Straight Up |: October 2005 Archives

The Hammer's mugshot, left, is so cute it could go in his family album. Mother would be proud. He even avoided the customary perp walk. Compared to Bugsy Siegal in his mugshot, right, The Hammer looks like he was posing for the church choir. But, in fact, he was being booked and fingerprinted for conspiracy and money-laundering.

Famous last words from Judy Miller in her Senate testimony:

As I painfully learned while covering intelligence estimates of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, we are only as good as our sources. If they are wrong, we will be wrong.

"Or if," she might have added, "we are spun, spun, spun." ("Miller’s sources weren’t just wrong, they spun her dizzy...," Douglas McCollam writes in the Columbia Journalism Review.)

Judy's defenders believe she's being treated like a ragdoll (click for the demo). We disagree.

And just for the record, Cary Grant never said, "Judy, Judy, Judy." He did say, "Susan, Susan, Susan."

Postscript: Now, a day later, is there anything else to say but Bill, Bill, Bill?

Few if any bloggers have flattened Judy Miller's tires with more gusto than David Ehrenstein, and so what if he can't spell. Witness My Old Plame and Thoroughly Postmodern Miller, from earlier this week, and today's Judge Judy.

But Arianne Huffington has been trying to keep up with him. Witness today's Random Thoughts and Unanswered Questions (a detailed enterprise), or yesterday's My Three Hours Hiking Among the Clustered Aspens With Judy Miller (a wan effort), or Bill Keller's Surprising Admission (wanner still). Even so, she has gotten off some priceless shots. This one, for example, in Judy Miller's Reporting: A Cancer on the New York Times?

Tom Friedman -- and anyone else still hanging out at Camp Judy (I notice we haven't heard from Lou Dobbs or Tom Brokaw since the Judy-culpa came out) -- really need to update their talking points. Maybe they can all chip in and get a group rate on a good rewrite man.

It doesn't quite reach the show-biz level of Ehrenstein wit. And won't somebody please show her how to write a hed? But hey, credit where due.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Do you mean to say that Tom Friedman has written a column worth reading? Yes, we mean to say that. Here's why: Quoting the spokesman for a delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists who cut short a visit "to study the workings of American democracy," he reports their stunned reaction to the Bullshitter-in-Chief telling Republicans they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court because of her religious beliefs:

"Now let me get this straight," Judge Mithaqi said. "You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.

"How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: 'Don't pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.' Is that the
Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don't think so. We can't have our people exposed to such talk."

Since you can't read the column online unless you have access to subscribers-only TimesSelect, we thought we'd cite the good stuff for the open record. Here Friedman quotes a Shiite lawyer in the delegation:

"I survived eight years of torture under Saddam," Unfi said. "Virtually every extended family in Iraq has someone who was tortured or killed in a Baathist prison. Yet, already, more than 100 prisoners of war have died in U.S. custody. How is that possible from the greatest democracy in the world? There must be no place for torture in the future Iraq. We are going home now because I don't want our delegation corrupted by all this American right-to-torture talk."

Although Mr. Unfi doesn't sound credible when talking about "no place for torture in the future Iraq" or about his motivation -- he'll have to do a lot more than shut his ears to keep the delegation from being corrupted -- his point is timely, today especially.

And finally, this reaction from another delegate member, the editor of a new Iraq newspaper, as he watched the rehearsed videoconference between the Bullshitter-in-Chief and 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq:

"It was right from the Saddam playbook. I was particularly upset to hear the Iraqi sergeant major, Akeel Shakir Nasser, tell Mr. Bush: 'Thank you very much for everything. I like you.' It was exactly the kind of staged encounter that Saddam used to have with his troops."

But it's the end of the column, written in parenthesis, that makes you appreciate Friedman's effort: "(Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren't so true.)" Let's just call it a triumph of the absurd.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

You had to see it to believe it. There it was on the tube last night, Frontline's "The Torture Question," documenting more clearly than ever what we already knew, what everybody knows by now, that Abu Ghraib was "a kind of 'Animal House' on the nightshift" (to quote former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger).

Except that Schlesinger's analogy, however well intended, fails to communicate what really happened, and how far up the chain of command responsibility went. No mystery there, of course. It went right to the very top. Today you can watch online at noon ET, when the documentary will be posted. See how the rule of law was perverted. See how the United States was turned into a Banana Republic by a regime with its head up its ass. In the meantime, join the discussion, which is available now.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Everybody's talking -- OK, not everybody, just us savvy media folks -- about the best magazine covers of the last 40 years. We took a vote, and our top choice, far and away, is the one illustrating the trouble with mergers, from The Economist (1994). Our second choice is the one by Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz mapping the post-9/11 country of New Yorkistan, from The New Yorker (2001). (Courtesy der Spiegel online.)

