Because he challenged me not to do it...

MORE WARREN!

This time, it looks like he's attempting to take shots at multiple liberal candidates. I'd permalink, but since that isn't possible, here's the quote for posterity:

Pithy, linkless declarations of belief about democracy:

The Senate should be abolished. It is an anachronism in a modern democracy.

The Canadian Senate is indeed an odd beast, consisting as it does of appointees by Canadian prime ministers. It doesn't appear to have an especially negative effect, though, and is actually somewhat of a progressive institution; the push for decriminalization of marijuana that briefly made Canada "cool" stemmed from that seemingly conservative body.

Odd, but it somewhat makes sense, in that the war on drugs is almost entirely a function of electoral considerations about being "tough on crime" and the common perceived connection between the drug trade and the same marginalized minorities that many conservative voters are already somewhat antagonistic towards.

Still, the problem is... what to replace it with, if you DO want a body of "sober second thought"? Simple elections would just replicate the house, and having a fixed number per province would increase the already-redlined level of provincialism in Canada. It'd also be another push hurtling Canada in the direction of Americanization and, eventually, being absorbed into the United States.

(What, you think that that isn't what this is about? If you turn Canada into the United States in all but name, the name will change soon enough as well. I haven't seen a single reason why Canadian conservatives, particularly the western variant, wouldn't make for ecstactically happy Republicans. They just don't want to leave the oilpatch.)

So the problem is, what DO you do with it?

Fixed election dates are great for political consultants like me, but not so great for democratic governance. Ask an American.

No argument here. That's the odd thing about this guy- as I mentioned below, were it not for his wholesale abandonment of liberals outside Ontario and his parroting of AIPAC talking points and fury at those who don't, he wouldn't be anywhere near as tempting to break down.

(Far more interesting than, say, Canadian conservatives, who are even more on-message and slavishly devoted than their American counterparts. Not surprising, as I think that were Harper not Prime Minister he'd probably be an especially loud and tendentious blogger.)

(Speaking of being on message...)

In any democracy, voters are indeed preoccupied with which special interests are paying which politician. Liberals who shrug about revelations concerning suspicious donations are making a big, big mistake.

Bloggers and the like demanded respect and more of a voice in our democracy, and they got it. As a consequence, they owe democracy a duty - such as disclosing which of them is being quietly paid by which corporation or leadership candidate. They'd demand no less of the mainstream media.

The former piece is a direct jab at Liberal candidate Joe Volpe, who (it was revealed) received rather a lot of money from Apotex, a generic pharmaceutical firm. Not exactly a big deal in the US (and, personally, I'll take generic manufacturers over patent jockeys anyday), but the specific means by which he did it goes against the spirit, if not the letter, of the campaign financing law that Jean Chretien enacted back in 2004.

(I won't get into the specifics; it honestly doesn't matter, except that it involves executives' families donating to a candidate in a sort of "bundling" scheme.)

Because it isn't against the letter of the law, the Liberals aren't investigating Volpe over it. Well, that and the simple fact that pretty much all of the candidates are almost certainly going to be using these sorts of tactics to get funding, as they do not enjoy the kind of grassroots financial support that Democrats (or, indeed, Canadian Conservatives) are focusing on. It's almost certain that Harper played the same kinds of games with his campaign financing, too, but (in typical Harper fashion) was closemouthed about it and trusted in the generally favorable media coverage he got.

Thus, this isn't really about Joe Volpe being exceptionally corrupt when compared to either Liberals or Conservatives; he just had the bad luck of being caught first and being a target of those candidates who are afraid of his--if several blog comments I've read are true--exceptionally strong on-the-ground campaign. Chief among them being Ignatieff supporters...

...which gets to Warren's other comment. I'd mentioned in a past entry that Ignatieff's supporters online are both numerous and slavishly on-message. If Warren's saying what I think he is, this isn't because they're devoted, it's because it's very lucrative to do so. That sucks, because it lessens the legitimacy and value of the online discussion and debate that should be at the core of the modern liberal movement. As Calgary Grit and his commentators note in this post, Ignatieff's foreign policy positions should be the spark of policy discussion, but it's not happening, primarily because Iggy's supporters appear constitutionally unable to even think about the idea that he was completely wrong on both Iraq and the torture issue.

