News Blues
Hey, remember the "giant sucking sound?" No, I'm not talking about Monica but the prediction by that little squirt from Texas, Ross Perot when NAFTA was up for approval back in 1994.
Since that trade pact passed the US has lost nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs, some to Mexico, most to Asia. Was it NAFTA that sucked all those jobs off shore? No. But NAFTA sure didn't help. What it did do though was offer manufacturing venues right on the US boarder where manufacturers could exploit both cheap, compliant labor and loose environmental rules.
Now we have son-of-NAFTA – CAFTA – the Central American Free Trade Agreement. It passed by two votes last night.
The House narrowly approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement this morning, delivering a hard-fought victory to President Bush while underscoring the nation's deep divisions over trade...The 217 to 215 vote came just after midnight, in a dramatic finish that highlighted the intensity brought by both sides to the battle. When the usual 15-minute voting period expired at 11:17 p.m., the no votes outnumbered the yes votes by 180 to 175, with dozens of members undeclared. House Republican leaders kept the voting open for another 47 minutes, furiously rounding up holdouts in their own party until they had secured just enough to ensure approval....The House vote was effectively the last hurdle -- and by far the steepest -- facing CAFTA, which will tear down barriers to trade and investment between the United States, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. (Full Story)
I have nothing against free trade. In fact free trade is the only option for an increasingly interdependent, crowded world. What I oppose are purely predatory trade agreements that benefit only two groups – US multinationals looking for cheap, easily exploited labor and corrupt regimes just tickled to be in cahoots with exactly those kinds of companies.
What we are seeing in NAFTA and CAFTA are industries that once only fled off-shore to avoid US taxes, now fleeing to these new "free-trade" regions to escape paying fair US wages and strict environmental laws.
Do I blame them? No. It's a bear shits in the woods story. Companies that exist to make a profit will always do whatever the law allows them to do in order to lower costs and increase margins. Some will even go beyond the law – way beyond the law, ALA Enron et al.
But why risk prison time when Congress can accommodate your needs for a few pieces of silver? Once President Bush signs CAFTA into law industry will have a vast new region in which to plant production facilities no US city would allow any place near it.
Everything south of the US boarder, including it's people, environment and even governments, will be ripe for corporate exploitation. Be assured, there will be a lot more than just manufacturing afoot after that. Not to be ethnocentric or anything, but let's be honest, most of the governments south of here are hardly models of representative democracy. They are shaky, fragile and corrupt. In other words, pig-heaven for US manufacturers.
So, US multinationals will open their checkbooks to the parties and/or politicians down there willing to fight any US-style labor and workplace safety, livable or minimum wage or environmental laws. The weak labor and pro-environment groups are just barely hanging on now south of the border, won't have a prayer against US corporate lawyers and political palm-greasers.
As noted above CAFTA passed the House by a mere two votes. So here are the names of the Democrats that voted yes. Remember these names. (The only thing remarkable about those in this group is how unremarkable each of them are. They are, as a lot, the least distinguished members of this already undistinguished minority party.) Got your pencil ready? Okay, here they are:
The Democrats voting in favor were Reps. Victor F. Snyder (Ark.), Melissa L. Bean (Ill.), Dennis Moore (Kan.), William J. Jefferson (La.), Ike Skelton (Mo.), Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), Edolphus Towns (N.Y.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), John S. Tanner (Tenn.), Henry Cuellar (Tex.), Ruben Hinojosa (Tex.), Solomon P. Ortiz (Tex.), Jim Matheson (Utah), James P. Moran Jr. (Va.) and Norman D. Dicks (Wash.).
If you live in one of those states, take that name with you to the polls next year.
Circling Their Prey
Out here in the country where I live I can look off my back porch and tell you with certainty that an animal is either dead or dying. If I see a bunch of buzzards circling above a certain stand of woods, I know -- they are waiting for their meal to be done – done dying.
Which brings me to the American consumer.
"They are debt buyers, outfits that acquire unpaid bills from credit card firms and other credit providers for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Some of these companies go after bills so old that consumers can no longer be sued for them in court or punished for them on their credit reports.....As the amount of consumer debt has risen over the years, so too has the number of these firms, growing from about a dozen firms in 1996 to more than 500 today....Year in, year out, the Federal Trade Commission receives more complaints about debt collectors than any other industry. But in recent years, these complaints have skyrocketed -- from 13,950 in 2000 to 58,687 last year. (Full Story)
I know, all the economic indicators keep going up. Bush administration economists declared yesterday that we are enjoying a "Goldilocks Economy," perfect in every way.
What they don't mention, or seem to care about, is that Goldilocks is paying for all this stuff with high-interest debt. On the same week the administration gushed about the economy, credit card companies sent out notices to their borrowers informing them they were raising rates and tightening terms. Make a payment late, for example, and your "compounded daily" interest rates jumps – no, not jumps, leaps to leaves that would have made Shylock blush.
Between 1995 and 2004, the debt collection industry grew from purchasing $12 billion worth of consumer debt to $77.2 billion, according to the Nilson Report, a newsletter that monitors the credit industry. The report said that last year debt buyers paid an average of 5.4 cents for every dollar of unpaid debt.
But never mind, they will still lend you more money. Got any equity left in your home? Great, they will lend you money against that too. Use it as a down payment on a big ass SUV and they'll even arrange a lease or loan for you on the balance.
And the good times roll on, the administration crows.
Why do I doubt that? For people who like to throw around terms like, "leading indicators," I would think they might worry that the sudden growth in leg-breaking bad debt collection businesses, from a couple of dozen to half a thousand, might indicate trouble on the economic horizon.
I know if I saw 500 vultures circling nearby I would suspect the worst was afoot below them.