--Tireless Staff of Thousands

Susan Feeney Fleet, trumpet player and feminist extraordinaire, lives in Metairie, La., in an apartment complex owned by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which is about to evict her and all her neighbors, despite what she terms "livable" conditions and only minor flood damage.

She saw yesterday's post and wrote: "I am expecting an eviction notice, with 30 days to get out. Since there are almost no apartments available here, I have no idea where I will go. Nice Christian concept at work here, put your residents out on the street. ... How's that for a 'barbarism' story?"

Fleet, whose gorgeous playing is recorded on "Baroque Treasures for Trumpet and Organ" with Robert Train Adams, moved to New Orleans in July, 2001, from Cambridge, Mass., where we first met her. At the time she was an assistant professor at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. (Formerly former principal trumpet in the Rhode Island Opera and Providence Chamber orchestras, she also taught at Brown and the University of Massachusetts.)

Before Katrina, in March, she wrote us from New Orleans: "Very happy, keeping busy ... still tooting my trumpet and sticking up for women musicians." In July, her musical research prompted the New Orleans Times-Picayune to write "A band of their own," about an eight-piece all-women group called "The Original Shades of Blue," which played from roughly 1929 to the mid-1930s.

The last time we wrote about a musician displaced by Katrina -- violinist Samuel Thompson -- he became a cause célèbre. Susan isn't likely to, not at this stage of the Katrina catastrophe, but we can hope.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Graphic novels are all the rage. Even Little Nemo's back in business. Well, Norman Ogue Mustill once wrote a satirical comic strip with his Exacto blade, and it wasn't made for Slumberland or Sundays. He called it "A Shockumentary," and we published it as the second half of his pamphlet, Twinpak, the sixth in a series of Nova Broadcast pamphlets.The time was 1969. The place was San Francisco. The other pamphlets were by Ray Bremser, Wolf Vostell, Dick Higgins, Liam O'Gallagher, and William S. Burroughs. Anyway, Ogue was not really Mustill's middle name. He took it as a joke -- Vogue without the "V" -- which tells you something about his turn of mind. Looking at "A Shockumentary" again today, we liked it so much we thought we'd post it. On another day we'll post "Song," the first half of Mustill's pamphlet. It's a musical score with nothing remotely lyrical in it.

Used by permission. "A Shockumentary" © 1969 by Norman O. Mustill

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

We weren't the only ones who noticed. We just noticed sooner. So our question is: Is Frank Rich reading us? If so, there's no crime in that. Hi Frank. We like the idea.

Deep in his column today about the grand jury investigation of the Valerie Plame case was this crucial sentence:

Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

Deep in our item last Wednesday -- OK, not so deep, only in the second graf -- we referred to this crucial sentence:

Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.

The crucial sentence first appeared -- in the 11th graf, to be precise -- in a story that ran under the headline "Focus of CIA Leak Probe Appears to Widen." It was published last Wednesday on page 3 of The Journal's main news section and -- credit where due -- was reported by John D. McKinnon, Joe Hagan and Anne Marie Squeo.

It's possible, of course, (even probable) that Rich was not reading us but was merely reading the Journal that day. So give the man a blog. If he had one, chances are he'd have noticed the crucial sentence then and posted it himself.

Critic John Simon says he would have given Harold Pinter three Nobels in one -- "the Nobel for Arrogance, the Nobel for Self-promotion, or the Nobel for Hypocrisy" -- but not the Nobel for Literature. Writing this morning in Radar magazine's online Kulture Klub, the notorious Mr. Nasty, right, objects to Pinter's prize because the playwright has been "spewing venom at the United States while basking in our dollars." Apparently our crackpot critic forgets that the Nobel is not an American prize to give. And never mind his literary objections. He'll be writing White House press releases next.

And now for a change of pace. . . .

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Should've mentioned that "Three Poems" was originally published 31 years ago in a collection of avant-garde artworks, "a great big diary" rather than an anthology, called the "Something Else Yearbook 1974." The two collages come from "Flypaper" (Beach Books, Texts & Documents, 1967).

