Office of the Independent Blogger

This is not a particularly important news story — at least not in the way that a story about a sudden, violent event such as the invasion of Georgia is — but it is significant for what it tells us about Chinese attitudes toward beauty, talent and the female gender.

In a last-minute move demanded by one of China’s highest officials, two girls were put together for the opening ceremony Friday, with one lip-synching over the other’s singing. The real singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn’t good-looking enough for the ceremony, its chief music director told state-owned Beijing Radio. So the pigtailed Lin Miaoke mouthed the words.

In a brief phone interview with AP Television News on Tuesday, the music director, Chen Qigang, said he spoke about the switch with Beijing Radio “to come out with the truth.”

“The little girl is a magnificent singer,” Chen said. “She doesn’t deserve to be hidden.”

Don’t you ever let anyone tell you that self-esteem and body-image issues are products of American society and culture.

All the turmoil in Georgia and China — quick walkthrough: here is a history lesson on the roots of the Georgian-Russian conflict; here is John McCain’s declaration that Russia faces “severe fallout” over this invasion; and here is the latest news out of Georgia: the Russians have opened a second, bloody front; on the other hand, there have been terrorist attacks all over China during these Olympic games, which you can read about here and here, for instance — has taken away media attention from the potentially cataclysmic situation in Pakistan.

Pervez Musharraf faces impeachment and is once again under attack from al-Qaeda. He has been accused of pocketing millions of dollars in US aid that was supposed to go to the good cause of killing terrorists, which he denies, and he refuses to resign. Musharraf has been able to survive numerous crisis before but it does not appear as if he has any outs left in this ballgame. This is unfortunate for the world not because Musharraf is a particularly helpful ally but because he is serviceable as a “moderate” of sorts in Pakistan. Heaven help the West if he falls and al-Qaeda sympathizers take over, which is a painfully real possibility as that country is full of them and it has nuclear weapons. There are very “few” leadership alternatives that would be good for us and by extension the rest of the World, and that’s terrifying to me.

This is a fascinating article about John Edwards’ mistress, who is a great, eccentric character. This article defends the National Enquirer from Edwards’ charges that it is “trash.” And this is an article about the “theater of the absurd” going on at the Beijing Olympics. Forgive me the short post but I’ve been dancing all day and night at the Italian Festival here in Chicago. I will return soon!

From the region of South Ossetia:

Russia and Georgia were effectively at war last night with fierce fighting near the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia and hundreds of civilians reported dead.

A column of 150 Russian tanks and other military vehicles entered South Ossetia yesterday after Georgian troops launched a major offensive to retake control of the area from Ossetian rebels late on Thursday night. The Georgian government said 30 people were killed in bombing raids by Russian jets, which it said had attacked the capital, Tbilisi, the Black Sea port of Poti and a military base at Senaki in addition to targets within South Ossetia, still formally part of Georgia.

The Russian intervention, which Moscow said was to protect its peacekeeping forces stationed there, came as a minister in the separatist administration of South Ossetia claimed more than 1,400 people had died in shelling of the Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, by Georgian troops. The Russian military said 12 of its troops had been killed and 150 wounded in the fighting inside South Ossetia. “Now our peacekeepers are waging a fierce battle with regular forces from the Georgian army in the southern region of [Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali,” said a spokesman for the Russian force.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s President, claimed his troops had regained full control of the rebel capital and most of South Ossetia, while insisting that the Russians were to blame for the fighting and appealing for international help. “What Russia is doing in Georgia is open, unhidden aggression and a challenge to the whole world,” he said. “If the whole world does not stop Russia today, then Russian tanks will be able to reach any other European capital.”

Barack Obama and John McCain have each called on the two nations to stop fighting, and so has the international community. I just wonder how long it’ll be in the course of human events before the Russian state can learn to behave itself and live in peace. That day is clearly not here yet, and who knows if it will come in my lifetime.

The Iraqi government claims that it is close to a deal with the United States on a troop-withdrawal timetable. More here:

Iraq and the U.S. are near an agreement on all American combat troops leaving Iraq by October 2010, with the last soldiers out three years after that, two Iraqi officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. officials, however, insisted no dates had been agreed. The proposed agreement calls for Americans to hand over parts of Baghdad’s Green Zone — where the U.S. Embassy is located — to the Iraqis by the end of 2008. It would also remove U.S. forces from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, according to the two senior officials, both close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and familiar with the negotiations.

