In the early hours of August 15th, 1996, Mauriceo Brown, DeWayne Dillard, Julius Steen and Kenneth Foster stopped outside the house of Michael LaHood. Brown got out of the car, robbed LaHood, and then shot him. To convict Kenneth Foster of capital murder under the law of parties, the prosecution had to prove that there was a conspiracy between him and Brown to rob LaHood, and that Foster should have anticipated that murder might have occurred during the robbery. At the trial Brown testified that there had been no discussion of robbing LaHood before he got out of the car.

Dillard testified at a state appeal that after the shot was heard, Foster had appeared surprised and panicked. Steen signed an affidavit in 2003 stating that, ‘There was no agreement that I am aware of for Brown to commit a robbery at the LaHood residence. I do not believe that Foster and Brown ever agreed to commit a robbery. I don’t think that Foster thought that Brown was going to commit a robbery.’
– Amnesty International press release, 8/24/07

Nevertheless, Kenneth Foster has been sentenced to death under the Texas “law of parties,” said to be one of the broadest of its kind in the United States. Judging by this case, at least, the law is either overly broad or it has been unconstitutionally applied — even under the relaxed standards of the 1987 Tison v. Arizona ruling, which requires that accomplices both have major personal involvement in the crime and display a reckless indifference to human life to be subject to the death penalty.*

I wonder if Texas law actually did the murder victim more harm than good. There had been prior robberies that night by the four men — but Foster had actually asked for the robberies to stop. If Mauriceo Brown knew or suspected this, his murder of LaHood may have re-established his dominance over the group — remember, we’re not discussing particularly sensible people here — instantly and unilaterally converting a waning robbery spree into a capital murder case, and tying his accomplices’ fates to his own.

Whether that was Brown’s motive or not, he’s already been executed. Even if you’re a supporter of the death penalty — full disclosure: I’m not — the question remains: is it right and just that Kenneth Foster also be put to death for this crime? If you feel the answer is “no”, consider adding your name to this petition to Texas Governor Rick Perry. As Amnesty International USA’s Larry Cox puts it, “In essence, Kenneth Foster has been sentenced to death for leaving his crystal ball at home. There is no concrete evidence demonstrating that he could know a murder would be committed.” Like torture, much of the war on drugs, and other misapplications of state power, the death penalty is more of a cancer on society than a cure for what ails it; legislatures and law enforcement are forever tempted to show “toughness” by broadening its scope, whittling away at exceptions, and — all too often — punishing and even executing the innocent as well as the guilty. It’s institutionalized blood lust; the sooner we abolish it, the better.

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* The Tison case was decided by 5-4, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writing the majority opinion. In a 5-4 1982 Enmund v. Florida ruling, the Supreme Court enjoined the death penalty for accomplices in cases where the defendant did not himself kill, attempt to kill, or intend to kill.

UPDATE, 8/30: Good news via KTRE-TV and AP:“Governor Rick Perry says he’ll spare Kenneth Foster from his scheduled execution tonight and commute his sentence to life. In doing so, Perry accepts a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which voted 6-1 today to urge the commutation.” From Governor Perry’s press release:“After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment,” Gov. Perry said. “I am concerned about Texas law that allows capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously, and it is an issue I think the legislature should examine.” Life is a hell of a long time for this, but maybe there’s the possibility of parole. I’ll be checking the “Save Kenneth Foster” blog for reactions; it documents state, national and world coverage of the case, as well as activism connected with the case.

If I’m right in the prior post that various grounds for impeachment have been somewhat blunted by recent administration stratagems (and the collaboration, at some level, of leadership Democrats), what then?

For my part, I’m reordering my arguments for impeachment to raise something to the level it probably should have been at all along: the fraudulent case for going to war in Iraq. Short of proof and wide acceptance that there was something fishy about 9/11 itself, this is probably the most fundamentally understandable, politically compelling case for impeaching Bush and Cheney there is.

