Both Presidential Campaigns are Lying to America, and I'm Sick of It

I’m tired, guys. I’m tired of the lying.

I’m tired of the negative ads, of the scare tactics, of the stupid labels, of the total falsehoods that both sides have been peddling throughout the 2012 presidential campaign.

Here’s the most recent case: Mitt Romney’s newest advertisement alleges that Barack Obama plans to “gut welfare reform” by bypassing legislation that requires welfare recipients to work for their government check. As Politifact said earlier in the week, this is flat-out false. It’s untrue. It got a “Pants on Fire!” rating because it is just wrong.

Obama fired back through press secretary Jay Carney, who retorted that Romney “supported policies that would have eliminated the time requirements in the welfare reform law”. This is also false. Both sides took a tiny ambiguity and leveraged it into a massive, sweeping attack on the opposition. What is that except telling blatant lies?

Where is the outrage over this? In November, we’re going to pick one of these men to lead our country. Through their surrogates, they have both lied to the public, or at the very least massively distorted the facts, in just the last week. What’s the matter with us? Don’t we care?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that Romney didn’t pay income taxes at any time in the last ten years, but refuses to provide any evidence for it. Romney took Obama’s “You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” remarks out of context and used them as a talking point. A recent ad by Priorities USA Action, an Obama-aligned Super PAC, tried to smear Romney by blaming a woman’s death on him and Romney retaliated by attacking the Obama campaign for the Super PAC’s misdeeds. Romney has insinuated that recent leaks of classified information were masterminded by the White House for political gain, again without proof. Another Obama ad says that Romney backed a bill eliminating all abortions, including those in cases of rape and incest, when he just did not. Romney gave a speech saying that “sequestration” is Obama’s fault, when the truth is far more complex.

All of these claims are from just the last few weeks. There are plenty of others there, and I encourage readers to look them up through Politifact or elsewhere. These are not fringe figures looking for attention or cable channels trying to boost their ratings. These are some of the most important and influential people in the country who are completely fine with being flat-out wrong. Who is holding them accountable?

The answer, truthfully, is no one. There are plenty of nonpartisan fact-checking organizations, like Politifact or the Washington Post or FactCheck.org, and these claims certainly don’t go unnoticed. Every time there’s a new ad or a new intentional error by one of the candidates, the other side goes nuts with online ads and press releases and scathing quotes.

But then the wounded side tells the world they’re in sole possession of the high ground, and their credibility goes flying out the window like a flock of angry ducks. There’s plenty of awareness that our presidential candidates are lying all the time, but there’s no popular awareness that both sides are equally guilty! There are no consequences, political or otherwise, for lying! The other side is doing it, the campaigns say, so why shouldn’t we?

I find this disgusting. I cannot believe that American politics, as an entity, has sunk to this catcalling, mud-slinging, lie-peddling level. And what makes it even more frustrating is that we, the people, are letting them do it. There is no true accountability for either side because we’re apparently just fine with this flood of uncontrolled chicanery all around us.

There’s only one way to make them stop, and it’s the oldest one in the book. Just… say… no. When you’re asked to donate money, tell them you don’t want to support a candidate who plays fast and loose with the truth. When you’re asked to volunteer, tell them the same. When they send out fundraising emails, when your friends try to convince you that one of these guys isn’t as horribly bad at telling the truth as the other, just say no. Maybe if enough people tell Obama and Romney that this is unacceptable and has to stop, they’ll start to change their behavior. Tell them you want to see an honest man in the White House, and maybe—just maybe—we’ll get one.

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When Dreams and Life Collide

You know that feeling you get when you wake up from a dream in which you've suffered some terrible physical disfigurement--lost an arm, a chunk of your face, whatever--and you go about your day as usual, scarcely remembering the dream, but then you happen to look into a mirror or something and you are just stunned by the appearance of your normal, healthy face... and it all comes rushing back that it was just a dream, and there's this brief moment where the line between reality and dream gets all blurry as two incongruent life-pictures crash against one another, and then suddenly it's over and you're back to normal like it never happened? There ought to be a word for that moment. It's like déjà vu, but not quite; it doesn't feel like a memory of the present, but like you've just experienced a different timeline colliding with your own and then merging into one reality that you experience. 

