Last round! Drink up!

Making the World Safe for Theocracy

George W. Bush is looking for a boost from this week’s Iraqi elections. But the voting is not likely to resolve one of the key flaws in the U.S. strategy — that once the majority Shiites and their Kurdish allies gained control of the government and the nation’s oil riches, they were likely to share with the rival Sunni minority. The big winners from Bush’s invasion are still likely to be Iran’s Shiite theocracy, which has close ties to Iraq’s Shiite political leaders. December 14, 2005 … Robert Parry for Consortium News


Chalabi’s Daughter Gets a Blog at Slate Magazine

[T]he pundit class has a new and well-connected member: Tamara Chalabi, the daughter of Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Ahmad Chalabi.
 


Ms. Chalabi, fresh off a Harvard Ph.D. in history, has a book due out next month, The Shi’is of Jabal ‘Amil and the New Lebanon, from Palgrave Macmillan. On Dec. 12, Slate began publishing a daily diary of her reports on her father’s campaign for prime minister.
 


Besides her family ties, Ms. Chalabi has some powerful help on the launching pad. Washington über-hostess Juleanna Glover Weiss, a registered lobbyist at the Ashcroft Group and a former spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney, has set out to introduce Ms. Chalabi to editors. … Read all at The Observer‘s Off the Record


Hate torture? Consider boot camp

Yup. Comparing boot camp to torture is Max Boot’s contribution to the debate on the use of torture. Need more be said?


Kevin Drum suggests we inaugurate a new award: The “Max Boot Memorial Cretinism Award.”


John Bolton Actively Sabotaging Condoleezza Rice: Finally Shows Real Stripes

Writes Steve Clemons:

[T]rue to form, just as he woke up each morning for the first four years of the Bush administration asking what he could do to make Colin Powell’s life miserable and, at the same time, doing Vice President Cheney’s bidding, John Bolton has now target Condoleezza Rice’s efforts to get America back on a more balanced foreign policy track with the rest of the world.


The American Prospect‘s Mark Leon Goldberg writes the first serious assessment of John Bolton’s tenure thus far as the recess-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. [Web version.]


The headlines for the piece titled “The Arsonist” run:

In his first six months at the UN, John Bolton has offended allies, blocked crucial negotiations, undermined the Secretary of State — and harmed U.S. interests.

We expected bad; we didn’t expect this bad. [….]


. .the tension between Rice and Bolton has grown dramatically in several areas, most notably with regard to Syria: The Prospect has learned that Bolton was the source of an October leak to the British press that submarined sensitive negotiations Rice was overseeing with that country.


Indeed, it was Rice, not Bolton, who achieved the one significant success of Bolton’s first 100 days at the United Nations: a unanimous October 30 Security Council vote requiring Syria to fully cooperate with a UN investigation into the suspected Syria-sponsored assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. … (Do read all.)


(Susan’s Note: This jives with what I heard Richard Holbrooke tell Charlie Rose a couple weeks ago. Holbrooke has been impressed with Rice’s ability to get things going, in contrast to Powell’s stalemated term.)


Robert Fisk on The Murder of Gibran Tueni

It’s pretty much conviction in Lebanon of Syrian government involvement — although I wouldn’t say Syrian government — Syrian intelligence involvement. Gibran Tueni was the son of one of the great statesmen of Lebanon who is still alive. Indeed, I saw him this morning walking, a broken figure, through the crowds at the funeral. Ghassan Tueni, a former Lebanese ambassador at the United Nations, owner of the An Nahar newspaper, which his son edited, who indeed won the Legion d’Honneur in Paris only five, six days ago. His son was present in Paris for that award to his father. … Read all of Juan Gonzalez’s interview of Fisk today on Democracy Now!.


Media Girl Does Some Deep Thinking That Resonates …

Continued below, and it’s a must-read …

First, Media Girl reviews Chris Bowers’ latest report in which he notes:

… I stumbled across some rather disturbing data that indicates the progressive blogosphere is making few, if any, real waves when it comes to influencing the content of the MSM. […]


To put this as bluntly as I can, progressives will not be able to break the conservative governing majority over the long term, no matter how narrow it may be, unless we can turn around the rapidly deteriorating media climate in this country. … it will be absolutely essential for the new progressive pundit class, which is to be found primarily in radio and the blogosphere, to be funded and cross-promoted.


In her reply that takes on Chris’s observations, Media Girl notes that, beyond think tanks and funding, “[i]t takes work to pay attention.”

Here’s something I’ve noted in my own stats: Links from the biggest sites above, with the exception of Atrios, seem to generate precious little traffic. Sites like Daily Kos are so insular, even a FP mention will generate only a few curiosity hits, while a casual oh-by-the-way link in a modestly trafficked site could generate hundreds of hits. … Having the biggest blog on the internet is great for the vaguely Democratic/progressive/liberal causes, but it’s not enough. The internet rewards internetworking, not just isolated size.)


This is not a new criticism: The big sites tend not to link to the smaller sites. The “Top 100” pay attention to each other, but the real strength of the progressive blogosphere is in the thousands upon thousands of very sharp smaller blogs out there. (Where would many sites be without Peter Daou constantly linking out to mid-sized sites?)


The internet rewards communities across websites. The internet rewards conversations between websites. The internet rewards relevance, which is measured by in-content links from other sites of relevance.


[B]logrolls are mostly ignored by the search engines now — certainly deprecated. The relevance comes from in-content linking. And there’s precious little of that from the big blogs because everybody’s looking one way, and the big bloggers don’t see the smaller sites behind them.


With all the heated debates on the left-of-right perspectives of the major issues, it would seem that there’s plenty of opportunity to link out — to post a dissenting opionion, for example. But unfortunately there seems to be a mindset on the part of many big bloggers that dissenting opinions should be ignored rather than engaged, preferring to do their part to help a website drift off “in obscurity.” If we cannot embrace the dissent within our vaguely-defined “ranks”, then how can we expect more progressive influence? If we’re so busy ignoring each other, then how can we expect others to pay attention?


Now there’s some food for thought. I strongly encourage that we all read Media Girl’s December 13 essay, titled “If ‘we’ ignore each other, can we expect others to pay attention?”


As she says, “The real question, perhaps, is not whether they should be paid by a thinktank, but rather why so many excellent voices languish in obscurity, ignored not just by Google News and the MSM but by their peers.”


What say you?


P.S. I couldn’t find the permanent link for Media Girl’s story, so linked to the home page. Hope you’ll find it easily.