature of the movie allows Greengrass to explore a particular theme that the 9/11 Commission tried to bring out but failed miserably in doing so due to the intrusion of partisan politics in its public hearings: The United States of America was fast asleep on September 11. And the wake up call found us all in a state of denial so profound that the resulting paralysis by the military, by the government – by all of us – contributed in no small way to the scope and dimension of the tragedy.

This is where the psychic pain for the audience is at its worst; watching first the disbelief, then the concern, then the near panic of total confusion as the FAA, air traffic controllers, and even the military all watch helplessly as their operations sputter and limp, eventually grinding to a muddled halt. The Air Force Colonel’s plaintive cry to his superior, “I have two planes to defend the entire east coast” while watching the Twin Towers burning on the wall sized monitor in front of him elicits empathy for his plight while at the same time engendering outrage that our $300 billion military could be reduced to such impotence.

Similar feelings are evoked watching as the FAA tries to understand what is taking place in the skies over America that morning. Operations Manager Ben Sliney (playing himself in the movie) does not stint in portraying himself as befuddled as the rest of his staff as reports start coming in from all over the country about hijacked airplanes, whether or not they are still in the air, and where they are. There are times when their confusion becomes almost farcical as they are first unable to talk to anyone at the “Hijack Desk” except a janitor who happens to be cleaning the conference room and then their all important military liaison is nowhere to be found.

But it was in the air traffic control rooms in New York, Boston, and Cleveland where the confusion was at its most chilling. The New York controller handling United 175 that eventually crashed into the second tower grew more and more frustrated as the drama unfolded, the tension in his voice rising the closer the plane got to the city. As the plane dropped off the radar, the audience knowing it had plowed into the North Tower, he pathetically kept trying to raise the plane on the radio, unaware of the enormous tragedy that had just engulfed the country. Similar scenes in the other control rooms were equally heartbreaking as one by one, the aircraft dropped off the radar screens, the full import of the aircraft’s disappearance from their flickering monitors lost in their disbelief and utter confusion.

A large part of the film’s success can be attributed to Mr. Greengrass’s spare and unemotional script. By writing and filming in cinéma vérité , Greengrass avoided many pitfalls that a more traditional approach would have opened up, not the least of which would have been the temptation for including declaratory speeches by hijackers and passengers alike. As it was, the sheer ordinariness of both the characters and the dialogue contributed immensely the horror of what was happening on the plane as well as the heroic nature of the passengers.

From a technical standpoint, the film succeeds brilliantly on several levels. The extensive use of the hand held camera by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd often gives the unsettling feeling that the viewer is in the middle of the action on the screen. This is especially true at FAA Headquarters and the various air traffic control rooms in Boston, New York, and Cleveland. As the controllers struggle to understand what is happening in the skies over America and desperation begins to creep into their discussions, the audience finds themselves in the middle of these conversations as the camera pans quickly back and forth, focusing on the puzzled faces of the technicians as the horrible reality of what is happening begins to dawn on them.

The editing by Clare Douglas and Christopher Rouse is clean and crisp, approaching a sublime level of near perfection during the attacks on the cockpit by first the terrorists then the passengers. The claustrophobic setting of the film – the inside of a commercial airliner – presented enormous problems, especially sequences filmed in the cockpit. It is a testament to the editors’ skill that both attacks elicited searing, emotional responses from the audience.

The percussive and synthesized score by John Powell was mostly unobtrusive, jarring us awake at appropriate places in the film with hammer-like percussion blows to the heart as when the terrorists rose from their seats to begin their attack – a perfect low-key compliment to the film’s intimate setting.

And it is that intimacy that draws us in and nails the audience to their seats. We do not get to “know” any of the characters in any traditional sense. There is very little exposition since everyone knows what the outcome will be. Instead, Greengrass allows the events themselves to simply unfold in as close to real time as possible, making no judgements about either the hijackers or the passengers. Even the one passenger who sought to warn the terrorists, fearful that any attempt to take back the plane would kill them all, is portrayed in a neutral manner (although the fact that the gentleman spoke with a vaguely European accent is an interesting aside nonetheless).

In the end, Greengrass lets the story do all his talking. A wise choice since the it would have been a relatively simple matter to have made a histrionic, flag waving spectacular instead of the intensely personal drama U-93 turned out to be. For some, that intensity will open old emotional wounds from 9/11 making it very difficult for them to see this film. I would urge them to make the effort anyway. For United 93 will not heal the hurt but rather recall in a vividly personal, emotionally charged manner who and what caused our souls to be scorched that terrible day.