I have no idea if this is a thing that other people do, or if it's just me being mildly deranged, so let me try to describe what I'm talking about in more concrete terms.

A couple of months ago, I dreamt that my right arm had been cut off. I was there when it happened. I felt my arm being tied up and held by somebody else, I watched the serrated knife begin to saw at my arm, I saw the glistening red muscle split neatly in two, and I saw the arm, holding on with just a little bit of meat remaining, straight out from the shoulder like a block of wood. It was just above the elbow.

It was one of the most realistic dreams I have ever had, and that’s probably why it stuck with me. It was vivid. I remember there was some reason why the arm had to be amputated, something valid that I agreed with—it had been smashed in a press, or was diseased, or something. But all the same I struggled as the knife went saw, saw, saw back and forth. I saw it from inside my body and from at a distance, a few feet away like a hovering magpie, watching the knife slice away.

Part of it, the greater part, was the details--it felt so accurate, so real! I remember walking around after the crude surgery—there was no blood fountaining out—and being aware of my balance changing because my left side was now heavier than my right. I remember the need to learn to write left-handed. I even recall touches on the face, where my Penfield neural map rearranged itself, corresponding to changes in my phantom arm. It was so viscerally compelling that when I woke up, I was genuinely surprised and disturbed to see my arm still usable and attached to my body. That's what made me think of it like two realities or timelines colliding. There was this moment of dissonance that we don't have a word for, that feeling of two fundamentally opposite realities--I have an arm, I don't have an arm--smashing together and being forced to reconcile themselves.

This dream I'm speaking of was a couple of months ago. I never got around to posting this, although I wrote it down right afterwards, and probably wouldn't have except that a similar thing happened last night. Somehow, in that dream, a chunk of my nose had been ripped or torn off (no pain or blood). When I padded to the bathroom in the morning and saw myself in the mirror over the sink, for a few seconds I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I looked completely normal--unshaven, mussed hair, rings under the eyes and all--but in that picture of normality there was something profoundly wrong. It wasn't that I had been injured, but that I possessed the dream-memory of the injury but no corresponding physical damage. Those two realities were pushing against one another, fighting until the conflict resolved itself.

Has anybody else had this experience? Do you know the feeling I'm trying to describe here? It's not limited to matters of the body, at least not for me; I've had this feeling in conversations, when I reference something that I did with a friend before realizing that it never happened. I've had it walking through my house, where I see that an object has moved or hasn't moved from where I think it was, and it takes awhile before I recognize that one of my memories of that object was actually a dream in disguise. Have you ever realized that something you thought was a memory, something you may not have even consciously classified as a memory, but that just unconsciously entered your picture of the world around you, actually originated in a dream and had no basis in this world? This is a serious question. If it's just me, I'd like to know it.

The End of Society (Every Thirty Years)

I feel like every generation sees all the horrible things that people can do and thinks "This is it, society is crumbling. The crises that we're facing now are the Great Crises Of Our Time." Every presidential election is held in momentous, earth-shattering circumstances; every decision he makes has huge ramifications for the future of our country, because God forbid we screw up once in awhile. Everything anybody in power does is a massive disaster about to happen. A recession, a catastrophe, a job-killer, whatever. You know the lingo.
You know how long the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket" has been around? Like 'Our country is going to hell in a handbasket'? According to phrases.co.uk, it's at least since 1865. "Going to the dogs," 1775. "Going to pot," 1682. Going to "wrack and ruin", 1548. Every generation looks at its crises and thinks they're as bad as anything anybody's ever faced, and they look at this country and see everything good that they've helped to build being supplanted by new, frightening, morally questionable bullshit that the next generation is bringing in. Remember when black men marrying white women was terrifying? Remember when the moral fiber of our country was at stake when school prayer was banned?
But everybody's new and scary is the next generation's normal... and here's the critical thing to understand: it's not a moral failing when the shocking or weird becomes commonplace. Old ways aren't better than new ways just because they're old. And yeah, people game the system and do stupid shit or get addicted to drugs or commit terrible crimes, but there will always be idiots and assholes and criminals and killers. It's part of life in a modern, pluralistic, Western society, where you're free to be stupid and perverted and wrong... and where people are also free to be beautiful and creative and happy and sad and gloriously alive.
If you look only at the bad parts of modern society, as so many people love to do--and which is easy to do because the news, by nature, focuses on the tragedies and political battles and so-called culture wars instead of presenting a truly comprehensive picture of the society that we grew up in and are helping to remake every single day--you miss all the incredible good things that are happening out there. A horrible, unexpected shooting like what happened in Oak Creek earlier today isn't any less tragic because ten thousand people come together in its aftermath, but it brings out our society's strengths as well as its weaknesses. There's so much love and compassion and courage out there that's harder to see because it rarely makes the nine o'clock news. Don't worry about society. We'll keep on trucking like we always have.