British writer Harold Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature this morning. The Swedish Academy notes that in his plays he "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." The academy made no mention of the "shame and disgust" Pinter has said he feels about Britain's subservience to the United States and its participation in the war in Iraq. But we assume the prize offers implicit agreement with his stance, and we hope he'll use his acceptance speech to highlight it. Watch the announcement in six languages: Norwegian, Swedish, English, French, German and Russian. The academy's prattle does not come in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or Italian.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Looking through some old correspondence from many years ago, I came across a letter to the poet Clark Coolidge telling him that I was "flirting with the possibility of writing some kind of gumshoe manuscript." I had no memory of it, and doubt that he does either. But the letter excerpted this sample:

I gunned the old VW to Italy. Lago Maggiore because I wanted to find out where the German nouveaux riches spent their vacations. And boy did I find out.

I was also searching for a guy. When I found him he looked at me with the unclean gaze of a male hustler.

"Listen," I said, "I wasn't raised on country cornflakes. I was bread & buttered in NYC, milk-toasted in San Francisco, and swallowed whole in Paris. Are you the buyer?"

"For nothing, you guessed it."

"Uh huh. You sound like you were digested in Rome and spit out in the Athens suburbs."

People don't hit it off sometimes. He was big but not that big, and he sat there in all the sartorial splendor of a plastic clothespin. Wore his floriated shirt buttoned or rather unbuttoned to the navel (sexy, too) and he had on a forget-me-not pinky ring, the kind to brand a nose with. He also had a nervous tick in his eye which was, I suppose, the sweetener -- the point of give in an otherwise lousy complexion.

I knew where my brass was. Before I checked in I'd stashed it in its custom leather holder under my right arm. I'm a lefty. It must've weighed nearly two pounds.

Then the telephone rang. He picked it up. "Hello, pussycat how are you . . ." It went on like that for long enough to have a cigarette, so I did. When he got off I said: "Goodbye. Sorry to make your acquaintance."

It was strictly from the lowest form of show business but you can't live forever in a VW as I found out, clammed up in mine those three months. A case of sciatica was not what the doctor ordered.

Right then I decided to give Higgins a phone call. Maybe no rhumbas with him either. I remember that Indian ashram was good for his spinal column but he sure as hell hadn't come back swinging.

The beep from his livingroom tape recorder came on. "You don't smell natural any more," I said and hung up. And that left me with a bottle of Belgian beer in my hand, checking the times at the Mannheim rail terminal. I already gave off more carbon monoxide than I could breathe. ...

Never did finish it.

In his review of Joan Didion's memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," John Leonard writes: "I can't imagine dying without this book." Apparently tens of thousands of readers can't imagine living without it. The book is "flying off the shelves," The New York Times reports, and "some stores already have reported shortages" -- with no small help from The Times.

Is "Magical Thinking" what's called "a fun read"? Sure. Leonard offers the details:

[W]e watch her listen -- to the obscene susurrus of electrodes, syringes, catheter lines, breathing tubes, ultrasound, white cell counts, anticoagulants, ventricular fibbing, tracheostomies, Thallium scans, fixed pupils, and brain death, not to neglect such euphemisms as "leave the table," which means to survive surgery, and "subacute rehab facility," which means a nursing home. But she also consults texts by Shakespeare, Philippe Ariès, William Styron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sigmund Freud, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Melanie Klein, Walter Savage Landor, C.S. Lewis, Matthew Arnold, D.H. Lawrence, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Emily Post, and Euripides. And, simultaneously, she is watching and listening to herself.

As Leonard further explains, Didion has never let herself, or her readers, off easy:

She's an Episcopalian, not a von Trapp -- a declared agnostic about history, narrative, and reasons why, a devout disbeliever in social action, moral imperatives, abstract thought, American exemptions, and the primacy of personal conscience. Inside this agnosticism, in both novels and essays, there is a neurasthenic beating herself up about bad sexual conduct, nameless derelictions, and well-deserved punishments -- a human being who drinks bourbon to cure herself of "bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink"; who endures "the usual intimations of erratic cell multiplication, dust and dry wind, sexual dysaesthesia, sloth, flatulence, root canal"; who has discovered "that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it"; who has misplaced "whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor"; who still believes that "the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood"; who got married instead of seeing a psychiatrist; who puts her head in a paper bag to keep from crying; who has not been the witness she wanted to be; whose nights are troubled by peacocks screaming in the olive trees -- an Alcestis back from the tunnel and half in love with death. You know me, or think you do.

