I Travel

Sorry not to have written lately. I spent much of last weekend flying over this rather large country of ours (and then dealing with all sorts of work and family-related business upon my return). My brother got hitched (yes!) to a terrific lady, so I flew out to the Bay Area on Friday night, participated in their elegant wedding and awesome afterparty at this inn (on top of a mountain overlooking the Bay) on Saturday night, and flew back to JFK on Sunday night for work Monday morning. My head's still spinning and I caught a cold, but it was worth it!

Haven't flown much since 9/11, so it was cool to find a channel on the telly on the back of the seat in front of me that tracked the location of the plane on a map, as well as its altitude, and air speed. It made me feel less anxious about being crammed into a tin can, thousands of feet in the air, in a contraption that seems all too heavy to even lift off the ground, let alone fly...

When I was a kid, my parents drove us all over the US. It was cheap (my parents' obsession), and we had lots of friends and relatives to stay with (mooch off of) along the way. (At some point, we added up all the States that I'd been too and the number was in the high 40s...) My parents also liked to camp, so much so that I can't stand the thought of camping with my kids when they're older.

I've always had too active an imagination to be out in the dark in the wilderness...and I'll always remember my first camping trip with the cub scouts. To set us on edge from the outset, one of the kids in our den puked out the window on the car ride up (spewing all over the fake wood siding of the boat-like Chevy wagon); there was a stream literally right outside of our tent and, as a result, the ground all around was mucky; at the campfire that night with some of the boy scouts, one of the scoutmasters told us this cock-and-bull story about aliens having landed in a park near where I lived--and then one of the scouts swings into the midst of us on a rope all Tarzan-like with an alien mask on and screaming his head off, scaring the living crap out of all of us 9 and 10 year-olds (we all wanted our mommies that night). Needless to say, I didn't sleep much, when the only thing separating me from whatever was lurking in the dark was a thin layer of nylon...and for years later I was always worried about being abducted by aliens whenever our family went camping (I'd also seen my fair share of creepy, made-for-TeeVee alien abduction movies and too many episodes of "In Search of..."). Good times. Really.

I also remember being fascinated that my dad could find his way, no matter where the hell we were in some backwoods part of America, with the aid of a map (and when I was young, it blew my mind that there were maps of every road in our country). And I learned to read a map from him (most likely so I could figure out how much longer we had to be in the car until we reached our destination), as well as plot out a route to take one from point A to B. A lost art, I'm sure, in the age of Mapquest and on-board GPS navigation systems...

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"I Travel" is from Simple Minds' "Empires and Dance" album.

Is Your Love is Like a Button?/You Can't Stop Pushing It?

Does anyone over 18 wear buttons ('badges' in Brit-talk) of their favorite bands anymore?

I've got a beat up jean jacket that I'm starting to decorate with a slew of badges that I had from my favorite bands. But I wanted more and was having a hard time finding a store or website that had a good selection of post-punk and alternative bands...until I found Mock the Rock.

Dude! I hit paydirt. My order just came in yesterday with buttons from Echo and the Bunnymen, Art Brut, Blur, Kaiser Chiefs, The Smiths, Super Furry Animals, Pulp, Supergrass, Futureheads, Psychedelic Furs, Elvis Costello, The Cure, Dandy Warhols, Elastica (!), The Fall, The Modern Lovers, The Pretenders, and T-Rex. And looking over the site just now, there are a bunch more than I'm gonna buy.

Go there now and get some badges, pin them on yer jacket, shirt, or bag--and see how many people will come and talk to you about 'em!

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Today's song lyric is from General Public's "Tenderness" off "All the Rage," their self-titled, debut album.

Ignore All Those Fools/They Don't Understand/We Make Our Own Rules

I think President Bush should now be considered the worst worstest president ever in the history of the US of A. Yesterday, he signed into law a bill that should make the Founding Fathers rise from their graves to tar and feather Dubya, as it is so antithetical to everything that our country represents.

Shame on you President Bush (and VP Cheney). And shame on us for not rising up in righteous fury to protest the suspension of habeas corpus for anyone jailed by our government. I don't care if you're a citizen or not, the laws of our nation should apply equally to everyone! And shame on us for allowing people--whether they are terrorists or not--to be tortured in our name!