If this goes through, it will essentially remove the war in Iraq as a major issue for discussion in the campaign except for the times when John McCain says that he supported a policy (the surge) that helped us “stabilize” that country. Obama will claim that this is his idea being adopted but McCain will charge that Obama would have never put us in a position to “win” the war, which, he’ll claim, we are doing now. I can not see this being a positive development for Obama’s campaign if it goes through, although it would and will be great for this country which always comes before politics.

It has also been announced, on a different note, that Bill Clinton will be addressing the Democratic Convention on the third night right before whoever-the-Vice-Presidential-nominee is speaks. This does not make a lick of sense unless Hillary is going to be the nominee because Clinton will simply remind the crowd that Hillary is not on the ticket and that a new leader has taken over, further dividing the party and taking attention from Obama as reporters wonder whether or not the Clintons have “gotten over it.”

At least we know that it’ll be an entertaining speech, if Bill’s the man.

Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver has been convicted of one crime and exonerated of another by a military tribunal, and the Wall Street Journal has what I think is a fair and balanced account of the proceedings here:

[F]or all the press corps innuendo about jurors “handpicked by the Pentagon,” these supposed rubber-stamps exonerated an al Qaeda terrorist of some of the charges against him.

Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver, was charged with two war crimes — conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. He was convicted of the latter by a panel of six senior military officers, and now could receive as much as a life sentence. Hamdan was a footsoldier, though by his own admission he provided security and logistics support to al Qaeda. He was privy to the workings of bin Laden’s terror network, and was not the mere civilian his lawyers depicted.

The conspiracy charge was arguably the more serious. If anything, though, its rejection proves the fairness of the military commissions process, which will stand as the most due-process-minded war tribunal in history. The judge presiding over Hamdan’s trial, Keith Allred, did not instruct the jury that the international laws of war applied to killing military soldiers in combat, only to civilians. This is a distinction without a difference: Hamdan had already violated those laws by fighting out of uniform and joining a terrorist organization.

Still, Hamdan received a fair trial, with a team of defense counsel at his elbow. Small differences (on the rules on secrecy and evidence) from regular courts martial were in place to avoid compromising intelligence. Part of the prosecution’s case was even excluded by Judge Allred because of rough treatment while Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. He also has the right to appeal up to the Supreme Court.

Good news.

Alright, I am back to blogging on a full-time basis. I turned nineteen this weekend and am ready to return to my old daily routine, as I have re-adjusted to life in my Chicago apartment after a summer of travel and entertainment. The first story I’ll be commenting on is this one about the White House forging a letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. It is not getting much coverage in the mainstream press at this point but it is written by one of journalism’s best, Ron Suskind, and has added credibility because it cites a conversation between George Tenet and director of clandestine operations Rob Richer where Tenet says “Listen Marine, you’re not going to like this, but here goes” and then informs him of the White House request. I do not know whether or not this is true, although I am inclined to believe it, but I want to write about people’s partisan doubts.

Through the Clinton years, the President and his faithful criticized the press for their constant digging into his affairs, professional and personal, and George W. Bush is similarly critical of modern journalists. There are numerous Bush partisans responding to this article by arguing that it can’t be true because it’s taken so long to come out, or wondering why it is coming out at this point in the Presidency, or admitting, in some way, that it is true but doubting whether or not it should be taken seriously because the press have been “digging” after Bush since he came into office. I hear these criticisms and think, “Why is that a bad thing?”

The media’s job is to dig and dig and dig at all hours of the day to serve as a fourth pillar of government, the “corrective” branch. Politicians often complain about the press, and so do their partisans, but there is nothing more necessary in our society than a perpetual police force in the press. I’ll feel that way when I serve in politics, too.

We were in a car accident last night. There were no serious injuries, but there could have been. A lane was blocked off on our way into Seattle and a trucker boxed us into the soon-to-be-gone lane, so we couldn’t get behind him and merge. Our passenger-side mirror was knocked off by a barrel, and we shook a little bit but managed to get into the safe lane. We were silent for a moment when Dan asked if I was okay. I said, “I’ve actually just been holding in a joke. ‘Good thing we’ve got insurance!’”

Once it became clear that we were safe and would be safe, there was no point holding the humor.

