Robert Stone has just posted some further thoughts to his post from yesterday in response to readers' comments at the bottom of that post. As with everything he writes, you should check it out. He is particularly sharp on the question of whether Abu Ghraib was the deliberate result of policy or the product of pure folly: "I hope nobody thinks that I believe identifying something as a pathetic fuckup automatically excuses it. AG was a crime against humanity -no hyperbole- and a fuckup as well." Yup, and Stone hits it on the head, too, when he addresses the suggestion that crops up repeatedly in the comments that the "bad apples" were psychopaths who merit no sympathy. As he writes: "The responsibility is always partly with the individual but the leadership and placement of these troops, their lack of education, their status as throwaway people from a throwaway poverty belt (All imposed on them by our society and particularly Bush-Cheney) are extenuating. Not exculpatory. Extenuating."

I said in my last post that I would address some points in this week's discussion, so let me start with that last point: the proposition, repeatedly put forward in the comments, that by expressing some sympathy for the MPs who came to be known as the bad apples, I was seeking to let them off the hook. I can assure you that nobody who has read my book, Standard Operating Procedure, has made such a charge.

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If the folks in Congress who are rushing to pass their housing bill really believed that they were helping homeowners rather than banks, they would set up a mechanism to keep score.

In other words, Congress should be asking how much equity, net of selling costs and excess homeownership costs (the difference between monthly ownership costs and rent) homeowners walk away with under the program. (My guess is that this number will be negative.)

That can be compared with the amount of money that the banks make by having Congress issue guaranteed mortgages. I'm confident that any serious account will show the banks get more out of this one than the homeowners. Unfortunately, Congress will probably not appropriate the money to allow for this scorekeeping.

By the way, Senator John Ensign should be proclaimed a hero of moderate-income homeowners everywhere.

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I can't get enough of these neocons.

Martin Peretz is a favorite. Who is he? He's former owner of the New Republic (his wife purchased it for him in the 1960's). He took the best liberal magazine in the country and turned it into a vanity rag dedicated solely to promoting the Likud line on Israel. The magazine lost much of its circulation (the readership switched to The Nation) and eventually Peretz was bought out but kept on as TNR blogger. His day job as teaching assistant at Harvard also ended after many decades.

Since Peretz left, TNR has gotten much better. It is no longer only about defending the occupation. But Peretz still is. Every column he writes is about his passion. His good guys (even artists, scientists, and movie stars) are invariably advocates of the Mideast status quo. His bad guys are always "anti-semites" like Jimmy Carter, critics of Israel, or, the worst, self-hating Jews!

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The weekend is upon us - it has been a full week here at the book club - so rather than try to land a grand conclusion here after Robert Stone's generous wrap-up, and dark notes of hope, I just want to thank everyone who has joined this discussion of Standard Operating Procedure: the excellent panel of discussants, the commentator-respondents, and the vast silent majority of TPM readers (to whom I belong) who take it in without weighing in, and then go out to spread the words or thoughts they've mulled here. E.J. Graff insists that I understate the purpose or activist ambitions of my work - but I assure you, I do not write to change the world but rather to describe how it is, and with the understanding that if it changes in response to anything I say it may not be at all as I would intend or wish it to go. I write and report, I suppose, because I wouldn't know what else to do with myself - because I have to - and in the hope that what I write will be read by thoughtful people who find it worth taking in and perhaps chewing over. One hardly ever knows if or how that's happening, and a book club like this is therefore truly its own reward.

I will respond, over the coming twenty-four hours, in the comments sections, to a number of points and questions raised in this afternoon's posts. I hope that if you've stayed with the discussion to this point, or just found dipping in and out engaging, you will read the book. There's a lot more to it.

Philip Gourevitch's book and Errol Morris's film Standard Operating Procedure are elements of hope in a very bad time. Moral catastrophe has never been, in my experience, examined with such thoroughness of insight. The writer and filmmaker, each in his own way, subject Abu Ghraib and the perception of it to the most sophisticated scrutiny. Their resistance to moral, political ad even photographic obviousness is downright revivifying. The sheer urgency and energy of their work gives us a measure of relief from the numbing shame we have brought on ourselves. The passion for truth--nothing less--that we find in both the book and the documentary allows us to hope that somehow we can work our way out of the pit we've jumped or fallen or been pushed into.