For those arguing that their positions are legitimate: I could buy that if I ever saw some diversity in the positions. I haven't. There should be people who say "I don't like those things, but I like other things that he's about and that's enough for me to support him", but by and large that isn't happening. It's ALWAYS "no, see, you're taking his comments out of context, go read his book" (when the critic has done nothing of the sort) or "Iraq was a good idea because of the Kurds, which he started supporting when..." (tell that to the families of those people killed in Haditha, or the Arabs forcibly relocated by those selfsame Kurds) or some babbling variation on "coercion isn't torture and should be used when ticking time bomb terrorists 9/11 realism"...which, honestly, even Thomas Friedman is probably none too inclined towards these days.

These are almost certainly people who would have never argued anything of the kind a year ago, but now are parroting talking points. And they're doing it as bloggers. So on that, Warren's right.

The problem, though, is the same as with his attacks on pseudonymity (which, of course, this numbers among)... there are too many good reasons for people to be able to speak their mind pseudonymously for "disclosure" laws to make much sense. If it's fraud, it's fraud, but let's be honest- anonymous and pseudonymous commenting isn't going anywhere, and the best thing you can do is look at the poster and judge for yourself whether he's a shill or not.

(In the case of Iggy's crew, it really isn't hard.)

By the way, speaking of online support and Volpe, I am curious about one thing... why is it that there seems to be not a soul online who's defending the man? No matter the candidate, you always got some defenders in the American primaries of 2004, and I'm sure he has supporters or he wouldn't be worth "outing" in the first place. Are his supporters under a gag order or something?

(If they are, I have one suggestion for his campaign organizers: release that gag order. Your guy is getting ripped up badly on the Internet, and the Internet will almost certainly be the source of the small donations that must fuel any future electoral campaign. Even were Volpe to continue after this mini-scandal and win the leadership with that fabled on-the-ground organization, he still would have the general to think about.)

In any case, one final thought: still not a word from Warren on the National Post's Iran debacle. How much do you folks want to bet that there's a gag order there, too?

Funny thing about Kinsella

As you can see from his recent stories, he and I share a dislike for Ignatieff. In many respects, we're probably similar in our political position.

I guess it's just a pity that his views on middle-east politics seem to come from AIPAC blastfaxes.

Iggy's Divorce

No, not with his wife. If anything, this divorce is far more damaging, because it was between Ignatieff and his human rights community colleagues. I had previously noted the Toronto Star rebuttal by human rights expert Casper Melville to Ignatieff's cowardly pseudo-defense of torture. What I hadn't known was that there was an excellent piece on the issue in the New Humanist last year, prior to the Canadian Liberal leadership race, about much the same thing. An excerpt:

Even before the publication of The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff had attracted some powerful, if predictable, enemies. His justifications for the Iraq war had incensed many radicals. Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, described the imperialist thesis as developed in Ignatieff’s Empire Lite (2003) as “a web of foolishness, error and confusion”. The argument that America was still the world’s best hope for the spread of liberal democratic ideas was “built on sand” and his proposals for nation–building when stripped of “claptrap” were deeply flawed. They amounted, Neumann wrote, to this: “The US should, having first consulted its own interest, occupy ‘failed states’ and suppress disorder. Then, over what Ignatieff repeatedly emphasises is a long period of time, Americans are to teach these little folks abut judicial procedure, democracy and human rights. Then Americans will help their apt pupils to create sustainably democratic institutions.”

But with the publication of The Lesser Evil in 2004, and a series of articles which expanded on aspects of the book’s arguments in the New York Times, he also began to incur the wrath of liberals and, perhaps more significantly, former colleagues in the human rights movement. The critics began to line up. In a 2005 article called ‘Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex Missions of Michael Ignatieff’, published on the website openDemocracy, Mariano Aguirre concentrated particularly upon the seven pages in The Lesser Evil which dealt with the question of torture.

In this brief section, Ignatieff turns to the so–called ‘ticking–bomb cases’ where torture might be the only way to extract information from terrorists which could save human lives. He cites Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had contended that “whatever we might think about torture in the abstract, the pressure to use it in cases of urgent necessity might be overwhelming. The issue then becomes not whether torture can be prevented but whether it can be regulated.”

Ignatieff rejects this argument — “as an exercise in the lesser evil it seems likely to lead to the greater” — along with other justifications for the use of torture by democratic societies. Nonetheless — and this is critical to the argument that was to develop — he does go so far as to suggest forms of duress that might be permissible. These include “forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in harm to mental or physical health, and disinformation that causes stress.”

