February 27, 2006

Lately, I’ve been thinking of Bush’s re-election as the political equivalent of the awful television program that becomes number one on the Nielsen ratings. Just because more people watch The Jerry Springer Show than watch Gilmore Girls, for example, does that make Jerry Springer the better program?

Okay, a (narrow) majority chose Bush for president over John Kerry, but does that necessarily mean that the choice was a wise one?

As I have been reading the opinions of Bush apologists recently, the fact that Bush has prevailed in the 2004 election and other endeavors is everything; the fact that Bush’s various victories have been so narrow and so polarizing means nothing to them. The assertion “Bush won the election” settles everything. A win is a win, apparently.

To me, the great thing about American constitutional democracy is that it establsihed a system in which we could all get along by negotiation. That wonderful tradition is now being trampled by a tyranny of the majority. American government these days is increasingly less about negotiation than about destroying your opponents.

Prayer in public schools? If the majority wants it, says the new thinking, let them have it! What about the constitutional rights of religious minorities? If they are only a minority, comes the reply, their opinion doesn’t count. And there seems to be an increased hostility towards enforcing a minority’s constitutional rights via the courts.

Of course, this is a big U-turn from the 2000 presidential election, where Al Gore won the popular vote, but Bush’s apologists said that the rules governing the Electoral College were more important than the majority’s opinion.

The United States may be a country based on majority rule, but it is also based on the constitutional rights of the minority. It may be heretical to say this, but just because a majority decides on something, that doesn’t always make the decision a good one.

December 12, 2005

In an unusual and agreeable move, President Bush [on this date] took some questions from his audience for a speech in Philadelphia, an audience that was (reportedly) not pre-screened. As a gesture of reaching beyond his insular White House bubble, Bush’s question-taking was welcome. However, I thought that his answers were incomplete, especially his answer about why his administration continually associates Saddam Hussein with 9/11. Here is how Bloomberg News reported Bush’s answer:

Asked why he and other members of his administration continue linking the conflict in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the U.S., Bush said the attacks in 2001 “changed my look on foreign policy.”

Most of the world agreed “that Saddam Hussein was a threat,” Bush said. “The 9/11 attacks accentuated that threat, as far as I'm concerned.”

...

Bush said he had no regrets about going to war, even after finding the threat from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was empty.

“Knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again,” Bush said in response to one question. “Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country.”

[Applause from audience.]

Dear Mr. President:

You say that America is “a safer country” because you overthrew Saddam Hussein in an unprovoked military action. All right, that is your opinion. But how would you back that opinion up? What can you point to that would quantify how much safer America is than it was when Hussein was in power? And saying that the Iraqis will soon be holding democratic elections isn’t a good enough answer; there’s no guarantee that Iraqi elections will create a country that doesn’t produce terrorists. I don’t ask this question as any great fan of Saddam Hussein, and so far, the fact that this villainous tyrant is now out of power is the very thin silver lining to the dark cloud that is Iraq. As you know, Mr. President, simply saying that something is true doesn’t make it so.

It could be argued that America is less safe now than it was when Hussein held Iraq in his iron fist. Even leaving aside the obvious example that our brave troops are in harm’s way now that Hussein has been overthrown, the reverse of what you say may very well be the more demonstrable position.

By deciding to go to war in a hasty manner, with an insufficient number of soldiers, poorly funded, and without a true international coalition to support us with troops and treasure, you have now strained our armed forces, strained our economy, and strained this country’s international standing. By ordering troops into Iraq, you also stretched thin the U.S. forces in Afghanistan — a nation that actually was directly involved in 9/11 — and made their job of rebuilding the post-Taliban country more difficult than it needed to be.

And by invading a Muslim country that our troops couldn’t leave in a timely way, our military presence is now viewed with suspicion by the Arab world as an army of occupation, and this perception doubtlessly encourages Muslims around the world to sneak into Iraq and help fuel the insurgency. How does any of this make us safer?

