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Paul Wellstone, R.I.P.

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We’re getting ready to post a tribute by Joe Conason. Here’s a response from Minnesotan Dr. Jane Dusek:

  We are not doing well in Minnesota this afternoon. After hearing of the
death of Sen. Paul Wellstone — one of the few lights of political honesty wewill ever see in this country — I got in my car and drove over to the Wellstone campaign headquarters in the Midway business district area of Saint Paul.

I could not get near the place. The crush of media and police units was too great. There was nowhere to park. People milled around the entrance of the headquarters. The doors were locked … people kept trying the doors, to no avail. Folks from businesses across the street milled around on the sidewalks, there. Everyone was in shock. Everyone was stunned.

As I pulled past the building, I saw a sight that nearly stopped me cold. A lone staff person, standing next to The Green Bus, Paul and Sheila’s well-known campaign icon. He was leaning in the railing, his head bowed in grief.

That sight broke my heart.

We don’t know what will happen, now, here in this state. We don’t know what will happen in the US Senate race, now, either.

All I know, right now, is that none of us are doing well.

And that we have all lost today.

Lost big.

Peace kooks

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Michelle Goldberg’s Salon cover story yesterday, documenting how some of the biggest protests organized against Bush’s Iraqi war plans have been organized by groups on the far-left fringe (Revolutionary Communist Party, supporters of the Shining Path, and so forth), has evoked a blistering response from Toby’s Political Diary:

  The reason Goldberg’s article was so bad was that it missed an important story for some ridiculous fluff that even sounded like old fashioned red baiting. The important story is not the reincarnation of the factions of the 1970’s left, but rather the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people to make political sense of their lives by connecting their day to day experience of work and environmental degradation with the larger issue of corporate control and America’s role in the world.

I think a lot of us at Salon would agree that that’s an “important story” — while defending the importance and relevance of Goldberg’s article. We’ll keep covering both kinds of stories. In the meantime, there are some well-considered comments on Toby’s post as well.

Scariest item of the week — and it’s only Monday

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From yesterday’s N.Y. Times Week in Review, a brief item noting that an asteroid entered the earth’s atmosphere in June somewhere over the Mediterranean and exploded with the force of a Hiroshima-strength nuclear bomb. U.S. instruments detected the explosion and properly identified it as the random natural event it was. A U.S. officer quoted in the story asks us to imagine that the asteroid had been poised over, say, India or Pakistan: “To our knowledge, neither of those nations have the sophisticated sensors that can determine the difference between a natural N.E.O. [“near earth object”] impact and a nuclear detonation.”

Just how inevitable is an invasion of Iraq?

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As part of my reunion extravaganza, the high school newspaper that first led me down the journalism path was celebrating its centennial. (Alas, its Web site does not appear to be fully operational at the moment.) On Saturday morning I moderated a panel of some of the paper’s more illustrious alumni on the subject of “The Press, the Presidency and Wartime.”

What surprised me was the consensus among the panelists — historian Robert Caro, polling superstar Mark Penn, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher and veteran DC corresondent Nicholas Horrock. When pressed, they generally agreed that it’s more likely we will not wind up in a shooting war in Iraq, and that the entire process we’re witnessing today is an elaborate game of chicken to bend Saddam to our will, or force his peaceful ouster. (Caro offered thoughtful parallels to the Gulf of Tonkin era –Johnson won the political battle for authority to use the military in Vietnam, and ironically it sunk his presidency — but begged off the contemporary analysis.)

It was fascinating to hear this from such a diverse and well-informed group. I hope they’re right. (Today’s Tom Friedman column shares this view.) If it’s all an act, I have to say, it’s a very convincing one. And of course we need to remember that games of chicken (the classic version, where two cars head for a dead-on collision to see who will swerve first) don’t always end well; sometimes either or both parties end up bleeding by the roadside.

History is littered with diplomatic car-crashes that caused unimaginable pile-ups — games of chicken that led to out-of-control wars. The worst-case scenario is August 1914. Those diplomats on the eve of the First World War thought they were playing out their hands in a finely tuned international game; they ended up sparking mass slaughter on a hitherto unimaginable scale. I wonder: Has anyone in the Bush White House read “The Guns of August”?

Bin Laden, serving U.S. interests?

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Courtesy Tom Fox’s Paris blog, a fascinating interview in a Lebanese paper with French scholar Gilles Kepel, who says that bin Laden’s effort to rally the Muslim masses against America has not only failed but backfired: “Kepel sharply criticized bin Laden, saying everything he did ultimately served US interests, whether during the Afghan war when he was America’s ‘puppet’ or after Sept. 11 when he was on Washington’s hit list. But Kepel said bin Laden may have won some popular Arab sentiment.
.. ‘I toured here and Syria, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates between October and December 2001,’ he said, adding he could measure the enthusiasm among youth, particularly young women, for bin Laden, who has become a type of Robin Hood or Che Guevara. Bin Laden’s videos, broadcast on television and featuring his vows to destroy America, have fascinated many Arabs. Kepel, however, described them as ‘only rhetoric, a symbol of (Arab) political impotence.’ “

Some turtles are more equal than others

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A stray reference to the U.S. as “the turtle on top of the pile,” in response to my post below regarding the new Bush doctrine of U.S. uber alles, has incited a stirring exchange involving the (highly relevant) saga of Yertle the Turtle. (Here’s the condensed version.) Being “top turtle” may not be all it’s cracked up to be; you may recall that Yertle, the ruler of all that he sees, is eventually laid low when a peon at the bottom sneezes.

(This is not to be confused with the celebrated tale of the scientist confronted by the old lady who insists that the world is a flat plate supported on a tortoise’s back, and when the scientist challenges her as to what the tortoise is on, she replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”)

And while I am gamely analyzing the Bush doctrine in light of Dr. Seuss, Frank Lynch is finding his way in via Dr. Johnson.

Biggest kid on the block

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It’s certainly a fine thing that the U.S. government is finally rewriting its global political and military strategy to take into account the fact that the Cold War is over. (The document’s full text is here.)

There are some things to applaud in this document. But David Sanger’s Times story highlights this statement: “The president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.”

Flash forward to 100 or 500 years from now, when some future Edward Gibbon is composing his massive “Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” and marks this moment as the zenith of American power, and the start of its downfall. Our leaders seem to be committing themselves at once to a military policy that brooks no challenge and commits us to outspend any challenger — and to an economic policy that inequitably but massively cuts government revenue. This is how empires are unmade.

Know thine enemy

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In Slate, Michael Kinsley makes a cogent, and characteristically pragmatic, argument against Bush’s war-on-terrorism rhetoric. If you just keep repeating that your enemy is “evil,” and don’t explore his motivations, you’re going to do a lousy job of preventing other enemies from proliferating.

Meanwhile, in Salon Premium, Josh Marshall explores the quandary Bush administration hawks find themselves in now that the president has chosen to work through the U.N. and its resolutions. Latest twist: Rewrite Bush’s speech. “Maybe the president said that the issue was making Saddam live up to the resolutions, but in fact whether he does or not is really beside the point, because the real point is that Saddam can’t be trusted and must be ousted.”