Why Terrorism Always Fails
About a year ago I wrote that terrorism always fails because terrorist inevitably "crap in their own mess kits." By which I meant, they end up causing havoc even for their own supporters and friends, who eventually realize they are not freedom fighters but homicidal nuts hiding behind a cause. To wit we read today:
"BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The Irish Republican Army announced Thursday it is renouncing violence as a political weapon and resuming disarmament in a dramatic declaration designed to revive Northern Ireland's peace process. (Full Story)
The IRA simply got to be bad for business -- the business of business and the business of life. And so their supporters pulled their plug. Today's announcement is nothing but the IRA trying to makes necessity appear virtuous.
We see that same process just beginning in the Islamic world. The same day the IRA story ran, this story ran:
An organization of top American Muslim religious scholars plans to issue a formal ruling today condemning terrorism and forbidding Muslims to cooperate with anyone involved in a terrorist act, according to officials of two leading Islamic organizations. (Full Story)
As security in the US tightened, Islamic terrorists were left all bombed up with place to go. So they started bombing their hosts in Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia -- crapping in their own mess kits.
Remember this the next time someone from the Bush administration tries telling you we are fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here.
The best way to fight terrorists is to mind our own security here thereby forcing them to remain in those handful of countries that support them. I call it the "Ransom of Red Chief" theory of fighting terrorism.
If Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, like these folks so well great, make them stay right there. Because it's only a matter of time before these terrorists-in-heat can't resist using all those guns and bombs against someone, anyone, for any damn reason. Because that's what homicidal nuts do.
Then what should we do? Nothing. Just sit back and watch the show. Like the Irish, they will eventually figure it out.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Thursday, July 28, 2005
July 26, 2005
New Labor to Old Labor:
"Bye"
I hope folks over at the DNC are paying close attention to what's going on in Chicago this week.
CHICAGO, July 25 - The huge split in organized labor has been fueled by stagnant living standards for many workers, by the ascendancy of the service sector and by labor's lack of success in politics and unionizing workers. But as much as anything, the schism reflects the conflicting ambitions of two titans of labor, John J. Sweeney, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and his onetime protégé, Andrew L. Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, until now the largest union in the labor federation. (Full Story)
What's going on there is so important it may well decide who will sit in the White House three and half years from now, and the future of the Democratic Party itself.
I am not going to waste your time chronicling the failures of the AFL/CIO or it's well-stuffed, over-paid, private-jet traveling, five-star restaurant dining, limo-riding, security-guard-surrounded, manicured, Italian-suited, underperforming, money-hander-outer-to-politicians, leader, John Sweeney.
Suffice it to say that this divorce was long overdue. The reason for it is about as fundamental as it gets in labor terms. The old, comfortable guard at the AFL-CIO has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in union dues trying to buy political friends instead of doing the hard work of labor organizing.
In the old days – when labor was young – there was no money. Instead labor used its muscle to get attention, and cooperation. Okay, it wasn't always pretty, and it was really hard work. It required union leaders to engage in one-on-one retail organizing. It meant handing out union fliers at factory gates in the wee hours of the morning, sometimes in freezing weather.
Back in those days union leaders, like Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, Harry Bridges and Cesar Chavez, put their personal safety, freedom and lives on the line facing down pipe swinging company thugs on picket lines.
It was hard, uphill work back when Labor was young. But with the winds of righteousness at their backs, it was effective too. American workers organized in record numbers, salaries went up, benefits went up, standards of living went up.
All those better-paid workers spent more, creating demand for more worker-produced products and services thereby creating more well-paying jobs. It was a self-fueling continuum that built the most prosperous, healthy and secure working class in history. Oh, and a robust national economy as well.
Corporate America could have just left that golden-egg-laying goose alone and let the good times roll. But they couldn't resist. They had to kill the goose in a short-sighted quest for instant gratification. Poorly treated and housed cheap offshore labor became the corporate Holy Grail of profitability. Millions of jobs were sent to developing countries, pensions were cut, healthcare benefits were slashed or eliminated, blah, blah, blah.. you know all this.
As this rape of labor marched on and on, and continues to do so, what did the AFL-CIO do? Nada. Nothing. Zip. At least,they did nothing effective. Because Sweeney and his kind at the top of labor had become indistinguishable from corporate CEOs and politicians. They looked the same. They lived the same. They vacationed the same. They talked the same. They walked the same.
Even as the percentage of America's unionized workers halved and halved again, the AFL-CIO stayed it's provenly ineffective course. The whole AFL-CIO operation was was on auto-pilot. The money to politicians kept flowing, the lobbying diners at five-stare eateries continued, complete with cigars. Backs were slapped, palms were greased. But jobs kept disappearing.
Finally this week a hunk of union members finally stood up and said, "Hey, what the f--k?" -- and filed for divorce.
Now there are two labor movements – Old Labor and New Labor -- and Democrats would make a serious mistake trying to play both ends. They are going to have to choose or be exposed as the valueless, directionless, losers they have shown themselves to be for the past three election cycles.
But which will Dems back? Old labor will continue thanding out money to politicians because that's now the only card they have to play. With their membership in shreds exerting old-fashioned muscle is no longer an option. So the checks will continue flowing to Washington.
New labor, on the other hand, will not have money to waste on politicians. The breakaway unions want to use their union dues for good old-fashioned labor organizing. They believe labor needs to rediscover its activist roots and organize, organize, organize, to rebuilt its ranks -- its muscle.
The most important thing New Labor learned from Old Labor is that "friends" you have to buy are notoriously unreliable. The only way labor can get its fair share of the economic pie is to come to the table with its own knife.
So, what are the Dems gonna do? The choice will be painful for that lot. On one side they have Sweeney waving his fat checkbook. On the other they have a bunch of hard-working guys and gals in blue jeans with dirt under their nails but no money -- at least not to waste on politicans.
If Democrats are smart they will back New Labor to the hilt -- and publicly. They will stand up and acknowledge that American labor is in crisis, that the pendulum has swung way too far to the corporate end of the power scale and needs to be re-centered. And, that Old Labor has failed miserably at that task.
In the short term support of New Labor will hurt Democrats. They will almost certainly lose much of that easy money as Sweeney and his Old Labor fat-cats punish supporters of New Labor by giving money to their opponents - most likely Republicans.