Also, by rushing to war against a nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist, you enabled Iran and North Korea, two countries with better documented unconventional-weapons systems, to resume theirs. Now, with our soldiers and diplomats distracted by the chaos in Iraq, it seems more likely (but hopefully not inevitable) for Iran or North Korea to deliver a nuclear device into the hands of anti-U.S. terrorists. Again, how does this make us safer?

As monstrous as his dictatorship was, at least Saddam Hussein kept a lid on the ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq that get in the way of smoothly establishing a successful democracy there, the same tensions that now put our troops in danger. Though cruel, Hussein maintained a secular state in a widening sea of Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorists find greater refuge in this theocratic philosophy, I would submit, than they ever found in Hussein’s regime. Rather than “accentuating” any perceived threat by Hussein, the 9/11 attacks demonstrated the destructive religious forces that Hussein’s dictatorship kept in check. Once again, how are we now safer?

It’s hard to say this stuff without sounding like a supporter of tyrannical regimes, which I most definitely am not. Unfortunately, not every place on the planet is conducive to U.S.-style democracy, as much as I wish it were otherwise. If the country of Iraq had not been artificially carved by colonial Britain out of three different ethnic regions of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, the history of the land may have played itself out differently, and a dictator like Hussein might never have emerged. But your administration didn’t seem all that interested in Iraqi history. In particular, it didn’t seem to concern itself with how post-invasion U.S. forces would pacify an ethnically heterogenous country vastly different from the more homogenous countries of Germany and Japan, countries successfully pacified by the Allies after World War II. But perhaps democracy could have eventually arisen in Iraq without us invading it.

And for all your uncompromising talk about America not abiding this particular dictator, Mr. President, he was abided by several U.S. administrations, including your father’s, before his fatal mistake of invading Kuwait in 1990. Also, this particular dictator may be gone, but others still exist. Do you propse overthrowing them militarily as well?

So, Mr. President, I strongly question your unsupported assertion that America is now safer than it was when Hussein was still in power. The next time that you make this dubious claim, I would like to see hard evidence for it.

December 10, 2005

Duh-bya has nominated ultra-conservative Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. It is the president’s prerogrative to nominate whomever he (or — if the fates allow — she) chooses. Just as it’s the Senate’s prerogative to ascertain that the nominee is a wise (in both senses of the word) choice. After Bush was (re-?) elected in November 2004, I knew that it would only be a matter of time before the legacy of the Warren Court — a legacy of fairness — was jeopardized.

One would hope that a president re-elected with a measly 51% margin would acknowledge the substantial 49% of the country who voted against him, and that he would look to a moderate choice for the High Court. But with George W., that’s just too much to hope for. For him, a win — no matter how narrow or how dubious — is a win. He’s deaf to all criticism, however well taken, and seems perfectly content to be president of the Republican Party — the Democrats and liberals of America be damned.

When Bush nominated his legal advisor, Harriet Miers, to the Court earlier this year, she seemed agreeably moderate, but her nomination implicitly said volumes more about the president’s insularity and his rewarding of loyalty than it ever did about Miers’s qualifications for the job. Indeed, it was Miers’s very non-committal stance on such red-meat red-state issues as abortion and gun control that led Bush’s base to object to her nomination. Her withdrawal on laughably disingenuous grounds and her replacement with the hard-core conservative Alito also speak volumes about Bush being more devoted to his narrow base than he is to the country as a whole.

The “smoking gun” regarding Alito’s hard-core conservative views came in the form of a 1985 application to the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, in which Alito blatantly proclaimed that the Constitution did not protect a woman’s right to choose or racial “quotas.” Some conservative apologists are now saying that this statement reflected only the youthful views of an eager job applicant, and at any rate, Alito would never allow his personal views to interfere with his judicial views. But syndicated columnist Marianne Means concisely rebuts all of these that-was-then arguments:

Argument one: He was only 35 at the time of the Reagan job application, and he is a wiser person now. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) quickly demolished that one, pointing out that by the time he had attained the age of 35, he had served in the Senate for five years, and nobody ever gave him a pass for youthful voting mistakes.