Here are the ugly details from Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing in the Washington Post:

"President Bush this morning proudly signed into law a bill that critics consider one of the most un-American in the nation's long history.

The new law vaguely bans torture -- but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn't. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture."

Don't it make you proud to be an A-murican? And for God's sake, what has Bush done over the past six years that would make us want to trust him to decide who should be imprisoned and for how long--and if they should be tortured or not?

Here's what the ACLU has to say about this travesty:

"With his signature, President Bush enacts a law that is both unconstitutional and un-American. This president will be remembered as the one who undercut the hallmark of habeas in the name of the war on terror. Nothing separates America more from our enemies than our commitment to fairness and the rule of law, but the bill signed today is an historic break because it turns Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. facilities into legal no-man's-lands.

"The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."

With powers like this, isn't President Bush more like a Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il--a leader unfettered by laws of man or decency? Should we now expect to address Dubya as Dear or Supreme Leader?

Osama's got to be proud. All he had to do was convince a bunch of crazies to slam a few airliners into a three (almost four) buildings and kill 3,000 Americans to convince Bush and Cheney to destroy everything that is sacred to us: our freedom, our values, our laws, and our Constitution.

Here's hoping that the Dems come back into power in Congress and reintroduce the concept of checks and balances into our government--and that the courts overturn this outrageous, revolting law.

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This post's title lyrics come from The Damned's "I Just Can't Be Happy Today," off of the brilliant "Machine Gun Etiquette" album.

Buy and Sell You/Terrorize You/Mass Destruct You

As someone who is related to several women (wife, daughter, mothers, sisters, niece, and grandmothers), has women friends and colleagues, and is generally concerned about women's status in our society, I feel compelled to point out Bob Herbert's column in yesterday's Times:

"In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls."

And...

"We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men."

Obviously, there are no simple answers here--clearly we need stronger laws protecting women from violence, hate crimes, and discrimination at work and home--but there also need to be seismic changes in our attitudes, habits, and culture. Hollywood and Madison Avenue have become so skilled at exploiting women's sexuality--and manipulating men's sexual desires--in order to sell just about anything you can buy. Yet, no father wants his daughter to be treated as a sex object, though we're perfectly happy to get off on the sexualized image of someone else's daughter in an ad, show, movie, video game, or music video (that generates gobs of money for corporations).

I'm not calling for widespread censorship or a culture-war clampdown on anything remotely sexual. We're a free and democratic society first and foremost. But all of us need to do some soul-searching and realize that, collectively, we have an enormously destructive problem on our hands, and act to change things for the better. We need to teach our boys in such a way so they grow up to respect women and treat them as full equals; to teach our girls that they should never settle for being treated as second class citizens; and we need to become more aware of what the corporations are dishing out--and refuse to consume what they're selling if the product or ad campaign is degrading to women.

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The "buy and sell you" lyrics are from the Super Furry Animals' song "Slow Life," which can be found on their "Phantom Power" album (which is one of the best 9/11-related records I've ever heard).

My City Was Gone, Part 2

If you are of a certain age and grew up in the New York City area, you probably found yourself at CBGBs to see a name act or a friend's band up on that tiny stage. While it was an incredibly vital part of the NYC music scene during the 70s and 80s (you know, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, Richard Hell, etc.)--the center of the underground and punk NY music universe at its peak--this simply wasn't the case in the 90s and 00s. The punk/alternative scene exploded, better venues came and went, kids grew up, most of the Ramones died (except for Tommy!), and the Bowery (and all the scuzzy, marginal neighborhoods in Manhattan) was gentrified. Can't stop change or the future.

CBs had become just another nasty pit with a glorious past and a brand name recognized world-wide.

After much wrangling with its landlord (ironically, a homeless shelter), CBs had its last show with the Patti Smith Group last night and is now closed. CB's owner, Hilly Kristal has talked about moving the club to Vegas (literally taking down some of the walls with its layers upon layers of band stickers, fan graffiti, and filth and piecing them back together Humpty Dumpty style on the Strip). This seems right to me. If the CBs on the Bowery couldn't be turned into some sort of landmarked punk museum (which would have been kind of cool...), the next best thing is to pack up the club and re-open/re-invent itself in the only other American city that doesn't sleep, makes gobs of money off of sin, and has a casino that sports a fake NYC skyline...

I dunno, it seems kinda punk rawk to me.

