Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I’m pleased to announce that for the first time since early 2003, I have a valid driver’s license. Now If only I had a car, I could drive somewhere exciting like South Jersey or Staten Island without fear of prosecution. What fun! To be clear, there is a car in the family, though it’s not the sort of item that qualifies as “ours”, but rather “hers.”

I won’t get into all of the boring details of why I didn’t have a license for so long, but I will say that it involved a rented Lincoln Towncar traveling at about 120 mph through Central Illinois in the middle of the night. Apparently they don’t care for that sort of thing there.

I’m sure those of you who saw Seymore Hersh on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this evening would agree with me that Hersh spit out about eight minutes of quotes worth repeating for the next year or decade or so. I don’t have the transcript, and I’m sure I won’t get it until way after my more prolific brethren have long since posted it, so I probably won’t bother. Nevertheless, I’d urge everyone to seek out the tapes and the transcripts in the morning. The transcript will probably be everywhere so have a peak. Knowing is half the battle.

This is as good a time as any to remind those who are so kind as to take the time to read this site, that I don’t always agree with everything my guest posters might decide to write. A case in point would be David’s most recent post, which can be found directly beneath this one.

I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq from the beginning and was quite horrified to watch the slow motion train wreck that was its build up and authorization. The discussion, if that’s what it was, leading up to the Senate’s vote to authorize force in Iraq, was the most pathetic display of public discourse I can imagine. The failure of the Democratic leadership to even raise pertinent questions, let alone actually muster the courage to oppose an unjustified, ill-advise and poorly planned invasion fills me with the urge to defecate.

Their fear was that, with the pending mid-term congressional elections, they would be murdered at the polls. They cowered before the specter of an unforgiving public whose blood lust was stoked by fabrication, lies and paranoia. They rushed the vote to authorize, hoping the whole mess would go away and they could conduct their campaigns on more friendly terms. They lost anyway. They were cowards and they deserved to lose. The problem, of course, is that the victors in those elections were, and are, bloodthirsty thugs.

And my opposition to the war, since the beginning, is worth what? Nothing. What’s done is done. What’s done is a catastrophe. Nothing to celebrate here. There was never any chance of that.

Listen, depending on the day you can find me on either side of the argument that it’s justifiable to use military force to keep murderous despots from murdering. That, however, is not the argument that was presented. The argument presented had nothing, whatever, to do with that. Tens of thousands of civilians dead, whole cities in ruins, over ten thousand of our own military wounded and well over one thousand dead — for what?

I should add that I do agree with David on many of his points. Like David, I do not care for sanctions as they inevitably wound the innocent and further empower those they were intended to weaken. I’m also certain that our country’s military is overburdened and likely incapable of dealing with a real, as opposed to a concocted, crisis.

Autumn continues in the city.

This is just a little continuation of my previous post about autumn in the Wissahickon Valley. I feel a bit guilty that I haven’t posted any pictures of rowhouses, since this is, after all, a site named Rowhouse Logic.This sad picture represents my first, feeble attempt in that endeavor.

I actually get a pretty decent number of hits from people searching for the word ‘rowhouse’. I can’t help but imagine a kid living in a ranch house somewhere, who has been assigned some brutal school project involving rowhouses, or urban America or whatever. The poor kid diligently Googles away, stumbles on this site, and winds up reading my verbal sludge. Poor kid.

Such is life kido. Better get used to it now, or it will bite you in the ass when you’re about 22 or 23.

Anyway, I took this picture from my roof on Monday because I thought that tree was pretty. While I myself am more used to the flat roof variety of rowhouse, those slanted roofs you see are indeed the roofs of rowhouses — The old school variety. If you want to see a bigger clearer picture, click here.

I’m going to steal two Josh Marshall posts. First the relevant links: Link & Link. It struck me, sitting at work today, that if you reversed the order of these two posts, the picture would be quite telling, so here goes.

1. Uh-oh …

   Kerry over Bush 50% to 46% among likely voters in the new AP/Ipsos poll.

2. AP: “The Education Department has advised school leaders nationwide to watch for people spying on their buildings or buses to help detect any possibility of terrorism like the deadly school siege in Russia. The warning follows an analysis by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department of the siege that killed nearly 340 people, many of them students, in the city of Beslan last month. ‘The horror of this attack may have created significant anxiety in our own country among parents, students, faculty staff and other community members,’ Deputy Education Secretary Eugene Hickok said in a letter to schools and education groups … The Education Department sent its letter by e-mail Wednesday to school police, state school officers, school boards, groups representing principals and many other organizations.” (emphasis added)

To be fair, I’m not at all sure which story hit first. I’ll just say it seems to fit a pattern.

A word about the warning from the Education Department. My wife is a public school teacher. This particular exercise in paranoia is aimed at people like my wife, her students, their parents and…well me. It’s really pretty effective stuff. My paranoia level went up a bit when I read it. Let me say this though, in any halfway decent school district, the teachers, administrators, and support staff have been watching out for suspicious persons since the advent of child abuse. As a matter of fact, they have been trained to do so and it is a part of their jobs. You can also assume that Columbine upped the level of awareness by more than a little.

So what’s the point here? No new strategy for keeping schools safe has been offered, no new programs seem to be in the offing, no specific threat outlined, and the only strategy advised is one that is already in place.

How about securing our ports guys?

Last weekend I rented Errol Morris’potent documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. I found the movie to be incredably moving and would recomend it to anyone who has any interest in recent American history. In spite of my many preconceptions, I found myself surprised by my personal reaction to McNamara himself. It’s hard to imagine a more conflicted and unsettled man. The movie is presented as eleven lessons from his life, drawn from both before and during his tenure as secretary of defense.

One point that McNamara and Morris make in the movie is, I think, esspecialy pertinant to our current situation. McNamara states, succinctly, that the reason the United States acheived success in the Cuban missle crisis but was defeated in Vietnam was that the people in power understood, quite fully, our advesaries in the former but did not in the latter. This lack of insight was, in McNamara’s mind, the foundation for failure.

Here’s a question. On February 23, 1998 Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States of America. Was our love of freedom one of his reasons? It’s pretty easy to google this one, so I won’t give away the answer.

Another question. Does the Bush administration know the answer to the previous question? Only they can answer. Personally, I’m not convinced. If they do, should they discuss it with the Amercian people in the clearest possible terms and leave the catchy rhetoric to the campaign trail?

One more question. Does knowedge of the motivations of your enemy and use of that knowledge help you fight them? Honestly, I don’t know. History suggests that it surely does.

Looking at Iraq, I think the question is even more disturbing. The motivations seem clear and, again, hatred of freedom seems pretty low on the list. Does anybody, not named Juan Cole, know who the hell we are fighting? We’ve heard a lot about bad actors and bad apples and Saddam loyalist and stuborn Baathists. We’ve heard a lot about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and a lot about Muqtada al-Sadr, but do we really know who is killing American soldiers, police recruits and damn near everybody else? Do we know who we are sending our military to kill? Is this really the recipe for success?