Argument two: Alito was an advocate seeking a job and therefore the document should not be considered definitive. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) wasn't impressed by that dodge. “Why shouldn’t we consider the answers that you're giving today an application for another job?” Kennedy inquired. Kennedy suggested that if Alito would sacrifice principle to pander to a prospective employer back then, why wouldn't he do so now?

Argument three: Alito respects precedent. Phooey. As a lower-court judge, he had no choice but to do so. But on the Supreme Court, he has the power to fiddle with precedents all he wants. It's been done before.

If events continue on their present course, it will only be a matter of time before Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized abortion as a woman’s constitutional right, is overturned. This saddens me. I don’t say this as any great fan of abortion. If a woman is contemplating getting an abortion but still has some doubts, I would encourage her not to go through with the procedure. But if she does want to have one, it should be in a safe and legal setting, preferrably before the fetus is viable. The choice should be hers. And as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, if a woman is compelled by others to carry a pregnancy to term, this puts her at a disadvantage with her male competitors on the job market, who would never face the physical predicament of pregnancy. In this instance, abortion is an [employment] equalizer.

I’m not dead-set against any kind of limitation on abortion, provided that there is a legitimate necessity for the limitation, but every piece of abortion-limiting legislation that I have heard of seems more like a bad-faith means to overturn or disempower Roe than a good-faith legislative solution to a genuine need. Some pro-choice liberals argue, quite sensibly, that abortion should remain legal but is not in the Constitution, and therefore, Roe ought to be overturned. But at the moment, constitutionality is the only thing keeping abortion legally alive. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe anytime soon, I’m sure the Republican-dominated Congress would quickly ram through a bill outlawing abortion — with Senate Republicans probably employing the “nuclear option” to thwart any Democratic fillibuster.

The sad thing is that this is a country of great legal talent, both conservative and liberal. If presidents were to nominate judges based on the distinction of their legal performance — whether they were pro-Roe or anti-abortion — we could have a Supreme Court of which we could all be proud. Instead, we now have a “stealth” court, a court where the nominees have little paper trail and opaque legal opinions. Once they get on the Court, we finally realize how conservative their opinions are.

As much as I appreciate many of Justice David Souter’s opinions, he was also a stealth judge, nominated for his ideological opacity and not his judicial distinctiveness. The Republicans who voted for Souter obviously thought that they were getting a conservative, and he surprised them. But one Souter does not legitimize this ill-advised way to choose justices with lifetime tenure, and President Clinton wisely — and realistically — conferred with Senate Republicans before nominating Justices Ginsberg and Bryer.

Some conservatives will say that that we have a “stealth” Supreme Court because of the hostile way Democrats treated the nomination of openly conservative jurist Robert Bork, but Bork was nominated by President Reagan more for his ideology than his legal reasoning.

Alito’s nomination is the logical result of picking judges in a highly politicized atmosphere. It marks a sad predicament where true believers try to overturn a Supreme Court decision that they don’t like, instead of respecting it. But the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the law of the land. And it’s sad to see it subjected to the forces of petty politics. Is it any wonder that we get a Court majority that writes such intellectually dishonest, results-oriented decisions as the election-subverting Bush vs. Gore?

December 1, 2005

I swear, I would give conservative commentators the benefit of the doubt more often if they would stop making such disingenuous arguments to support their claims. But instead of reasoned logic, they fall back onto extreme either/or propositions or bumper-sticker slogans to paint those with differing perspectives as beyond the pale. Actual, thoughtful debate seems to be alien to them.

To illustrate my point, I like to cite some examples by our old friend Max “Give Him The” Boot:

WHITE-FLAG DEMOCRATS

by Max Boot

And the Democrats wonder why they are considered weak on national security? It’s not because anyone doubts their patriotism. It’s because a lot of people doubt their judgment and toughness.

As if to prove the skeptics right, Democrats have been stepping forth to renounce their previous support for the liberation of Iraq even as Iraqis prepare to vote in a general election. Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, John Murtha — that’s quite a list of heavyweight flip-floppers.

