G.O.P. to W.: You’re Nuts!

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for those gnarly union stevedores in “On the Waterfront,” the ones who hung up rats on hooks and took away Marlon Brando’s chance to be a contend-ah.

Maybe it’s corporate racial profiling, but I don’t want foreign companies, particularly ones with links to 9/11, running American ports.

What kind of empire are we if we have to outsource our coastline to a group of sheiks who don’t recognize Israel, in a country where money was laundered for the 9/11 attacks? And that let A. Q. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, smuggle nuclear components through its port to Libya, North Korea and Iran?

It’s mind-boggling that President Bush ever agreed to let an alliance of seven emirs be in charge of six of our ports. Although, as usual, Incurious George didn’t even know about it until after the fact. (Neither did Rummy, even though he heads one of the agencies that green-lighted the deal.)

Same old pattern: a stupid and counterproductive national security decision is made in secret, blowing off checks and balances, and the president’s out of the loop.

Was W. too busy not calling Dick Cheney to find out why he shot a guy to not be involved in a critical decision about U.S. security? What is he waiting for — a presidential daily brief warning, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack U.S. Ports?”

Our ports are already nearly naked in terms of security. Only about 5 percent of the containers coming into the country are checked. And when the White House assures us that the Homeland Security Department will oversee security at the ports, is that supposed to make us sleep better? Not after the chuckleheaded Chertoff-and-Brownie show on Capitol Hill.

“Our borders are wide open,” said Jan Gadiel of 9/11 Families for a Secure America. “We don’t know who’s in our country right now, not a clue. And now they’re giving away our ports.” The “trust us” routine of W. and Dick Cheney is threadbare.

The more W. warned that he would veto legislation stopping this deal, the more lawmakers held press conferences to oppose it — even conservatives who had loyally supported W. on Iraq, the Patriot Act, torture and warrantless snooping.

Mr. Bush is hoist on his own petard. For four years, the White House has accused anyone in Congress or the press who defended civil liberties or questioned anything about the Iraq war of being soft on terrorism. Now, as Congress and the press turn that accusation back on the White House, Mr. Bush acts mystified by the orgy of xenophobia.

Lawmakers, many up for re-election, have learned well from Karl Rove. Playing the terror card works.

A bristly Bush said yesterday that scotching the deal would send “a terrible signal” to a worthy ally. He equated the “Great British” with the U.A.E. Well, maybe Britain in the 12th century.

Besides, the American people can be forgiven if they’re confused about what it means in the Arab world to be a U.S. ally. Is it a nation that helps us sometimes but also addicts us to oil and then jacks up the price, refuses to recognize Israel, denies women basic rights, tolerates radical anti-American clerics, looks the other way when its citizens burn down embassies and consulates over cartoons, and often turns a blind eye when it comes to hunting down terrorists in its midst?

In our past wars, America had specific countries to demonize. But now in the “global war on terror” — GWOT, as they call it — the enemy is a faceless commodity that the administration uses whenever it wants to win a political battle. When something like this happens, it’s no wonder the public does its own face transplant.

One of the real problems here is that this administration has run up such huge trade and tax-cut-and-spend budget deficits that we’re in hock to the Arabs and the Chinese to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. If they just converted their bonds into cash, they would own our ports and not have to merely rent them.

Just because the wealthy foreigners who own our debt can blackmail us with their economic leverage, does that mean we should expose our security assets to them as well?

As part of the lunatic White House defense, Dan Bartlett argued that “people are trying to drive wedges and make this to be a political issue.” But as the New Republic editor Peter Beinart pointed out in a recent column, W. has made the war on terror “one vast wedge issue” to divide the country.

Now, however, the president has pulled us together. We all pretty much agree: mitts off our ports.

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If you looking for an outlet for celebrity schadenfreude, look no further thanGo Fug Yourself.

The sections on Courtney Love and Britney Spears are inspired. You will giggle for hours. And then you will be glad that their razor wit hasn’t been directed at you.

For example, I chopped my hair off into a bob yesterday and when Richard joined Jen and I at the pub, I waited a half-hour before I said, “Do you notice anything?”