Are Friends Electric?

Warning: Geek Fanboy Posting

If you're not watching the revamped "Battlestar Galactica" on SciFi, you're missing one of the best written, produced, and acted show on the telly. Forget the cheesy 70s series with its shiny chrome robots and feather-haired B-level actors. The producers of the new Galactica took the basic premise--that the robots in another part of the galaxy revolted and killed nearly all of the humans on their twelve colony homeworlds, and are hunting down the few thousand survivors who escaped on a motley group of civilian and military spaceships--and jettisoned almost everything else.

A big new development is that the Cylons have evolved and now, shades of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers," look, feel, and act exactly the same as human beings (though there is limited diversity...the "skinjobs" only come in a few models, but there are many copies of each), and that they believe they are doing God's bidding. To orient yerself in this universe, check out the excellent 2-hour mini-series movie on DVD and you'll be able to jump into the series from there--or check out this handy primer.)

Anyhoo, the third season premiered a week ago, with a premise that only a science fiction show can get away with: the humans, who had thought they had found a planet to inhabit that was unknown to the Cylons--dubbed New Caprica--are now living under Cylon occupation (much like Vichy France under the Nazis, with the human President techically still head of state, but in reality very much compromised). Of course, many of the crew of the Galactica, the good soldiers that they are, have opted to fight back using guerilla tactics. The human insurgents are shown blowing up a Cylon ship and send a suicide bomber to the graduation of the first class of police academy recruits (who are viewed as traitorous collaborators), which ends up killing many humans and a few Cylons (who don't die, but have their personalities/memories transferred to another robot body through--and I love this--a 'resurrection machine'). The Cylons respond with increasingly harsh measures, including unlawful detentions, interrogations that include torture, and rounding up lists of suspected insurgents in the middle of the night and making them "disappear" in a ravine outside of town.

That's right folks...in this brave new world, we've confronted the enemy and he is us: we're the Cylons.

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"Are 'Friends' Electric?" is from Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army's "Replicas" album.

The Kids are Alright

Bill Maher (love him or hate him...I do both) has a pretty spot on take on the many child predators among us apart from Mark Foley.

And we get upset when animals sometimes devour their young?!

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Hope I die before I get old, indeed.

My City Was Gone

I know it's not like I'm living in Baghdad or Beirut and my local supermarket or hospital has just been blown up, but the recent news that two of my most beloved NYC stores are closing really bums me out. Both Coliseum Books (an independent bookstore that I've been going to since the late 70s) and Tower Records (where I bought LPs in the early 80s and CDs at the end of that decade!) are kaput, killed off by mega competition from thousands of internet-based discounters, iTunes and file-sharing, and Manhattan's ridiculously high rents. (I'd much rather hit an indie record or book store than a chain or go on-line...but there are almost none anywhere near where I work or live!)

I stopped by the Lincoln Center Tower yesterday. All CDs were on sale and, as a result, blood is in the air -- people were frantically picking through the stacks like buzzards pecking at the flesh and bones of some mass of roadkill. And I guiltily picked up some CDs (The Saints and Los Abandoned) that I couldn't ever expect to find at the local Best Buy.

Change is good...inevitable, really. But NYC is rapidly losing so much of what had made it so unique and vital for so much of my life. And neighborhoods that used to be so out on the fringe of things (and have all these funky people, shops, restaurants, and bars) have been transformed into the playgrounds of the very, very rich.

Hate to sound like a cranky old man talking 'bout how great things were back in the day...but they really were!

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"My City Was Gone" is from my favorite Pretenders album, "Learning to Crawl." Chrissy Hynde mourns the destruction of her hometown of Akron, Ohio during the Reagan years: "All my favorite places/in my city had been pulled down/reduced to parking spaces."

Music for Boys

It's fascinating how the pompous, moral majority right-wingers in our country are so quick to blame liberals/Democrats for all our ills (see Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on gays, pagans, the ACLU, liberals, secularists, pro-choicers, etc.), especially in light of the Foley scandal, which of course, is the Democrats' fault (even though it is becoming quite clear that the GOP and House leadership have known about Congressman Foley's sexual harassment of/predatory behavior toward underage House pages for years and didn't do a damn thing about it). Let's see, the GOP controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and has purged our Federal agencies of people not loyal to Bush, but somehow the right wing Republicans are still the underdogs, fighting against the godless pagans who threaten their very existence by teaching the theory of evolution in schools (we're related to the damn dirty apes!), recognizing that the separation of church and state is enshrined in our Constitution, believing in global warming (c'mon, the environment isn't going to matter after WWIII/the Rapture -- the good people will be living in heaven, and the pagan zombies will be eating each other's brains on the burned-out remnants of Earth), and by the mere suggestion that imposing government regulation on businesses might be a good way to protect the well-being of the average Joe and Jane American.