The centerpiece of our trip to Eugene, Oregon was supposed to be a side-trip to Toketee Falls, but when we arrived there in the early-afternoon on the fifth we saw that it was closed as a result of snowstorms destroying the route back in January. Now, we had come a long way to see the Falls, and it was difficult to accept that we’d just wasted a couple of hours driving away from our ultimate direction to get there, so when we parked to assess the situation we decided to keep going. Or Dan did. “I didn’t come out here to turn around with nothing,” he said, and we drew up a timetable for his return, with the agreement that I would stay behind and call the proper authorities if he did not return in reasonable time and then maybe we’d do it all over again.

Fortunately, it did not have a disastrous outcome for either of us. He returned about forty minutes after he left me and said, “I would not recommend what I just did to anyone. But it was beautiful. You know all those things we saw in the pictures? I was right there, and it was beautiful.” This piqued my interest, and so I asked him for more detail. He said that all of the staircases have been destroyed, and there’s a bridge out that you must now cross over a tree, in addition to numerous other impediments along the path. Then when you arrive at the falls, the observation deck is fragile and has sustained some serious damage that makes it dangerous to stand on, to say the least. It is about a hundred feet high over a cliff.

They need to fix that path soon because it is absolutely gorgeous and it’s been blocked since January, which is more than half-a-year ago and so it is unacceptable for them to take so long in fixing it. But that wasn’t the only excitement we had on the fifth. We had woken up that morning in a harbor in Crescent City, California, where we had arrived at in the middle of the night looking for a place to stay as Eureka had not had any. We’d been in Eureka the night before because that is the town that Dan was born in but has no recollection of, so he wanted to go there to get to know his roots. Like a salmon. Well, we were there to watch fireworks but there was a ridiculous amount of fog and it was almost impossible to see the actual fireworks. The clouds did change colors in a beautiful fashion, at least, and it was pleasant to walk around the town. There was a carnival… besides us, that is. Sleeping in the harbor was probably the worst thing to happen to us so far this trip, even if nothing happened to us aside from getting a lousy amount of sleep inside of a car. It’s just frustrating to not have a bed and to have it happen because you didn’t think to reserve a place somewhere on the Fourth of July. We’re much smarter than that, but I guess we were having too much fun.

Last night Dan and I were walking and talking in downtown Seattle and I said to him, “I guess that everyone traveling across such a large area as we are would have a near-death experience or two on the way, right?” He laughed and said that he didn’t think so. “I guess you’re right… how many other people would walk into the ocean fully-clothed or stand atop a compromised balcony?” It’s called “style.”

I apologize for the delay in writing. It’s been delightful on this trip, and I’ve been very, very busy. I’ll write again soon, and try to include earlier days and more recent days, too. I do want to say that the fast lane is for people “who want to go fast.” It’s not very complicated, but a couple of days ago we were going under the speed limit in the freeway on the way up to Portland because everyone else was going slow. Don’t think that all we’re doing is nearly-dying, as we are having a great deal of fun and are generally being quite safe about everything. The car “accident” was mostly a fluke, and everything else is alright.

I almost died today. Well, yesterday, but that’s just a detail. The greater point is that I am alive. Who knows what would have happened if there didn’t happen to be lifeguards at the beach in Encinitas just outside of San Diego?

This is definitely not what I expected to write about in the first entry of this travel-log. I expected to make remarks about the fun we are having with our Honda Civic hybrid rental car, or detail our trip to the Getty Museum and Santa Monica yesterday after a delightful plane ride, or describe the joy we had driving down the highway to meet a former Major League Baseball starting pitcher for an interview in San Diego but instead I find myself writing about a near-death experience. That’s life.

The story I have to tell can be summarized in one sentence, really. It is not a sentence I expected to hear at the beach, nor is it one I could have imagined through pure imagination. As I prepare to type it, I am reminded of an argument made in this article about the nature of non-fictional narratives: “Nonfiction has to be true, of course, but it doesn’t have to be believable, which may help explain why so many recent best-sellers are of the Ripley’s variety. Coincidences that no novelist could get away with happen all the time in ‘real life.’ And while characters in fiction have to be consistent, people rarely are.”