Again, the disingenuous description of the Iraq War as the “liberation” of the country. The main reason that we went to war, Bush told us, was to disarm Saddam Hussein of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction which he was going to use against us at any moment. Removing Hussein from power and the liberation of his people were portrayed by the administration only as secondary effects of this “disarmament.” Now that no stockpiles have been found, the administration and its apologists are insisting that the liberation of Iraq was the primary causus belli. They know that it wasn’t. But they keep referring to our near-unilateral invasion of Iraq as a “liberation” because it makes the administration’s intentions sound more noble than they actually were.

Clinton characteristically wants to have it both ways. He says the invasion was a “big mistake” but that we shouldn’t pull out now because “there's a lot of evidence it can still work.” (You mean, Mr. President, that we should continue sacrificing soldiers for a mistake?) ...

Well, Bush didn’t leave us much choice. Going into Iraq militarily was indeed a mistake. But now that we’re there, we can’t just immediately pull out. To do so would, as Bush himself now says, lay the groundwork for civil war and the emergence of a Taliban-like theocracy (funny how Bush’s outlook for a post-war outcome was a lot rosier before the invasion). So, yes, Max, thanks to people like you, our troops are put in the position of possibly having to die for a mistake. Maybe democracy in Iraq will indeed work out, as Clinton says, but if it does, it will be despite — not because of — the misguided notion that Jeffersonian democracy can be imposed from without at the point of a gun.

Just a few years ago, it seemed as if the Democrats had finally kicked the post-Vietnam, peace-at-any-price syndrome. Before the invasion of Iraq, leading Democrats sounded hawkish in demanding action to deal with what Kerry called the “particularly grievous threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. But it seems that they only wanted to do something if the cost would be minuscule. Now that the war has turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated, the Democrats want to run up the white flag.

Kerry was going on intelligence — misleading intelligence — passed onto him by the Bush administration. The administration knew — or should have known — that much of the “information” about Hussein’s weapons program came from an Iraqi asylum-seeker in Germany called “Curveball,” a source that German intelligence said was very unreliable. The Bush administration did not pass along to the Congress the caveats and dissenting opinions that were included in the intelligence that they received. Consequently, several Democrats in Congress echoed the administration’s misleading warnings about what an imminent threat Hussein was.

Now that the Congress knows that the information given to it by the administration was so much hooey, several Democrats are speaking out against the war on the basis of what is now known. So, administration apologists are throwing the Democrats’ pre-invasion words back at them in an effort to portray them as flip-floppers. The administration and its supporters must know that this is an intellectually dishonest thing to do, and the fact that they resort to such a tactic, instead of a more honest one, tells me that they have a very untenable position.

Furthermore, it was the Bush administration — not the Democrats — that expected the costs of this war to be miniscule, allocating only a fraction of the troops and treasure that experienced military advisors told them that they would need. Now that the war has turned out to be harder than he anticipated, Bush has shown a stubborn unwilingness to acknowledge the facts on the ground, insisting that we “stay the course.” His speech in Annapolis yesterday [November 30, 2005] was his first real acknowledgement that the war (or counter-insurgency or call it what you will — it won’t change the fact that Americans are dying needlessly) has not been going that well. Choosing between Democrats who recognize that news from Iraq is not good and want to change things accordingly (on the one hand) and a president who will not recognize this and only talks about “staying the course” (on the other), I’ll take the Democrats. To Boot, this is “running up the white flag” — what a pathetic argument.

They are offering two excuses for their loss of will. First, they claim they were “misled into war” by a duplicitous administration. But it wasn’t George W. Bush who said, “I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons [of mass destruction] again.” It was Bill Clinton on Dec. 16, 1998. As this example indicates, the warnings issued by Bush were virtually identical to those of his Democratic predecessor.

But Bush’s stampede to war was — to put it sarcastically — not identical to that of his Democratic predecessor (who, of course, did not go to war). Clinton found a way to contain and disempower Hussein without costing the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. I know that some war apologists say that Hussein’s remaining in power was an obvious destabilizing influence on the Middle East, but — given the destabilizing influences that Bush’s invasion has unleashed — it’s not at all obvious to me. Furthermore, the fact that Clinton said similar things about Hussein does not argue against the possibility that the Bush administration indeed misled the country to war. Bush said that Hussein was an imminent threat; Clinton did not.