But make no mistake about it, New Labor is now the real House of Labor. It may be little more than a shotgun shack right now, but it's the real deal. And, it deserves unbridled Democratic Party support.
But, if DNC fails to figure that out it will be just another sign the Democratic Party needs a taste of the same medicine Big Labor got this week in Chicago.
So, Howard Dean, tell us -- are you a Sweeney?
"Bye"
I hope folks over at the DNC are paying close attention to what's going on in Chicago this week.
CHICAGO, July 25 - The huge split in organized labor has been fueled by stagnant living standards for many workers, by the ascendancy of the service sector and by labor's lack of success in politics and unionizing workers. But as much as anything, the schism reflects the conflicting ambitions of two titans of labor, John J. Sweeney, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and his onetime protégé, Andrew L. Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, until now the largest union in the labor federation. (Full Story)
What's going on there is so important it may well decide who will sit in the White House three and half years from now, and the future of the Democratic Party itself.
I am not going to waste your time chronicling the failures of the AFL/CIO or it's well-stuffed, over-paid, private-jet traveling, five-star restaurant dining, limo-riding, security-guard-surrounded, manicured, Italian-suited, underperforming, money-hander-outer-to-politicians, leader, John Sweeney.
Suffice it to say that this divorce was long overdue. The reason for it is about as fundamental as it gets in labor terms. The old, comfortable guard at the AFL-CIO has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in union dues trying to buy political friends instead of doing the hard work of labor organizing.
In the old days – when labor was young – there was no money. Instead labor used its muscle to get attention, and cooperation. Okay, it wasn't always pretty, and it was really hard work. It required union leaders to engage in one-on-one retail organizing. It meant handing out union fliers at factory gates in the wee hours of the morning, sometimes in freezing weather.
Back in those days union leaders, like Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, Harry Bridges and Cesar Chavez, put their personal safety, freedom and lives on the line facing down pipe swinging company thugs on picket lines.
It was hard, uphill work back when Labor was young. But with the winds of righteousness at their backs, it was effective too. American workers organized in record numbers, salaries went up, benefits went up, standards of living went up.
All those better-paid workers spent more, creating demand for more worker-produced products and services thereby creating more well-paying jobs. It was a self-fueling continuum that built the most prosperous, healthy and secure working class in history. Oh, and a robust national economy as well.
Corporate America could have just left that golden-egg-laying goose alone and let the good times roll. But they couldn't resist. They had to kill the goose in a short-sighted quest for instant gratification. Poorly treated and housed cheap offshore labor became the corporate Holy Grail of profitability. Millions of jobs were sent to developing countries, pensions were cut, healthcare benefits were slashed or eliminated, blah, blah, blah.. you know all this.
As this rape of labor marched on and on, and continues to do so, what did the AFL-CIO do? Nada. Nothing. Zip. At least,they did nothing effective. Because Sweeney and his kind at the top of labor had become indistinguishable from corporate CEOs and politicians. They looked the same. They lived the same. They vacationed the same. They talked the same. They walked the same.
Even as the percentage of America's unionized workers halved and halved again, the AFL-CIO stayed it's provenly ineffective course. The whole AFL-CIO operation was was on auto-pilot. The money to politicians kept flowing, the lobbying diners at five-stare eateries continued, complete with cigars. Backs were slapped, palms were greased. But jobs kept disappearing.
Finally this week a hunk of union members finally stood up and said, "Hey, what the f--k?" -- and filed for divorce.
Now there are two labor movements – Old Labor and New Labor -- and Democrats would make a serious mistake trying to play both ends. They are going to have to choose or be exposed as the valueless, directionless, losers they have shown themselves to be for the past three election cycles.
But which will Dems back? Old labor will continue thanding out money to politicians because that's now the only card they have to play. With their membership in shreds exerting old-fashioned muscle is no longer an option. So the checks will continue flowing to Washington.
New labor, on the other hand, will not have money to waste on politicians. The breakaway unions want to use their union dues for good old-fashioned labor organizing. They believe labor needs to rediscover its activist roots and organize, organize, organize, to rebuilt its ranks -- its muscle.
The most important thing New Labor learned from Old Labor is that "friends" you have to buy are notoriously unreliable. The only way labor can get its fair share of the economic pie is to come to the table with its own knife.
So, what are the Dems gonna do? The choice will be painful for that lot. On one side they have Sweeney waving his fat checkbook. On the other they have a bunch of hard-working guys and gals in blue jeans with dirt under their nails but no money -- at least not to waste on politicans.
If Democrats are smart they will back New Labor to the hilt -- and publicly. They will stand up and acknowledge that American labor is in crisis, that the pendulum has swung way too far to the corporate end of the power scale and needs to be re-centered. And, that Old Labor has failed miserably at that task.
In the short term support of New Labor will hurt Democrats. They will almost certainly lose much of that easy money as Sweeney and his Old Labor fat-cats punish supporters of New Labor by giving money to their opponents - most likely Republicans.
But make no mistake about it, New Labor is now the real House of Labor. It may be little more than a shotgun shack right now, but it's the real deal. And, it deserves unbridled Democratic Party support.
But, if DNC fails to figure that out it will be just another sign the Democratic Party needs a taste of the same medicine Big Labor got this week in Chicago.
So, Howard Dean, tell us -- are you a Sweeney?
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
July 25, 2005
The Questions You May Not Ask
When's it okay to ask a would-be public official about his or her spiritual beliefs?
Senator: Judge Roberts is it true that before you make a major judicial decision you consult Tarot cards?
Well, of course, as a practicing Catholic, I seriously doubt Judge Roberts has even a passing familiarity with Tarot cards, so that's just ridiculous.
But what if there were hard evidence that a Supreme Court nominee was smitten by the occult, wouldn't it be important to probe those beliefs? And, if those beliefs centered around Tarot Cards, Quiji boards, channeling the long dead, fortune telling or astrology, you can bet your sweet bippy the nominee would be grilled to a turn. Such unconventional superstitious beliefs make us nervous when they are espoused by public officials. (Remember the flap over Nancy Reagan and her astrologer? )
But what about that? What about public officials' belief in things supernatural? How far can we go, how far should we go, in probing the beliefs of those who would lead our nation or make the rules by which we are governed? Does a belief that human events are influenced by extra-judicial, supernatural forces, matter?