The farther we get from 9/11, the more urgent that reminder becomes. We’ve already had one wake-up call. Is it necessary for the fanatics to give us another?

UPDATE

Libertas has an excellent review of the film, echoing many of the themes I touch on here, although the reviewer is disappointed that Greengrass failed to provide much in the way of a moral context.

The following is fiction and meant as satire. Any resemblance between what is written and real, live, people is entirely coincidental except, of course, when it isn’t.

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a King named Berrywart. King Berrywart ruled the people of Unis, a relatively small kingdom located somewhere near France. Where exactly the French won’t say having been defeated in battle many times by the King’s small, but vicious army of armored marmosets and pike carrying ostriches. Many a battlefield had been well fertilized with the contents gleaned from French pantaloons left behind in retreat after retreat by the Grand Armée.

But French bashing is not really part of our fable. I just threw it in there because it’s fun.

King Berrywart had enormous problems. Some clever lad had constructed a vehicle that used turnip juice as fuel. The turnipmobile changed everyone’s way of life in Unis. No longer did people walk to the market. Now they drove their vehicles. This presented difficulties because parking became a bitch downtown plus have you ever smelled burning turnips?

Needless to say, with the immense popularity of the turnipmobile, the production of turnips became a top priority in the Kingdom. Several very clever peasants banded together in a loose alliance and essentially took over the entire production of turnips. They forced other peasants who were growing turnips out of business by charging a pittance for turnip juice, thus making it impossible for the smaller turnip growers to make a profit. They were absolutely ruthless.

These clever peasants also controlled the process which turned turnips into turnip juice. And while they competed amongst each other for customers, they were able to keep the price of turnip juice stable by refining just enough juice to satisfy the ever growing demand of the people for fuel.

The peasants became very rich. They wore rags imported from France. They lived in the finest of mud huts with floors made from the softest straw. The results were predictable. Other peasants who did not produce turnips and were forced into wearing old rags imported from Uruguay and living in small, dank, mud huts with dirt floors were jealous. They grumbled darkly about “conspiracy” and complained about the smell.

Now there were two political parties in Unis. For a long time, the Demon party controlled the Commons with the Pibble party in opposition. And while the Demons took campaign contributions from the rich peasants, they enacted all sorts of laws to make their lives and livelihoods difficult. First, in order to improve the parking downtown, the Demons imposed a tax on juice at the turnip press. The Demons built several parking garages (which almost immediately began to fall apart thanks to bid rigging, payoffs, shoddy materials, and an incompetent builder whose only qualification was that he was the brother in law of the head of the Demon party). Then they passed regulations that forced the rich peasants to remove the bad smell from the turnip juice when it burned. This proved to be easier said than done and their costs to refine turnip juice skyrocketed.

Of course, the rich peasants were forced to pass on these increased costs to the people of Unis. Not only that, they were forced to cut back production of turnips due to other regulations passed by the Demon controlled Commons. They were told they couldn’t grow turnips in certain fields because it spoiled the view of the mountains for some wealthy friends of the Demons. This forced the rich peasants to increase their yield per acre of turnips which added to the cost of the juice.

Then, a group of poor peasants petitioned the Commons to have the rich peasants remove several of the refining facilities because they were unsightly and smelled very, very bad. Always willing to pander to the voters (it’s how they stayed in power for so long), the Demons forced the refineries to close. And when the rich peasants asked if they could build other refineries to replace them, the Demons laughed them out of the Commons.

Needless to say, the rich peasants had to keep raising the price of turnip juice just to maintain their profits.

Finally, a new day dawned in Unis as the Pibble party wrested control of the Commons from the Demons. Seen as the rich peasant’s best friends, the Pibble party promised all sorts of relief for the their friends in the turnip business. They promised to let them grow turnips in fields that blocked the view of the mountains for some of the Demon’s wealthy contributors. They promised to ease up on the smell regs. They promised a lot but nothing ever came of their promises.

Time passed. The world changed. Now everyone was driving turnipmobiles. The rich peasants were forced to import more and more turnip juice from abroad just so that the people of Unis could be supplied with the vital fuel. But the supply from abroad was unreliable. Some peasants in far away Dinnerplate were willing to pay more for turnip juice so more supplies from abroad went there rather than Unis. Since the rich peasants had to buy turnip juice at the inflated price, the cost of juice at the press in Unis started to skyrocket.

