September 2004 Archives

Sara called me at work a few days ago to tell me that the mystery of the vanishing bat had been solved.

One night last year while Sara and Lucy were on a weekend vacation, I heard Ben yelling from his room, "Daddy, daddy, there's a birdy in here!" My first thought was that he had been struggling to fall asleep and decided to come up wth a creative way to quit trying. When I arrived at his room and asked him where it was, he said it flew away—a response that normally would have increased my incredulity, yet there was no guile in his visibly shaken mien. He was genuinely terrified. So I told him I'd look around.

It didn't take me long to find the "birdy." It was a bat, and it was perched on the picture rail in the upstairs hallway just above the bathroom door. I quickly closed Ben's door, assuring him that I would get rid of the birdy. No sooner did I turn around than that bat swept through the hallway, nearly flapping in my face and fully freaking me out. It plunged down to the first floor, and I tumbled down the stairs after it. I grabbed my racquetball racquet and crouched down, waiting for its next offensive maneuver.

But the bat didn't come back. I grabbed a flashlight and searched every room. Still no bat. I scoured the basement—the cobwebbed corners, the darkened nooks, the cluttered dry-goods shelves. Nothing. After twenty minutes or so of good bat hunting, I trudged back to Ben's room to give him the less-than-satisfying explanation that the birdy must have flown away all by itself. I fully expected, of course, to see the bat again, if not the same night, then at least within the week.

So, how did Sara end up seeing the bat more than a year later? She scheduled furnace maintenance. The service technician replaced the furnace filter—and removed one very old, very dry bat.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Stanley Fish discusses his writing class's analysis of recent speeches given by Bush and Kerry. Guess whose message has more rhetorical force?

President Bush, the students pointed out, begins with a perfect topic sentence...that nicely sets up a first paragraph describing how conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia four years ago aided terrorists. This is followed by a paragraph explaining how the administration's policies have produced a turnaround in each country.... The paragraph's conclusion is concise, brisk and earned: "We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer."

Senator Kerry, my students observed with a mix of solemnity and glee, has violated two cardinal rules of exposition: don't presume your audience has information you haven't provided, and always pay attention to the expectations of your listeners.

If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are.

Read the full article: "The Candidates, Seen From the Classroom."

Peddling Fear in the Bible Belt

Anyone who reads the Bible must be a stupid idiot, right? That's obviously what the Republican Party thinks. Otherwise, they wouldn't think that Christians will fall for the fear-mongering claim that liberals want to ban the Bible: "Republicans Admit Mailing Campaign Literature Saying Liberals Will Ban the Bible"? Right. And if you believe that liberals will ban the Bible, you should also know that Osama bin Laden is voting for Kerry.

Republicans for Humility

Thankfully, not all Republicans are such offensive, insulting, shameless hucksters. In fact, some see right through Bush's swagger, and are calling on him to act like the decent Christian man he claims to be: Republicans for Humility.

Bush in Fantasy Land

There seems to be a growing chorus of voices in Editorial Land practically pleading with Bush to leave his Fantasy Land and stop pretending that everything in Iraq is going just fine:

• "Bush Upbeat as Iraq Burns" by Bob Herbert in The New York Times
• "Let's Get Real" by Paul Krugman, also in The New York Times
• "Match Iraq Policy to Reality" by Jessica Mathews in the Washington Post

Every once in a while I come across a cool little tool that makes life on the web just a little easier, or a bit more fun. Here are three that I use fairly often:

TinyURL: Let's say you just read a great article in The New York Times and you want to tell your friends about it. Unfortunately, you're not sure you can remember the URL (web address): http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html? ex=1253073600&en=cd231d47f63894da&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. The good news is that you don't really have to. Instead, you can go to tinyurl.com and paste that gobbledygook into a field, and the web site will spit back a tinyURL like this: http://tinyurl.com/3jxyt. Now, any time you put that tinyurl into the address field, it will take you to the New York Times article.

BugMeNot: Have you ever gone to a news site, such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, only to be barred from entry until you give up your email address and other personal information for their free registration? Well, now you can "bypass compulsory registration" at most sites. Just go to bugmenot.com and type the URL for the site you're trying to view (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com). BugMeNot will give you a user name and password that someone has donated.

Mailinator: Another way to get around the personal disclosure part of the free registration trap is to type in bogus information. Some sites, though, require email confirmation before granting you access; they send an email to the address you enter and give you a link that you need to follow to "activate" your registration. So, a bogus email address will backfire. That's where mailinator.com comes in. Instead of typing your real email address, type any name at mailinator.com (for example, lilswede@mailinator.com). Then, all you have to do is go to mailinator.com, type that fake address (in our example, lilswede) in the "Check your inbox" field, and press the "Go" button. You'll see the confirmation email sent to you by the site that made you register. Open it and follow the instructions as usual. You can think of mailinator.com as a provider of temporary email addresses. Oh, the email people send to mailinator is temporary, too—it's automatically deleted after a few hours.

