I didn't know until today that old song is about suicide, heroin addiction, and a mental hospital. It's true. Here's an old NPR story about it, Fire and Rain:
Taylor wrote "Fire and Rain" in 1968. The song has three verses. One is about a friend who committed suicide, another is about Taylor's addiction to heroin, the third refers to a mental hospital and a band Taylor started called The Flying Machine.
Those are weirdly appropriate references if Taylor wants to be the troubadore for Biden's upbeat publicity event about consumer price inflation, which is currently eating away at the value of all your money at an annual rate of over eight percent. It's insane to deny that reality, but our government is addicted to spending, and we'll need to put the economy in treatment for a long time before it begins to recover.
Biden, by the way, keeps declaring victory over inflation even as objective reality (and the NYT) tells us the Consumer Price Index has hit new highs and the stock market new lows.
Inflation was bad in 1968, too, at over 4 percent, but not half as bad as it is today, when we are seeing the largest increase in forty years (9.1 percent for the year that ended in June, 2022).
Call me crazy, but when I watch the new-ish White House spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre (pronounced Cringe John P Air, I think), dismiss the realities of the latest inflation report, I have never missed Marie Harf more.
Marie, if you're out there, please take a job at the White House and save these people from themselves.
C'mon, man! I wish the White House press office would stop the malarkey.
The new Assistant to the President and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told CBS News' Ed OKeefe that she just plain didn't know what he meant when he asked her about President Biden's fanciful claim that he had been appointed to the Naval Academy in 1965.
She "did not hear that part of the speech ... I need to read it myself, and just go back and see what you're talking about exactly. I can't speak to it right now."
I only hope that, somewhere, Marie Harf is warming up to take over the press office. Biden needs some competent help there as he heads into the mid-term elections.
I like that term the news media keeps using for what happened to the eight-minute video record of Jan Psaki's exchange with Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2013 - a white flash. "Poof! Where the exchange once existed, a flash of white light replaced it" according to Erik Wemple of the WaPo. That makes it sound practically supernatural.
As for the charge of tampering, it's a fair cop, as our British cousins say. But let it be noted that what Ms. Psaki told Rosen back in 2013 was not a lie, but the truth. She acknowledged that bilateral contact with Iran had been going on, contrary to an earlier, misleading, statement by another official. That fact is getting lost in the noise.
Come to think of it, since someone was tampering with old video files, why didn't he or she make the original lie disappear rather than Psaki's admission of the truth? And what kind of inept conspiracy is it that removes video of a press briefing but leaves the written transcript intact, not to mention a separate video record of the same press conference on a site maintained by DOD? And what could anyone hope to gain by deleting that Psaki clip in the first place, when it was run on Fox News the same day it occurred?
Come to think of it some more, so far as I know there is actually no requirement for State to maintain a record of its press briefings. As Spokesperson-Admiral John Kirby said to the WaPo, there were no rules in place to prohibit the deletion of a record of a press briefing. So, what if State decided tomorrow to delete all records of past briefings and tell the press that from now on they can take their own notes and run their own pool camera? Not that I think that would be a good practice - keeping a record is in State's own best interests - but, if it did just that, would there be any offense to investigate?
Oh, and my girl Marie Harf? She is not guilty. If we know nothing else, we know that.
Here's an example of why I miss her in the Spokesperson job, the September 17 daily press briefing in which the new Spokesman/person got this snarky question about our Syria program:
QUESTION: So, much has been covered. So let me ask you about the substance of the train and equip program [for Syrian rebels]. When it was launched, it aimed to train 15,000 people. Here we are months later, many months later, and you only have a handful of trained personnel. Would you say that this program has proven to be an abysmal failure and perhaps it is time to move on to something else?
QUESTION: Please use the words “abysmal failure” in your answer.
Marie would have hit that one out of the park. Oh, sure, the ex-Admiral who took her place competently defused the question by boring everybody with a long answer about the three original goals of the program, blah, blah, blah. But that's merely answering the question. Marie would have made news herself with that question, which is what I want to see in a Spokesperson.
WASHINGTON — By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.
But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
You will perhaps not be surprised that the White House spokesman said President Obama is not to blame for President Obama's failed effort in Syria.
Here's a thought: if State isn't going to use Marie for press briefings anymore, can't it please lend her to the White House to raise the level of Spokespersonery over there?
You've probably seen the news from Diplopundit already. Marie Harf, just a few weeks after she was passed over for promotion to the Spokesperson slot in favor of an ex-Navy guy, will now lose her Deputy's job to another old white man in a boring suit. And one who has already had his turn in that job before! Talk about unfair.