Aguirre describes this style of argument as ‘and yet and yet’. Ignatieff is “absolutely in favour of the principles and the defence of human rights, and yet, and yet, if a terrorist has valuable information about a biological weapon that is going to explode in New York, then maybe the security forces could use some level of force on him. Thus, the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University becomes a sort of Bruce Willis figure.”

This ‘and yet and yet’ approach, suggests Aguirre, is just what the US government needs as a justification for its current breaches of human rights. “Ignatieff considers himself a liberal, so sometimes he criticises the Bush administration. And he is an intellectual, so he has doubts about almost everything and airs them with the liberal readers of the New York Times. But in the end he shares the US government’s vision of the violent and compulsory promotion of democracy, the war against terrorism and the use of instruments, for example torture, which are apparently in need of revisionist treatment.” In these ways, “he has established a sort of rational framework for democratisation by force and also for the revision of our understanding of human rights.”

This is precisely the problem with Ignatieff, and I wish I'd known about that "and yet, and yet" description, as it perfectly describes the issues that Ignatieff's sleazy redefinition of "torture" represents. Not that this is going to turn away Ignatieff's supporters- at this point, they seem reduced to reciting talking points and taking foreign policy positions that, a year ago, they'd see as abhorrent.

(They think he's going to win, and they want to back a winner, so...)

But it should give the rest of us pause, both those who live in Canada and those who don't. I've said before that I think that the Canadian Liberal party has a good shot of being the heart of North American liberalism, because it can BE liberal without having to run away from it, like the Democrats do. It would be a shame if that heart was corrupted by these mealy-mouthed apologias for the inexcusable, but that's what seems to be in the offing if Ignatieff became Liberal leader.

That's not to say he'd be a worse Prime Minister than Stephen Harper, of course. Stephen Harper is a zealous market fundamentalist; a neoconservative exploiting a base of social conservatives to gain the kind of autocratic power that only a Canadian Prime Minister at the head of a majority government can enjoy. We've already seen that he wants to control the government from his own desk, and the only check on his ambitions is the reality that he only controls a minority government. That's why every single thing he's done since the end of January has been turned towards winning that majority; from budgetmaking, to speechmaking, to muzzling his ministers, all of it is aimed at gaining power. Nobody knows what Harper would do with that power, but I imagine it would be to do his damnedest to remake Canada in the image of Howard's Australia and Thatcher's England. Needless to say, anybody would prefer Ignatieff to THAT.

I'd just rather that Canadians, and liberals, didn't have to make that choice.

Hat tip: Politique Canadienne.

Bored? Conservative? Somewhat Dim?

You need to get to "decrypting" Muslims. It's the biggest thing around, and now Akram's Razor has a handy tool for doing so.

A sample:

Rule 4: Deep down, Muslims are always thinking about (and yearning for) violence.
Muslims are by nature warlike and inclined to violence, so physically harming other people is never absent from their minds, regardless of the topic under discussion. In cases where they endeavor to conceal this fact, you just need to dig deeper. Strap 'em down and break out the lie detector.

Thus, if a Muslim American student activist talks about his personal interpretation of jihad (literally, "struggle [in God's way]") as striving to integrate Islam's values of justice and service to ones neighbors into his daily life as a patriotic American, you can be sure that he is in reality trying to slip in a plug for terrorists who behead and kill plane loads of those same neighbors. Similarly, if some graduating students who are Muslim decide to add to their gowns green stoles that read in Arabic Rabbi ziddini ilm ("Oh Lord, grant me knowledge", a prayer from the Quran) on one side and the Islamic profession of faith or Shahada on the other, these provocateurs are obviously trying to turn the ceremony into a tribute to the Hamas suicide bombers (who are known for wearing black armbands emblazoned with the Shahada). Don't let the fact that Muslims use those prayers in the most mundane of situations--even before going to bed--throw you off the scent.

There you go. Already, you can start writing breathless posts about horrible Muslim university jihadists. If you're breathless and irrational enough, this guy will probably link to you, a bunch of lGF (or "lie gushin' fools") posters will follow, and soon you'll enjoy fame, fortune, and probably your own AM talk show!

IT'S JUST THAT EASY!

Order now.