“What?” Richard said. His German accent makes him seem more droll than I think he intends. “Do you have new glasses?”

“No! What is different?”

He considered me. “You look good tonight.”

Bloody Germans.

In any case, I am happy the ladies of Go Fug Yourself aren’t around to mock my fashion sense as I have Herr Buettner.

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One of the foods that I cook that disturbs Stuart greatly is mussels. I was scrubbing a batch recently and he came in and looked at me. One was open and I was tapping it to see if it would close.

“Hello. Are you alive?”

“They’re alive? And you cook them in their little houses?”

“Yep!” I said cheerfully. I stopped tapping on the shell and tossed it in the trash.

“Why did you throw that one away?”

“Because he’s dead.”

He shook his head. “You are so wrong.”

Ever since I read Kitchen Confidential, I am rather nervous about eating mussels in a restaurant. Plus why would you when you consider the mark up on the things and how ridiculously easy they are to make at home?

For a quickie Moules Marinères, I sauté shallots and garlic in butter. Add white wine. Boil. Add mussels. Shake the pan a few times. Steam seven to ten minutes. Add chopped parsley. Put mussels in bowl. Boil down the wine a little. Take off the heat and add a pat of butter. Pour over mussels. Eat.

So easy and so cheap and so good.

It also inspires abject horror in Stuart, which has its own pleasures.

Two of my LA readers that found me through my illegal posting of New York Times Select columns, went looking for ancho chilies based on my post aboutChicken Adobado and had some problems finding it so they ended up making a mussel dish and they were kind enough to share it with me.

Haven’t tried it yet, but it reads delicious.

Goan Warm Mussel Salad

1 cup finely chopped onions
2 tablespoons light vegetable oil
1 tablespoon finely shredded fresh ginger
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ground red pepper
1/2 cup rich coconut milk
Coarse salt to taste
4 pounds mussels (about 4 dozen), scrubbed clean
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro leaves
2 tablespoons grated unsweetened coconut (optional)

Place onions and oil in a deep pot and cook, stirring over high heat until they turn light brown, about 5 minutes. Lower heat and stir in ginger, coriander, turmeric, and red pepper. Cook for an additional minute. Stir in the coconut, salt, and mussels, and bring contents to a boil. Cover the pot and steam until the mussels open up, about 7 minutes. Transfer mussels and the sauce to a deep platter. Sprinkle with lemon juice, cilantro and, if desired, coconut. Serve immediately.

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Krugman’s Monday Op-Ed.

Taken with the chaser of the US reclassifying documents for no obvious reason, (other than to cover up embarrassing things the government has done, even if they happened a lifetime ago) makes for one hell of a hangover
————————
February 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Mensch Gap

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Be a mensch,” my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren’t mensches.

Dick Cheney isn’t a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney’s recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn’t a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion’s aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about “unknown unknowns” and going to war with “the army you have,” ducking responsibility for the failures of leadership that have turned the war into a stunning victory — for Iran.

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn’t a mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of New Orleans? “I remember on Tuesday morning,” he said on “Meet the Press,” “picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, ‘New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.’ ” We now know that by Tuesday morning, he had received — and ignored — many warnings about the unfolding disaster.

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn’t a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan’s catastrophic start doesn’t reflect poorly on his department, that “no logical person” would have expected “a transition happening that is so large without some problems.” In fact, Medicare’s 1966 startup went very smoothly. That didn’t happen this time because his department ignored outside experts who warned, months in advance, about exactly the disaster that has taken place.

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.

Was it always like this? I don’t want to romanticize our political history, but I don’t think so. Think of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a letter before D-Day accepting the blame if the landings failed. His modern equivalent would probably insist that the landings were a “catastrophic success,” then try to lay the blame for their failure on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Where have all the mensches gone? The character of the administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for failure approaches the pathological. He surrounds himself with subordinates who share his aversion to facing unpleasant realities. And as long as his appointees remain personally loyal, he defends their performance, no matter how incompetent. After all, to do otherwise would be to admit that he made a mistake in choosing them. Last week he declared that Mr. Leavitt is doing, yes, “a heck of a job.”