Moreover, revisiting the “mushroom cloud smoking gun”, Downing Street memos, and all the rest of it would also be very relevant to the other news drumbeat in recent days: increasingly strident claims that Iran is behind attacks on U.S. soldiers, via “sophisticated” IEDs (so-called EFPs, “explosively formed projectiles”).

As was the case for Saddam’s WMDs, the public evidence for claiming Iran is officially responsible for these EFPs remains tenuous at best. It’s worth holding the Bush administration accountable for how empty the chief ground for invading Iraq was, just so we remember (1) why our troops are being attacked by IEDs of whatever origin in the first place and (2) how untrustworthy our so-called leadership is when making these kinds of claims.

Determined impeachment advocates — whether the handful of vertebrates in Congress or the millions beyond the Beltway — should see Bush administration tactics like the Gonzales resignation, the MCA, and the “FISA “fix” as annoying obstacles to impeachment, not as insurmountable ones. These tactics just affect the atmospherics of impeachment, not the fundamental necessity for it which each of the underlying issues — partisan law enforcement, torture, warrantless surveillance — so amply demonstrate. Regrettably, our country’s alleged press corps and our country’s alleged political leadership often pay more attention to atmospherics than to substance.

But no mere atmospherics can distract a country from being deceived into a war — at least none should. That campaign of deception will always be a strong, clear cut reason for impeaching Bush and Cheney — preferably before they strike again.

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NOTE: “claims” — Frank James, “The Swamp” Chicago Tribune blog , 08/24/07 (”General: Iran’s weapons vs. U.S. troops must stop”).
UPDATE, EDIT, 9/2: EFP doesn’t stand for “enhanced force projectiles.” For more on why not to believe they’re made in Iran, read “More EFP Nonsense,” 5/7/07, and “Iran and the EFP Causus Belli,” 8/31/07, by Bob Cernig (”Newshoggers”).

Like a lizard shedding its tail to get out of trouble, the Bush administration has shed an expendable appendage to change the news cycle and get away with business as usual. The Gonzales resignation strikes me as part of a quite successful pattern of strategic retreats and counterattacks by the Bush administration, all designed to protect its impeachable and often flatly criminal core.

The FISA revision a couple of weeks ago remains Exhibit A in this respect. Bush’s lawlessness in pursuing warrantless electronic surveillance was one of the clearest statutory-level “smoking gun” grounds for impeachment — but the egregiously misnamed “Protect America Act” seemed to make legal precisely the actions even administration officials like James Comey objected to. Likewise, regarding torture, elements of the Military Commissions Act (MCA) may have had the purpose of insulating administration officials from legal, constitutional, and international law claims by retroactively applying its provisions to acts after September 11.*

These two bills represented Congressional collapses — in the former case, inexcusably presided over by an “opposition” party allegedly representing me — that arguably weakened the political case for impeachment on either of these grounds. This was because they enabled a cheap political retort along the lines of “you want to impeach them for stuff you just legalized?” — whether or not that’s true for every single act of warrantless surveillance, or cruel, degrading, or flatly torturous conduct carried out at Bush and Cheney’s direction or with their blessing.

Turning to Gonzales, Robert Kuttner recently supported impeaching Gonzales as a kind of “baby step” towards prying loose more data about AttorneyGate and possibly proceeding with Bush and Cheney’s impeachment at a later date. And Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA-1) is sponsoring a Gonzales impeachment resolution which Nancy Pelosi famously sighed and delicately rubbed her temples about a month ago. But in the face of continued Bush administration stonewalling of the Senate and House Judiciary Committee Attorneygate investigations — i.e., investigations of impeachable voter suppression tactics and the partisan abuse of law enforcement — maybe even Pelosi and Reid were becoming willing to move. Now, however, Gonzales’ resignation may have blocked the “Gonzales impeachment” avenue towards Bush and Cheney’s impeachment.**

Of course, what will come next instead is a struggle about Gonzales’ successor, whether that successor is apparent frontrunner Michael Chertoff, current Solicitor General Paul Clement as “acting Attorney General,” or perhaps even a recess appointment. What can we count on in that respect?

A couple of things, I think. First, Democrats will claim the Attorney General’s resignation is an important victory to their credit — never mind that too many of them voted to confirm his nomination in the first place, never mind that Josh Marshall and “Talking Points Memo” did more to bring down Gonzales (and Abramoff, and DeLay) than they or their pals in the mainstream media ever managed.

Second, as commenter DAS argues in a Matthew Yglesias item about Gonzales, the new shape of debate will be “the Dems already drove poor AG AG out — isn’t that enough? now that the few bad apples are out, isn’t the problem over?” In that respect, whatever replacement mechanism happens, deep thinkers like Joe Lieberman have already explicitly argued that Bush’s cabinet level appointments — Alberto Gonzales, in fact — always deserve presumptive approval, presumably barring an axe murder or an illegal nanny in their background.

Thus, hearings about any eventual nominee (if there are any) will presume (1) he or she isn’t worse than Gonzales, and (2) the President’s institutional “right” to get whomever he wants.

By contrast, it will be deemed partisan, divisive, and unsporting to wonder whether there’s any reason not to assume the next Attorney General will continue Gonzales’ pattern of abuses of office, forward-leaning yes man behavior, and never failing to tell the “half truth, the partial truth and everything but the truth.”

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NOTES: “FISA revision,” “may have had the purpose,” “presumptive approval,” “forward leaning yes man” — discussions at this blog; “half truth” etc. — Senator Charles Schumer, reported by CNN, 7/27/07; “sighed” etc. — Ari Berman, The Nation, 7/31/07 (”Why Pelosi Opposes Impeachment”); “recess appointment” — Josh Marshall, “Talking Points Memo,” 08/27/07; Other links may be supplied later.
* Marty Lederman (”Balkinization”) disagrees that the MCA law also served this purpose, though his point may have been more about lower level military or intelligence officials violating Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions under administration detainee and interrogation policy than about protecting policymakers like Yoo, Rumsfeld, Addington, Haynes — or Gonzales — from charges like those prosecuted in the Nuremberg “Justice Trial“.
** However, as Avedon Carol and John Conyers have pointed out, you don’t have to actually be in office to be impeached — after all, one of the consequences of conviction is that you can’t hold federal office again. Considering that Gonzales has been on short lists for a Supreme Court nomination before, that would be no small thing.

President Bush’s idiotic speech to the VFW last week has been adequately skewered and roasted by others, saving me much time and effort — thank you, all.* My small contribution is to observe that important elements of Bush’s idiotic August speech were foreshadowed by equally idiotic June and July Washington Post columns by his former speechwriter Michael Gerson.**

One of Bush’s many idiotic assertions was about the lessons of Viet Nam — he claims to believe American troops weren’t bombing and shooting there long enough:

Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”

Compare Gerson in June (”An Exit to Disaster”), retelling Kissinger’s story about Cambodian prime minister Sirik Matak, who refused to be evacuated by the US from Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge approached:

Eventually, between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge when “peace” came to Indochina. Matak, Kissinger recounts, was shot in the stomach and died three days later. Sometimes peace for America can produce ghosts of its own.

And again — and more ominously — in July (”Trouble with the Neighbors”):

These are realistic responses to the serious provocations of Iran and Syria: ramping up economic pressure on both regimes; intensifying operations within Iraq against foreign influence; and taking limited but forceful action against Syria’s Ho Chi Minh Trail of terrorists.

(Emphasis added.) Right: military action against the Ho Chi Minh Trail worked out so very well for everyone the last time. Wrong. By many accounts, the U.S. escalation into Cambodia helped the Khmer Rouge gain recruits and support just by pointing to B-52s overhead.

Bush (and Gerson’s) Indochina history lessons aren’t just a misguided argument for digging in for the very long haul in Iraq. They’re also a recipe for escalation and regional war — and Gerson, for one, merrily asserts that’s a good and simple thing, approvingly citing a former administration official (Bolton?) calling Syria “lower hanging fruit.”

But “fair and balanced” is my middle name, and I’m therefore willing to entertain the idea that I’m completely wrong about all of this, and that we made a tragic mistake by pulling out of Indochina over 30 years ago.

So let’s do what we can to correct that: let’s dress up Bush in that flight suit of his and send him to Viet Nam for a long overdue tour of duty — with Michael Gerson as his wing man.

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* For some good Bush-kebab, see Jim MacDonald (”Making Light”), several offerings by Josh Marshall (”Talking Points Memo”) and hilzoy (”Obsidian Wings”), who leads with “Once upon a time, we used to expect our Presidents to have some idea what they were talking about.”
** I wrote about both columns.

…go to New Orleans today.” That’s Mike Tidwell (Bayou Farewell, The Ravaging Tide), speaking on a typically excellent Bill Moyers Journal:

MIKE TIDWELL: What gives me optimism in the face of this overwhelming challenge, and, you know, Katrina really is a curtain-raiser. If you want to know what Miami’s going to look like 100 years from now, go to New Orleans today. Below sea level, behind levees, battered by huge storms– if we don’t stop global warming. This climate crisis is here now. The Great Lakes are dropping in water levels. Texas has got too much rain. The Carolina’s too little. Hurricanes are getting– it’s here now. It’s not a my kinda sort of a maybe thing in the future that computer modeling says is coming. It’s already deeply here.

So, the fact that it’s here, that this giant climate system with all the momentum built in it toward warming, it’s already unpacking its bags. What could possibly give us the optimism and hope that we can now respond at this late stage, strongly and fiercely enough to hold it in check? And the thing that I come back to is, when we decide to change, we tend to change explosively. You know, look at the great changes in World War II and all these things that have happened in the 20th Century. I believe that this issue of climate change and sustainable– sustainability, which also implies questions of human rights, and fairness. When this light bulb finally goes on, and it’s going on.

You know, I think Katrina opened the door, Al Gore walked through it. And the zeitgeist changes a lot more. But once we finally really get serious, we’re going to change really fast.

Tidwell was joined by Melissa Harris-Lacewell. While at the University of Chicago, she co-authored the “2005 Racial Attitudes and the Katrina Disaster Study.”

BILL MOYERS: What have you learned, the two of you, about politics, American politics from the Katrina disaster?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, I often say that Hurricane Katrina and it’s political aftermath is the 2006 win of the democrats in the mid-term elections. And it–

BILL MOYERS: How so?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: I know it seems odd.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Because it’s not as though Katrina is at all even talked about in the 2006 elections. But you’ll remember that from September 11th, 2001 until August 28th of 2005, one was unpatriotic if you criticized the Bush administration or really any of the actions taken by our government. So, the Democratic Party and much of the American media was quite timid in terms of its critique of the administration.

But what Katrina and the bungling of Katrina does is it provides a wedge that opens the door. And the criticisms start to flow from CNN, from– and then from the Democratic Party. Now, the sad and scary thing is that all of these issues, urbanism, race, class, environmentalism which were the true core issues that made Katrina possible get lost. Because what the Democratic Party makes the choice to do is to use that wedge as an opportunity to critique Iraq. Not that it’s– I mean, it’s fine, right? But they use that. And so then Iraq becomes the story of the 2006 elections.

BILL MOYERS: At the expense of Katrina?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: At the expense of Katrina. And all the lessons that Katrina had the capacity to teach us about domestic politics.

I think there’s a lot to that, and I’ve also argued that Katrina was the key turning point for Bush’s political fortunes. It’s sad to see how little the Democratic leadership has done with the opportunity; it suggests they haven’t understood much of anything about the last six years.

There was — and maybe there still is — an opportunity for tying it all together. I’m no political consulting whiz, but it might be something like for real security at home, against vainglorious and selfish politics abroad, for a sustainable future, against circling the wagons and living life under siege, for recommitting to the values of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the people of the United States, against sliding towards a national security and surveillance state run by and for corporations and political elites.

And for impeaching Bush and Cheney for their crimes and their neglect of their duties to the Constitution and the people of the United States, and against spending any more time finding excuses not to.

Anyhow, more excerpts at Recording Katrina — or just go watch the whole thing.

OK, so maybe that last one wasn’t worth the wait. This is — the latest installment of the “Back-Talk” video series by “Unclassified Producer,” via eRobin at “fact-esque”:

So is this ad by the ACLU, briefly featured on the video. The ACLU is giving me ad whiplash — first “Find Habeas,” now this:

Click through to help run the ad!

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NOTES: Among the items cited in the Back-Talk clip are “War Crimes and the White House“, by former Marine commandant P.X. Kelley and ex-Reagan administration offical Ron Turner; Bush’s “capacity to interrogate, not torture but interrogate” comments to Katie Couric; former Reagan administration Treasury undersecretary Paul Craig Roberts “Impeach Now” article in Counterpunch and “The Raw Story” link to a radio interview with Thom Hartmann; Bruce Fein on Bill Moyers “Journal”; Bush lying about getting “court orders” for wiretaps (discussed here); ex-Senator and 9/11 commission member Bob Kerrey on Bush administration ignoring repeated warnings prior to 9/11.

“A crowd has gathered, facing a light, an illumination brought about by a fire, an event, an ideology -
or an ideal. The strong light casts shadows, and as the light moves toward the back and diminishes,
the mood degenerates; rowdiness, disorder and violence occur, showing the fragile nature of man.
Illumination, hope, involvement, hilarity, irritation, fear, illness, violence, murder and death -
the flow of man’s emotion through space.”

– Raymond Mason, The Illuminated Crowd  (sculpture and words, 1985, Montreal)

Bear with me here; I doubt this will be an essay for the ages with a neatly constructed argument and conclusion. Instead, I’m going to wander around a bit, because I’m not sure where this is all headed myself.

We came across this sculpture while wandering about Montreal last week. It’s on the Avenue McGill, just up the street from Indigo Books, and just down the street from McGill University, seemingly just another piece of plastic/corporate/civic art, in this case set in front of a faceless black glass and steel headquarters for one BNP Paribas Bank.

Onlookers react to WTC collapse.
Angel Franco/New York Times.
Also at DigitalJournalist.com

Another crowd, sixteen years later
I’d never heard of it. But as I came closer, and read the words, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It was like coming across a prediction of that September day going on six years ago, a prediction of how we — or at least I and many like myself — would react.

On the surface, of course, are the immediate reactions to an immediate, transfixing event. Mason’s sculpture is all but a pre-enactment of photos like this one.* But Mason had more in mind than a crowd merely gaping at a disaster; it seems to me he was also driving at the repercussions over time of the fire, event, ideology — or the fiery ideological event. As the description implies, you find expressions of despair, rage, fear, and finally acts of violence as you walk along the side of the sculpture group.

And that surely fits, too.

There’s been an interesting set of posts touching on this lately. Roy Edroso’s Writing Lesson contrasts a forthright statement by one individual, Christopher Hitchens, with a less forthright paraphrase of the same by Rod Dreher. In his 2002 Boston Globe piece, Hitchens recalls his sense of exhilaration as the implications he saw in 9/11 crystallized for him:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.**

As Edroso acknowledges, this is at least interesting and honest: “[o]ne of the things I still admire about Hitchens’ writing is that I believe him: not his belligerent analyses, but his portrayal of his own thoughts and feelings.” And in the daisy chain of posts leading back from Dreher through Ross Douthat to the original rediscoverer, Julian Sanchez, there’s a common thread that there was something oddly “special” and unifying, even exhilarating, about 9/11. Sanchez:

…it is hard not to get caught up in that feeling. I recall Camus writing something similar about the feeling among members of the French Resistance, who in conditions that surely licensed despair felt a kind of supernatural energy at the chance to throw themselves into a cause so clearly vital and right, who saw that never again would their lives be so invested with meaning.

Canetti the Inevitable
But I think what Mason’s sculpture suggests — clearly, it proves nothing, it’s “just” a very interesting sculpture — is that there may have also been less to it than that.*** I hesitate to cite this, because I haven’t read it in full, so it seems like name dropping. Plus it seems a little wide of the mark in some ways. But here goes anyway, from Elias Canetti’s famous work “Crowds and Power”:

The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge. Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it. This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.

These differences are mainly imposed from outside; they are distinctions of rank, status and property. Men as individuals are always conscious of these distinctions; they weigh heavily on them and keep them firmly apart from one another… [...]

Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd. During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal. In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.

But the moment of discharge, so desired and so happy, contains its own danger. It is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever.

Like Mason’s sculpture, this proves nothing, but it’s surely apropos. I think many of us — again, me included, but maybe also Hitchens included — did feel a certain relief and exhilaration at being “united” about something again. It’s very seductive to be part of a crowd, even a virtual one glued to our TV sets, or our online news reports — or our warblogger echo chamber. In Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War, Lesley Brill wrote:

Alongside the grief, fright, and disgust, however, one sensed a swelling pleasure, even exuberance, as among the stunned, delighted audience of an over-the-top horror movie. Was it because at last, after nearly thirty years, there was a real battle to join? [...]

Here, finally, came a crisis worthy of our half-trillion-dollar-a-year armed forces, one offering moral certitude and potential redemption. With it arrived a dreary, increasingly dangerous bonus: “After 9/11” instantly replaced “In the new Millennium” as the signal cliché for declaring Now to be definitively different from an outmoded Then.

So what
So how to wrap up? What to conclude? Like I said, I’m not sure; this is all pretty tenuous, plucked helter skelter from sociological meditation, art, and sundry quick stops along the Internet.

I guess it makes me not dismiss Dreher’s allegedly “groupthink” reaction too much. It’s just that the “clarity” he felt wasn’t clarity so much as being spellbound and thinking that was clarity. At any rate, this sense of awesome togetherness was real — and it was predictable.

The 9/11 moment was designed to be a gigantic groupthink moment, a “where were you when” moment — an illuminated crowd moment. A nation in its millions transfixed, grieving, enraged — and yes, comforted by the knowledge that you were part of a crowd, that nearly everyone else was feeling what you were feeling, too. I’m not saying Dreher was more honest than Hitchens, just that I think his reactions were believable too. (Not especially worthy, just believable.) Many people thought not in “I,” but in “we.”

So when Sanchez argues that Rove misplayed that violin, I suppose I disagree a bit with that, too. There may have been no good tune to play on that violin; this wasn’t ever going to be the few, the proud, the Resistance, this was going to be an echoing mass moment on CNN, brought to you by Bin Laden first, and Rove and Bush thereafter. I don’t disavow how I felt or how angry I was or that I wanted to see Bin Laden pounded flat or that I liked the unity I felt in that. I do see how predictable I was, and how easily the country (and I) could be played for suckers in the ensuing months and years.

So what’s the antidote to all that? Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe that’s people for ya, at least most people.

But maybe being a little forewarned is to be a little forearmed if there’s another 9/11. Beware of that pointing guy, saying “follow me, children! I’m sure I know what it all means.” Or maybe the essential antidote is simply remembering Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s insight:

“Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side.”

Maybe less wallowing in the grief of it all would be wise, too. But good luck with that. We’re not wise, we’re hominids, we’ll grieve, we’ll wallow. When I see those pictures, I know I still do.

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* From the “Onlookers” section of the “Here is New York” site archiving 9/11-related photography. For more onlooker/crowd comparisons with the sculpture, see also “the illuminated crowd,” a pooled shared online photo site at Flickr.com.
** Hitchens link via a comment by doghouse riley at Edroso’s post; d.r. points out that the article was rather selectively excerpted by Dreher. Since my convention is to italicize quotes, I’ve replaced Hitchens’s original italicization with underlining, but the effect may be slightly different for some readers.
*** Both a New York Times review of a gallery retrospective and the table of contents to a book by Michael Edwards imply Mason was fascinated by crowds as a subject for his art. The fascination was shared by at least one friend of his, Georg Eisler, who created several paintings about them including “Hillsborough,” about a 1989 stadium panic disaster in Liverpool.

ATC delays are actually “air traffic control” delays, of course. They wound up costing me a fair of time, money, and aggravation over the last week and a half.

True, I wasn’t trapped on a runway for hours without food or adequate toilet facilities like the folks chronicled in yesterday’s USA Today editorial. But heading home from Atlanta a week and a half ago at 12:30 AM instead of 8:30 PM makes a difference when you have a 9 year old kid in tow, even when she’s a great kid who didn’t fuss about it. The upshot was that we were all so beat by the time we got home around 3:30 AM that we spent half of my 2d “day of vacation” recovering from the first one.

And at the other end of my vacation, a second ATC delay left me stranded overnight in Syracuse, my best option being a 6:00 AM flight out the next morning. To that airline’s credit (US Airways), I was informed relatively promptly by cell phone, and rebooked at the gate to a new itinerary and more convenient destination. While they didn’t put me in a motel, I did get a “distressed traveller” discount. But a Ramada Inn was just not where I wanted to be that night, and schlepping into work yesterday morning with my carry-on luggage also wasn’t in my original vision for the trip.

Reading an item about all this on cheapflights. com, I’m told by one Mike Boyd, aviation consultant, that this isn’t about “trying to cram too many airplanes into too little airspace“:

“We have too little air traffic control infrastructure to efficiently handle the natural demand generated by our economy,” he contends in a recent edition of his Aviation Hot Flash newsletter. Boyd asserts that the FAA “is nowhere near implementing an ATC system that is anywhere near the needs of the transportation system”.

In other words, we’re trying to cram too many airplanes into too little airspace. I get how weather and chance can have cascading effects across airports, but it seems to me that, say, European air travel isn’t quite this discombobulated, despite the “natural demand generated by their economy.”

I don’t know whether ATC delays in the U.S. come from relatively more flights, relatively fewer air traffic controllers, inadequate equipment, or what. All I know is this didn’t used to happen nearly every time I travel by air, and now it does. So now I apparently need to allow for 4-6 hours of delay for a given air trip on top of the hour or so of “security theater” — are my toothpaste and sunblock properly separated for inspection in a little plastic bag? do my little girl’s shoes contain an explosive device? — that we have to put up with.

It’s enough to make me want to pick a nearby spot for a vacation and do it all by car next time. I’ll just need to guesstimate which bridges along the way aren’t about to collapse.

Lambert Closse and his dog Pilote
Statue in Place D’Armes, Montreal

I kind of liked this statue. We’re on vacation, and are currently in Montreal for a couple of days. We’ve been having a nice time, and have seen Hyde Park, the Saratoga battlefield, and now a bit of Montreal. We’ve mainly been hanging out at a cabin camp near Merrill, New York, with some good friends and neighbors of ours — canoeing, croquet, reading Alan Furst, horse riding lessons for Maddie, etc.

Back by Monday, blogging will remain sparse to nonexistent until then. Meanwhile, here are a few photos.

I (and no doubt hundreds of other people) received an e-mail earlier this week from my Congressman, Chris Van Hollen (D-MD-8), on the subject of impeaching Dick Cheney. Cutting to the chase:

While I understand the sentiments of those calling for impeachment, I am concerned that impeachment proceedings would have the effect of consuming the attention of the whole Congress, and leave little room for us to pass positive reforms and fully address the business of the American people. [...] Should the House engage in impeachment hearings, it would inevitably divert time, resources, and attention from other efforts to pass meaningful legislation to address the many needs of the country.