Simpler Robert Spencer

"Muslims are all murderous bastards, and that's why we need to slaughter them down to the last man, unless they change the Koran. Which they won't, of course."

(Honestly, you can only read so many right-wing anti-Muslim sites before you realize that that's the core argument behind pretty much all of them. Not that they'll admit it, but if you argue "a" leads to "b", and "b" leads to "c", then you can't get away with screaming loudly that you never said that "a" leads to "c".)

Retraction

The National Post finally wrote a retraction of the Iran story. It's behind a subscriber wall, but if you hit Born With a Tail, you'll find it quoted in full.

I'm glad that they finally relented, and put away the "some claim it might be mistaken" BS and owned up. Derek at BWaT believes that the reporter didn't think it "passed the smell test" in the first place, and likely got pressured into playing it up by the Aspers. Considering past practices, that seems very much possible.

So, Warren... when are you going to leave aside the ludicrous twaddle that you've been distracting yourself with about the UAE, and own up to the fact that Zerb was right?

Steven, some originality, please

More Canadian hijinks:

Stephen Harper says that the media hate him, decides to "convince people directly". So, yeah, apparently the Canadian press and the Canadian government are now at war.

Honestly, if you're going to rip off Dubya, at least be a little less obvious about it, huh?

In any case, considering how embattled the Republicans are right now, why follow their lead? You'd think that if one compared polling numbers, Hastert 'n Co. would be sending people up to go follow Harper around.

Ah well. As Calgarygrit notes, this isn't exactly a new thing, and at this point I'm becoming increasingly blase about the (seemingly bizarre) prospect of the United States soon having a much less conservative government than Canada.

Now this is getting silly..

Kinsella, still apparently smarting from the Iran debacle, is reduced to comparing traffic stats:

Pierre and I don't want to make, er, some corporate bloggers feel badly about themselves, or anything. We merely pass this along for her, um, your edification.

By "her", of course, he means Zerb, who has written a string of decent pieces on the debacle (look here, here and here), in addition to the original piece that apparently caught Kinsella's ire for daring to criticize the Mothership. All and sundry are, at least to my eye, excellent blogging: they're a good mix of citation, original commentary, and enough links to satisfy anybody. More to the point, not one mentions Warren Kinsella by name, thus providing no possible reason for Kinsella's absurd overreaction.

Forget the numbers. On this subject, at least, Zerb has proven herself a far, far better blogger than Kinsella, whose lustre is being more and more tarnished by the minute. Honestly, if his Daisy compatriots are smart, they'll either reign the guy in or at least get him to link to a plausible reason why he's engaged in this fruitless offensive.

(While they're at it, they could maybe get him to scrounge up a plausible reason for people to still believe that he gives a rat's ass about liberalism, considering the fawning postings he continues to write about Stephen Harper and what a Harper majority would mean to Canadian liberalism. The "Calgary Communist" seems to have more of Calgary in him than Communist these days.)

Edit: Ok, fair's fair, it's almost certainly a reaction to this entry about a "google smackdown" showing that Zerb's name has got more searches in google lately.

However, compare Warren's language above to Zerb's. She treated it like a joke, which makes sense; the number of google searches for your name isn't a useful metric of popularity. He's acting like it's at all meaningful that he gets more links in a reverse search on Google.

Sorry, Warren, but by that logic, I'm way more important than you are.

Bow down.

Huffington on Gore

Nice piece by Arianna Huffington about Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and how it highlights the difference between the overly controlled and processed Gore of the 2000 election and the human being we see today.

(She also describes how the same process has happened to Hilary Clinton, and how it's largely robbed her of those traits that made her human and interesting.)

I'm looking forward to An Inconvenient Truth, and I'll probably see it tomorrow; but I was expecting a straight-up documentary about global warming, not on Gore himself. Considering how close the country came to having him as president, and the damage that the victor of that contest caused, I'm actually more interested than I was before.

That said, I do have one issue: Gore was never as "stiff" as Huffington asserts. She has her own reputation to keep, and so I'm not surprised that she doesn't want to contradict a position that she had had at the time, but the Gore slams of 2000 were transparent attempts to build a narrative of "cold DC wonk vs. friendly (if none too bright) southerner". There's no need to perpetuate that crap in 2006.

I intended to blog on something else

...but Warren, oh Warren, you just keep pulling me back.