For the tl;dr crowd: We're gonna be fine.

Note to Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): The Stuxnet Worm Was Not A Secret

Look, I'm not a reporter and I don't have a security clearance. All I do is read the newspaper and think about what I'm seeing. But even I can tell you--and could have told you, back in June 2010 when the first reports about the Stuxnet computer virus in Iran came out--that the U.S. had its finger in that particular pie. Either the worm was an American creation, or it was produced and distributed by the Israelis with U.S. help. You don't need to be a software expert to figure that out.

Time out for storytime. Around 22 months ago, when I was working on my research project on the state of American nuclear power, I ran across a few news stories about funny things happening to Iran's nuclear power project. They were more funny-weird than funny-haha, mostly because people were dying in unexplained ways; Iranian nuclear scientists were being killed by bombs, and something called the Stuxnet worm was wrecking Iranian nuclear centrifuges by making them spin out of control. Nobody knew who was doing it or why, but when they were asked about these operations, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials acted suspiciously like the cat that ate the canary.

Fast-forward to June 1st, 2012, when a New York Times story outed the U.S. government as the producers of Stuxnet. Along with several other "security leaks" from around that time, this created a black eye for the Obama administration and spurred Congress into ponderous action. The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), has approved a (problematic) bill that's supposed to halt leaks like the origins of the worm. Why is this important? Because "National Security", capital N, capital S. Disclosing information like the origins of the worm hurts us, because... I don't know, because then everyone knows we did it.

Except that everyone who was paying attention, and probably everyone in the relevant intelligence agencies inside Iran and out, probably already knew about the worm. Even an uninformed layabout like myself knew. When I read those first stories, I thought "Hm. A concerted and sophisticated attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and scientists, with the apparent aim of halting or disabling their nuclear program, without an attack by conventional weapons. Who in the world could possibly have a motive to do such a thing? Oh, right, duh." Other than the U.S. and Israel, who else really has that much of a beef with Iran, an overpowering fear of an Iranian nuke, and the cyberweapons community to pull off a worm like Stuxnet? The U.S.'s involvement was an open secret from the day the worm hit the news.

And let's not forget, at least on a macropolitical level, Iran loathes the U.S. We've dropped economic sanctions on them, accused them of a hundred kinds of malfeasance, overthrew their government back in the '50s (giving them a brutal dictatorship instead for the next 25-ish years) and routinely conduct military exercises off their shores. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Israel and "the West" of being behind the assassinations. Given that the U.S. policy towards Iran since approximately forever has been trying to keep them from developing nuclear weapons, what are the odds that Iran did not suspect or conclude that the U.S. or Israel was behind the attack?

So what's the harm in this particular leak? The Iranians most likely knew, or at least suspected. There's no external mechanism to punish the U.S. for releasing the worm, and it primarily affected a country that the U.S. has no love for anyway, so the harm in the international community would likely be minimized. And as early as September 2010, outside, non-governmental speculation was moving towards the U.S. By the time the leak actually happened, it just confirmed what everyone else was thinking, especially since the bulk of the infected computers were in Iran. I don't think this particular leak deserves to be plugged on national security grounds, because revealing it is not a threat to U.S. national security. We are not any less safe because we now officially know where the Stuxnet virus came from; arguably, we're more safe because we know it was us! The only threat posed by the Stuxnet leak is to domestic politicians' images, and that--I think--is not worth flipping out about.