The Democrats’ other excuse is that they never imagined that Bush would bollix up post-invasion planning as badly as he did. It’s true that the president blundered, but it's not as if things usually go smoothly in the chaos of conflict. In any case, it’s doubtful that the war would have been a cakewalk even if we had been better prepared....

But throughout the build-up to war, Bush portrayed the invasion as something that would be quick and relatively bloodless. Then-CIA director George Tenet told Bush that the invasion would be a “cakewalk.” [I was incorrect about that attribution. The word “cakewalk” as applied to the invasion of Iraq was originally used by Kenneth Adelman, a war supporter and member of the think tank Project for a New American Century.] Now that Bush’s propaganda has proved untrue, it’s the Democrats’ fault in the Republican-controlled Congress that things haven’t gone as smootly as Bush said? [I was unable to conclude this sentence because I was at a loss for words.]

Even most Republican senators are demanding a withdrawal strategy. But it is the Democrats who are stampeding toward the exits. Apparently the death of about 2,100 soldiers over the course of almost three years is more than they can bear. Good thing these were not the same Democrats who were running the country in 1944, or else they would have pulled out of France after the loss of 5,000 Allied servicemen on D-Day. ...

This is a duplicitous argument that really drives me up the wall, and other war apologists have made it. Conservatives keep comparing the war in Iraq to the Civil War or World War II and wonder what Iraq War opponents would have done in those situations. I’ll state the obvious: The Civil War was a war of necessity. World War II was a war of necessity. The war in Iraq is a war of choice. We didn’t need to invade Iraq when we did or the way we did. And I would submit that we did not need to invade Iraq at all. The fact that war apologists keep making such a dishonest comparison of the Iraq War to wars of necessity also tells me that their position is a dishonest one.

“Things may develop faster than we imagine,” Al Qaeda's deputy commander, Ayman Zawahiri, apparently [!] wrote to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the top terrorist in Iraq. “The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam — and how they ran and left their agents — is noteworthy.” Even more noteworthy is that so many Democrats seem so sanguine about letting history repeat itself.

Unfortunately, if there is any sanguinity, I think it’s from war supporters affected by “Gulf War syndrome.” Now, I supported the Gulf War back in 1991, and I support it today. I think that Saddam Hussein did an absolutely monstrous thing by invading Kuwait, and it was right for President George H.W. Bush and an actual coalition of the international community to drive Hussein out of that country, out of a respect for international borders. So, although I usually prefer peace to war, I’m not in the peace-at-all-costs camp, and I was relieved that the 1991 Gulf War was over so quickly and with a minimal loss of life.

However, because of the Gulf War, I think that a lot of war buffs began to think of military conflict as something that could be waged quickly and easily. They ignored the prudent way that the elder President Bush put together a genuine international force in the build-up to war — assembling a true coalition, getting U.N. approval, etc. — which was largely responsible for the Gulf War’s success. And these war buffs began to think that America, as the world’s only superpower, could do whatever it jolly well pleased around the world. In doing so, they overlooked some of the obvious similarities between Vietnam and Iraq — for instance, between the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” and WMD, the lack of a realistic exit strategy for either, etc. — which made the possibiity of a quagmire more likely.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is what went down: Being run by oil executives, the current Bush administration wanted control of Iraq’s petroleum from the moment it entered office. They made plans for an invasion of Iraq and eventually saw the 9/11 attacks as an opening for implementing them. Neocons in the administration then cherry-picked intelligence, however dubious its origin, and passed it off to an intellectually lazy president as proof that Hussein had meaningful ties to 9/11 and was reconstituting his nuclear-arms program. Bush and his surrogates then went around the country saying that Hussein was an imminent threat to America and questioning the patriotism of anyone who said otherwise.