The newest bit of comedy? Antonia Zerbisia's link on Warren's site is now called "Bilious Anti-Warren Harridan".

No, seriously. The guy's turning into Andrew Sullivan, except straight. (And, well, balder.)

(On the off chance you followed through Antonia Zerbisias' recent screencap on Twitter, I have a bit of a followup thing here. -Demosthenes, 2012.)

Post Editors Cry "Quick, Give Me Cover!"

Warren Kinsella is happy to oblige, as he ignores the beam in his newspaper's eye to point out the mote in the Toronto Star's.

He attacks the Toronto Star for this article, which is complimentary to Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory, as being a betrayal of the Star's liberal principles.

He then goes on:

Sitting here in church, waiting for Mass to begin, I observe, by way of conclusion, merely this: I, a Calgary communist, love writing for the conservative National Post. They are conservatives, and they are honest about it, even when they are on the losing side (and they ask me to write for them, notwithstanding that they know my own views on things like Iraq or or Bush or tax cuts). But the so-called Atkinson Principles? It is to laugh.

With Post, at least, they walk the talk, you know?

Indeed they do! When they let people make up stories about Iran, they make a point of ensuring that little things like facts and plausibility doesn't stand in the way of The Truth. Never mind that their token liberal inveighed against the use of Nazi comparisons by the paper's critics- when it's the Mothership that's threatened, he'll pull out all the stops.

(Like that "wiped off the face of the earth" bit, which Juan Cole ripped the heart out of ages ago. There's no such phrase in Persian, and the real one it's translated from ("removed from the pages of history") is much milder and was a restatement of an old Khomeini quote to boot.)

So now we have Warren Colmes (or, if you'd prefer, Alan Kinsella) desperately attacking the Star for supposedly betraying it's liberal values, in order to distract from his own employer betraying its journalistic ones. Guess this is payback for Zerb cleaning their clock, and this (convieniently ignored) story about how the Post wouldn't even return the Star's phone calls.

Oh well. The token "Calgary Communist" has to feed his family somehow. I just hope he finds honest work someday.

Joe Lieberman's Screwed

Go check Eschaton:

Lieberman 1004 66.5%
Lamont 505 33.5%
1509 voted.

Lamont's on the ballot. Quite an amazing feat. Tears in Liebermanland tonight.

Lieberman should be unsinkable, considering his stature and generally liberal policies.

Guess there really are repercussions for acting like Bush's toady on foreign policy, huh?

Zerbisias on the Possible anti-Iran hoax (Edit: With New Kinsella Hijinks!)

(On the off chance you followed through Antonia Zerbisias' recent screencap on Twitter, I have a bit of a followup thing here. -Demosthenes, 2012.)

Although I'd enjoyed her blog before, I wasn't expecting the Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias to have the best summary I've read on the recent flap of an erroneous story in the National Post that suggested that Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews would be required by the Iranian government to wear identifying markers. The story, which made the obvious Nazi comparisons, was not only false, but quite possibly a deliberate hoax by a winger PR firm. (She links to this DailyKos story.)

Makes sense, though, considering the paper that is at the centre of this mess (and, it is quite possible, a knowing co-conspirator in this hoax) is the Star's ideological nemesis: the National Post.

(I'd link to the original story, but as Zerbisias points out, it was quietly removed and altered when the truth came to light.)

That the National Post would be ground zero for this is unsurprising; although a centre-right paper in many respects, it skews roughly to the right of the Jerusalem Post when it comes to the Middle East, and can be counted on to be a loyal ally to Israel through thick and thin.

(Of course, at this point, I'd imagine the Post is an ally that Israel would probably rather not acknowledge, considering how likely it is that this will be spun by the usual suspects as Mossad black propaganda.)

In any case, when looking up Canadian news, I'm probably going to continue to read the Globe and Mail instead. At least it isn't, apparently, a pack of moonies away from being the Washington Times. Sorry, Warren.

Edit: Ok, maybe I'm not that sorry. Warren's reaction, incredibly, is this:

Sigh. Anti-Post screecher Zerb - you know, the gal whose paper previously achieved journalistic distinction for declaring the Blue Jays "racist" - has popped a head valve over the Chris Wattie Iran story in this week's Post. Qu'elle suprise.