Once we had arrived at the shore, and I had stood on my own two feet for the first time in several minutes, the lifeguard looked me over and said: “Good God, man. Are you wearing pants?” I was. Slacks. And a golf shirt, with socks. Grey socks. It had to have been the strangest rescue he had ever had to make. I did not intend to go deep into the ocean at all when we pulled up to the beach, partly because I was not wearing shorts and partly because I am not an exceptional swimmer and it has been awhile since I went for a good swim in deep or deepish water, but I was floating backward in relaxed pose when I realized that I was rather far from the shore. I attempted to swim back but could not for the life of me move from where I was and in fact seemed to have been swimming backward. I looked across the water and saw a young man about thirty, forty feet away and I asked him if he would get me help, please. “You need help?” I do, I told him. “I do not think I can get out of here alone.” I was starting to tire from swimming in place, and I did not believe that I could return to shore of my own strength. (I am generally aware of my limitations and my strengths. Fighting strong currents is not a strength. And I was probably right, but I will never know as the lifeguard arrived half a minute afterward to tether me to him and bring me back to land.)

“That’s a nasty, nasty rip there, man,” he told me as he tied me. “I need you to kick for me, okay?” He set off, carrying me behind him as if I were a corpse, motionless but for the thoughts racing around inside my head about the situation I had just found myself in as I simply could not generate the strength for a good kick but thoughts are not “heavy.” I apologized for my inability to help him help me, and he took it all in as his duty. Then he noticed that I was wearing normal clothes, and told me that I should be in as near a state of total undress as legally allowed when I go swimming, if I wish to swim efficiently. I will certainly keep that in mind, and I will always remember the look on his face when his voice rose to heights it likely hasn’t reached since before he hit puberty and said “Good God, man. Are you wearing pants?”

Believe it or not, I did not know what a riptide was, but I do now. I will avoid them, and I won’t wear pants into the ocean.

I would write about my interview but I will be working on an article about it for a different publication and so I will not go into details at this time. I will write about the other things we have done since we arrived on the west coast tomorrow, in all likelihood. Right now I am rather tired and somewhat busy, so I will return to the first day tomorrow. Today’s near-death experience, coupled with a more pleasant start and finish to the day, has left me exhausted. I do recommend you look here for images from the trip. I am not a good photographer nor do I have a great camera nor am I the sort of man who likes to just snap picture after picture (I would rather be sharing word after word) but I have taken some, and I’ll share them even if they are nothing special. Tomorrow I will write you, with the blessings of a lifeguard.

You know, the Human Genome Project proves that we are all far more alike than different, with a 90+% margin of similarity, too. That’s the first thing I thought of when I read the news this evening. Barack Obama has pledged five hundred million dollars in faith-based initiatives, which I am not at all opposed to and welcome as these sorts of programs provide purpose to people who might otherwise have no hope, and I do not believe that faith-based aid, equally (or near-equally) dispersed amongst different sects, is not a violation of the First Amendment. I just wonder if “Bush-is-a-Theocrat” Democrats will be as furious with this move from Obama as they would be if Bush were the one responsible. There was a good Obama article in the Wall Street Journal today that argues that the Illinois Senator is running for Bush’s third term and it’s definitely worth looking at. If nothing else, it demonstrates that even two people completely different from one another from several perspectives have common ground and plenty of it. Of course, the scientists proved that awhile ago.

I have been a little short with this blog in the last few days, and that is a direct result of this trip I am taking through the west coast. I will be using it in the next few days to blog my travels across the West Coast as I am driving with one of my closest friends from Los Angeles to San Diego to LA again then back to San Francisco, Eureka, Eugene, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, with other stops along the way. I’ll be writing shortly about the first night out, soon, and I will occasionally drop a political note in as well. It’s just incredibly time-consuming and I am sure that I’ll be rather tired every night, from the travels.

David Addington, who is one of the Bush Administration’s legal experts and can be charitably described as a cross between Dick Cheney and Chewbacca, appeared before a subcommittee to discuss the use of interrogation techniques and “stunned” his questioners with the contempt he showed for them. Toward the end of the session, he answered a question about whether or not he had ever discussed “waterboarding” by claiming that he could not answer “because al-Qaeda might be watching.” The chic comment to make about this story is “I wonder if he would answer after a good ‘waterboarding,’” and I suppose I could succumb to being chic just this once but al-Qaeda might be reading.

A couple of nights ago I commented on the “Merry-Go-Round” pace of our negotiations with North Korea over their nuclear program. Tonight, I want to refer you to this Fred Kaplan analysis of the situation, especially these paragraphs:

Daniel Sneider, assistant director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, calls the deal “a plutonium-containment program” and adds: “That’s fine. But it’s not what it was supposed to be.” Scott Snyder, senior associate at the Asia Foundation (and author of Negotiating on the Edge, the best book about North Korea’s diplomatic strategy), agrees: “The scope of this agreement does not match what we signed up for.” He also says, “As always with North Korea, it’s disappointing and frustrating.” Still, he says, “It’s better than nothing.” Both Sneider and Snyder, it should be noted, have been strong advocates of arms control and critics of the Bush administration’s earlier approach.