There is no loyalty in Washington. When I think of all the ingratitude they've shown Marie after everything she's done for them, and after all the ridicule she's put up with from that boys club in the press - raise your hand if you've ever been personally victimized by Matt Lee - it is just so sad to see her sidelined into a senior adviser job far away from the TV cameras.
Well, polish up that resume. The next election is barely a year away, and Hillary's campaign will need plenty of top-notch media expertise.
Marie, you should know that I'm on your side. So it pained me to see how State passed you over for the big job, and for an old white man, too! You've been victimized and disadvantaged by patriarchal oppression and male privilege. If I were you, I'd sue.
How did this happen? After you put up with all that criticism of your performance, unfair as it was, often sexist and almost always juvenile in nature, this is how SecState Kerry rewards your loyalty?
Don't despair. You're only, what, 34 years old? Born in 1981? I literally still have a wristwatch that I bought in 1981, and it works great. Buck up. Things will get better.
And don't worry about being compared to your new boss, Admiral Kirby. People just think he's more professional because he has a deeper voice and wears a blue uniform. But when you get right down to it, he has delivered exactly the same Obama administration messages that you have. He just does it without the sorority-girl vocals, blonde hair, and adorable glasses.
Don't you change a thing. You'll outlast this ex-Navy guy, and there is always a new administration coming along every four years.
As a cheerleader for the Obama administration, Marie has only one job. It's stupid, but she's going to do it. I have to admire that kind of focus.
Frankly, I wish everybody would leave Marie alone. All she did was repeat a very common bit of conventional wisdom about the "root causes that lead people to join these groups" such as ISIL. You know, root causes, like joblessness and a lack of economic opportunity.
The notion that poverty drives terrorism has been debunked repeatedly, but that hasn't made the idea go away. And it isn't just Marie who insists otherwise. Here's another believer in those root causes:
“We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror” – George W. Bush, remarks at the International Conference on Financing for Development (2002)
Republicans, among others, have pushed the poverty-leads-to-terrorism equation when they were selling foreign economic development programs to the American public. In the case of George Bush in 2002, it was the Millennium Challenge Corporation that was going to undermine those economic root causes of terrorism.
Joshua Keating, today in Slate, demolishes the idea that terrorists are just angry about being unemployed:
The idea of terrorists as desperate young men lacking in economic opportunity is not borne out by empirical evidence. A well-known 2002 paper by economists Alan Krueger (later an assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration) and Jitka Maleckova found that support for violence among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza was not any higher among those with lower living standards or levels of education. In Lebanon, participation in Hezbollah was actually associated with higher living standards and levels of education. The same was true for Israeli settlers who participated in attacks against Palestinians.
A 2012 survey in Pakistan reached a similar conclusion: Poorer Pakistanis were less likely to support militants than the middle class. The political scientists conducting the study hypothesized that “the urban poor suffer most from militants’ violent activities and so most intensely dislike them.” A 2004 study by Harvard economist Alberto Abadie, looking at country level data, found that “terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries.” Abadie found political freedom to be a more important factor: Countries in the kinda-free range had more terrorism than highly democratic or highly autocratic countries.
Actual terrorists are often better educated than most in their societies, and, indeed, in ours. From a 2005 New York Times Op-Ed
We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to college. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans.
The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men, all of whom had a college education. The 9/11 pilots, as well as the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all things, urban preservation, while the operational planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina. We also found that two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved in 9/11 had attended college.
The University of Chicago's project to study suicide bombers found, where information is known about the attackers, that three times as many suicide bombers had professional or skilled occupations, or were students, than were unemployed or low-skilled. As for education, almost three times as many had post-secondary education as had only secondary education or less.
Quite a few filthy-rich kids have become terrorists. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 'underpants bomber' who failed to detonate his weaponized BVDs over Detroit, is the youngest child of a wealthy Nigerian banker and businessman, reputedly one of the richest men in Africa, and a former Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria and former Nigerian Federal Commissioner for Economic Development. He was also educated, having earned a degree in mechanical engineering from a University in London.
The four suicide bombers who committed the July 7, 2005, attacks in London did not lack economic or other opportunities. They were all second generation immigrants with university educations, jobs, and families. Why did they commit one of the more heinous terrorist attacks in recent British history?
The ringleader of the four, Mohammad Sidique Khan, explained their motive in a very articulate martyrdom video:
I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe. Our drive and motivation doesn't come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam, obedience to the one true God and following the footsteps of the final prophet messenger. Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.
Is there any reason to doubt that was his motive? He was thirty, educated, employed, and married with a child. He did not lack opportunity. As he said, he chose to forsake that opportunity in order to take revenge upon Britons at large for their democratically expressed support for wars against his fellow Muslims. He was not distracted from this mission by tangible commodities, no matter what Washington figures from George W. Bush to Marie Harf may think. Could Khan have made that any more clear?