Unlike Zerb, whose every waking hour seems to spent in Asper (and sometimes Israel) bashing, I will wait for all the facts to be in on this one. But permit me to say that her comparative silence on Iran's declared intention to "wipe Israel off the face of the Earth," a little while ago, was noteworthy. (And when Iran says something like that, is requiring Jews to wear identifying bits of cloth such a stretch?)

All I will note, instead, is that one of Zerb's researchers for her post on the Post is that piece of human garbage named McClelland - you know: the guy who writes "fuck the Jews" on his web site. And who Zerb quotes approvingly all the time.

I'd ask "who should be ashamed now," but there's no point, is there?

At this point, Mr. Kinsella, I'd say the answer should be you. Sorry, but Zerbisias handed your paper its ass on a platter. You chose to sit at that table, so don't complain about the food.

And, might I add, does this guy have any arguments he can bring to the table except useless ad hominems? Zerb gets that lame "waking hour" bit, and Robert McClelland gets called "human garbage" for a comment that Kinsella doesn't bother to substantiate and is utterly immaterial to the issue at hand.

No wonder he took a shot at me for being pseudonymous! Apparently having no other decent ad hominem to bring to bear, he had to pull out that lame excuse!

(Of course, considering that he didn't even acknowledge that his paper has quietly backed away from its own inflammatory reporting, I think the term "lame excuse" just about sums up the situation, doesn't it?)

Really, though, it makes sense. Only someone who's trading on his connections and past notoriety could possibly get away with that half-assed an argument. Pseudonymity is about building a reputation based on the quality of your arguments, but when you can't bring quality arguments to bear, it makes a hell of a lot of sense that that concept would be threatening, wouldn't it?

Ah well. In any case, this is one situation where "Asper-bashing" is entirely warranted.

Further Edit: Go read the comments to Zerb's piece- Kinsella gets savaged. Also, for a little comedy, go read this piece by Kinsella over the horror that is the use of the word "Nazi" by graffiti artists who write "Nazi Post" on National Post newspaper boxes. I loved this little gem:

We could go on, but the point should already be made. Analogies to the crime of the Holocaust -- and to its perpetrators, the Nazis -- are more than an inappropriate use of language. They are a gross, vile insult to the actual suffering of millions who perished at the hands of the Nazis: Jews and non-Jews, rabbis and priests, communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, trade unionists, non-whites, dissidents and disabled persons.

I'm not sure: do newspapers with (possibly deliberately) poorly researched articles charging a state with behavior directly analoguous with Nazi behavior--that feature pictures of Hungarian Jews on the front page, no less--qualify as "inappropriate", Warren?

Just curious.

And in Iraq?

Horror, pure and simple, as a group of marines, apparently, kill a family at prayer in cold blood:

A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children . . .

On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.

Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right . . .

Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that "there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

Military officials say Marine Corp photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the investigation hasn't been completed.

One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.

“This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.

Billmon:

Ugly? That doesn't even begin to cover it. Dick Cheney is ugly. The Pentagon is ugly. An Abrams tank is ugly. Executing helpless women and children while they're huddled on the floor, praying to their God, is a war crime committed by terrorists. It's Lidice and Rwanda and Srebrenica and, of course, My Lai. The men who committed this crime aren't really human any more -- they shed their humanity like a snake sheds its skin when they walked into those houses and started shooting. All that's left of them is a dark pit at the center of their reptilian brain stems, a place that knows no pity or remorse or even self-awareness. They're lost souls -- lost to the world and to themselves.

I don't know if it's better or worse that this atrocity seems to have been committed by a military unit completely out of control, instead of one that was following orders, as was clearly the case at Abu Ghraib. One one hand, you can argue that it's simply a reminder that Americans are as capable of being beasts as anyone else: Germans, Japanese, Russians, Serbs, Arabs, Afghans, Israelis, Somalians, Afrikaaners, Salvadorans -- the list goes on and on. There's nothing exceptional about us, even in our war crimes.

On the other hand, the fact that U.S. Marines -- the few, the proud, etc. -- were capable of such bestiality says something ominous about the psychological state of the American military after three years of being stretched to the limit. These weren't draftees or Guardsmen or pathetic losers like Calley. These were professionals, supposedly the best of the best, and yet they threw away their training, their code and their honor, and drenched themselves and their flag in the blood of innocents. They simply snapped, in other words, and it makes me wonder how many more like them are out there -- one IED or ambush away from going beserk.