The confirmation process for a new Supreme Court justice is always a dicy affair. Everyone dances around hot button social/religious issues like abortion. Everyone tries to find out how the nominee feels about such issues without coming right out and asking. Instead they try to read the tea leaves in the nominees past statements and/or decisions.
But a nominee -- any nominee -- is ultimately the product of what he or she believes most deeply. So why can't we ask what it is they believe most deeply?
No can do.
Even as America's fundamentalist Christians demand and get more and more access to the public square, we are told we cannot probe their belief structure. To do so, we are told, would be worse than impolite, it's downright ignorant and bigoted. Even though their beliefs shape their decisions in office, we have no right to question them -- or those belief's basis in fact or fantacy.
Wait, that's not exactly true. Not every superstition is untouchable. If a nominee were, say, a practicing Scientologist his or her beliefs would be fair game for questioning. How about a practicing fundamentalist Mormon who upholds the "holy" right of bigamy? You can bet there'd be some questions about that. Or a funadmentalist Muslim who believes women should have almost none of the rights men enjoy? Wanna bet he'd get his empty head handed to him on a Senatorial platter?
What about a practicing witch, or a member of the Church of Satan? I could just hear the screams of outrage from the right! They'd eat those "pagans" for lunch.
Superstitious beliefs that are out of the mainstream are fair game. And, those who publicly espouse such beliefs are almost always excluded from high public office -- and thank goodness for it. If such "wierdos" ever made it as far as a Senate confirmation hearing the Senators would elbow one another aside to get the first digs in – on camera.
So why do Christian nominees, like Judge John Roberts, get a pass? If he is, as reported, devoutly religious, why are his superrnatural beliefs off limits? Simple; some superstitions more equal than others. There are "mainstream" superstitions and there are those "nutty" ones. I mean, come on, what kind of nut would consult a Quiji board when they could pray to an all-powerful pretend-friend in "heaven?" One belief is nutty, the other, while just as nutty, is "mainstream."
Test given: The guy who consults the Quiji board would not be qualified to serve on the Supreme Court while the other guy would be qualified.
Something's whacky there.
I only mention all this because mainstream Christians are just as prone to believing utter nonsense as the rest of the metaphyical lot. And I don't like being governed in troubled times like these by people who still believe in primitive, Mother Goose-ish fables about angels, devils, miracles, judgment days and similar voodoo, be it mainstream or otherwise.
The fastest way to rid ourselves of superstition in government is to break the taboo and openly question such beliefs in those seeking high public office. Currently we can't ask, we can't probe because "they" hold the presumed moral – if not intellectual – high-ground. That misconceived notion has created a situation in which almost every candidate for public office now must either be, (or pretend to be,) "a person of faith."
But what if the taboo against asking were lifted? What if we could probe, even challenge, their beliefs?
"You say you're a person of faith. That's nice, but faith in what? Tell us about it. Do you really believe that, in spite of everything science has learned over the past couple of centuries, the earth is really only 6000 years old? How do you square that with the facts? Are the scientists just wrong and your, totally unsubstantiated, beliefs right? When the science is at odds with your faith, do you believe that's the work of Satan?"
If we could do that you can bet fewer and fewer candidates would trot out their superstitions for public view – and review.
Anyway, I have gone on too long with this rant. I was just going to write a paragraph introducing a wonderful piece on this subject that appeared in the Guardian last week. Got carried away.
Sorry about that. But here it is. It's fabulous.
In the name of God
"Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the Islamic death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public life."
Polly Toynbee
Friday July 22, 2005
The Guardian
Two weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God.
Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services have already revealed that they know absolutely nothing.
In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.
All religions are prone to it, given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent on wiping out heathens. Jewish zealots in their settlements crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some African Pentecostal churches harbour sects of torturing exorcism and child abuse. Muslims have a very long tradition of jihadist slaughter. Sikhs rose up to stop a play that exposed deformities of abuse within their temples. Buddhism too has its sinister wing.
See how far-right evangelicals have kidnapped US politics and warped its secular, liberal founding traditions. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith.
Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason. Extreme superstition breeds extreme action. Those who believe they alone know the only way, truth and life will always feel justified in doing anything in its name. You would, wouldn't you, if you alone had the magic answer to everything? If religions teach that life after death is better then it is hardly surprising that some crazed followers will actually believe it.
Moderates of these faiths may be as gentle as the carefully homogenised Thought for the Day preachers. But other equally authentic voices of religion, the likes of Ian Paisley or Omar Bakri Muhammad, represent a virulent intolerance that is airbrushed out by an official intellectual conspiracy to pretend that religion is always or mainly beneficent. History suggests otherwise. So do events on the streets of London. Meanwhile the far left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around. (Never mind their new friends' views on women, gays and democracy.)
It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private - but well-regulated - sphere.
Instead David Blunkett said he wished he could spread the ethos of religious schools everywhere and Labour has done just that. The 3% of the population who are Muslim may well feel excluded in a country that makes so many special allowances for Christians when slightly more Muslims go to the mosque than Anglicans attend a church once a week.
A third of all state schools are religious. The National Secular Society, a lone voice in monitoring their onward march, reports that Labour has let 40 more nonreligious state secondaries be taken over by the Church of England in the last four years, with another 54 about to go. The Office for the Schools Adjudicator said in a recent report that the only reason faith schools often achieve better results is because of "their practice of selection from churchgoing families". That attracts the pretend churchgoers, but selection, not religion, is the magic.
In the face of this hypocrisy it seems a small thing to let Muslims have more schools too. Only this week Ruth Kelly (devout herself) announced plans to go ahead in her autumn white paper with more Muslim schools. Bombs, she said, would not stop her policy of offering more "choice" and allowing more faith groups, including Muslims, to run schools. A Hindu state school will open soon in Harrow.