Bowser's Various Plans Are an Ongoing Economic Disaster For Him

Bowser’s stated goal, according to Wikipedia, is to “marry Princess Peach, defeat Mario, and conquer the Mushroom Kingdom”. Not having played the Mario games very much (read: at all) and being unfamiliar with the Mushroom Kingdom’s economy, it seems to me that Bowser’s pursuit is financially quite unprofitable. By kidnapping Princess Peach, Bowser then has to deal with the inevitable journey of Mario and Luigi and whoever else through his lands, which seems like it would be a huge financial drain on him.

What, you think upkeep for a lava castle is cheap?

-It’s not made clear, and probably differs depending on the game, whether the resources Mario and Luigi find throughout their various quests—mushrooms, coins, fire flowers, POW blocks, etc.--are part of Bowser’s arsenal or simply indigenous to the Mushroom Kingdom. If it’s the former, he’s losing a colossal amount of money as Mario goes through his power-ups; if the latter, he’s still losing money because they’re gathering and consuming these valuable goods within his territory that he can no longer harvest.

-Bowser has to employ whole armies of Koopas and other enemies to try and stop or slow down Mario and Luigi. That means regular pay, hazard pay, compensation for injuries suffered on the job, medical care for the disabled and death benefits to the families of fallen soldiers. Bowser could be simply intimidating the Koopas into helping him, or else relying on clan loyalty, but Koopas have to eat like everything else. And after the first few games where Bowser is defeated, you’d have to think his intimidation factor among the rank and file would go down. It’s a whole lot easier to ask for medical benefits when your employer isn’t an invincible tyrant, but a vincible one, and some asshole has been bouncing on your head and throwing your shell at people all day. And somebody has to water those damn carnivorous flowers.

-Property damage and loss. Bowser doesn’t own all the territory Mario travels through, but he tends to own quite a bit of it. That means a considerable amount of time and money spent constructing spiked passageways, digging lava pits and installing huge swinging blades to screw with Mario and friends. And every time Mario clears out one of Bowser’s castles, he raises a different flag over it (at least in the game I just played part of). Bowser is basically a warlord who is usurping parts of the Mushroom Kingdom, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the raising of a different flag meant that it was reverting to government control, or at least remaining in Mario’s hands. Either way, Bowser loses that castle—and because his armies are eventually decimated by Mario and he himself defeated, he probably doesn’t have the strength to retake them by the end of the game. That’s a big deal.

-Finally, the loss of prestige is important. Sure, Bowser is big and scary in all the games, but after the first few he’s a known quantity. Mario and Luigi know him, they’ve worked with him and they’ve beaten him. He’s not a tremendous threat. This relates to the “intimidation factor” thing up above: by being beaten, he loses prestige and reputation amongst the rest of the Kingdom. And that means that he is less able to demand concessions or tribute from the central government. Why would they give anything to him if they know he can be trounced by a couple of unemployed plumbers, even if he has kidnapped Princess Peach? After the first few times, she’s probably gotten used to it by now. And there’s always the pain and suffering that Bowser endures in the process of repeatedly getting his ass kicked, including getting all of his flesh burned off and turning into a skeleton.

"AAARGH! Oh, but it's OK, I'm going to marry Princess Peach and--oh, God, how are my bones staying together."

It's hard to think of what rewards the Mushroom Kingdom would offer that could be tempting enough to go through all this crap, game after game after game. At some point in the last few decades, Bowser's total expenditures probably overtopped the predicted economic productivity of the entire Mushroom Kingdom if he was able to capture and hold it. When it gets to that point, buddy, you should probably just give up.

Parade of Nations: The Twelve Who Were Never Colonized (Ish)

When I was watching the Parade of Nations last night, it occurred to me that around 1/4 of the 206 nations represented in the Parade were once British colonies. (For the record, I did think of this before that picture of Queen Elizabeth went viral.)

That made me wonder, how many of these countries were able to escape colonization entirely? How many of them were never under the sovereign rule of any European power?