Now that the administration’s dire warnings have been utterly discredited, the Bush administration and its apologists are changing their story about why we went in and what they told us at the time. To say that this is dishonest would be an understatement. And the fact that conservative commentators are making such deceitful arguments in support of the war tells me that the administration’s reasons for war were deceitful from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, you can’t reduce all of this to a bumper sticker, so I imagine that most Americans will continue to be bamboozled by Bush’s lies.

November 24, 2005

IRAQ’S A LOST CAUSE? ASK THE REAL EXPERTS

by Max Boot


WHEN IT COMES to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.

A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion. ...

Yes, Max, I’m sure that several things are going well in Iraq. I hope that some things are going well in Iraq because I don’t want U.S. forces — excuse me, I mean coalition forces — to become a permanent occupier, which might be the case if nothing at all were to improve.

But your article, Max, overlooks an important issue: The war that we are now fighting in Iraq is not the war that the Bush administration sold us. If enthusiasm about how things are going in that country is starting to sag, it’s because the Bush administration all but promised that a military invasion of Iraq would be a quick and bloodless fix for that particular front of “the war on terror.”

As Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed writer Jay Bookman says in a recent column, the Bush administration egregiously underestimated how long and how costly a military engagement with Iraq would be. “As proof,” he writes:

•They budgeted a total of $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq — we now spend more than that in Iraq in about a week.

•They thought they could occupy Iraq with a third of the troops that experienced generals told them they needed; today, our troops are getting maimed and killed with explosives looted from Iraqi weapons sites because we lacked the manpower to guard those sites.

•They expected to have the country on its feet and financing itself from oil in 90 days; 30 months later, we are farther from that dream than ever.

Bush’s now infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo-op aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in 2003 marked what the president surely thought was the end of the war. He was predicting a quick Desert Storm-like victory, all the while ignoring warnings from Gulf War architects like Brent Scrowcroft that a military invasion of Baghdad would be a different kettle of fish entirely.

Now that the administration’s fairy tale of a swift and painless victory has not come true, administration officials and their neocon apologists are chiding us because we should have expected war with Iraq to be, in Rumsfeld’s words, “a long, hard slog.” But in their build-up to war, the Bush administration did not prepare us for a slog of any sort. I wonder if the term “bait and switch” means anything to them.

I’m tired of being lectured by war apologists that, because the Bush administration’s unrealistic and ill-advised fantasies about a quick and easy victory in Iraq have not come true, the American people are at fault for not energetically supporting the administration’s catastrophic blundering. Why don’t you say anything about that in your article, Max?

Old Rants

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I recently came across some writings of mine on another Internet site, and I got the idea to repost some of them onto my blog. Looking over them after a while, I can’t believe how informed I kept myself on the issues of the day. That will be a hard habit to get back into.

A recurring topic of all these writings is the disaster that was the presidency of George W. Bush. It would have made more sense to repost these things I wrote when he was still in office, but better late than never.

In most cases, my pieces respond to other writings. I will quote a portion of the essay to which I’m responding (printing the whole thing would violate copyright), but whenever possible, I make a link in my post to the entire article. And the titles of my posts will be the dates that I wrote them.

alias babyporridge

Some of you may have noticed that my July 1, 2008, post is hawking a CD that isn’t real. No, there isn’t to be any compact disk called Calamities & Codswallop, although I think that would make a good title for something (anything!), and I’m a little impressed with myself for thinking of that wacky moniker on the spot.

There is, however, such a person as Nikki Malvar. She is the very presentable person in the picture, and under the sobriquet “babyporridge,” she makes YouTube videos as well as her own music on her MySpace page. At its best, her music reverberates with the kind of haunting notes and quirky lyrics reminiscent of The Roches or Suzanne Vega and is definitely worth a listen or two.

But where the mischievous Ms. Malvar made her most lasting impact on my neurons was with her YouTube videos, whose sublime silliness is about as far away from the reflectiveness of her songs as the Marx Brothers are from Jacques Brel. For quite some time, I wanted to put my bemused musings about her videos down on paper (or the electronic equivalent thereof), but I had no idea what to say: such anarchic absurdity can’t be contained by the strict structures of nouns, prepositions, and adverbs.