This proved too much for the poor peasants in Unis who demanded that the Pibble party do something – anything – to bring the cost of turnip juice down. The Demons, seeing an opening, skewered the Pibble party for allowing the rich peasants to make enormous profits. Rather than try and explain that the rich peasant’s profits were necessary so that more domestic turnips could be grown and refined, the Pibble party turned on the rich peasants and demanded an investigation. The rich peasants were a little bemused. After all, it was the Commons that had forced this situation on everyone with their stupid, shortsighted, and ignorant turnip policies.

King Berrywart was befuddled. A former turnip grower himself, he sympathized with the rich peasants but was also sympathetic to his friends in the Pibble party. “We must give the people relief!” he cried. “We will give one hundred wartmarks (known as “wammers”) to all taxpaying citizens of Unis to help in this crisis.”

The kingdom’s economists did a double take when Berrywart made that announcement. They tried to follow the logic of Berrywart’s thinking but were unable to do so. Berrywart wanted to collect the tax on turnip juice, have the Kingdom’s tax bureaucrats count it, and then have them issue one hundred wammers to each taxpaying citizen? The economists figured such a program would cost at least 133 wammers per citizen which would add to the already ballooning deficit being run by the Kingdom. Why not just suspend the tax, they wondered?

Meantime, the Demons had a better idea (politically speaking, that is). If the Pibble party could pander to the people then the Demons could up the ante. “Let’s tax the excess profits on turnip juice,” they cried triumphantly. This had the advantage of playing to the ignorance of the people of Unis about how turnips are grown and refined while making them sound like they’re “doing something about the problem.”

Of course, all the scheming and planning by the Pibbles and the Demons did not produce one additional drop of turnip juice. So the price remained high. And the people?

The people of Unis took out their frustrations at the polls in November. And which party do you think suffered the most?

UPDATE

Powerline has the skinny on the Republican “plan” to save the nation.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category is Rhymes with Right for “Arrogant District Refuses To Protect White Students.” Finishing second was “Hate Central” from The Sundries Shack.

Finishing on top in the non Council category was “Do We Need Religion? Part 1” by Wolfgang Bruno.

If you’d like to participate in the Watchers Council weekly vote, go here and follow instructions.

There are indications that in addition to aggressively pursuing leakers inside the CIA, Director Goss is also looking at retired agency personnel who may be facilitating the leaks to reporters:

The Agency has issued warnings to former employees that they are still bound by secrecy rules regarding classified information and that violating their oaths may lead to unfortunate consequences:

The attempt to silence former employees extends beyond those who still have consulting contracts. Larry Johnson, a former CIA official who blogs at www.TPMCafe.com, said he recently received a “threatening” letter reminding him about his confidentiality agreements.

Mr Johnson – who has criticised the White House for not aggressively investigating the outing of Valerie Plame, a former covert operative, said it was the first such letter he had received despite regularly commenting in the media on intelligence matters since his retirement in 1989. He said other former employees also received letters.

He said the CIA was also “very forceful” in intimidating a retired official who maintains ties to the agency after he signed a letter criticising the administration over the Plame leak.

One can only guess which “retired official” Johnson is talking about but there is little question as to what letter is being referenced. The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) sent this “open letter” to the President regarding the outing of Valerie Plame signed by several VIPS members. Of course, the point wasn’t that it was critical of the Bush Administration but rather that VIPS has proved itself a partisan organization.

Our favorite ex-spook at In From the Cold gives us some background on what Goss is trying to accomplish:

But in today’s “leak culture,” the retention of former staffers as contractors and consultants has a clear downside. Consider this e-mail that I just received from a staffer on Capitol Hill, who spoke with an employee at an unnamed “three-letter” intelligence agency. It seems that some of the anti-Bush cabal are using contractor or consultant positions to stir up more trouble on the inside. My contact on the Hill reports:

“I got a call from inside the government. Someone wanted me to let people know that the people who were fired by Goss and/or have left the government to write books have gone to work for intel outside contractors where they have just put on their badges and go right back into the agency and hang around just like before. I am told that they are in the lunch room talking to GS-10s and11s, and 12s to stir up a revolt.”

If this report is accurate—and I have no reason to doubt its validity—then Mr. Goss needs to redouble his house-cleaning efforts at Langley, and his fellow agency directors might want to start hanging around the cafeteria as well. No one would deny any employee their right to free speech; but this sounds like an effort to foment rebellion within the agency, and that is not a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. There are clear prohibitions on certain types of political activity by federal employees, and the reported actions of these former officers would appear to fall under that category. I think it’s time to start firing some contractors and cancelling consultant deals. These former spooks were hired to do intelligence work—not instigate a palace revolt.