Will the book be on Laura Bush's reading list? Sure. She'll be giving it away for Christmas, too.

This just in: Did top White House officials obstruct justice, commit perjury, or violate the False Statements Act in the Valerie Plame case? Today the noose tightens on "Scooter" Libby, right, Cheney Boy's chief of staff. Murray Waas explains it all for you. Next comes Karl Rove, the man who was not involved.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

Laugh yourself silly.

Brooding Vincent van Gogh. Sunny David Hockney. Two artists who could not be more different. Two artists separated by temperament and time, by style and technology. Yet both are united by their belief in the power of drawing.

For van Gogh, drawing was "the root of everything," New York Times reporter Carol Vogel writes today, quoting him in the lede of her story about an upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 van Gogh drawings, among them a pen-and-ink drawing of a Saintes-Maries street, partial detail right, along with a painting he made from it and a pen-and-ink drawing he made of the painting.)

For David Hockney, "who believes that art must find its roots in drawing again," a 1999 MSNBC.com report by Yours Truly noted in the lede, "drawing-by-other-means -- digital imaging via computer, for example -- has already begun that rediscovery."

In a lecture at the time, Hockney said:

What's interesting today is what is happening to photography now that the computer has come along. Actually, the hand is coming back into the camera. What is called manipulation of photographs, I call drawing. What’s really happening is that we are beginning to draw through the camera, through the lens.

The whole point is that we have moved into a period where the photograph has lost its veracity. You don’t necessarily have to believe anything that’s happening in a photograph. We did believe it for a certain length of time, or thought we did.

Now there’s no need to believe it at all, meaning that photography is in a sense back with drawing and painting, actually like drawing and painting. Nobody foresaw that happening.

Or as the Getty quotes him about his photocollage, "Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #1," above left, to which he applied Cubist ideas for the imagery: "Most photographers think that the rules of perspective are built into the very nature of photography, that it is not possible to change it at all. For me, it was a long process realizing that this does not have to be the case."

We call it the Joan Didion memorial issue. What else would you call this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review?
It featured Robert Pinsky's notice on the cover (trying too hard, it was dully academic), along with a lovely family photo from Didion's private collection, and Rachel Donadio's profile of her, a two-page spread that ran so long it spilled over onto a third page (also dull, sad to say). The occasion was the arrival of Didion's new book, "The Year of Magical Thinking." Couple all that with Michiko Kakutani's daily review (on Oct. 4) and the cover story of The New York Times Magazine (on Sept. 25) -- an 8,500-word excerpt from the book (which we liked very much) -- and it gives us an inkling that Joan is connected.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

We didn't intend to take the week off. But it turns out that's what happened. There was no particular reason, except a touch of blog fatigue, which was regrettable because we missed posting the BBC saga about the divine inspiration that led to the invasion of Iraq.

The story of the Bullshitter-in-Chief's "mission from God" showed up first as a press release, then as reported in The Guardian with a terrific illustration, right, and finally as a tale about the BBC's failure of nerve. That the bullshitter believes he's on a mission from God, not just in Iraq but in all things, has been reported before. It's been part of his regime's theocratic compulsion from the beginning. But his claim, as attributed to him by Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, had the ring of a biblical maniac:

President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …' And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God I'm gonna do it."

The content of the message was sensational, of course. We were also struck by the goofiness of his tone, which rings true to his public utterances, and by God's familiarity with him on a first-name basis -- which is just one more confirmation that we've got a certifiable nut in the White House.

Another story we failed to note was last week's piece in The Wall Street Journal about an obscure case involving Dick Cheney during the disputed 2000 election which offers a rare glimpse into a Constitutional battle that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers took on. What makes the piece interesting -- given the uproar about her expertise in Constitutional law -- is that it shows she won the case by arguing for a "broad and inclusive" reading of the Constitution, "a style of legal interpretation more commonly associated with liberal-leaning judges" than conservatives. Now ain't that a kick in the head?

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: As long as we're catching up, here's the very latest commentary on the Miers nomination from today's New Yorker: "In the Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton writes that the Senate’s role in confirming appointments is designed to make the President

both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

"Hamilton was no naïf about human nature, but in the present case his formula seems to have underestimated the Presidential capacity for both shamelessness and -- well, courage isn’t quite the right word. Arrogance."

Love the Hamilton reference (which is new to us) and the reference to arrogance (which is not).

