I have passed my thesis defense...

It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Today, I edit my thesis, produce the final copies, and submit them and about one half ton of paperwork to the Graduate School.

Once that's done, I'm pretty much DONE.

...still a little stunned....

LOVE

Amy  ¶ 2:25 PM

  HAPPY EASTER!

Dig this beautiful basket of goodies Stacy and I put together yesterday -- candy, toys, dolls... fun! Three cheers for pagan holidays!



Here is us with our creation:

  ¶ 1:59 PM

  I usually run relatively lukewarm on Maureen Dowd's columns, but the one she has in the NYTimes right now really strikes a chord with me. She touches on something, a "spirit of our age" (or perhaps more accurately "a lack of spirit of our age") that is truly disturbing.

Western (human!) society gave up on supersonic flight last year. Over the past 5 years, we've slowed down progress into newer, more efficient, less polluting sources of energy, and embraced "suburban tanks" and the sweet smell of octane in the morning.

DOWD: "Consider the pathetic performance of NASA, which inverted its motto to "Failure is an option" by shrugging off warnings about the safety of the seven Columbia astronauts who burned up coming back to earth, and not trying to send up a rescue shuttle."

"Failure is an option" -- touche, Dowd. That's it exactly. By not preparing for the possibility of SNAFU (notice the N in that acronym stands for "normal"), by not creating plans B, C, D, and E, we invite catastrophic failure. According to the Atlantic Monthly's regular aviation writer (one of my faves since I am so obsessed with plane crashes), William Langewiesche, the technology has existed for ages to outfit airplanes with "plan B" type safety devices -- most notably parachutes that could slow the plummet of a falling plane and save lives -- but that there is resistance in the aviation community to acknowledging that the worst could happen... as though acknowledging it makes it more likely to happen? Sounds strange, but this is exactly the attitude you see in the government today: criticising Fearless Leader only helps the terrorists, they say. Acknowledging there's a big problem here only makes bad things more likely to happen, they say.

Take this BS attitude, and place it in a 21st century full of motivated, clever organizations committed to spectacular terrorist attacks -- and what you have, my friends, is a big fat ugly stupid arrogant moronic sitting duck just waiting to get blown to bits... but don't worry, once the bits are blown, we can shrug our shoulders and blame "the system." As Dowd points out, that is exactly what our government, Condi Rice in particular, is doing. No one is fixing the problems -- they are only interested in fixing the "appearance of" a problem.

Welcome to the fall of Rome.

Bob Kerrey also has an op-ed in the NYTimes today, and his shows a decidedly opposite spirit: one that is willing and able to accept responsibility for failure, and seek out ways to make the current situation as good as possible, and try to prevent future failures. No blame game, no bullshit.

I recommend reading both of these short but pointed pieces, repasted for your enjoyment, below:


MAUREEN DOWD: THE NO-CAN-DO NATION

Young Americans are bravely fighting and dying in Iraq, trying to fulfill the audacious vision of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to remold Iraq in the image of America.

But while we try to turn them into us, who have we become?

The president presents himself as an avatar of American values, plain-spoken cowboy and tough flyboy.

But Condi Rice's testimony on Thursday raises the depressing possibility that we've lost the essence of our frontier spirit: the ingenious individualist who gets around the system and faces down the drones.

From Abigail Adams to Tom Sawyer to Bugs Bunny to Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith to Indiana Jones, the best American character is plucky, nimble, clever, inventive.

So it's disturbing to see our government reacting to crises with a jaded shrug and lumbering gait, especially since we are up against such a creative, chameleonlike enemy.

Consider the pathetic performance of NASA, which inverted its motto to "Failure is an option" by shrugging off warnings about the safety of the seven Columbia astronauts who burned up coming back to earth, and not trying to send up a rescue shuttle.

This no-can-do spirit marked George Tenet's lame excuses to senators in February who wanted to know why the C.I.A. never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11, even though the Germans gave the agency his name and phone number. "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11," Mr. Tenet said.

And what would Eliot Ness say about an F.B.I. that is less computer savvy than American preschoolers and Islamic terrorists? The F.B.I. is only halfway through modernizing its computers, which could not, before 9/11, do two searches at once, such as "Al Qaeda" and "flight schools." Can't we draft Bill Gates for duty?

This ominous passivity was threaded through the testimony of Ms. Rice, a brainy and accomplished woman who should represent the best of America. She blamed "systemic" and "structural" impediments that prevented the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. from sharing. She complained that other people hadn't recommended what she should do; even the terrorists were faulted for not giving specifics.

The screeching chatter in the spring and summer of 2001 — "There will be attacks in the near future" — did not yank Mr. Bush and his team from their Iraq fixation. "But they don't tell us when," Ms. Rice protested. "They don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how." Paging Nancy Drew.

Inconclusive intelligence did not bother the Bush team when it wanted to be "actionable" on Iraq, or engage in "tit for tat" with Saddam.

The Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing — remarkably headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" — mentioned Al Qaeda's wanting to hijack planes and the 70 F.B.I. field investigations into suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S.

The briefing had three-month-old information that Al Qaeda was trying to sneak into the country for an explosives attack. No wonder the C.I.A. chief and counterterrorism czar were running around with their hair on fire.