That’s pretty amazing. Mac has been getting pretty much the same thing from his sources as well:

Since last year when I got into the Plame Game and began to contact people back at the farm about what in the heck was going on I was told that this whole thing was much more than met the eyes. Again, supporting the Iraq regime made a lot of people very wealthy. Small wonder that so many “ideologs” have been in opposition, less of a wonder why they are running so scared now.

I can’t tire of telling you how important it is that Mary Loose Lips has been brought down. More than just a random ‘discovery’ – she is the key to the lock. Guys at the agency and the DOJ knew exactly where to target – and they hit it dead on. In the coming days you will see why Senator Rockefeller HAD to make such an emergency visit to Syria in 2002. For a little tip, read here.

Mac may be referencing a connection with Saddam’s Oil for Food program and Rockefeller’s jaw dropping visit to Syria where he bragged on national television to have tipped off the Syrians about George Bush’s determination to go to war. The inference is that networks related to OIF would start rolling up, tying off loose ends, and destroying evidence. The Russians went to work immediately in this regard evidently not only destroying thousands of OIF documents but also evidence that they were supplying Saddam with banned weapons. (See Bill Gertz’s book Treachery for the whole sickening story).

With the DCIA now targeting leakers both inside and outside the agency, might he also stumble across a connection between the two? And given the friendliness of many in the media to several VIPS members such as Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson – including some of the most influential national security correspondents in the business – might there come a time when a possible circle of deceit that runs from Langley, to VIPS, and to the press is revealed and the nest of partisans given their just desserts?

Faster please…

UPDATE

I didn’t include any links to AJ Strata’s stuff because frankly, he’s got so many goodies it was hard to choose. Start here and keep scrolling.

It’s times like these I really wish Mike Royko was still alive and writing his columns about Chicago politics.

Royko, with an eye both cynical and sweet, saw politics as something of a patriotic three ring circus with charlatans and crusaders vying with criminals and reformers for money and attention, all hoping the ringmaster in the person of Mayor Richard J. Daley (his son is Richard M.) would cast his baleful, hooded eyes in their direction and thereby bless their efforts. Since the charlatans and criminals were usually pretty well connected, they always seemed to come out on top, leaving the crusaders and reformers to fight another day.

The reason for the reverie about Royko is that he would have had an absolute field day with this bit of nonsense passed by the Chicago City Council:

Chalk up another first for Chicago, which on Wednesday became the nation’s only combined nuclear- and foie gras-free zone.

After passing a sweeping ban on public smoking in December, the City Council has now followed up with a more exclusive bit of lifestyle policing. On a voice vote, aldermen outlawed the sale of the fatty delicacy made from goose or duck liver, settling a months-long culinary battle between goose huggers and gastronomes. (Aldermen declared the city a nuclear-free zone in 1986.)

Foie gras isn’t made in Chicago, only eaten here in a handful of posh restaurants and sold at gourmet food shops. But ban supporters claim its production is barbaric, with tubes jammed down the gullets of ducks and geese to force-feed them until their livers swell to 10 times normal size. At a council committee hearing, actress and animal rights activist Loretta Swit likened force-feeding to the torture of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Swit, you may recall, played Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the Korean War TV series M*A*S*H which I guess makes her an expert on the torture of both POW’s and mass television audiences. Now that she mentions it, I seem to recall those gruesome pictures where we stuck tubes down the throats of those jihadis and force fed them pork and beans. Otherwise, I can’t for the life of me understand what torturing human beings at Abu Ghraib has to do with goose livers.

That is, unless the aldermen are preparing a Manifesto that would free all animals from the drudgery of serving humans. They might want to start by closing the world famous horse racing facility Sportsmen’s Park (not before they give me back all the money I’ve lost there over the years) and then move on to freeing all the exotic beasts trapped behind bars at Lincoln Park Zoo. Freeing them might be a problem because being exotic beasts themselves, the aldermen might not appreciate the competition from other ravenous predators prowling the city.

Or perhaps that as long as we’re equating humans with animals, they may want to emulate the Spanish socialists who are calling on granting human rights to…APES!

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”

Talk about socialism appealing to the lowest common denominator…

The socialists see great apes possessing “sufficient mental faculties” only because they follow Lenin’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” although no one has checked recently to see how well the socialists can draw termites from a piece of deadwood using a broken reed or whether they’ve forgotten how to use a rock to crack hazelnuts.