But this is not choice. Only yesterday an angry email arrived from a parent on the south coast protesting that the only choice of primary school was a C of E, a Catholic and an oversubscribed ordinary school. Disqualified from the first two, failing to get into the third, their child is sent miles across town; three nonreligious schools would have been genuine choice. A YouGov poll shows that more than half of voters oppose this. While Northern Ireland struggles with sectarianism festering in religious schools, this is no time to foster yet more segregation.
So what do we do about the madmen? Bombs do change things, maybe not in the extremists' favour. A great shift in attitude seems to have swept through many Muslim groups who signed the full-page newspaper statement yesterday headed "Not in Our Name". Many were equivocators on the fatwa that had Salman Rushdie locked away for years. At the time Iqbal Sacranie himself said: "Death, perhaps, is too easy for him ... his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks forgiveness to Almighty Allah." Nowadays Sir Iqbal is a leading moderate, showing how tolerance grows, given a chance.
The statement read: "We will not allow our faith to be hijacked by a few extremists. British Muslims should not be held responsible for the acts of a few individuals." Entirely right . Yet - like members of the same family - like it or not they are stuck with responsibility for rooting out wild men hiding in their midst and questioning what elements of their religious practice have proven so lethal. But no one can police minds and no new draconian laws to silence thinkers and preachers will ever stop dangerous ideas.
All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time - it may take a nonreligious leader - to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come. And it might clear the air of the clouds of hypocrisy, twisted thinking and circumlocution whenever a politician mentions religion.
Email the author: polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
Amen Sister Polly
When's it okay to ask a would-be public official about his or her spiritual beliefs?
Senator: Judge Roberts is it true that before you make a major judicial decision you consult Tarot cards?
Well, of course, as a practicing Catholic, I seriously doubt Judge Roberts has even a passing familiarity with Tarot cards, so that's just ridiculous.
But what if there were hard evidence that a Supreme Court nominee was smitten by the occult, wouldn't it be important to probe those beliefs? And, if those beliefs centered around Tarot Cards, Quiji boards, channeling the long dead, fortune telling or astrology, you can bet your sweet bippy the nominee would be grilled to a turn. Such unconventional superstitious beliefs make us nervous when they are espoused by public officials. (Remember the flap over Nancy Reagan and her astrologer? )
But what about that? What about public officials' belief in things supernatural? How far can we go, how far should we go, in probing the beliefs of those who would lead our nation or make the rules by which we are governed? Does a belief that human events are influenced by extra-judicial, supernatural forces, matter?
The confirmation process for a new Supreme Court justice is always a dicy affair. Everyone dances around hot button social/religious issues like abortion. Everyone tries to find out how the nominee feels about such issues without coming right out and asking. Instead they try to read the tea leaves in the nominees past statements and/or decisions.
But a nominee -- any nominee -- is ultimately the product of what he or she believes most deeply. So why can't we ask what it is they believe most deeply?
No can do.
Even as America's fundamentalist Christians demand and get more and more access to the public square, we are told we cannot probe their belief structure. To do so, we are told, would be worse than impolite, it's downright ignorant and bigoted. Even though their beliefs shape their decisions in office, we have no right to question them -- or those belief's basis in fact or fantacy.
Wait, that's not exactly true. Not every superstition is untouchable. If a nominee were, say, a practicing Scientologist his or her beliefs would be fair game for questioning. How about a practicing fundamentalist Mormon who upholds the "holy" right of bigamy? You can bet there'd be some questions about that. Or a funadmentalist Muslim who believes women should have almost none of the rights men enjoy? Wanna bet he'd get his empty head handed to him on a Senatorial platter?
What about a practicing witch, or a member of the Church of Satan? I could just hear the screams of outrage from the right! They'd eat those "pagans" for lunch.
Superstitious beliefs that are out of the mainstream are fair game. And, those who publicly espouse such beliefs are almost always excluded from high public office -- and thank goodness for it. If such "wierdos" ever made it as far as a Senate confirmation hearing the Senators would elbow one another aside to get the first digs in – on camera.
So why do Christian nominees, like Judge John Roberts, get a pass? If he is, as reported, devoutly religious, why are his superrnatural beliefs off limits? Simple; some superstitions more equal than others. There are "mainstream" superstitions and there are those "nutty" ones. I mean, come on, what kind of nut would consult a Quiji board when they could pray to an all-powerful pretend-friend in "heaven?" One belief is nutty, the other, while just as nutty, is "mainstream."
Test given: The guy who consults the Quiji board would not be qualified to serve on the Supreme Court while the other guy would be qualified.
Something's whacky there.
I only mention all this because mainstream Christians are just as prone to believing utter nonsense as the rest of the metaphyical lot. And I don't like being governed in troubled times like these by people who still believe in primitive, Mother Goose-ish fables about angels, devils, miracles, judgment days and similar voodoo, be it mainstream or otherwise.
The fastest way to rid ourselves of superstition in government is to break the taboo and openly question such beliefs in those seeking high public office. Currently we can't ask, we can't probe because "they" hold the presumed moral – if not intellectual – high-ground. That misconceived notion has created a situation in which almost every candidate for public office now must either be, (or pretend to be,) "a person of faith."
But what if the taboo against asking were lifted? What if we could probe, even challenge, their beliefs?
"You say you're a person of faith. That's nice, but faith in what? Tell us about it. Do you really believe that, in spite of everything science has learned over the past couple of centuries, the earth is really only 6000 years old? How do you square that with the facts? Are the scientists just wrong and your, totally unsubstantiated, beliefs right? When the science is at odds with your faith, do you believe that's the work of Satan?"
If we could do that you can bet fewer and fewer candidates would trot out their superstitions for public view – and review.
Anyway, I have gone on too long with this rant. I was just going to write a paragraph introducing a wonderful piece on this subject that appeared in the Guardian last week. Got carried away.
Sorry about that. But here it is. It's fabulous.
In the name of God
"Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the Islamic death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public life."