Two questions arise. First, could Rice and Hill have managed a better deal? It’s hard to say. In his book, Scott Snyder writes that the North Koreans typically adopt a very hard line toward the end of a negotiating session. At that point, the other side has to be willing to stand firm and walk away. Clinton’s emissary did just that toward the end of the Agreed Framework talks, after the North Koreans announced a signing ceremony then told the puzzled American that the five remaining disputes would simply be settled in Pyongyang’s favor. (They relented when he said he was going home.) Should Hill, too, have taken his car to the airport? Would the North Koreans have backed down? Who can say?

There is one big difference between 1994 and 2008: The United States had lots of leverage back then—and it has very little now. There are two reasons for this. First, when Clinton dangled the threat of force in front of the North Koreans in ‘94, they might have believed he’d really use it; Bush never even dangled a threat, and, with military forces stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan, such growling wouldn’t have been credible anyway. Second, and more important, by 2008, the North Koreans had already reprocessed plutonium and set off an atomic bomb; they were a bona fide “nuclear state.” They could walk away from the table with a more sincere shrug than we could.

He goes on to note that the problems we have with North Korea have their roots in several different dirt-patches, but that John Bolten and his ilk in the Administration made it almost-impossible for us to achieve our diplomatic goals.

Robert Novak has written an article on potential Republicans for Obama whose defections John McCain is said to fear, and the two biggest names on the list are Chuck Hagel and Colin Powell.

“The national security adviser for Ronald Reagan left the present administration bitter about being ushered out of the State Department a year earlier than he wanted. As an African American, friends say, Powell is sensitive to racial attacks on Obama and especially on Obama’s wife, Michelle. While McCain strategists shrug off defections from Bruce Bartlett and Larry Hunter, they wince in anticipating headlines generated by Powell’s expected endorsement of Obama.”

Time’s “The Page” speculates that Powell could be a surprise speaker at the Democratic Convention in Denver, and I think that would be a development worth some note but would anyone outside of Beltway gossip parties care? I’d guess that, generally, not.

I’ve only got a couple of small notes for you, dear reader, before I head to bed. The first is just my recommendation that you read this article, about the FBI’s file-deletion program and regulations. We often like to think of our age as the “information age,” but while information is easily-accessible today it is also easy-to-destroy, and we often lose sight of this fact. It is unsettling to any student of history to know that priceless records are being destroyed by the FBI.

My second note is on this news story.

North Korea on Thursday is expected to release details on its plutonium stockpile and continue preparations to publicly dismantle a controversial nuclear reactor — key steps meant to assuage international concerns about nuclear activity in the usually secretive Communist nation.

Under an agreement hammered out in six-nation talks that included the United States and China, leaders in Pyonyang agreed to provide a full accounting of the plutonium, “acknowledge” concerns about its nuclear proliferation and uranium enrichment activities and agree to continued cooperation with a process to ensure that no further activities are taking place.

I can’t believe that these negotiations have been going on since, roughly, 1994. I’d like to attribute it to the inefficiency of the Communist system but it’s more a result of paranoia and stonewalling on their side and an unwillingness to communicate on the other side, with China refusing to apply necessary diplomatic pressure alongside us and the other nations generally unable or unwilling to make any strong moves toward nuclear accountability on the Korean Peninsula.

Forgive me for the absence yesterday, dear reader, but I am in Indiana to support my cousin in his Little League playoffs and their Internet is beyond working for me without a hassle. I’ll be back home tomorrow evening, so expect more thorough posts then, but right now I am going to comment on the Zimbabwe elections, where Mugabe has run the opposition candidate out of the race and into the Dutch Embassy for fear of his life. If there were any justice in Zimbabwe then Mugabe would be in prison and the people of that country could start to recover from their leveled economy. But fear not, dear reader: the election is going on despite the opposition withdrawing.

How democratic is that!

In more interesting news, John McCain has offered a three hundred million dollar prize to any person or company who discover a next-generation hybrid battery that can work for all of us. Obama calls it a “gimmick.” I disagree. It is a great idea worthy of much applause, and it is largely receiving it.