Our simian friends have a lot to teach their socialist brothers. After all, how much worse could being ruled by Chimps and Gorillas be than having socialists run a government? I’d bet there would be a lot more lying around building nests out of grass and a lot fewer executions.

Quite an improvement, no?

UPDATE

Tom Elia had the story before I did and quotes an Agence France-Presse report that refers to Chicago as “hogtown,” referencing the slaughterhouses that haven’t been a large part of the city of more than 40 years. Quoth Tom:

Maybe if the Agence France-Presse reporter expanded his or her reading list beyond, say, books by Upton Sinclair, he/she might know this.

Maybe it’s time for this reporter to try out some Nelson Algren… ya know, stuff like dat…

They probably think Al Capone still runs the liquor business…

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.” (Pearl Buck)

You and I have fallen asleep at the wheel lately. While we were busy making fun of liberals, looking into the McCarthy mess, and wailing about immigration reform, Congress and the giant telecom companies have temporarily put one over on us.

They’re trying to steal the internet right from underneath our noses.

Let me explain. The way our internet currently works is pretty straightforward and, to give you the buzzword of the day, “net neutral.” That is, if you want to visit this site, you click your mouse over a link and presto! You’re magically transferred to my little slice of nuttiness. If you have a broadband connection, you’re whisked here in nothing flat. And with DSL or dial-up, the resources allocated by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to find the quickest route to the House and to load this page are exactly the same as those allocated if you are trying to access Daily Kos. In short, your ISP is simply providing access – they don’t have the right to act as a “gatekeeper” by giving priority in the allocation of net resources to one site over another.

That’s not to say the technology that could change net neutrality doesn’t exist because it does. And wouldn’t you know it, the giant telecom companies want to use that technology for what else? To make more money:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

Last night while we were enjoying our dinner, the enemies of a net neutral internet scored a significant victory in the House Energy and Commerce Committee with the passage of a Telecommunications Reform proposal that would allow large corporations to take control of the net in ways that would harm free speech and free commerce:

The bill passed 42-12, but not before AT&T got off its final counterattack, just before passage around 7 p.m. In the empty room, right before final passage, Gonzales, from the home town of AT&T, San Antonio, offered an amendment to require the FCC to make a study “competition in the Internet world,” particularly what he called “special arrangements” between Web sites and other companies. It would be similar, he said, to the type of tie-in arrangements that proponents of Net Neutrality said will exist with telephone companies favoring content. Such arrangements between Web sites and others, Gonzales says, would make it hard for a “garage-bases startup” to make a go of it. Citing an article from Southwest Airlines’ magazine, he noted that Google gets revenue from ads tied to searches and that Yahoo is “fighting for deals.”

Democrats were flabbergasted. Eshoo, who represents Silicon Valley, said she was “baffled by the amendment, because Gonzales, who earlier said he was opposed to regulating the Internet. This, she said, “is about regulating search engines.” Markey said he was preparing an amendment to expand the study to include the top five telephone companies and top five cable operators, but didn’t get to offer it. The Gonzales amendment was defeated 11-43, but Google, and Yahoo! and the others should be on notice. This isn’t over. They are squarely in the gunsights.

We’ve been hearing about the promise of broadband for more than a decade, a potential life altering technology that will integrate our entire homes so that all of our communications will be part of one, seamless whole. Television, phone service, internet access, and anything else we choose to include would be controllable through the magic of a broadband connection. Access to thousands of movies, songs, TV shows, news, and blogs, as well as interactivity on a scale never previously seen will change commerce, culture, and radically affect the everyday lives of citizens.

When I first heard of this vision, I couldn’t imagine it. Growing up in a world with three networks and where newspapers were still an impactful part of society, even the advent of the computer revolution didn’t faze me that much. That is, until I got my broadband connection from Comcast last year. The amount of on demand content on my television is pretty extraordinary – much of it available for no extra charge. And while I am currently resisting switching our phone service to Comcast, it is probably just a matter of time before I give in there as well. It goes without saying that the speed of my internet connection – the ability to download A/V as well as flitting from site to site almost instantaneously, makes me wonder how I ever lived with a dial up connection.

I can now see the vision of those broadband pioneers. The outlines of this brave new world are just starting to take shape. But all of these dreams will be meaningless if we allow the large telecom companies and their toadies in Congress to set themselves up as traffic cops on this information highway, the final arbiters of taste, politics, and perhaps even speech itself. Their brazenness in attempting this coup d’etat has been made possible because people like you and me fell asleep. We forgot that vigilance is the price we pay for living in a democracy. We neglected out duties as citizens and the rich, the powerful, and the greedy took full advantage.