Polly Toynbee
Friday July 22, 2005
The Guardian
Two weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God.
Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services have already revealed that they know absolutely nothing.
In the growing fear and anger at what more may be to come, apologists or explainers for these young men can expect short shrift. This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.
All religions are prone to it, given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent on wiping out heathens. Jewish zealots in their settlements crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some African Pentecostal churches harbour sects of torturing exorcism and child abuse. Muslims have a very long tradition of jihadist slaughter. Sikhs rose up to stop a play that exposed deformities of abuse within their temples. Buddhism too has its sinister wing.
See how far-right evangelicals have kidnapped US politics and warped its secular, liberal founding traditions. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith.
Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason. Extreme superstition breeds extreme action. Those who believe they alone know the only way, truth and life will always feel justified in doing anything in its name. You would, wouldn't you, if you alone had the magic answer to everything? If religions teach that life after death is better then it is hardly surprising that some crazed followers will actually believe it.
Moderates of these faiths may be as gentle as the carefully homogenised Thought for the Day preachers. But other equally authentic voices of religion, the likes of Ian Paisley or Omar Bakri Muhammad, represent a virulent intolerance that is airbrushed out by an official intellectual conspiracy to pretend that religion is always or mainly beneficent. History suggests otherwise. So do events on the streets of London. Meanwhile the far left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around. (Never mind their new friends' views on women, gays and democracy.)
It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private - but well-regulated - sphere.
Instead David Blunkett said he wished he could spread the ethos of religious schools everywhere and Labour has done just that. The 3% of the population who are Muslim may well feel excluded in a country that makes so many special allowances for Christians when slightly more Muslims go to the mosque than Anglicans attend a church once a week.
A third of all state schools are religious. The National Secular Society, a lone voice in monitoring their onward march, reports that Labour has let 40 more nonreligious state secondaries be taken over by the Church of England in the last four years, with another 54 about to go. The Office for the Schools Adjudicator said in a recent report that the only reason faith schools often achieve better results is because of "their practice of selection from churchgoing families". That attracts the pretend churchgoers, but selection, not religion, is the magic.
In the face of this hypocrisy it seems a small thing to let Muslims have more schools too. Only this week Ruth Kelly (devout herself) announced plans to go ahead in her autumn white paper with more Muslim schools. Bombs, she said, would not stop her policy of offering more "choice" and allowing more faith groups, including Muslims, to run schools. A Hindu state school will open soon in Harrow.
But this is not choice. Only yesterday an angry email arrived from a parent on the south coast protesting that the only choice of primary school was a C of E, a Catholic and an oversubscribed ordinary school. Disqualified from the first two, failing to get into the third, their child is sent miles across town; three nonreligious schools would have been genuine choice. A YouGov poll shows that more than half of voters oppose this. While Northern Ireland struggles with sectarianism festering in religious schools, this is no time to foster yet more segregation.
So what do we do about the madmen? Bombs do change things, maybe not in the extremists' favour. A great shift in attitude seems to have swept through many Muslim groups who signed the full-page newspaper statement yesterday headed "Not in Our Name". Many were equivocators on the fatwa that had Salman Rushdie locked away for years. At the time Iqbal Sacranie himself said: "Death, perhaps, is too easy for him ... his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks forgiveness to Almighty Allah." Nowadays Sir Iqbal is a leading moderate, showing how tolerance grows, given a chance.
The statement read: "We will not allow our faith to be hijacked by a few extremists. British Muslims should not be held responsible for the acts of a few individuals." Entirely right . Yet - like members of the same family - like it or not they are stuck with responsibility for rooting out wild men hiding in their midst and questioning what elements of their religious practice have proven so lethal. But no one can police minds and no new draconian laws to silence thinkers and preachers will ever stop dangerous ideas.
All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time - it may take a nonreligious leader - to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come. And it might clear the air of the clouds of hypocrisy, twisted thinking and circumlocution whenever a politician mentions religion.
Email the author: polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
Amen Sister Polly
Monday, July 25, 2005
July 23, 2005
A Character Test
How do you measure character? That's one of those questions that seems obvious until you start thinking about it. Certainly there are as many ways to measure a person's character as there are situations in which character is tested.
Here's one of those situations.
WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa. (Full Story)
This little test was given to the two men closest to the two most powerful men in the world, Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby. And, by even the most generous standard, they flunked.
Imagine this. The two of them were working with then CIA chief, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, on a statement Tenet would make taking the blame for letting the "nuclear material from Africa" line stay in the President's State of the Union speech. The press had figured out that the story was full of holes and was pressuring the White House to explain how such dubious information got into the speech.
So Rove and Libby worked out a deal with Tenet; he would take the fall, retire and get a medal in return for getting the Bush and Cheney off the hook. "The hook" being of course, that the statement in Bush's speech was wrong... or in their weasel-worded statement penned for Tenet, "unsubstantiated."
It was wrong and Rove and Libby knew it. Whether they knew it was wrong when VP Cheney insisted it be put in the President's speech or not isn't clear -- yet. But there is no doubt they knew it wrpmg by the first week of July 2003. Otherwise why would such two high-level officials waste their valuable time drafting a cover, a cover they considered serious enough to throw their own CIA chief to the wolves to perfect?
If that were the end of the tale it would be just another one of those "Washington is a snake pit," stories. But there's more. What happened next speaks volumes about the character of the characters at the highest levels of this administration.
At the very time Rove and Libby were crafting their own Niger retraction, former ambassador Joe Wilson unleashed his "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Suddenly Rove and Libby had another job – a job that was in direct contradiction to the one they were already working on. Only a schizophrenic or patholognical sociopath could pull this one off. But clearly they had found the right two guys to do it. So, even as they polished the wording of Tenet's retraction/mea culpa explaining why he should never have allowed the bogus Niger yellowcake line into the Presidents' speech, Rove and Libby began the work of vilifying and discrediting the very person who tried to tell them that to begin with, Joe Wilson.
Rove and Libby deceminated the talking points to GOP foot-soldiers: Wilson was a liar. Wilson wasted his time in Niger drinking green tea with diplomats. Wilson got it wrong.