What do their reflections on Abu Ghraib tell us? For one, in case we haven't noticed it, that the Bush-Cheney operation ought never to have been trusted to supervise the deployment of armed troops. This is not the first time we've seen a FUBAR situation grow out of folly, ignorance and antinomian immorality at the top. The history of the Grenada invasion is worth recalling. Thee are a lot of narratives to choose from in Abu Ghraib. The story of troops terrorizing civilians is eternal. Military organizations are dangerous to everyone, as any veteran will testify. Controlling them responsibly requires common sense and thoughtfulness, insistent decency, rigorous adherence to regulations that are in a humane tradition. Requires everything, in other words, that the Bush people so conspicuously lack.

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... In Which E.J. Acknowledges Her Sense of Inadequacy in Responding to Gourevitch & Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, And Yet Does So Anyway

Given the enormity of what we're discussing, and given the fact that unlike others here I am not steeped in questions about war, torture, policing, and related issues, apparently the only way I can write another book club post is to begin by mocking my inadequacies. I signed up to discuss this book for two reasons: first, my sense of overwhelming shame and responsibility, as an American citizen, for the degeneration of my country into one that stands for torture, indefinite detention, "black sites," "extraordinary rendition," and so on. And two, my sense of profound awe at how Morris and Gourevitch's work have moved me to grief about the way those policies have destroyed not just Iraqis but also American young people.

But responding to those large realities--the realities of our national policies, and the realities of what happened to those young reservists who are at the center of S.O.P. the book and S.O.P. the movie--is actually different from responding to the movie and the book as independent objects. The first is a large moral and sociopolitical enterprise; the second is the smaller enterprise of literary criticism. Earlier this week I could only respond to the information and insights that the auteur/authors have given us. Today I want to comment a little about the artistic endeavors.

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Though the tendency here at TPMCafe seems to be mega-posting (the danger of dragging New Yorker-habituated writers into on-line book clubs, I guess), I'm going to keep this brief, and mostly interrogatory, though I'd first like to commend Rory Stewart for noticing something vitally important about the origins of prison catastrophes. He wrote about what might be, in this book, and in this discussion, and in the broad debate about how to prevent other Abu Ghraibs, an over-emphasis on the importance of "well-drafted and well-disseminated regulations," and a concurrent slighting of the importance of employing prison directors who actually walk the prison and have their eyes open to the sort of activities that sensible regulations ban anyway. In my own personal prison, Ketziot, in Israel, the lieutenant colonel in command of my bloc left for home everyday at five p.m., leaving us in the charge of his lunatic deputy, whose behavior was actually constrained by his underlings, including yours truly, on those occasions when I mustered up the guts to call him out for his various idiocies. But this doesn't always happen, and so the most important variable in these sorts of prisons is the quality of the commander, not the stringency of the regulations.

In any case, an answer to one of Philip's questions, and then a question of my own. Philip asked, "Is my crime really lesser, is it somehow mitigated and is your outrage somehow mollified, if I appear to take no pleasure in it?"

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I have to hand it to Hillary Clinton. She just gave a great Democratic speech in Unity, New Hampshire.

It was strong, hard-hitting and generous. It was also softer than her previous speeches. She seems to have been transformed by her campaign. While she was running, it was all about winning. But not in retrospect.

She seems to have become a vessel, embodying the hurt of her most hurting supporters. She conveyed that her support for Obama is not about him or about her. It's about them.

It was a masterful performance and, in many ways, a beautiful one.

Hi -, greetings from Oxford at four-thirty in the morning. Apologies for being so late joining the discussion - and apologies if this is a little long (and effected by lack of sleep). I'd be very interested to hear what you all thought about Philip's question about the draft but I'm particularly responding here to Philip, Mary and Jeffrey's posts and the military and ideological background of the crimes.