Paul Krugman has an interesting take on the rampant conspiracy-theory paranoia that pervades the GOP and people living in the reality-challenged, parallel universe Red State America:

"Last week Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, explained the real cause of the Foley scandal. "The people who want to see this thing blow up," he said, "are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros."

Most news reports, to the extent they mentioned Mr. Hastert's claim at all, seemed to treat it as a momentary aberration. But it wasn't his first outburst along these lines. Back in 2004, Mr. Hastert said: "You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from."

Does Mr. Hastert really believe that George Soros and his operatives, conspiring with the evil news media, are responsible for the Foley scandal? Yes, he probably does. For one thing, demonization of Mr. Soros is widespread in right-wing circles. One can only imagine what people like Mr. Hastert or Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times, who once described Mr. Soros as "a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust," say behind closed doors.

More generally, Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style in American politics."

I thought the right wingers were trying to keep their anti-Semitism in check, since Israel supposedly is playing its part in bringing about Armageddon. You'd think they'd try to shut-up in public at least until the Rapture, when Jesus will come back and slaughter all the Jews, pagans, non-believers, etc., and embrace all of the Christian evangelicals to his bosom as he swoops them up for eternal bliss in heaven (this ain't too far from the whole 77 virgins at your beck and call in Paradise that the Islamic fundamentalists are peddling to would-be suicide bombers, is it? Though the Muslim vision seems a bit more on the fun side of eternity...). Isn't God's plan really great? And, as usual, the Republicans use everyone else as a means to their own ends!

The New York Times reports today that "Evangelicals Blame Foley, Not Republican Party." Of course, since they see homosexuality as a sin (and many are convinced that gay men are pedophiles who "recruit" boys to this type of sexual orientation), it's quite easy for them to focus on this non-scandalous aspect of the scandal, that Mark Foley is gay. Though, for the life of me, why would any gay person be a member of the Republican party? The GOP hates gays (along with black people, Jewish people, people of color, liberal people, immigrant people, French people, Muslim people, etc.)

Foley's attempts at excusing his own inexcusable behavior -- his alcoholism, his alleged sexual abuse by a priest -- are outrageous. Shouldn't he be atoning for his sins and asking for forgiveness instead of playing the so-called blame game? WWJD, indeed!

Two of my favorite things to come out of Foleygate:

1) How do you separate the boys from the men? Mid-term elections!

2) Fox "News" identified GOP Congressman Foley as a Democrat several times during the Bill O'Reilly show! (And I'm paranoid enough to believe that they did this on purpose to trick their viewers into believing that this was another Democratic sex scandal a la Bubba-Monica.)

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"Music for Boys" is from The Suburbs' "Credit in Heaven" album.

A Phone Box Full of Books (Is My Name in There?)

I’m a big supporter of libraries. Where else can you walk in off the street, take out any book, DVD, CD home for weeks at a time (gotta love the fact that you can renew your loan on-line), and not pay a dime. If they don’t have the book/CD/DVD you’re looking for, you can even have it delivered to your local branch library from their city-wide collection. Pretty cool. I even send the NYPL a donation now and then to help support ‘em. As RIF says, "reading is fundamental."

There’s a small public library near one of the places I work, so I hit it every now and then during lunch. Admittedly, its collection is pretty limited (though its children’s library rocks), but like a bibliophile archeologist, I like rummaging through the stacks to see what surprises I can unearth.