BONUS

TypoGenerator: Because I'm feeling extra geeky tonight, I'll tell you about this other tool, the typoGenerator. When you go to the web site, type a word or phrase in the input field and press the Generate button. Then, according to the site, " typoGenerator searches images.google for the text and creates a background from the found images, using randomly chosen effects...it places the text, using random effects, too." You can look artsy fartsy without any effort whatsoever. Here are three "typoposters" I generated at the site:

Finally, someone in the mainstream (i.e. conservative) media came out and stated the obvious: Bush has done his fair share of flip flopping. Four years ago the Republicans pinned the same flip-flop label on Gore, so I was a little surprised that they would try it again with Kerry, and even more surprised that it seems to have stuck.

The Associated Press article, published by USA Today, notes: "President Bush has his own history of changing his position, from reversals on steel tariffs and "nation-building" to reasons for invading Iraq." It goes on to list at least 10 positions that Bush has changed—from tariffs to trade and from Homeland Security to Osama bin Laden.

Read the full article, "Both Sides Often Switch Positions."

Do I think that such evidence will change people's minds about either Bush or Kerry? Not a chance. Liberals will wave articles like this one in the air like battle flags while conservatives avert their eyes, in search of evidence to support their own views.

Update: In the September 24 edition of The Washington Post, John F. Harris writes "Despite Bush Flip-Flops, Kerry Gets Label".

An article published today in Slate.com catalogs the carefully scripted public statements by Bush supporters suggesting that Bush's presidency is the direct result of God's intervention. The final three paragraphs are absolutely brilliant:

...it's hard to recall another instance of a presidential campaign so confidently promulgating the idea that its candidate had divine endorsement. The potentially dangerous implication is that since God put George W. Bush in the White House, opposing him is opposing Him. A person could get smited for that.

Of course, it's always possible God did put George W. Bush in the White House. But if He did, it doesn't theologically follow that He wants him to have a second term. Even those who believe that God controls world events usually concede it is hard for humans to divine the intent of the Divine.

After all, in the Bible, God is described as doing things for all sorts of inexplicable reasons—sometimes as a reward to the people, and sometimes as a punishment.

Read the full article, "Heaven Sent," by Steven Waldman.

In an article I read about the Republican National Convention, the writer noted that while Saddam Hussein's name came up over a dozen times, none of the speakers mentioned Osama bin Laden. Now, I have no idea why they wouldn't even mention the guy's name, but I just might have figured out why we haven't captured him yet:

• The Bush administration is too busy fighting the real terrorist threat—John Kerry. And,
• Osama bin Laden is actually hiding in Iraq—right next to the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Anyone out there have any other ideas about why Osama is still on the lam?
While I'm on the political harangue, here are a couple links to funny, fake political ads:

• The Bush campaign's TV commercial if he was running against Jesus
• Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth

Yesterday I took my camera along to work in the off chance that I would have time to snap some pictures of people milling around outside during lunchtime with all the booths set up for Celebration on the Grand, the last hurrah of the summer in downtown Grand Rapids.

But since the bus dropped me off a half hour before work started, I decided to slow down the usual 10-minute walk and snap a few on my way to the office. Here is what I came up with.

Click on the pictures to see the full versions.

It appears that conventional wisdom, at least of the Republican sort, doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. Two articles in Slate.com do a particularly nice job of exposing the lies, half-truths, deceptions, and misdirections that speakers at the Republican National Convention tried to pass on to the American public:

• Lies, Damned Lies, and Convention Speeches by Fred Kaplan
• Imperial President by William Saletan

Here is a (rather lengthy) passage from Saletan's article, which includes a quote from psuedo-democrat Zell Miller's speech:

If the convention speeches are any guide, Republicans have run out of excuses for blowing the economy, blowing the surplus, and blowing our military resources and moral capital in the wrong country. So they're going after the patriotism of their opponents. Here's what the convention keynoter, Miller, said tonight about Democrats and those who criticize the way President Bush has launched and conducted the Iraq war:

   "While young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.
   "Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.
   "In [Democratic leaders'] warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself.
   "Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide."

Every one of these charges is demonstrably false. When Bush addressed Congress after 9/11, Democrats embraced and applauded him. In the Afghan war, they gave him everything he asked for. Most Democratic senators, including John Kerry and John Edwards, voted to give him the authority to use force in Iraq. During and after the war, they praised Iraq's liberation. Kerry has never said that any other country should decide when the United States is entitled to defend itself.

But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy. [emphasis added]

Fred Kaplan's article is no less instructive—or disheartening. Referring to the charge that Kerry voted to curtail funding of all sorts of weapons, Kaplan notes:

...it's not just that Cheney and those around him are lying; it's not even just that they know they're lying; it's that they know—or at least Cheney knows—that the same lie could be said about him. That's what makes it a damned lie.

Kaplan then directly quotes Cheney's own complaint, during his tenure as Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, that Congress wasn't cutting weapons programs enough.

I could go on and on, quoting these articles and fuming, but my blood pressure is too high already, so I'll just leave you to read them in their entirety (they're linked above) or check out these others:

• Heads in the Sand, a New York Times Op-Ed by Bob Herbert
• Feel the Hate, another New York Times Op-Ed, this one by Paul Krugman
• The GOP's Dirty Z-Bomb, by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr.
• GOP Prism Distorts Some Kerry Positions, by Glenn Kessler and Dan Morgan, in the Washington Post