But how did such people attain power in the first place? Maybe it’s the result of our infantilized media culture, in which politicians, like celebrities, are judged by the way they look, not the reality of their achievements. Mr. Bush isn’t an effective leader, but he plays one on TV, and that’s all that matters.

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders’ character, it has horrifying consequences. You can’t learn from mistakes if you won’t admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

Above all, the anti-mensches now ruling America are destroying our moral standing. A recent National Journal report finds that we’re continuing to hold many prisoners at Guantánamo even though the supposed evidence against them has been discredited. We’re even holding at least eight prisoners who are no longer designated enemy combatants. Why? Well, releasing people you’ve imprisoned by mistake means admitting that you made a mistake. And that’s something the people now running America never do.

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I love London pubs. And it’s not just because I can drink gallons of Guinness. Although, yes, okay. That’s part of it.

I love how the Stella goes into the Stella glass. Carling into the Carling glass. Guinness in the Guinness glass and Guinness Extra Cold in the. . . well– you get where I am going with this.

In America, at least in my limited experience living and visiting in eleven states, when you order a beer it comes in a generic beer glass. And the Guinness Extra Cold thing? How fantastic is it that you have regular cold and then extra cold?

I like how you can go into a pub in the afternoon with a book or a notebook and have a pint and no one messes with you. I would never go into a bar in America by myself. Here it is like going to a Starbucks.

My new reason why I love London pubs is the pub quiz. It’s sort of like trivia pursuit with a hundred people and food and drink in close proximity. The last two Tuesdays we have gone to the pub quiz at The Frog and Forget Me Not (Of course I would adore any pub with frog in the title.) We haven’t been completely slaughtered which gives us false hope that we will win someday. I am good for answers like Martin Chuzzlewit but then I messed up recognizing the first few notes of Sesame Street.

There are a lot of soul destroying answers that I am glad we don’t know the answer to, like the name of chat shows or how many men Paris Hilton has fucked*.

It’s all good fun.

*This was a joke. No pub quiz that I have attended has asked how many times Paris Hilton has played hide the salami. First, there is no way the number could be substantiated. Second, given the fact she is a cheap whore, the number is in constant flux.

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I’ve mentioned before what a big fan I am of Neko Case. Her new album comes out in early March which I am really looking forward to.

You can download a video where she talks about the new album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood and the creative process for it on Anti’s Website.

If you are in a city where she is performing, I strongly reccommend that you go. She puts on a great show.

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The weather has been a bit gusty here. When the wind blows just right, which it has been, it catches something on the roof just outside our bedroom window. We’ve christened the resulting wind tunnel vibrating noise The Yeti.

Arrrruuuuuuughghhhhhhhhhhhggghhhhhhh.

All night The Yeti was calling out. Mix that up with the wind in the trees and you get some interesting dreams.

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Dante was wrong. It isn’t Judas, Brutus and Cassius in Satan’s mouth in the final level in hell. It is the customer service staff at TurboTax. Or, at any rate it should be.

I’ve been using TurboTax online for years to do my taxes. I like it a lot. Is an easy program and it walks you through a lot of deductions that you may not be aware that you could take. Yesterday I sat down with all my forms and discovered that with a little creativity on my part, I get a refund. I get to the end where I have to pay and I can’t because the online form doesn’t allow for an address outside of The United States.

I still have my American checking account but I changed the address to the one over here so I could get my mail.

I foolishly call the customer service line. It takes me twenty minutes to explain to the man that can barely speak English what my problem is. . . (I have no problem dealing with people where English is a 2nd language. I wish I were bilingual. However when I call a customer service line, I expect a certain level of comprehension from the person I am speaking to. Call me crazy.)

He tells me that I will have to buy the download product and will then need to do the taxes again. Okay. Fine. That’s annoying but I’ll do it. Then he tells me that the download product is more money than the online.

Not acceptable. Why would I pay more when I could use the online product except for a substantial design flaw in their system?