He's the blackest white man you'll ever encounter: Studs Terkel, at 93, speaking this morning about his memories of Mahalia Jackson, about the difference between spirituals and gospel songs, about interviewing Louis Armstrong and listening to his favorite jazz tune, Armstrong's gorgeous recording of "West End Blues" (listen to it yourself), made with Earl Hines on piano, about James Baldwin and what Bessie Smith meant to him.

Terkel, left, who underwent open heart surgery six weeks ago, showed up at the downtown Manhattan firehouse that serves as Democracy Now!'s broadcast studio and put the broadest smile on DN anchor Amy Goodman's face that we've ever seen. Besides his cultural commentary, we loved his political remarks. In fact, there's no way to separate them. Of "the clown," his term for the Bullshitter-in-Chief, he says: "This guy is a burlesque of Ronald Reagan. He makes Reagan sound like Abraham Lincoln."

As soon as Goodman's interview with this national treasure is posted, we'll put up the link. In the meantime, listen to this (give it time to download) for the pleasure of fabulous talk from a fabulous character who happens to be real. It's a WFMT Chicago radio interview with Terkel. And if you really want to explore, listen to this radio drama: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, featuring Terkel and the novelist Nelson Algren -- another black man who happened to be born white -- from way back in 1960.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: It's up. Here he is this morning being interviewed on Democracy Now! (Full disclosure: Studs is a friend.)

Every once in awhile we realize what we've been missing. So, in case you've been missing it, too, may we recommend On An Overgrown Path? It has a delicious worldwide blogroll of radio stations that lets you listen to Radio B.A.C.H., for instance, which streams Bach 24/7 from Poland -- right now we're listening to the unmistakable Glenn Gould playing the French Suite -- or to Bartok Radio, one of Hungary's three nationwide channels, which broadcasts 24/7 from Budapest. Or check out RHTK Channel 4, broadcasting from Hong Kong. We don't know who runs the site. But he or she is Pliable, and has listed more than 60 other foreign and domestic stations. It's a great service.

--TSoT

You don't get anything like the buckfush.com editorial illustration, below, anywhere in The New York Times. But the subscriber-based TimesSelect service of The Times does have lots of new features, although they're not offered in the print edition or the free online edition. One, for instance, is the Talking Points personal opinion pieces by editorial page editor Gail Collins. She writes about everything from fictional women in American politics, i.e., the new TV show "Commander in Chief" ("Imagining a Woman in the Oval Office: The Powerphobic President") to real women in American politics ("The Gender Landscape: It's Reigning Men").

But here's an interesting development that's new to us: Today's editorial, "Faux News Is Bad News," appears in the regular free section of the online Times but not in the print edition (at least not in the Late Edition that arrived on our doorstep in New York City). We haven't seen the national print edition, so we don't know if it appears there -- but we assume it does.

Coincidentally, the editorial "Finally, a Teachers' Contract," which focuses on a late-breaking NYC issue and appears in print in the local Late Edition, does not appear online. We assume it's not in the national print edition either (presumably because it's of less interest, nationally). Anyway, what to make of this? Only that in our Webified times your Times, his Times, her Times, and our Times are not necessarily the same Times. And there've been no comments about this -- or none that we've seen yet -- at The Annotated Times.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

"A pitbull in size 6 shoes" -- that's what the Bullshitter-in-Chief has called Harriet Miers, right, the trusted adviser and legal gofer he nominated this morning to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. What does that say about Miers's judicial temperament, let alone his arrogance? Next question ...

So here it is: Did she really say (this comes courtesy of Salon.com's Daou Report) what David Frum is reported to have said she said? "She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: A rhyme with reason ...

LOWERING THE BAR

Miers the minimum,
Lawyer by trade;
No known philosophy,
Judicial blockade.

If Miers shot down,
Deemed unfit,
Bush warming up
An illiterate.

-- Leon Freilich

It's making the rounds on the Internet. But we like it anyway.

Question: How many members of the chief bullshitter's regime does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Ten.