Then, on July 1, 2008, the date of my aforementioned blog post, I was visiting her own blog, where she posted the picture of herself that you see below. I liked how most of the photograph was taken up by the empty space surrounding her, while her own image was scrunched into a corner. (Very “Zen,” don’t you think?) I immediately thought that the picture would make a good album cover and set about mocking up my own mock CD package. Not having any other way to show her the results, I posted the image here on my blog and let her know about it, fully expecting to delete the image once she had viewed it. However, after a couple of hours had hobbled away, I felt a fondness for the fake CD cover and asked Nikki if I could leave it up. She graciously consented, and I promised that I would write something about her on my world-famous blog.

Days went by. Then weeks. Then months. Summer turned to fall. America elected a new president. Fall turned to winter. Christmas came and went. High-School Musical 3 came out, and people actually went to see it. Nearly a year had passed, but I still hadn’t written anything. Worse, I was feeling bad for not living up to a promise, so much so that I could barely bring myself to blog about anything at all. My blog, already sadly neglected, drifted into dereliction.

So, these comments are as much an effort to resuscitate my blog and assuage my guilt as they are an attempt to squeeze the square peg of my words into the round hole of the most indescribable videos on YouTube. When you watch a babyporridge video, don’t expect a coherent story. Don’t expect a comprehensible idea. Don’t expect anything to make sense. All that you can reasonably expect is the sight of a young lass in her late-teens/early-20s frolicking in front of her video camera, sometimes showing off her musical skills, delighting in her own nonsensical sense of humor, and exuding her infectious zest for life.

Here’s a video of hers called “I Was a Fetus Once,” in which she announces her nineteenth birthday. In this shot, she’s flipping a clear plastic ruler through her pitch-black locks. In the next shot, she’s lip-synching to “Delicious Demon” by The Sugarcubes, sometimes clad in a black dress, sometimes in male drag with a mustache scribbled on the finger resting just below her nose. Now, she’s concocting her famous booger soup (a recipe she obviously stole from Rachel Ray) and dancing around her kitchen. Did I miss anything? In her video “Paperbananas,” she holds a banana in front of the lens. Wait a second! That’s not a banana! That’s an avocado with a hand-drawn sign saying “banana” tacked to it. Could’ve fooled me! The video titled “What Disney Left Unsaid” features her as Cinderella opposite herself as her own Shakira-wigged fairy godmother, singing in high-speed overcrank. What’s it all about? Haven’t the foggiest. But why am I laughing so hard?

Hmmm ... I’ve written this much without mentioning that babyporridge currently lives in Australia after spending her childhood in the Philippines, Malaysia, and the United States. So, even though she presently resides in Sydney, she sounds like she comes from middle America — give or take a broadened A or clipped R. There’s no way of discretely inserting that info into this blog post. I’ll need to find another way.

If anything can be said, it’s this: babyporridge’s baffling videos demonstrate how viewing habits and expectations have changed since the advent of digital video and its transmission on demand via computer. Back in the days before home video (yes, I was around then), the idea of watching an audiovisual presentation without a readily identifiable point to it would widely be seen as a waste of time. But with the availability of webcams and streaming video, any “rules” about what makes for a worthwhile viewing experience fly out the window. Now with YouTube, a cat playing the piano carries as much viewer fascination as Lucy Ricardo stuffing her face with chocolates. If instant video weren’t just a mouse-click away, would there be room for the stupefying silliness of someone like babyporridge? And to what extent is the appeal of these videos connected to the concept of a virtual community? In other words, are some viewers drawn to videos like babyporridge’s because they feel that they are getting to know someone socially?

But at the end of the day, babyporridge videos are fun to watch, pointlessness and all. They are reminders that some of life’s magical moments don’t need any meaning. Lewis Carroll understood that. Unfortunately, babyporridge/Nikki has not been particularly prolific of late. After a year or so of regularly producing about a video a week, she has made (or not deleted) only four videos in the last eight months. A much-needed hiatus? If so, she’s earned it. Here’s hoping, though, that the video gods will instill babyporridge with inspiration once again. Every now and then, the world needs to stop making sense.

a babyporridge video