Round-round-round in circles we go. Speak to the manager. Basically tells me tough and transfers me back into the queue to speak to a technical person. There is a thirty-minute wait according to the message. I consider staying on hold but realized that there is no way this other person would help me and it will only result in my blood pressure reaching even further levels.

I decide to think outside the box. I call Bank of America to see if I could switch my address on file back to the Los Angeles apartment, make the payment to Satan’s minions at TurboTax and then switch it back.

The guy was willing to do that. Great! I think.

Can I confirm my driver’s license number?

When I opened the account back in 1997 I had a Washington drivers license. I haven’t had that license for ages and have given them my California license a couple of times. He refused to change the address because I could not confirm an invalid drivers license.

The humor of the situation- that I changed my address from California to the UK before was lost on him.

At least he spoke English.

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I’ve just been giggling like a little girl watching The Daily Show blurbs on the Dark Lord (Cheney) shooting incident.

I’ve controlled myself from blogging about it because (paraphrasing Jon Stewart) it is a really easy thing to make a joke about and I also didn’t want to give it any energy.

What I didn’t realize until today was the Veep and his sycophantic entourage where at one of those places where the animals are farm raised and then released to be killed by fat assed fucks like our Vice President, who moments before were peeling their pasty, saggy skin off their SUVs heated leather seats.

That is not hunting. I’m not sure what to call it, but it ain’t hunting.

Before I get a nasty gram from some right-winger freak like I have in the past, my father used to hunt so I know what the hell I am talking about. I also know how to fire a weapon. I’m not good at it and I don’t like it much. So say what you want. The man wasn’t hunting.

I think they were beyond irresponsible in how they released the information but it is much ado about nothing. It was an accident. Accidents do happen.

I wish the White House Press Corps were as rabid on any number of subjects rather than this. Am I enjoying the ballyhoo? Oh, sure. It’s a hoot.

I just think there are much darker things happening in America that we should be frightened about. . .

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Happy Birthday to Nicole in London. . . Happy Birthday to Nicole in London. . . Happy BIRTHday to Nicole in London. . . (big finish) Happy Birthday tooooooooooooo meeeeeeeeeee.

Well not to me. But my blog is one today.

I started it shortly after I heard that Yahoo was sending me to London for three months. There is only one entry in February. I think I figured since I wasn’t in London yet, there was nothing to blather about.

I’ve gotten over that now and blather away to my heart’s content.

It has been a weird year. It started with me not really liking my job and where I was. I was in a relationship with a very nice but passive-aggressive man who couldn’t carry on a conversation with my friends and would drink my 20.00 bottles of wine and replace it with Trader Joe’s Two-buck-chuck.

I hated my job. Well, I didn’t hate the job. I hated feeling like I never accomplished anything and what I did accomplish was never noticed and it took years for my suggestions on how to make things more better to be implemented.

I was so stuck in a rut, I needed rock climbing equipment to climb out.

One year later: I have traveled to five countries, moved myself and my books and my kitchen things and my clothes and my useless tchotchkes to London, and am with the sweetest (and most frustrating) man on the planet who I love very much.

And, oh yeah. . . planned and executed a wedding with the end result being. . . I’m married.

Guh!

Be careful what you ask for. . . and all of that.

But I am very happy. I’ll be happier when I have a job to complain about but that will be happening soon.

The blog was a way to quickly keep friends and family up to date with my little adventure and it has become in an odd little way, a sort of community. I’m now addicted to a few blogs, to the point that I sometimes repeat the funny anecdotes that they relate in their blogs to my friends.

Soon there will some changes to this little space of Internet real estate. Back in September I got mydomain but I have just been redirecting it to blogspot.

I’ve decided to switch everything over and use WordPress because it has an easy tool to move all the old posts over. My only snag is the templates that I have been adding to my FTP editor haven’t been taking the images correctly. I spent all day yesterday fighting with the stupid thing. Not sure when I will unveil the new site, but when I do, all ten of my usual readers will just need to go to www.travelingtreefrog.com. I’ll let you know when it’s when.

So, thank you all for reading my blather. It will be fun to see where the next year takes us all. . .

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