I enjoyed the detail in each incident in the book: the glimpses into the MP's living space, the unexpected black humour, which made the atrocities more shocking and more comprehensible. Sometimes the laconic phrases such as 'Harman in a letter to her wife' or "Graner who has been a corrections officer' seemed almost deliberately tantalizing. I would have loved Philip to talk briefly about how Harman's sexuality was viewed within her unit or how it played into the pornographic staging of the photographs; or in Graner's case how he had treated prisoners when he was a corrections officer in the States. But I can see why Philip left those things aside.

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Here's a troubling question that hangs over the Abu Ghraib story: if you look happy when you torment your prisoners is it worse than if you look unhappy about it -- grim, or at least dour?

Appearances matter, for better or worse, and certainly, the more unseemly a criminal's demeanor the more easily and absolutely we revile his actions. The Book Club commenter who calls himself Munguza argues that much of the public outrage over the Abu Ghraib photographs was provoked by the fact that some of the soldiers in some of the pictures "apparently enjoyed brutally abusing Iraqi prisoners," and "indulged in deliberate, premeditated mistreatment as a form of entertainment."

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I'm impressed.

Joe Klein at TIME not only is discussing the neocons' critical role in inflicting the Iraq war on this country but also warning that the same crowd is ginning up for war with Iran.

The reason I say I'm impressed is because it takes serious chutzpah to discuss this issue. As Klein has discovered, talking about the neocons wins one the title of anti-Semite (if one is not Jewish) or self-hating Jew (if one is).

I guess Klein is a self hater although I'm sure that he would join Larry David or Woody Allen (and me) in his response to that charge. "I'm not a self-hating Jew. I like myself. It's you I can't stand."

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• Ghost Who Walks breaks down Hillary's debt and comes up with a figure of 5% of her campaign expenses that she has to cover. "To put it in perspective it's just over double her and her husband's debts when he left office. And about 30-35 speeches from Bill with his typical fee."
• Ripper McCord addresses Bush's "photo-op appeasement" of North Korea. Ripper doesn't understand why everyone is so excited about a "report no thicker than a college term paper" that's only seven months late.
• ItsNeverOver offers her take on the Gloucester High School pregnancy pact. While most of the pundits have been blaming Hollywood, the post points out the drastic increase in teen pregnancy after Bush's abstinence-only sex ed policy.

Last summer, when I left the Republican Party, I did so because I believed it was incapable of change--even in the face of the electoral defeats that led to minority status in the House and Senate. In my book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, I wrote that "the Republican base is strong and rallying behind its ramparts. It is kicking out moderates and vowing never to change. It will crawl over broken glass to support the extreme Republican agenda."

Given its history on clean air standards, I expected a deafening silence from the GOP when in my May 16th post I decried the EPA's weakening of rules on building power plants near national parks. In the piece, I called on Republican Senators Alexander, Warner and Gregg, among others, to speak out on behalf of the national parks and forests in their states and protest what I called "the continuing Bush lunacy" on this issue.

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Offering Senator Clinton the position of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to lead the reform of the American health care system, is a much better answer to the question "What to do about Hillary?" than making her the Vice President. Serving as Secretary of HHS will allow her to leave a mark on American society that will last for many decades, to the benefit of hundreds of millions of Americans--old, young and yet to be born. Furthermore, it will accord her an opportunity to correct major mistakes that she admits to making during her previous attempt to reform the health care system. Also, the position will provide her with a strong platform from which to launch her future political ambitions. As a bonus--whatever mess her husband inserts himself into will not involve the White House.

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Various media outlets report that the Obama-Clinton unity talks are not going so well.

She wants him to pay her campaign debt. He'd rather use the money he raised for his own campaign.

There are also reports that while Hillary is now down with Barack, Bill is still mad. That makes sense. She's still a senator and he's....retired.

Anyway, it will all be fine in the end although Rick posits other possibilities.

What I reported two days ago about the White House asking Congress to remove North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terror list was confirmed a few moments ago by President Bush.

In a Rose Garden statement, President Bush also suspended sanctions on North Korea that are tied to the "Trading with Enemies Act".

This is huge news -- and is a giant step in putting US-North Korea relations on a new and more constructive track. This is a success for the Bush administration -- and more importantly for Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian & Pacfic Affairs Christopher Hill who has been a punching bag for former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton who has been spitting on Hill's deal-making for the last year.

