![]("/~clehmann/albums/Mexico/IMG_0153.thumb.jpg"/)
Back in the summer of 2003, Kat and I took a trip to Mexico. I tried to be all artsy with a lot of the photos I took. Here they are, enjoy.
A View From the Schoolhouse
Back in the summer of 2003, Kat and I took a trip to Mexico. I tried to be all artsy with a lot of the photos I took. Here they are, enjoy.
(From Kos.)
Grant Wahl, writing for Sports Illustrated, reports that the Iraqi soccer players do not want Bush to use them in his campaign. This comes as the Bush campaign has released a new ad claiming that, because of his foreign policies, there are two more democracies in the world. (Watch the ad.)
First, anyone who thinks that Iraq and Afghanistan are stable democracies at this point just isn’t paying attention. The success of both are very much in doubt — and it’s still an open question of whether or not these governments will be democracies.
Secondly, as I wrote on Tuesday, this is the second time this week that Bush / Cheney has been asked to stop invoking someone’s name as they campaign. The campaign better stick to invoking Reagan’s legacy — at least his family is split as to whether or not it’s o.k.
Finally — what were they thinking on this one? Does this administration really think that the Iraqi people see them as liberators still? After the torture? After the continued fighting? After more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed? What gall. But the athletes said it better than I can:
From Salih Sadir:
Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise himself.
and
We don’t wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away.
From Ahmed Manajid:
How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes.
From coach Adnan Hamad:
My problems are not with the American people. They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?
Think anyone in the administration was listening? Here was their response in the article:
"The ad simply talks about President Bush’s optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror," said Scott Stanzel, a spokesperson for Bush’s campaign. "Twenty-five million people in Iraq are free as a result of the actions of the coalition."
Guess they weren’t listening.
Thank you. Matthew Yglesias:
Intelligence matters. The job of the president of the United States is not to love his wife; its to manage a wide range of complicated issues. That requires character, yes, but not the kind of character measured by private virtues like fidelity to spouse and frequency of quotations from Scripture. Yet it also requires intelligence. It requires intellectual curiosity, an ability to familiarize oneself with a broad range of views, the capacity — yes — to grasp nuances, to foresee the potential ramifications of ones decisions, and, simply, to think things through. Four years ago, these were not considered necessary pieces of presidential equipment. Today, they have to be.
How did the GOP ever convince us otherwise? Don’t we want our President to be one of the smartest people in the room at any given moment? This issue drove me out of my mind in 2000. When, after the debates, the papers said that Bush won because he didn’t make a complete fool of himself, I wanted to bay at the moon. Gore acted "elitist" because he couldn’t believe he was having to share a stage with someone whose answers were as simplistic — or wrong — as Bush’s were.
Does his pronounciation of "Abu Gharib" embarrass us world-wide? Yes… not because we’re poking fun, but because our President doesn’t know the name of the prison where his soldiers are being accused of the kind of torture we associate with repressive dictatorships. Is the fact that Bush clearly didn’t know what "sovereign" meant in reference to Native American tribes a national embarrassment? Yes, not because Bush clearly can’t think on his feet, but because he clearly has no understanding whatsoever of the American government’s relation with Native American tribes.
Intelligence matters — my hope for American politics for the rest of my life is that we never see another candidate have to apologize for his intelligence.
Months ago, I caught Howard Dean on Air America, and Randi Rhodes asked him if he thought Bush was dumb. He, politically, said no, but he said the President was "intellictually incurious." He just doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t read the papers, he doesn’t read detailed briefing reports. He just doesn’t want to know.
As a teacher, I question the message he is sending to students all across America about the need for intellectual curiosity. Fortunately, his presidency has been such an abject failure, I think the kids are learning the right lessons all by themselves.