But it wasn't working. Wilson came across on TV as a straight-shooter, and when Tenent issued the retraction Rove and Libby had prepared for him, that only made Wilson's position even more credible.
Then Rove and Libby got wind of the secret State Dept. memo disclosing that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Bingo. "Wilson's wife is fair game." Rove declared to a reporter at the time.
So there you have it – a clear and unambiguous character test. Two guys who not only knew the Niger information was wrong and were actually crafting a retraction, were at the same time feverishly working to discredit the only guy who had the guts to say so when it could have averted a war. And, they were prepared to not only ruin Wilson, but his wife as well. (Not to mention putting field agents and sources of Valerie Plame in jeopardy as well.)
Of course the President knows all this. We know he knows because before Karl and Dick clued him in he said he would fire anyone "involved" with the leak of Plame's identity. After he found out who was "involved" he change his standard to "anyone guilty of a crime," which would mean any firings would come only after a trial and conviction -- a likelihood that, even under the best of circumstances would not take place until well after Bush's term ends three years from now. So, he knows. And we know he knows.
This from the White House George Bush promised would "return integrity and honesty to the Oval Office." Bill Clinton lied about getting a hummer from a floozy. I suppose that's what Bush was referring to.
I wish there were a set of scales on which we could pile the lies Clinton told that would measure not only the number of lies, but their gravity and implications for the nation and the world. And, on the other side of the scale, the lies this administration has told, their number and their gravity.
On one scale we have lying about that hummer. No one dies.
Result: Clinton faces impeachment.
On the other side Bush lies about WMD in Iraq, goes to war, at least 25,000 Iraqis die, 1800 US soldiers, so far. Bush lies about the cost of the new Medicare drug benefits endangering the fiscal health of the entire Medicare system. Bush lies about Iraq trying to buy yellow cake from Niger then orchestrates lies about Wilson. Then the administration lies about how or who blew Wilson's wife's CIA cover.
Result: Tenet gets a metal. Rove gets promoted. Bush gets to appoint at least two new Supreme Court Justices and three more years in the Oval Office.
Something is out of whack.
Site of the Day
http://www.sfgate.com/comics/fiore/
How do you measure character? That's one of those questions that seems obvious until you start thinking about it. Certainly there are as many ways to measure a person's character as there are situations in which character is tested.
Here's one of those situations.
WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa. (Full Story)
This little test was given to the two men closest to the two most powerful men in the world, Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby. And, by even the most generous standard, they flunked.
Imagine this. The two of them were working with then CIA chief, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, on a statement Tenet would make taking the blame for letting the "nuclear material from Africa" line stay in the President's State of the Union speech. The press had figured out that the story was full of holes and was pressuring the White House to explain how such dubious information got into the speech.
So Rove and Libby worked out a deal with Tenet; he would take the fall, retire and get a medal in return for getting the Bush and Cheney off the hook. "The hook" being of course, that the statement in Bush's speech was wrong... or in their weasel-worded statement penned for Tenet, "unsubstantiated."
It was wrong and Rove and Libby knew it. Whether they knew it was wrong when VP Cheney insisted it be put in the President's speech or not isn't clear -- yet. But there is no doubt they knew it wrpmg by the first week of July 2003. Otherwise why would such two high-level officials waste their valuable time drafting a cover, a cover they considered serious enough to throw their own CIA chief to the wolves to perfect?
If that were the end of the tale it would be just another one of those "Washington is a snake pit," stories. But there's more. What happened next speaks volumes about the character of the characters at the highest levels of this administration.
At the very time Rove and Libby were crafting their own Niger retraction, former ambassador Joe Wilson unleashed his "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Suddenly Rove and Libby had another job – a job that was in direct contradiction to the one they were already working on. Only a schizophrenic or patholognical sociopath could pull this one off. But clearly they had found the right two guys to do it. So, even as they polished the wording of Tenet's retraction/mea culpa explaining why he should never have allowed the bogus Niger yellowcake line into the Presidents' speech, Rove and Libby began the work of vilifying and discrediting the very person who tried to tell them that to begin with, Joe Wilson.
Rove and Libby deceminated the talking points to GOP foot-soldiers: Wilson was a liar. Wilson wasted his time in Niger drinking green tea with diplomats. Wilson got it wrong.
But it wasn't working. Wilson came across on TV as a straight-shooter, and when Tenent issued the retraction Rove and Libby had prepared for him, that only made Wilson's position even more credible.
Then Rove and Libby got wind of the secret State Dept. memo disclosing that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Bingo. "Wilson's wife is fair game." Rove declared to a reporter at the time.
So there you have it – a clear and unambiguous character test. Two guys who not only knew the Niger information was wrong and were actually crafting a retraction, were at the same time feverishly working to discredit the only guy who had the guts to say so when it could have averted a war. And, they were prepared to not only ruin Wilson, but his wife as well. (Not to mention putting field agents and sources of Valerie Plame in jeopardy as well.)
Of course the President knows all this. We know he knows because before Karl and Dick clued him in he said he would fire anyone "involved" with the leak of Plame's identity. After he found out who was "involved" he change his standard to "anyone guilty of a crime," which would mean any firings would come only after a trial and conviction -- a likelihood that, even under the best of circumstances would not take place until well after Bush's term ends three years from now. So, he knows. And we know he knows.
This from the White House George Bush promised would "return integrity and honesty to the Oval Office." Bill Clinton lied about getting a hummer from a floozy. I suppose that's what Bush was referring to.
I wish there were a set of scales on which we could pile the lies Clinton told that would measure not only the number of lies, but their gravity and implications for the nation and the world. And, on the other side of the scale, the lies this administration has told, their number and their gravity.
On one scale we have lying about that hummer. No one dies.
Result: Clinton faces impeachment.