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Although Obama seems to be "up" in current national polls, McCain is actually doing a much better job of shaping the agenda to his advantage. He has used strong symbols (it does not matter if they are "gimmicks") to portray himself as activist on gas prices and the environment and put apparent distance between himself and Bush. And he has managed to paint Obama as an ordinary schemer on campaign finance. Abetted by the media's proclivity for dramatic gestures and horse race analysis, the McCain camp has done what it needs to portray their man as a fighting underdog focused on real-world issues. Meanwhile, Obama's "economic tour" has gone little noticed -- and his campaign seems not to understand how very difficult it will be to get the media to convey the economic stakes in this election to ordinary voters.

Baldly put, the last two weeks leave me wondering if Obama's campaign is prepared for the general election battle. Here are my questions:

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Rush Limbaugh still imagines a country where the majority of American agree with him.. But this morning the Bloomberg/L.A. Times poll confirmed the earlier Newsweek poll that Obama is up 15 points on McCain.

This freaks El Rushbo out, especially because he sees the coming Democratic landslide as impeding his ability to take home $33 million a year from bloviating on the radio. His problem is that Nancy Pelosi says she might revive the "Fairness Doctrine", the law that used to say that broadcasters using the public airwaves to make money had an obligation to provide both sides of an issue to the public. Rush is hopping mad about the very idea that the 600 radio stations that run his show might have to put out the other side of his opinions like denying global warming. Why these liberal commentators might even be "non professionals."

So you have to put on nonprofessionals, give them some time, they get a chance to answer this stuff, you end up with boring radio, and you end up with a nightmare of logistics. The way it would manifest itself over a passage of time is that a lot of management just wouldn't put up with. "I can't run a radio station this way where most of my day is spent answering the phone from a bunch of liberals demanding that they get some time on the radio to respond to whatever my conservative hosts are saying," and so they shut it down. They kill the format, and they go play Chinese opera or whatever.

Check out this CBS report (and video) about supposed Israeli plans to attack Iran. I think there is a very good chance it will happen soon. The Israelis will start by attacking but the US will jump in to help Israel finish the job. As was the case with the UK and France in the Sinai campaign of 1956, the US intervention will be pre-arranged. Or Israel will attack, Iran will respond by hitting our forces in Iraq, and Bush will use that as casus belli.

I hear the one major obstacle to this is the presence of Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense.

He is flatout against any attack by us or by Israel.

Will that be enough to stop the next war? Hopefully it will be because we sure cannot count on Congress -- neither Republicans nor most of our favorite liberal Democrats -- to oppose war with Iran. SEE: See this on Congress and Iran.
This resolution will be on the House floor any day now. Expect overwhelming vote FOR.

And this for some horrific humor. (The humor is unintended).

• Aubie84 brings up Robert Wexler's "Manhattan II" approach to energy independence and compares it to Obama's "race to the moon" analogy. Either way, "it's a no-brainer. We should start tomorrow."
• Billy Glad points out a paragraph in a report on Feingold and Dodd planning to filibuster the FISA bill quoting Obama saying "What I've seen and learned...is necessary to help prevent terrorist attacks." Since Obama didn't get to "benefit" from the intelligence on Iraq and subsequently made the right decision on that issue, maybe all of the "seeing" and "learning" he has been doing in the Senate has has led to his cave on FISA.
• Both Scientific and Thom Rogers both draw our attention to James Dobson's's criticisms of Barack Obama. Scientific blasts him for taking it for granted that Republicans have cornered the market on God, and Thom Rogers questions his qualifications to spout fundamentalist rhetoric.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin on the theme of "Confronting Foreign Intelligence and Information Gaps." Feingold's speech -- sponsored by my home institution, the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation -- went beyond the admittedly important questions about who was responsible for the intelligence fiascos of the Bush years to the even more urgent issue of how to reform U.S. intelligence gathering going forward. Along the way, he also expressed his views on an increasingly controversial issue, the privatization of intelligence functions, which is dealt with at length in Tim Shorrock's new book, Spies for Hire.