Big score the other day was “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” (somehow appropriate given my love of music and as my 40th birthday looms over me next month – I’ve got another 40 good years at least, I hope, to go…). When I saw this book at Barnes and Noble last year, I wrote it off as some as some gimmicky tome of pap. But flipping through it, I discovered that its selection of albums from the 1950s through 2005 was pretty amazing – and that the majority of reviews were smart, insightful, and really well written. I was particularly impressed with the Post-punk/New Wave, Alternative, and Britpop albums they chose (and while they cover hip-hop fairly well, not enough reggae is in there, mates). Everyone will have their quibbles over what was excluded (as well as included), but it gets mad props for not playing it middle-of-the-road safe. Of course, it turns out that the editors and writers are British (compare this book to the relatively sucky Spin or Rolling Stone ‘best of music’ books, and they just aren’t up to the task). Might just have to actually buy this book.

If you’re looking for some good on-line music review sources for Alternative, Post-Punk/New Wave, and Reggae music, check out Trouser Press, All Music Guide, and PopMatters. AMG and PopMatters are updated daily, and Trouser Press has a pretty lively message board that is worth checking out frequently. I know there is a huge buzz about Pitchfork, but half the time I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, and they tend to review a lot of rather obscure indie rock bands – who deserve the coverage – but they’re just not my scene.

Trouser Press started out as one of the first independent music magazines in the US (1974-1984) to cover the Post-Punk/New Wave scene back in the late 70s and first half of the mid 80s. The now out-of-print second edition of the “The Trouser Press Record Guide” was my music bible for the late-80s and early 90s – its one of my most prized music books (I really dig pop-culture reference type books – Leonard Maltin’s movie guide and one of the Guinness World Record books were throne reading throughout high school).

The reviews on AMG vary (though Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s critiques are usually spot on, and the ska and reggae reviews my Jo-Ann Green and Rick Anderson are quite good, as well -- disclaimer, I think I dealt with all of them when I was doing promotions and marketing for Moon Records in the 90s), but the scope of their coverage is mind-bogglingly massive. AMG also sends out a list of new releases worth checking out each Tuesday (when new CDs are placed on the shelves of record stores across the USA – something that is, most sadly, more and more of an anachronism in our iTunes/Amazon world).

PopMatters not only reviews albums and shows, they cover books, comics, movies, and other pop-culture related ephemera. Pretty good stuff.

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The "A phone box full of books/(is my name in there?)" lyric comes from The Clash's "Overpowered by Funk" from "Combat Rock."

Here I am in a Psychopathic World/Trying to Avoid Disaster

In Sunday's New York Times, Richard Clarke, Bill Clinton's counter-terrorism tsar, argued that we all shouldn't focus so much on which administration is to blame for failing to prevent 9/11 (both failed because it happened)...but instead we must figure out where to go from here in protecting the still-vulnerable U.S. from future attacks -- without shredding the Constitution. Since he's the only government official ever to apologize to the American people for failing to prevent 9/11 (during the same 9/11 Commission hearings that Condi Rice was forced to disclose the title of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) from the CIA -- Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S. -- and dismiss it as "historical information"), I'm willing to give some thought to his proposal.

Then again, it's becoming more and more evident that Condi and the Bush administration had plenty of warning that something wicked was this way coming during their first, pre-9/11 8 months in the White House. (And this is playing the blame game, folks -- the Bushies have cast the blame on everyone else -- especially Clinton -- for 9/11, tarred and feathered the Democrats as weak-kneed, pee-in-your-pants sissies when it comes to protecting the nation from terrorists, and used 9/11 to prey on the fears of the American public and manipulate us for their own political ends.)

Yeah, I loved that Clinton got all in Chris Wallace's face on GOP/Fox "News" and forcefully reminded everyone that at least he tried to kill bin Laden and keep al-Qaeda in check (and did indeed warn the Bush administration that they were a grave threat and handed them a plan for combating al Qaeda and the man to lead the effort: Richard Clarke):

"Clinton said he came "closer to killing" Osama bin Laden in a 1998 missile strike on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan than anybody has since.

"I didn't get him," Clinton said. "But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

"So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted."

The most damning revelation that emerged from all this was that in December 2000, Clinton finally learned from the FBI and CIA that the party responsible for the suicide-bomb attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors and wounded another 39, was al Qaeda. Clinton, in his last month as President, decided that the US response (and all its policy implications) should be up to the new administration (contrast this with Bush, who plans to leave mopping up the Iraq mess for the next President):

"[9/11 Commission member] RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think it's an important subject. The issue of the Cole is an important subject, and there has been a lot of politicization over this issue, why didn't President Clinton respond?

"Well, we set forth in the report the reasons, and that is because the CIA had not given the president the conclusion that al Qaeda was responsible. That did not occur until some point in December. It was reiterated in a briefing to the -- to the new president in January....

"[CNN Correspondent] WOLF BLITZER: Well, let me stop you for a second. If former President Clinton knew in December. . . .

"BEN-VENISTE: Right.

"BLITZER: . . . that the CIA and the FBI had, in his words, certified that al Qaeda was responsible, he was still president until January 20, 2001. He had a month, let's say, or at least a few weeks to respond.

"Why didn't he?

"BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think that was a question of whether a president who would be soon leaving office would initiate an attack against a foreign country, Afghanistan. And I think that was left up to the new administration. But strangely, in the transition there did not seem to be any great interest by the Bush administration, at least none that we found, in pursuing the question of plans which were being drawn up to attack in Afghanistan as a response to the Cole."

What did Condi and Dubya do with this vital bit of intel? Nada, zip, zilch. Focused on Star Wars/SDI missile defense. Finishing up Poppy's war in Iraq. Vacationing in Crawford and dismissing the CIA briefer who delivered the August 6, 2001 PDB "Bin Laden Determined to Strike US" that he'd "covered his ass" (quoted in Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine") and to git along, so he could get back to clearing brush.

According to 9-11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, in an interview with CNN:

"One of the questions ... I specifically had, was why President Bush did not respond to the Cole attack. And what he told me was that he did not want to launch a cruise-missile attack against bin Laden for fear of missing him."

Yeah, remember that Clinton got a lot of crap from the Republicans when he fired a cruise missile at bin Laden and failed to hit the target. It's hard being the Decider, isn't it? Your plan might not succeed!

But Condi insisted that she and the Bush administration did all they could to fight al-Qaeda and prevent 9/11 (this from the National Security Advisor who said that no one could imagine terrorists flying airplanes into buildings and that Saddam would leave mushroom clouds in the wake of his imminent attack on the US).

Now we learn that former CIA Director George Tenent met with National Security Advisor Condi Rice to sound the alarm on a sure to be coming al Qaeda attack. According to the New York Times, "on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending Al Qaeda attack that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff."

From an excerpt in the Washington Post quoting Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" tome:

"On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

"Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. . . .

"He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action. . . .

"Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden. . . .

"Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies. . . .

"The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda."

Condi's response to this devastating revelation? "'What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."

That's it? Essentially, a "I don't recall"/"they are lying" defense?

It's worth revisiting another bit of her dissembling, too, in light of all the other warnings that National Security Advisor Rice and others in the Bush administration must have been receiving from our intelligence agencies in the months running up to 9/11. From "What You Think You Know About September 11..But Don't," posted on Slate on September 10, 2003:

The misconception: No one could have predicted the Sept. 11 attacks. Since 9/11, President Bush and his team have repeatedly insisted that the attacks were inconceivable. David Corn chronicles these claims in his new book The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. In May 2002, for example, Condoleezza Rice said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Ari Fleischer echoed her, "Never did we imagine what would take place on Sept. 11 where people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons."

What's wrong with the story: In fact, there were tons of warnings of exactly this kind of attack. The recent congressional report on the 9/11 intelligence failures lists a dozen pre-9/11 indications that terrorists were plotting a suicide hijacking. For example, in 1994 Algerians hijacked an Air France airliner with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. (They were tricked by French officials into landing in Marseilles to refuel, where they were overpowered.) In 1995, police in the Philippines uncovered an al-Qaida plot to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. (One of the plotters: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.) A year later, al-Qaida had the idea of flying a plane from outside the United States and crashing it into the White House. Two years later, al-Qaida planned to fly a plane from outside the United States and crash it into the World Trade Center. And so on.

Intelligence officials, who are endlessly juggling all kinds of different threats, didn't take the suicide-plane schemes seriously because they believed there were other, more imminent dangers. But no one can say they weren't warned."

I'd be a lot more forgiving -- and I think I'm speaking for a lot of people on the left -- if Condi, or Dubya, even Cheney (especially Cheney) had just gone on TV at some point after 9/11 and said "we had some warnings about this, and we should have seen it, and we completely blew it."

But they didn't -- and way too much has gone down since then...

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"How To Avoid Disaster" is by the Aussie punk/rock band, The Saints, from their "All Fool's Day" album.