(I’ve published the full text of the e-mail separately.) Regrettably, Congressman Van Hollen thus continues to espouse the idea that impeaching Dick Cheney (and presumably George Bush) would be a “diversion” based on “sentiments” — rather than a constitutional duty he and other House members are bound by oath to perform.*

I was particularly struck by Van Hollen’s rosy view of Congressional successes to date in reining in this executive branch. After averring that “Congress must conduct aggressive oversight and investigate the Vice President’s and the Administration’s actions,” Van Hollen wrote:

I am pleased that the 110 th Congress is taking its responsibilities seriously. The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which I am a member, has already held hearings on waste and fraud in spending on the Iraq War, management of Homeland Security contracts, allegations of political interference with the work of government climate change scientists, political dealings at the General Services Administration, and the leak involving Valerie Plame. We have also issued a subpoena for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come before the Committee and discuss the Administration’s flawed justifications for the war in Iraq .

Additionally, the Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Chairman John Conyers, examined Presidential signing statements in its first hearing. They are in the midst of ongoing investigations into the Attorney General’s office and the Administration’s practice of using Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official government business. The House Select Committee on Intelligence is holding hearings into abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and on issues with the classification of national security information.

He has got to be kidding me.

Frankly, my little girl, her 4th grade pals and I can conduct the kind of pattycake oversight this Congress has — powerless, ineffectual, bordering on the ridiculous. Why, if I’m not mistaken we issued a subpoena just the other day for Condoleezza Rice to appear before us — with results no worse than what Mr. Van Hollen’s committee has achieved to date.

This e-mail arrived after last week’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rewrite debacle, not before. In the wake of that vote (which I should note that Van Hollen opposed, to his credit) it should not only be rank and file Democrats and constitutional patriots who should be disturbed — it should be Van Hollen.

Recapping, Congress took away the FISA court’s exclusive power to issue warrants for electronic eavesdropping “directed at” foreigners, and then gave it to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — after they’d conclusively established in both the House and the Senate that Gonzales lies roughly every time his lips are moving.

If that’s “aggressive oversight,” I’m a monkey’s uncle. I will of course continue to listen to Mr. Van Hollen’s views, and seek to understand them and discuss them. But I will not tolerate being taken for a fool.

And more to the point, neither should Mr. Van Hollen. Oversight isn’t just about holding hearings. It needs to involve consequences when you find out the person you’re overseeing is conducting the nation’s business badly, and especially when you find you’ve been lied to. And when Congress finds its constitutional obligation to conduct this kind of oversight is essentially being reduced to farce, it should reach for stronger weapons — like impeachment proceedings.

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* The notion that a Congress busy with impeachment hearings and politics can’t meet its other responsibilities is plainly a canard. As pointed out at Takoma Park Impeach Bush and Cheney, the 93d Congress, while most remembered for the impeachment hearings in the House and the investigative hearings in the Senate, was also responsible for landmark legislation such as the Employment Retirement Income Security Act, the Congressional Budget Act, and the War Powers Act.

In what Wikipedia warns is only a “partial list of notable legislation” by the 93rd Congress, I also found such obscure achievements as the Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, along with the Fair Labor Standards Amendment, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, the Amtrak Improvement Act, the Domestic Volunteer Services Act of 1973 (VISTA), the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act, the Research on Aging Act, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1973, the Rehabilitation Act, the Legal Services Corporation Act, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the National Mass Transportation Assistance Act, the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act, the Privacy Act of 1974 (what were they thinking), the Trade Act of 1974, and the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act.

I hope Mr. Van Hollen will be as impressed and inspired as I was at this record of achievement by a Congress whose attention was allegedly “consumed” by impeachment — and that he’ll no longer argue Congress must choose between impeachment and serving the American people in other ways.