There is a whiff of genocide in the air, and not just in Iraq. While the keyboard warriors still talk in slightly coded terms about waging war with the "ferocity" required to win, some of the real warriors aren't bothering to conceal what those terms really mean. A few days ago I came across a diary at Daily Kos (can't find it now) in which the diarist relayed the gist of his recent conversation with a Marine Corporal -- an MP, of all things, currently stationed at Quantico -- who was eager to get to Iraq so he could "kill some sand niggers."

There are good soldiers out there, ones who are horrified by this sort of violation. There are good American conservatives out there, too, who sincerely believe that the US military can make the world a better place.

What we should never forget, though, is that there are others out there- those that don't truly believe that the enemy is human and deserving of any rights and respect whatsoever. Some of them are America's enemies, but some of them are America's friends.

And some, to the United States' sorrow, are Americans themselves.

One other Billmon quote:

As for the excuse making, well, it's just Abu Ghraib, not to mention My Lai, all over again. There's something about war atrocities (ours as well as the other side's) that brings out the absolute worst in the keyboard commandos. If they could only hear themselves, they might realize they sound just like a bunch of Serbian paramilitary groupies, arguing that their boys couldn't have raped and murdered their way through Bosnia because Serbian fighters are men of honor, that everybody knows the foreign media made those stories up, and that the "Turks" just got what was coming to them -- all at the same time.

That's the problem, really. American exceptionalism isn't an incontrovertible fact, but a national myth. Like all myths, it can inspire Americans to actually strive to live up to the myth. Like all myths, however, it just serve as a feeble excuse for inhuman acts.

It certainly has today.

And Now for Something Completely Different (read: not about Warren)

A ways back I had mentioned how much I liked the Dean Gray "American Edit" song mashup. I'm also a big fan of trailer mashups; some of them are utterly brilliant.

Because I haven't tried video embedding yet, and because this really is a great trailer mashup, I give you Titanic 2: Jack's back. It's about a month old, but heck with it, it's quality stuff anyway.

Iggy's in trouble...

I hadn't taken a close look at the numbers for last night's narrow vote in the Canadian Parliament on extending their mission in Afghanistan, so I hadn't realized that only 24 Liberals had voted in favor of the mission. I did know that Ignatieff's group of 11 had played a decisive role, but I hadn't realized that they made up almost half of the supporters. That puts Ignatieff in a bad position.

And now, Stephen Harper is twisting the knife:

After narrowly winning the vote to prolong the risky Afghanistan mission, a triumphant Stephen Harper crossed the floor of the Commons and threaded his way to the back of the Liberal benches to shake hands with Michael Ignatieff.

The prime minister's gesture may well turn out to be the political equivalent of the kiss of death for Ignatieff's bid to lead the Liberal party.

Ostensibly, Harper was simply thanking the rookie Toronto MP and acclaimed scholar for being one of only 24 Liberals to support the Conservative government's motion to extend the Afghanistan military deployment for two years.

But some Liberals suspect more partisan motives. They think Harper wanted to underscore the divisions the Afghanistan issue has created in Liberal ranks, particularly among the 11 leadership contenders.

The decision by Liberal leader Bill Graham to make the vote an open one was a good(if somewhat misunderstood) idea; there are divisions in the Liberal party, and were Graham to require a straight vote, he would have had to direct the party to vote "no" or face a caucus revolt. He clearly didn't want to do that to the mission's unquestioning supporters, despite the utterly bankrupt tactic that Harper's vote represented.

That said, it did put Ignatieff in an awkward position, and Harper (with admitted skill) read that and did what he could do to exact the most damage. Ignatieff got Liebermanned, in a political system that is about as inclined towards bipartisanship as your typical Texas Republican.

The media is painting this as a Harper victory; fine, that's their right, although I don't agree. To a great extent, though, Ignatieff is the reason for that victory. Because of that, and because Harper took such trouble to recognize him for it, Ignatieff is now going to be battling this for the rest of the leadership race.

Wanted: liberal comment writers

Please apply within.

Once again, the conservative tide among Canadian blog comment writers is incredible; even when they aren't large "C" Conservatives, the talking points are so relentlessly pro-Harper that it astounds.

Where the hell are all the liberals in a comments thread responding to one of the more small "l" liberal candidates for Liberal party leadership?

Do they all just hang out at DailyKos?