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed;
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed;
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb;
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness;
5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb;
6. One to arrange a photograph of the bullshitter, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner 'Bulb Accomplished';
7. One regime insider to resign and in detail reveal how the bullshitter was literally 'in the dark' the whole time;
8. One to viciously smear No. 7;
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how the chief bullshitter has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along;
10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

And we're still sitting in the dark because no one has changed the lightbulb.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: A reader writes: "Don't you think that the enlightened would change the lightbulb themselves? Oh, wait, that would require effort. Honestly, it's rather tedious to continue the rhetoric, Jan. Most of us have seen the light." -- Joan Hunt

We've been reading "A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib," by Marian and Anita Blasberg, which appears in the online English edition of Der Spiegel. It begins with the sort of anecdotal lede that would try our patience if it weren't so smart and didn't suddenly blossom into the kind of visceral, detailed reporting we don't often encounter:

On the day he lost his innocence before the eyes of the world, Sergeant Javal Davis was sitting in the mess hall at Victory Base in Abu Ghraib prison, eating a plate of rice and tuna fish.

It was April 28, 2004. Insurgents were still launching the occasional rocket-propelled grenade at their base near Baghdad, and CNN was broadcasting images from home: basketball, the White House, Wall Street. It was a normal day at Victory Base. But then the room suddenly went still.

There was a man on the screen, his arms spread out and attached to electrical wires, his head covered with a sandbag. The headline read: "Scandal at Abu Ghraib." Other images followed, images of prisoners on dog leashes, of piles of naked, intertwining bodies.

Someone turned up the volume, and Javal Davis heard the reporter mention his name. A photo from his high-school yearbook flashed across the screen, a picture of a tall black boy with a friendly face and a big smile. Then the Secretary of Defense appeared, talking about seven degenerate soldiers who had brought shame upon the USA.

The story leaps ahead "14 months later" to Newark, N.J., where Davis is sitting in his attorney's office four months after being released from prison, "the first of the nine soldiers America took to court and charged with dereliction of duty and conspiracy, with assault and sexual humiliation of prisoners." Davis wonders why his country has punished him and not the higher-ups "responsible for creating the system of torture and abuse." Leafing through various papers that attest to his character before he went into the military -- an employee-of-the-month award, college transcripts, a personal reference -- he asks, "Am I a bad person?"

Across the world Hajj Ali, who was released from Abu Ghraib 16 months ago, is sitting on a sofa in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan, with "the curtains drawn," though it is "a beautiful summer day," to keep him from seeing the girls "lounging in bikinis at the pool" below his window.

Hajj Ali reaches for a pack of cigarettes with his right hand and uses his lips to extract a Marlboro. Then he starts up his laptop and calls up an Iraqi Web site, albasrah.net, that shows the pictures from Abu Ghraib. He scrolls through the site, pausing occasionally: "Here," says Hajj Ali, "this is Abu Hudheifa, the imam, lying in the hallway with his gunshot wounds. Or here, Sabrina Harman, bending over the dead from the shower room."

Hajj Ali speaks slowly and quietly. His voice sounds a little hoarse.

"Graner," he says, "that pig."

Then comes one of the most gripping details you're liable to read anywhere.

He scrolls down to a picture of a man standing on a box wearing nothing but a black blanket, his upper body bent forward slightly, his arms attached to wires and a hood over his head. Hajj Ali swallows and zooms in on one of the hands. "Look," he says, "something isn't right about the hand; it seems injured."

Hajj Ali says he is convinced that he is the man in this picture.

The story has seven parts, each filled with intimate, chilling revelations about war crimes we think we've become familiar with, but which until now have remained distant and hidden, despite all the books and all the column inches already published about them, and impossible to fully appreciate.

We've also been reading our favorite literary critic, Clive James, right, in tomorrow's unusually rich edition of The New York Times Book Review. His spendid putdown of Elias Canetti's "Party in the Blitz" offers gems of wit that force us to forgive his conservative leanings. James writes, for example, that the "comparative brevity" of this memoir "should be taken ... as its chief virtue." It is, after all, the work of "a particularly bright egomaniac" who "measured himself against other men according to the adamantine strength of his self-regard," James notes.

Canetti, left, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1981, wrote previous memoirs which, according to James, "not only take him to be the center of events -- a standard strategy in autobiographical writing, and often an entertaining one -- they proceed on the assumption that no events matter except those centered on him." But the review is not all out-and-out brickbats. Sometimes they are backhanded brickbats, like calling this memoir "so delightfully awful that it makes his self-satisfied literary personality palatable at last." Or this:

On the threshold of death's door, Canetti saw nothing to be worried about when he examined his conscience. On this evidence, he couldn't even find it. Instead, he wrote a book fit to serve every writer in the world as a hideous, hilarious example of the tone to avoid when the ego, faced with the certain proof of its peripheral importance, loses the last of its inhibitions.

A warning to bloggers everywhere.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands