Today's the 65th anniversary of the Germans' Blitzkrieg on Poland, and here is the poem W.H. Auden wrote about it. Always a puzzling disavowal, Auden wished it deleted from his vast collected work. Few people can.

Yours -- E.K. (Got Comments? Write me at ekblog@yahoo.com)

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.                                ©1940 W.H. Auden

On September 1, 1939, lightning hit and killed 835 sheep that had been bedded down for the night on the top of Pine Canyon in the Raft River Mountains of Box Elder County in northwestern Utah. Rain from a passing thunderstorm wet the ground and sheep, causing the lightning's electrical discharge to move completely through the herd of female sheep and lambs. The next morning, fifteen sheep (out of 850) were found alive but in a dazed condition. The sheepherder was knocked temporarily unconscious, but escaped death because he was in a tent. However, burned spots on his canvas tent revealed he probably missed the fate of the sheep by only a slim margin. (Text and photo courtesy of the Utah Center for Climate and Weather and the National Weather Service.)

Lots of ink and hand wringing about the state of the Kerry campaign appeared out of nowhere yesterday on the evening news and the Internet.  Suddenly the air is full of "Kerry shake-up" rumors.  Of course when you look close its always "Democratic sources outside the Kerry campaign” who are predicting the gloom and doom.  These sources are of course never named.  The Iron Mouth calls for truth in news: they are “Democratic sources angling for a job.”   

What about the timing?  I'm willing to bet that on any given day, there are a large number of “Democratic Sources outside the campaign” who are anxious to let the world know of their plan for the Kerry effort.  So why does the story “break” on day 2 of the GOP convention?  Enter the Television Producer--the person whose job it is to find “stories” to play on the news.  The Producer calls a few people he knows, perhaps on Zell Miller's staff, who will gladly tell him the candidate is in trouble.  Thus TV news drama is heightened--and Bush handlers don't call the Network to threaten banishment to the overflow press room for the Network's correspondents because they led with a story explaining that the President of the United States had to change his position on the winnability of the War on Terror. 

Let's face it--Kerry had a tough two weeks--but that's to be expected.  Bush planned his big SBVT push to be during the month of August when Kerry would be laying low, trying to save money because he had an extra month in which he had to make his $75 million work.  So it is nearly inevitable that Kerry would take a hit at this point in the campaign.

But the fact of the matter is this, campaigns go in cycles and sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down.  We need some of that ol' Clinton toughness--the kind that got us through a real scandal--one where our guy did do something wrong.  So stick to your guns John.

Ponder and deliberate before you make a move.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Can We Win The War on Terror?

Yesterday morning, President Bush was asked by Matt Lauer of the Today Show if the War on Terror could be won.  The President replied “I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.”  Bush was wrong.  The War on Terror could have been won.  But the Administration failed to see the War on Terror in coherent policy terms.  This strategic failure continues to this day and threatens to result in defeat for the United States.

The goal of the United States in the War on Terror should have been simple—to dismantle terrorist networks planning to attack the U.S. by physically capturing or killing their members and destroying their ties to the communities which supported them.  Thus a proper strategy for the United States in the war would involve an all-out attempt to capture the leaders and footsoldiers of al Qaeda, coupled with a public-relations blitz to separate the Arab masses and terrorist funders from al Qaeda’s brutal brand of Islam. 

A quick application of the ideas of the celebrated military theorist von Clausewitz supports this conclusion.  Clausewitz held that war was state policy by means of force.  A corollary to this concept was that the center of gravity of resistance to this policy must be identified and blow after blow must be directed towards it.  In popular uprisings of the sort similar to today’s terrorist campaigns, Clausewitz held that personalities of the uprising’s leaders and public opinion were the center of gravity. Clausewitz also advised that the best way to begin a war was with the defeat and destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces. 

Yet this Administration has never approached the War on Terror with anything approaching a coherent strategy of any type.  Although it acted to quickly eliminate the Taliban and the terrorist training camps as Clausewitz would have advised, it quickly lost focus once major military operations in Afghanistan ended.  It never adopted a unified strategy with which to pursue the goal of eliminating Islam-inspired terrorism aimed at the United States.  Major al Qaeda leaders remain alive to inspire, if not direct, their followers.  Rather than capture these leaders and take down their networks, the Bush Administration instead sought to graft the major thrust of its pre-September 11th Middle East policy—eliminating the régime of Saddam Hussein—onto the War on Terror. 

Setting aside theories that the War on Terror was a smoke-screen for neocons to fulfill pro-Israel wish lists, the Administration apparently hoped an attack on Iraq would result in victory in the War on Terror.  According to the most coherent of these dubious theories, Islamic peoples surrounding the new successful Iraqi democracy would demand the same of their leaders, somehow causing Muslim public opinion to accept pro-Western values.  Other theories implied that American victory over Hussein would make anti-American elements in Islamic countries cower in fear.  Even on their face these two ideas suffer from an incompatibility which has played a large role in the looming specter of an American defeat in Iraq, a defeat sure to embolden our enemies and balk our friends.

This war is not lost, however.  But the chances of victory are much less now.  Victory requires twin Gordian feats:  a stable Iraq must be created while drawing out the troops necessary to hunt and kill terrorist leaders, and the massive damage created to world public opinion by the ill-conceived adventure in Iraq must be reversed.  It is clear that a second Bush administration can do neither.  

Alan Greenspan:  Great sage.  Effectively ended long standing practice of Fed Chairman keeping their own political opinions to themselves.

bipartisanship:  Noble.  Fool's bet in current practice.

budget deficits:  Mysterious imbalance between money coming in and going out.  Almost never the fault of the party in power.

character:  An attribute quickly losing all meaning.  Slowly replacing patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels.

conservatism:  A philosophy that holds the past takes precedent over the future.  Currently characterized by exploding budget deficits and unending foreign entanglements.

draft:  Controversial.  Made unnecessary by the frequency of National Guard deployments overseas.

Enron:  Victim of its own success.  Undefeated champion of the California Energy crisis.

France:  Snooty.  Misguided underwriter of the American Revolution.

gay marriage.  Greatest threat to the family.  Divorce a close second.

heroism.  No longer attributed to those with medals or great achievements.  Reserved for those exhibiting cocky swagger.  

Iraq:  A mess.  Locals not working out as expected.

Jesus:  Saves.  Arrested for vagrancy at the Second Coming.

Libertarianism:  Competing with Anarchism for the utopian dreamer crowd.

nation building:  Bad in 1994.  Just the ticket in 2004.

neoconservatives:  Wrong in the 1970's, 80's and 90's.  Visionary in the 21st Century.

progressive taxation:  Difficult to defend.  95% of Americans think they are in the top tax bracket.

Pundits:  Sad group.  Arbiters of the Conventional Wisdom minus the wisdom part.

Red States:  Home of strength, virtue, and common sense.  Historically first in line at the Federal teat.

stem cell research:  Dawn of a new era in medical research.  Best left to foreign scientists and institutions.

Ten Commandments:  Best displayed in government office buildings.  Not taken seriously when placed in church lobby.

Terror alerts:  Colorful but confusing.  May be based on what Secretary Ridge had for breakfast three years ago.

1.         Tactical Dimension: A Public Narrative—Kerry Lied, Bush Smears

In the short term, Kerry has been hurt by the SBVT ads.  The lies of Rove & Co. have struck a glancing blow against his leadership credentials.  The Bush team has succeeded in moving the focus of the news off Bush and onto Kerry for the first time in many months.  Polling conducted before the Kerry counter-attack showed Bush eating into Kerry’s lead.  Bush has finally succeeded in moving the needle in his direction.

Bush also sought to pull out the old bully’s trick of provoking a response and then trying to act cool when the inevitable response comes.  Although the Kerry camp did play into Rove’s hands by complaining to the FEC, (“Mom! he’s over on my side of the car seat!”), and by staging the Max Cleland visit to Crawford, there is little worry the electorate will see the generally stolid Kerry as unbalanced.

But Kerry’s response also showed the Democrat’s determination to bring forth a new meme: Bush is a smear artiste.  This will have the longest-lasting effect of any aspect of the SBVT ads.

An added dimension was the “bitch slap” meme brought out by Josh Marshall.  The Kerry camp used the SBVT episode as a springboard to establish the democratic nominee’s cojones credentials. View Josh's Post here

Adding up the score indicates that Kerry lost 2 points to Bush’s one.  Kerry’s war credentials took a slight hit that may or may not have lasting impact in the minds of Americans, but SBVT’s ads have been clearly linked to the Bush campaign in the minds of a plurality of voters.  View the poll here (Warning Adobe requried).  This is the most important aspect of the Kerry attempt to turn the tables on the SBVT attacks.

2.         The Strategic Dimension: The Law of Diminishing Returns

But two steps forward, one step back is not enough for Bush.  With the right track/wrong track numbers showing the majority of the country believing that the country is on the wrong track, View Current Right/Track Wrong-Track Polling, the Bush Team must succeed in moving the needle much farther in his favor and fast.  These numbers are critical for an incumbent president and without serious movement, they spell doom in big letters for the President.  The Bush team must create a series of SBVT’s to bring Kerry down to where Bush is now. 

But the Kerry Camp’s response to SBVT made it highly unlikely that the Republicans will be able to unleash a series of more attack ads like this one.  Linking Bush to “smear” attacks makes new attacks much less likely. 

In short, Kerry’s team has sent Bush a strong message:  Your attacks will come at a price.  As the press has finally decided that its job is to report facts and not to allow lies to pose as opinions worthy of airing, the SBVT allegations have fallen apart.  The electorate and the press are unlikely to give another round of sleaze a second glance.  Bush will be forced to fight the election on grounds he would rather not: the actual state of the country.

These are hard times for the Fourth Estate.  It is an entity that currently seems bereft of any real mission save a corrosive song and dance cynicism that neither enlightens nor informs.  Frankly I’m not going to sugarcoat the past, but do you really think the Founding Fathers were hoping that the nation’s citizenry should not have the tools to decide their own fate or that of the nation as a whole?  I’ve watched with despair a long series of events in which the one entity we should count on to inform us seems wholly unprepared to handle even its most basic responsibilities, and even more disappointingly makes excuses for that lack of performance by often blaming the victims of its callous disregard.  Certainly we can say that there are some incredible reporters and columnists out there doing solid work but the exceptions don’t make the rule.  While watching what amounts to libel passed along as merely one man’s opinion by those who at least should know better, I thought I’d offer a series of suggestions to our much ballyhooed media elite… especially those stuck within the Beltway.

1.  Judge them by what they do, not by who they say they are:  We are often bombarded with personality pieces masquerading as actual analysis of the news of the day, and quite often reality seems to take a back seat to some sort of weird rote psychoanalysis put forth by journalists who are frankly not qualified to comment.  Depending on the subject, this kind of coverage rewards not only outright character assassination but also a very creepy cult of personality worship we used to associate with Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, not American Democracy.  If you turn on the news and suddenly see George W. Bush spending his birthday swimming across the Rio Grande with his security entourage, don’t say that I didn’t warn you!  But then again, how different would that be from the most recent round of “Ask President Bush” campaign events or even that aircraft carrier stunt last year? 

Any journalist should know that public figures throughout time have always resorted to some form of carefully crafted image or façade to give them credibility or standing, on the other hand, your job is to neither blindly perpetuate that façade, nor is your job to applaud its cleverness when it is continually contradicted by the facts!  In fact, when a public figure’s actions contradict their image then they are fair game for criticism and they should not only be held to account, but under particularly egregious circumstances they should be held up to ridicule, if not contempt… and I’m not just talking about Britney Spears!

Hint:  A president who has a well crafted image as a heroic, tough guy straight-shooter but who has held fewer press conferences than any president since it became a conventional part of a president’s duty either 1.) has something to hide, 2.) cannot handle criticism, or 3.) is woefully unprepared to handle even the basic duties and expectations of the Presidency.  Better yet, if that same tough-guy president refuses to come before an investigative committee without his vice-president present, you have to question whether his reputation is well deserved or merely convenient.

 Another rule of thumb along the same lines:  If a public figure or organization does something that is so out of character that its too good to be true, don’t be afraid to be suspicious of their motives.  Recently Matthew Yglesias ridiculed the coverage of the Labor Department’s new overtime rules or more specifically the unchallenged motives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in supporting the measure.  Anyone knows that the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t go out of its way to praise regulations that hurt its members, in fact quite the opposite, so imagine my surprise when journalists couldn’t figure out which side had more credibility on the subject.

Hint:  If the #1 pro-business lobbying organization in the country says that the new rules will cost our members a bundle of money and we support it wholeheartedly, you really have to wonder if those rules are a going to benefit most workers at all.  Feel free to mention that instead of splitting the difference and suggesting that criticism from the AFL-CIO is merely shrill and in keeping with a rigid outdated organization…after all, didn’t they see that the Chamber of Commerce is making some sacrifices, too?

Our system of government rests on the principle that public officials need to be held to account for what they do, not who they are, and if you don’t understand the difference you might want to move on to a career in advertising because journalism should not be about touting the latest defective name-brand product to come along.

More later….

Welcome to The Iron Mouth. The Iron Mouth will be speaking daily. Topics you will hear the Mouth speak of may include politics, culture, religion, outsourcing, bail bondsmen, turncoats, anti-antidisestablishmentarianism, under use of punctuation, and others.

The Mouth starts as five friends, but the door is kept slightly ajar: three within the deep savage heart of the D.C Beltway, one perched aloft the glassy, reflective towers of nearby Baltimore, the last in Middle America. Of course, these friends don't always share the same point of view, though as friends they certainly try to get along.

The Iron Mouth is named after La Bouche de Fer, a journal published by the Cercle Social, a club founded by Abbe Claude Fauchet (1744-1793). Fauchet, a revolutionary priest, was a leader of the attack on the Bastille and styled himself the "Attorney General of the Truth" in the French Revolution. Viva.