Edit: guess they're here, where Red Tory hosts a discussion of the Afghanistan mission that actually seems to feature, well, liberals.

More Warren (This time it's actually relatively complimentary)

One of the reasons I was surprised by the weakness of Warren Kinsella's post on Afghanistan is that generally Warren can make a good argument, and he makes a good one here.
(This national post piece is linked from his own blog. I'd give you a permalink, but he, bizarrely, doesn't have them.)

He points out the growing importance of blogs and bloggers in Canadian politics as a source of news and commentary, and how blogs almost certainly played a role in the Conservatives' win in 2006. I'm sure I agree, and it's one of the reasons I became interested in the nascent Canadian political blogging scene in the first place. He quotes Paul Wells as saying that the Conservatives' increased "blog awareness" had a role in their success.

Perhaps. But as he says elsewhere in the piece, bloggers are primarily white males earning over $60,000 a year. This is almost by definition going to be a conservative crowd. Even when they're not, the Internet doesn't really reward moderation: because of the self-selection involved, a slow migration to polarized extremism is--as Cass Sunstein theorized ages ago--practically inevitable. As I'd said in an earlier piece, what distinguishes the Canadian "blogosphere" is how utterly dominated by conservatives it is- the communities of liberals and leftists that tend to spring up in the comments threads of popular liberal blogs are nowhere to be found, and carping Cons abound everywhere.

This is something Warren may want to take seriously, though. He has, apparently, abandoned the Liberal Party at the federal level. I can only assume he's fine with the idea of subjecting Canada to the tender mercies of a market fundamentalist zealot masquerading as a "hockey dad". I can also only assume he's doing it because he wants to help the Liberal Party of Ontario and let the rest of the country hang.

(It's a bizarre move that I can't recall people even considering in the United States, but anyway...)

What bloggers did in the last federal election, they can do in the next provincial one. Even if Warren is fine with Harper, he's surely not fine with John Tory, and Tory will be able to count on a torrent of online support from both inside and outside the province. It's easy to take shots at the Liberals when it's the party you've abandoned, but will it be so easy when Dalton McGuinty be the next to fall?

In any case, it's a good column, and Kinsella's work in the Post is refreshingly free of the WSJ-like conservative boosterism that infests the rest of that paper's opinion journalism.

Of all the possible responses

...to the post below, the last thing I was expecting out of Warren Kinsella was a pseudonymity slam.

I guess when you're trading on your fame, someone who wants to ensure that debate doesn't devolve into personal attacks and appeals to personal authority is anathema, huh.

Yes, it does open up the possibility of pseudonymous slander... but honestly, what good does pseudonymous slander serve? If you're engaged in real debate and discussion of ideas it isn't slander, by definition. If you are attempting to slander, you can't possibly bring anything credible to the table, because you can't assert personal knowledge without revealing your identity.

The Publius identity was important in American history because of the federalist papers, not because it was used to accuse Ben Franklin of being a closet fag. That's not what pseudonyms are for, and, honestly, they just don't work that way. The point is that the author of an argument simply isn't important...in the long run, it's the argument itself that matters.

And in the case of that post, the argument sucked.

A Memo to Warren Kinsella

While I can understand your position, this kind of crap won't stand:

I know some of them truly, truly agonized over this. But as I said to one MP, hours before the vote: "Forget about the strategy crap, like how it will look politically that we send the troops over there, and now we are changing our minds. Forget about that. Think about the fact that we are there because it is the right thing to do, and that we are there alongside the rest of the world. That's what counts." I didn't bother to ask him how he would feel about a vote to withdraw, on the day that is inexorably coming - on the day when a bomb detonates in a Canadian city's subway system. None of this will seem very distant and abstract, then.

Most of this argument is fine. The bolded part, however, is the kind of ridiculously manipulative twaddle that poisoned the debate over Iraq in the United States, and Canadians (Liberals, no less!) should have no part in.

Scare tactics about possible bombs in the Toronto subway system, aside from necessarily being based on a complete misinterpretation of Al Qaeda's current organizational structure, are no way of winning an argument.

Warren asserts that a loss in the vote would have "condemned the Liberal Party to the moral wilderness for years to come. God's Truth". Sorry, Warren, but considering what that sort of argument has engendered in the past few years, I'd say that this post places you more firmly in the wilderness than this vote could ever have.

God's Truth.