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First, a housekeeping note: in addition to my main posts (and I know this is a long one, which I hope you'll find worth chewing over), as this Book Club unfolds, I have been weighing in fairly regularly in the comments section. So that's a heads-up for anyone interested to check out the rolling discussion after my first post, and my response to E.J. Graff's questions, and my account after Mary Karr's latest post of the prisoner nicknamed Gus, who appeared naked and prone at the end of Lynndie England's leash in the infamous photograph.

Meanwhile, Nick Flynn has left comments scolding me for "inexplicably" omitting from the book the voices of the Iraqi prisoners who appear in the Abu Ghraib photographs. "In a project that declared as its primary focus to understand those in the photographs," Flynn says, "I was disappointed to be offered only the MPs versions of those nights." The thing is - that's not the primary focus of my project. On the contrary, when I explain my decision not to include in the book the photographs which have so dominated and, at times, distorted perceptions of the Abu Ghraib story, I write: "In attempting here to see the story afresh it became clear that much of what matters most about Abu Ghraib was never photographed. The photographs have a place in the story, but they are not the story, and it would be untruthful here to submit once again to their frame."

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Hasn't the Times had enough of Bill Kristol? His op-ed columns are awful, just Republican talking points without wit or intelligence.

Unlike David Brooks, another Times conservative, Kristol gives the reader nothing to chew over. Brooks is smart -- and usually wrong. But he makes me think and sometimes he gets it just right much as George Will does.

One of Kristol's problems is that he clearly doesn't believe half the things he writes. He is not a conservative but a neocon. I suspect that he's a Republican only because of Israel (like Krauthammer). So his views on other issues are forced. He has to pretend he cares about choice and low taxes because he is playing at being a conservative. All that pretending produces seriously bad columns, inept columns. Krauthammer's columns are crazy but his writing is fine because all the hate energizes him. He loves hating and it shows! Kristol isn't even a good hater.

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When John McCain does public policy, it's not a pretty sight. Children run and hide under the bed. Women play "Gloomy Sunday" on the old Victrola. Strong men look down and spit on the ground. John is tackling the growing scarcity of fossil fuels and global warming that could exterminate the human race. What's the answer? A prize for a better car battery.

Prizes can be good, as a substitute for patents and copyrights. In return for a prize, a discovery could be put in the public domain for use by all, as that Dean Baker person has explained. Not quite that much thought has gone into the McCain idea, however.

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Barely a month after President Bush chose the venue of Israel's Knesset to scold his domestic critics (or was he scolding the Israeli leadership, as this NYT editorial suggests) with accusations of appeasement, French President Nicholas Sarkozy found himself at the same podium yesterday, but with dramatically different results.

Sarko gave his American counterpart something of a French lesson not only in how to behave at a foreign parliament, but also in what constitutes both friendship to an ally and leadership on an issue.

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• Kevin Cassidy, at the behest of Harry Reid, donated $20 to the DSCC. In the name field of the donation form, he wrote in 'No Fisa Immunity.' Now, as Mr. No Fisa Immunity, Cassidy implores others to follow suit.
• Thom Rogers retools Marx's famous adage and calls religion the "crack cocaine of the masses." Playing off of Charlie Black's comments, Rogers calls these Republican tactics "classic stimulus-response psychology. The more you take, the more you need."
• Big Blue takes a look at the DNC's fundraising numbers to show how big a toll the marathon primary actually took on the party.

According to Charlie Black, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an "unfortunate event," but it was a turning point in John McCain's primary campaign. McCain's "knowledge and ability to talk about it re-emphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be commander in chief. And it helped us."

Senator McCain's general election campaign depends even more on his national security and foreign policy experience, his claim that he's ready to be commander in chief. McCain has traveled the world, he knows the leaders.

When Bhutto was assassinated, McCain said he knew Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf personally, and could get him on the telephone. The United States picks up the tab for more than a quarter of Pakistan's total military spending. The president of Pakistan is probably going to take our president's call.

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Thank you, Philip, for another heartbreakingly brilliant book. I have already told several people that they MUST read it, and am planning to give it to a number of others. I'll get to some of your questions here and in later posts, and will ask some of my own. But I don't want to assume that TPMCafe readers have read or seen S.O.P., so I'll write a little about the book and movie first. Just a little ... because I've got little post-it flags and yellow highlighter notes through far too much of it to mention here. Read it for yourselves, please.

I am assuming that everyone here remembers the horrible photos: the caped and hooded man on the box; the pyramid of naked prisoners; the skinny female soldier holding the detainee on a leash. And I am assuming that most of us were shocked and profoundly ashamed, as I was, that this is now what America stands for: torture and occupation and humiliation, rather than truth and justice and morality and honor. (I'm not saying that the U.S. has always fulfilled the ideal, but I am ashamed we have so actively rejected it.) Or am I assuming too much? A friend recently told me that, after 9/11, he took for granted that something like Abu Ghraib would happen, given human nature, given all we know from the Stanford prison experiment and so much else. I was shocked by his cynicism. To realize that human beings were being tortured in my name, with my tax dollars, and that I had no idea how to make it stop, sickened me with shame.

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When Sy Hersh first told me about Abu Ghraib, I could not understand him, and not merely because he begins sentences in the middle of sentences. This was a problem of cognition. I had long ago built a template in my mind about these sorts of issues, and the story Sy was telling me did not fit.

This template was something I devised in the 1991, when I was a military policeman at the Ketziot Military Prison Camp in the Negev Desert of Israel. I had moved to Israel at the age of 20. I was drafted, and after many strange and discomfiting turns, I found myself in Ketziot, where I didn't want to be, for several reasons, including a) it's very hot in the Negev and I have the melanin of a Finn; b) I was raised as a socialist Zionist, which meant that I was a Jewish nationalist who opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; c) the job itself, which was to maintain order in a prison holding 6,000 Palestinians, most of whom would kill me if given a chance. This is not to say that I wouldn't die for Israel. I just didn't want to die enforcing an occupation I thought morally and politically dubious.

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Today, David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office, is testifying before Congress about the need to clamp down on entitlements (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). As everyone should know by now, the focus on "entitlements" is part of a dishonest effort to transform the country's health care crisis into a demographic problem.

Health care costs in the United States are out of control. We already pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy controls and get worse outcomes. This gap is projected to expand in the decades ahead as our costs are projected to keep rising relative to those of other countries. Because we pay for close to half of health care through the public sector (primarily Medicare and Medicaid), the health care crisis, if not addressed, will create a budget crisis. We then lump Medicare and Medicaid in with Social Security, and voila!!! We have an entitlement crisis.

Today, we also received new data on house prices, with the Case-Shiller index (the best available house price index) showing that real house prices have been falling at 26 percent annual rate over the last quarter and are now down by 19 percent over the last year.

While David Walker's testimony on entitlements and plunging house prices may seem unrelated, the latter will soon make the former completely irrelevant.

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Nick Flynn, my friend. I didn't speak to Gus, of course, and I yield to your inside scoop and superior (this isn't sarcastic) knowledge of things political. No dookey. I'm not a big political thinker and don't pretend to be. I am introspective dweeb who wanders around her apartment reading new translations of Virgil. But I am a citizen, and I do give a big rat's ass about understanding how soldiers become solely responsible for the crimes of policy makers. And how in the future do we stop another Abu Ghraib from happening? Somehow I don't think spanking those already spanked seems useful.

Standard Operating Procedure gave me a chance to consider the humanity of people who've been whole depersonalized, people from a class not much represented by the media roasting them, while their superiors--the real perpetrators of serious war crime policies--skate walk into their big-fee speaking engagements. (I wonder what Rumsfeld gets?)

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Kidding! I kid the Obama people. Ha-ha. We kid because we love.

The quadrennial rite of summer is the turn of the Democratic Party presidential nominee towards "the center." The dispiriting ritual has begun. Inquiring minds may ask, where was our point of departure for this journey? If we were already at the center, how far is there to go, must we go?

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I don't know which is scarier--Bill Kristol speculating on Fox News that George Bush might invade Iran if he thought Obama was going to win the Presidency or Rush Limbaugh going ballistic about Barack, "the magic Negro". These guys are like deer caught in the headlights of a change election. They can't believe their Hundred Year Reign is over so soon.

• ColinPad argues that sanctions might be the way to go in Iran. "I suggest that, instead of tainting legitimate opposition movements with overt funding, we continue with sanctions and let displeasure with the current regime generate authentic dissident groups."
• TTGZ reminds us that, even though we're 'fired up and ready to go,' we're still in the dark days of the Bush White House, and Obama's FISA cave is just going to be one of the stumbling blocks on the road to 'change.'
• M3Man debunks Obama's public financing "flip-flop" to show how his rejection of public money will actually take power out of the hands of big business interests.
• Gettex waxes fondly on her small-town Republican upbringing and directs our attention to Mark Schmitt's article in the American Prospect about how the Republicans have painted themselves as the only real Americans.

As a memoirist, I'm constantly in the position of having to distrust images that come to me embedded with deep, almost unassailably powerful reservoirs of feeling. The sound bytes in which I like to remember myself in kidhood as a wise and noble girl thriving in Dickensian circumstances don't account for the kid I shot at with a bee bee gun or picketing my neighbors' house (It was a union town) so other kids wouldn't play with them.

Case in point: for twenty years I remembered my teen years as the time my beloved, oil worker daddy had bailed out on me, when, in fact--as I examined those easy memories--I was the one who left him. I stopped squirrel-hunting and bass fishing and started reading and ingesting pharmaceuticals and protesting the war he supported. He still showed up at my job as a night switchboard operator bringing a supper plate covered in foil. Yes, there was a sad chasm between us as he stepped up the process of drinking himself to death. But as it widened, he stood on his side of it looking mournfully after me--not the other way round. I was trying to escape the Tropic of Squalor we were living in.

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A hundred years ago in Boston, the Congo Reform Association published a pamphlet by Mark Twain called "King Leopold's Soliloquy, A Defense of His Congo Rule." The text takes the form of a monologue by the Belgian monarch, as he reads through a stack of protest literature, describing crimes perpetrated by his colonial agents against his Congolese subjects: torture, abduction, enslavement, starvation, mutilation, extermination. "Blister the meddlesome missionaries!" the king fulminates. "They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witnessing the happenings; and everything they see they commit to paper." But, even as he rails, Leopold comforts himself with the boast that he has never come across a critic (however truthful) whom he could not discredit, stifle, or convert by the application of force or cash. Then he comes upon a pamphlet that contains photographs of mutilated Congolese, and he quakes before the evidence of this "most powerful enemy" - "the incorruptible Kodak":

The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe... the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little Kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!

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Philip Gourevitch will be joining us this week at TPMCafe Book Club to talk about his new book: Standard Operating Procedure. His first post should be up this morning.

Joining him will be poet and essayist Mary Karr, author Rory Stewart, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, E.J. Graff, senior correspondent at The American Prospect and novelist Robert Stone.

Since the Obama campaign announced its intention to stay out of the public financing system for the 2008 general election campaign, there has been a lot of predictable harrumphing from editorial commentators who were strangely silent when the McCain campaign cheated in the existing system during the primaries (using it to guarantee a loan and then backing out so McCain can do unlimited spending until the convention). Most commentators have airly dismissed the Obama argument that using the contributions and energies of millions of modest donors is a better road to political reform than trying to manuever in a broken public system that has many holes and has left Democrats in the past vulnerable to variegated big-money maneuvers by conservatives.

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My apologies for posting so much on Iran this weekend. If I could, I'd merge my posts into one so as not to crowd the page. But this is worth seeing. I promise it's my last post of the weekend.

This has to be seen to be believed.

The head of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organization addresses the people of Iran.

It's hilarious and utterly weird. Probably 2% of American Jews have heard of this guy who is addressing the Iranian people in our name. (He keeps saying "we." Who exactly is his "we?" When did we American Jews get our own President?) Like him or not, we have a President and this guy ain't him. There is also the State of Israel which does not speak for American Jews but which has a Prime Minister who speaks for 6,000,000 Israeli Jews and, to an extent, for all Jews who identify with Israel.

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