So I did a lot of research. The rules are these:
-The country is not on the continent of Europe.
-The country was never ruled by an European country, including Russia and Turkey, from 1400 to the present day (although I'll mess with this rule if I so choose).
-Some of this stuff is subjective. I'm subjecting.
-The country is currently a sovereign, independent state.
-All research comes from Wikipedia; if I write down any historical fact, assume it's from the relevant Wikipedia article. 

The undisputed winners: Liberia, Japan, Thailand, Bhutan and Iran. The area that became Liberia had British, Dutch and Portuguese trading posts, but after the U.S. started sending free blacks and former slaves to Liberia in 1820, the area was never snapped up by any European power. It officially became a country in 1847. Meanwhile, Japan, Thailand and Iran were powerful enough/had strong rulers/didn't enter into "sucker" treaties/and/or played Western powers off against each other to such a degree that they've been able to maintain independence all the way to the present day. Bhutan fought a war or two against the British, lost some territory and political influence, but kept itself autonomous throughout the colonial period.


The rather disputed winners: Nepal, Tonga, China and Ethiopia. Tonga was apparently under the British aegis as a "protected state", had a British consul for seventy years and was part of the "British Western Pacific Territories" for fifty, but it was able to maintain its own indigenous monarchy all the way up to the present day; in other words, it never gave up its right to self-government. Nepal was never a British colony, and in fact fought a war to ensure autonomy from the British Empire; however, they had to cede a third of their country to do it, which is why they're in the "dubious" category.
 Ethiopia was one of only two countries (along with Liberia) to survive the Scramble for Africa more or less intact, but finally fell to Italy in 1936 when Mussolini decided to create his 'New Roman Empire'. The British ejected the Italians in 1941, and the country regained full independence again in 1944. (Eight years isn't so bad; consider the Philippines, for example, who were under Spanish, American and Japanese rule from 1571-1945.) Finally, China was technically never a colony (except for Hong Kong and Macao), but got screwed in so many other different ways by various Western powers (plus the U.S.) that it's hard to label them as a perennially free country with a straight face.

The (maybe) ineligibles: North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia. Back in the day when Korea was one country, it apparently did a decent job resisting the West, but a lousy job resisting Japan, which ruled them for 35 years. Meanwhile, Mongolia was essentially ruled by China throughout the colonial era, and like Korea, was geographically remote from other Western territories or centers of power. Both the Koreas and Mongolia were able to escape rule by the West, but only because they were totally (Mongolia) or partially (Korea) ruled by other powers during that time. I'm not sure if they should get credit for resisting imperialism, given that.

Commentary on Mitt Romney’s Speech to the VFW (7/24/2012)

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/07/24/transcript-mitt-romneys-remarks-at-vfw-national-convention/

The first thing that jumps out at me is Romney’s attempt to pin the looming defense cuts to the Pentagon, a process known as sequestration, on President Obama. He referred to “President Obama’s massive defense cuts”, “the President’s radical cuts in the military” and says that “the President has chosen this moment for wholesale reductions in the nation’s military capacity.” I think it’s pretty clear that all three statements are attempting to pin the cuts, and the blame, on Obama.

The problem is, they’re not Obama’s cuts—or at the very least, responsibility falls on both houses of Congress as well as the President. The cuts are a result of Congress’s failure to produce a bill that would cut $1.2 trillion from the federal budget, and will (or may) be enacted as a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011. They are not a uniquely Obama policy, nor does he (or anyone else, really) actually want them to be enacted. Their inclusion was as an incentive to get other cuts passed, not as anything that was actually supposed to pass. Romney’s presentation of them as belonging solely to Obama is, at best, misleading.