I am sorry to say that most of us on the right either ignored this issue or failed to warn people adequately. This must change. There is a website devoted to defeating this attempt at internet regulation called Save The Internet.Com. I urge you to go to this site and join the coalition to protect the internet from the machinations of giant corporations who wish to impose their own, narrow vision of what the internet should be on the rest of us.

The fight is just beginning. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

No use blaming the Democrats when the backlash comes against this ill-conceived, ill advised Administration “guest worker” program. Whatever credit Bush is going to get from his corporate supporters and the US Chamber of Commerce will be lost in an avalanche of criticism from the center-right.

In short, Republicans who vote for this mess are going to be put on notice: Make sure you have something lined up in the way of another job after November:

President Bush and a group of senators yesterday reached general agreement on an immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for many illegal aliens.
But left out of the closed-door White House meeting were senators who oppose a path to citizenship. The meeting even snubbed two men who had been considered allies of Mr. Bush on immigration—Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and chairman of the immigration subcommittee, and Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican.

Mr. Bush in brief remarks to the press said there was agreement to get “a bill that does not grant automatic amnesty to people, but a bill that says, somebody who is working here on a legal basis has the right to get in line to become a citizen.” But senators, speaking afterward, said Mr. Bush was far more specific in the meeting.

“There was a pretty good consensus that what we have put into the Hagel-Martinez proposal here is the right way to go,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, Florida Republican. “I think he was very clear [on] pathway to citizenship, so long as it goes to the back of the line, and he even opened the door here for something we’ve haggled back and forth on, that you can shrink the time for people to become citizens by simply enlarging the number of green cards.”

It is not an overstatement to say that this is a complete electoral disaster for Republicans. Not only are there sure to be howls of rage from the Republican base, but every single poll on immigration shows that the great political center for which any candidate must depend to put them over the top on election day is dead set against the President’s program.

Americans are a normally fair minded people as a group. And when they see special treatment being doled out to people who break the law, it sticks in their craw and makes them more likely to take out their feelings on the closest available target; in this case, Republican lawmakers.

In an irony of ironies, the President is going to have to rely on Democrats to get this bill through both Houses of Congress. I’m sure the Democrats will be more than willing to oblige the President since they correctly see the immigration issue as a winner. They can criticize the President from the right by attacking his border security measures while continuing to assault from the left by saying that Republicans are racists who want to oppress Hispanics.

Such arguments won’t impress conservatives but they will resonate with their own base as well as peel middle of the road voters away from Republican candidates. This is a recipe for defeat in November and if it occurs, the President and the open borders Republicans will only have themselves to blame.

There’s a chance that opposition can still coalesce in the House and defeat this bill when it comes to a vote. But those Republicans are going to have to be certain that we conservatives have their backs. I suggest sending an email to your Representative urging him to vote against this proposal and making it clear that how he or she votes will be a determining factor in your decision about who to vote for (or whether or not you intend to vote at all) this coming November.

UPDATE

Both Tano in the comments and PJ Media who linked to this piece sound a little skeptical about my analysis. Let’s go to the polls!

From Rasmussen Survey of 4/7/06:

Forty-six percent (46%) of Americans said that they prefer the candidate with the harder line on illegal aliens while 38% opt for the candidate who wants to expand legal opportunities for foreign workers to find jobs.

An earlier survey found that two-thirds of Americans believe it doesn’t make sense to debate new immigration laws until we can first control our borders and enforce existing laws. That same survey found that 40% of Americans favor “forcibly” requiring all 11 million illegal immigrants to leave the United States.

Sixty-seven percent of those who think immigration is an important issue favor a pro-enforcement (anti-amnesty) candidate. And 82% of Americans think the immigration issue either “very important” or “somewhat important.”

Disaster? What disaster?

Oh btw – I’m not one of them but that same poll shows an astonishing 40% of Americans favor “forcibly” requiring all 11 million illegal immigrants to leave the United States.

In short, a politician would have to try pretty hard to get to the right of the American people on this issue. Congratulations to the President and the open borders Republicans who support him in Congress. Not only are we going to be stuck with a nightmare of an immigration law, but you’re making it very difficult for the dwindling number of people who support you to become motivated enought to get up off the couch on election day and go vote for you.