What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed "historical."

W. kept fishing and denouncing Saddam, while Condi sat for a glam Vogue photo shoot and interview.

On Iraq, they ran roughshod over the system. On Al Qaeda, Condi blamed the system, saying she couldn't act on Richard Clarke's plan until there was a strategy, a policy, "tasking," meetings, etc.

The F.B.I. officials who ignored Coleen Rowley as she tried to break through the obtuse leadership of Louis Freeh's F.B.I. to get evidence on Zacarias Moussaoui, and Kenneth Williams, the Phoenix agent who outlined the Al Qaeda plot to train Arab terrorists in our flight schools, have not been held accountable. Why aren't the heroic Ms. Rowley and Mr. Williams running something?

Dick Clarke has struck a chord because his passionate efforts reflected those great American virtues of ingenuity and brashness. Even if he was a bit of a cowboy, loading up his .357 sidearm to return to the West Wing the night after 9/11, at least he was not dozing through High Noon.


BOB KERREY: THE WRONG WAR

At Thursday's hearing before the 9/11 commission, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, gave a triumphal presentation. She was a spectacular witness.

I was a tough critic of some of her answers and assertions, though I believe I was at least as tough with the national security adviser for President Clinton. At the beginning and end of every criticism I have made in this process, I have also offered this disclaimer: anyone who was in Congress, as I was during the critical years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, must accept some of the blame for the catastrophe. It was a collective failure.

Two things about that failure are clear to me at this point in our investigation. The first is that 9/11 could have been prevented, and the second is that our current strategy against terrorism is deeply flawed. In particular, our military and political tactics in Iraq are creating the conditions for civil war there and giving Al Qaeda a powerful rationale to recruit young people to declare jihad on the United States.

The case for the first conclusion begins with this fact: On 9/11, 19 men defeated every defense mechanism the United States had placed in their way. They succeeded in murdering 3,000 men and women whose only crime was going to work that morning. And they succeeded at a time of heightened alert — long after we recognized that Al Qaeda was capable of sophisticated military operations.

Remember, the attack occurred after President Clinton had let pass opportunities to arrest or kill Al Qaeda's leadership when the threat was much smaller. It occurred after President Bush and Ms. Rice were told on Jan. 25, 2001, that Al Qaeda was in the United States, and after President Bush was told on Aug. 6, 2001, that "70 F.B.I. field investigations were open against Al Qaeda" and that the "F.B.I. had found patterns of suspicious activities in the U.S. consistent with preparation for hijacking."

Once again I know that President Clinton, President Bush and Ms. Rice all faced difficult challenges in the years and months before 9/11; I do not know if I would have handled things differently had I been in their shoes. It has been difficult for all of us to understand and accept the idea that a non-state actor like Osama bin Laden, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, could be a more serious strategic threat to us than the nation-states we grew up fearing.

But this recognition does not absolve me of my obligation to ask those who were responsible for our national security at the time what they did to protect us against this terrorist threat.

One episode strikes me as particularly important. On July 5, 2001, Ms. Rice asked Richard Clarke, then the administration's counterterrorism chief, to help domestic agencies prepare against an attack. Five days later an F.B.I. field agent in Phoenix recommended that the agency investigate whether Qaeda operatives were training at American flight schools. He speculated that Mr. bin Laden's followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel.

Ms. Rice did not receive this information, a failure for which she blames the structure of government. And, while I am not blaming her, I have not seen the kind of urgent follow-up after this July 5 meeting that anyone who has worked in government knows is needed to make things happen. I have not found evidence that federal agencies were directed clearly, forcefully and unambiguously to tell the president everything they were doing to eliminate Qaeda cells in the United States.

My second conclusion about the president's terrorism strategy has three parts. First, I believe President Bush's overall vision for the war on terrorism is wrong. — military and civilian alike.

Second, the importance of this distinction is that it forces us to face the Muslim world squarely and to make an effort to understand it. It also allows us to insist that we be judged on our merits — and not on the hate-filled myths of the street. Absent an effort to establish a dialogue that permits respectful criticism and disagreement, the war on terrorism will surely fail. The violence against us will continue.

Such a dialogue does not require us to cease our forceful and at times deadly pursuit of those who have declared war on us. Quite the contrary. It would enable us to gather Muslim allies in a cause that will bring as much benefit to them as it does to us. That's why President Bush was right to go to a Washington mosque shortly after Sept. 11. His visit — and his words of assurance that ours was not a war against Islam but against a much smaller group that has perverted the teachings of the Koran — earned the sympathy of much of the Muslim world.

That the sympathy wasn't universal, that some in the Arab world thought the murder of 3,000 innocents was justified, caused many Americans to question whether the effort to be fair was well placed. It was — and we would be advised to make the effort more often.

Third, we should swallow our pride and appeal to the United Nations for help in Iraq. We should begin by ceding joint authority to the United Nations to help us make the decisions about how to transfer power to a legitimate government in Iraq. Until recently I have not supported such a move. But I do now. Rather than sending in more American forces or extending the stay of those already there, we need an international occupation that includes Muslim and Arab forces.

Time is not on our side in Iraq. We do not need a little more of the same thing. We need a lot more of something completely different.

CLICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES  ¶ 1:46 PM