Romney also lambasted Obama for pulling missile interceptors and a radar system out of Poland and the Czech Republic respectively, calling it the “sudden abandonment of friends” in both countries. And while the policy change was reportedly sudden to both countries, it was also welcome in both; Der Spiegel reported that a majority of Poles opposed the shield, while the Reno Gazette-Journal (Romney’s speech was in Reno) noted that the radar system was unpopular in the Czech Republic and was unlikely to get the Czech parliament’s approval for placement. (In fairness, Lech Walesa lambasted the U.S. for giving up on the program.) And while Romney portrays the dropping of the shield as a concession to the Russian government, the justification for the system’s construction was not to defend against Russia—ten interceptors in Poland wouldn’t do much good against the Russian arsenal—but to block missiles from Iran. It’s entirely possible that the change was in part to placate the Russians, who hated the idea of the program—although the administration never painted it as such—but a 2009 defense review of the program noted that the Iranians were concentrating on different types of missiles than the ones the shield was supposed to block. That was the reason given for the "policy reset".

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee mentioned Hugo Chavez as “inviting Hezbollah into our hemisphere”, but there’s little evidence that Hezbollah has any activity in the Americas beyond some fundraising. And while the administration’s failure to speak out publicly in favor of the Green Revolutionaries in Iran seems to me like a legitimate black mark, as the National Catholic Reporter points out, it’s entirely possible that an American endorsement of the protesters could’ve done more harm than good—living as they do in a country that rallies around its hatred of America. This one is totally up for debate, though.

Later, Romney tells his audience that “at the United Nations… [Obama] spoke as if our closest ally in the Middle East was the problem [there]”. Here are the relevant speeches, since Romney doesn’t specify which (2009, 2011). While both include criticism of Israeli policies, both also acknowledge the ever-present dangers that Israel faces, both foreign and domestic. In my opinion, it would be very difficult to call a line from either speech part of the “chorus of accusations, threats and insults” that they supposedly contribute to. (Don't take my word for it though--read them yourselves!)

While the problems with China are real—it does “permit… flagrant patent and copyright violations, forestall… American businesses from competing in its market and manipulate… its currency”—Romney doesn’t offer a solution, saying only that “the cheating must finally be brought to a stop. President Obama hasn’t done it and won’t do it. I will.” Short of a wholesale trade war, which would be disastrous for both countries, I’m not sure if there’s really much that either Obama or Romney could do to manipulate China or change Chinese policies without offering major concessions in return. They are, after all, China.

Similar criticisms apply with the Iranian paragraph. Romney calls for “sanctions [to] be enforced without exception,” “negotiations [that] must secure full and unhindered access for inspections” and “a clear line” to be drawn against “any enrichment, period”. All of those things are current U.S. policy, though, and have been since the Bush administration. As with China, it’s not exactly possible to enforce domestic policy decisions on a foreign country; the US has tried sanctions, but they haven’t really worked. And Romney doesn’t mention the clandestine US program that has been working in-country to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program for years, including the Stuxnet virus and the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists (although that was probably Israel). I’d say we’re doing plenty in Iran, quite possibly more than we should be.

Finally, Romney denounces the leaks of classified information that have happened over the past few months (like Iran, as I just mentioned) but he does so mostly on the assumption that the leakers were “seeking political advantage for the administration”. Not only has that yet to be determined, but Romney also says that the leaks demand a “full and prompt investigation by a special counsel”. There are two special prosecutors investigating them at the moment. Romney does have a point that all US district attorneys are Presidential appointees, so it makes sense an independent agency should be investigating the leaks, but it remains to be seen how harsh the attorneys’ report will end up being. And the implication that the prosecutors cannot be trusted because they're Obama appointees leads back, inevitably, to the idea that the leaks were orchestrated by the White House for political gain--which has yet to be proven or disproven. Give it time.

Now, I know this is campaign rhetoric. Only a fool would expect either side to adhere strictly to the facts, devoid of spin, glaring omissions or unfounded attacks—and that goes for Democratic candidates as well as Republican ones. But despite the historical Republican lead on matters of defense and national security, President Obama has a fairly strong foreign-policy record, which is reflected in the polls http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78910_Page2.html. If Romney wants to supplant the President’s current lead on matters of foreign policy, he’ll have to do better than the Reno speech. The problem is that the best critiques of Obama’s foreign policy are currently coming from defense doves, which is precisely the opposite of what Romney is painting himself as. Attacking Obama’s national security policies from the hawk side won’t be an easy road for the former Governor.