On the other side Bush lies about WMD in Iraq, goes to war, at least 25,000 Iraqis die, 1800 US soldiers, so far. Bush lies about the cost of the new Medicare drug benefits endangering the fiscal health of the entire Medicare system. Bush lies about Iraq trying to buy yellow cake from Niger then orchestrates lies about Wilson. Then the administration lies about how or who blew Wilson's wife's CIA cover.
Result: Tenet gets a metal. Rove gets promoted. Bush gets to appoint at least two new Supreme Court Justices and three more years in the Oval Office.
Something is out of whack.
Site of the Day
http://www.sfgate.com/comics/fiore/
July 23, 2005
A Character Test
How do you measure character? That's one of those questions that seems obvious until you start thinking about it. Certainly there are as many ways to measure a person's character as there are situations in which character is tested.
Here's one of those situations.
WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa. (Full Story)
This little test was given to the two men closest to the two most powerful men in the world, Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby. And, by even the most generous standard, they flunked.
Imagine this. The two of them were working with then CIA chief, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, on a statement Tenet would make taking the blame for letting the "nuclear material from Africa" line stay in the President's State of the Union speech. The press had figured out that the story was full of holes and was pressuring the White House to explain how such dubious information got into the speech.
So Rove and Libby worked out a deal with Tenet; he would take the fall, retire and get a medal in return for getting the Bush and Cheney off the hook. "The hook" being of course, that the statement in Bush's speech was wrong... or in their weasel-worded statement penned for Tenet, "unsubstantiated."
It was wrong and Rove and Libby knew it. Whether they knew it was wrong when VP Cheney insisted it be put in the President's speech or not isn't clear -- yet. But there is no doubt they knew it wrpmg by the first week of July 2003. Otherwise why would such two high-level officials waste their valuable time drafting a cover, a cover they considered serious enough to throw their own CIA chief to the wolves to perfect?
If that were the end of the tale it would be just another one of those "Washington is a snake pit," stories. But there's more. What happened next speaks volumes about the character of the characters at the highest levels of this administration.
At the very time Rove and Libby were crafting their own Niger retraction, former ambassador Joe Wilson unleashed his "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Suddenly Rove and Libby had another job – a job that was in direct contradiction to the one they were already working on. Only a schizophrenic or patholognical sociopath could pull this one off. But clearly they had found the right two guys to do it. So, even as they polished the wording of Tenet's retraction/mea culpa explaining why he should never have allowed the bogus Niger yellowcake line into the Presidents' speech, Rove and Libby began the work of vilifying and discrediting the very person who tried to tell them that to begin with, Joe Wilson.
Rove and Libby deceminated the talking points to GOP foot-soldiers: Wilson was a liar. Wilson wasted his time in Niger drinking green tea with diplomats. Wilson got it wrong.
But it wasn't working. Wilson came across on TV as a straight-shooter, and when Tenent issued the retraction Rove and Libby had prepared for him, that only made Wilson's position even more credible.
Then Rove and Libby got wind of the secret State Dept. memo disclosing that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Bingo. "Wilson's wife is fair game." Rove declared to a reporter at the time.
So there you have it – a clear and unambiguous character test. Two guys who not only knew the Niger information was wrong and were actually crafting a retraction, were at the same time feverishly working to discredit the only guy who had the guts to say so when it could have averted a war. And, they were prepared to not only ruin Wilson, but his wife as well. (Not to mention putting field agents and sources of Valerie Plame in jeopardy as well.)
Of course the President knows all this. We know he knows because before Karl and Dick clued him in he said he would fire anyone "involved" with the leak of Plame's identity. After he found out who was "involved" he change his standard to "anyone guilty of a crime," which would mean any firings would come only after a trial and conviction -- a likelihood that, even under the best of circumstances would not take place until well after Bush's term ends three years from now. So, he knows. And we know he knows.
This from the White House George Bush promised would "return integrity and honesty to the Oval Office." Bill Clinton lied about getting a hummer from a floozy. I suppose that's what Bush was referring to.
I wish there were a set of scales on which we could pile the lies Clinton told that would measure not only the number of lies, but their gravity and implications for the nation and the world. And, on the other side of the scale, the lies this administration has told, their number and their gravity.
On one scale we have lying about that hummer. No one dies.
Result: Clinton faces impeachment.
On the other side Bush lies about WMD in Iraq, goes to war, at least 25,000 Iraqis die, 1800 US soldiers, so far. Bush lies about the cost of the new Medicare drug benefits endangering the fiscal health of the entire Medicare system. Bush lies about Iraq trying to buy yellow cake from Niger then orchestrates lies about Wilson. Then the administration lies about how or who blew Wilson's wife's CIA cover.
Result: Tenet gets a metal. Rove gets promoted. Bush gets to appoint at least two new Supreme Court Justices and three more years in the Oval Office.
Something is out of whack.
Site of the Day
http://www.sfgate.com/comics/fiore/
How do you measure character? That's one of those questions that seems obvious until you start thinking about it. Certainly there are as many ways to measure a person's character as there are situations in which character is tested.
Here's one of those situations.
WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa. (Full Story)
This little test was given to the two men closest to the two most powerful men in the world, Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby. And, by even the most generous standard, they flunked.
Imagine this. The two of them were working with then CIA chief, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, on a statement Tenet would make taking the blame for letting the "nuclear material from Africa" line stay in the President's State of the Union speech. The press had figured out that the story was full of holes and was pressuring the White House to explain how such dubious information got into the speech.
So Rove and Libby worked out a deal with Tenet; he would take the fall, retire and get a medal in return for getting the Bush and Cheney off the hook. "The hook" being of course, that the statement in Bush's speech was wrong... or in their weasel-worded statement penned for Tenet, "unsubstantiated."
It was wrong and Rove and Libby knew it. Whether they knew it was wrong when VP Cheney insisted it be put in the President's speech or not isn't clear -- yet. But there is no doubt they knew it wrpmg by the first week of July 2003. Otherwise why would such two high-level officials waste their valuable time drafting a cover, a cover they considered serious enough to throw their own CIA chief to the wolves to perfect?
If that were the end of the tale it would be just another one of those "Washington is a snake pit," stories. But there's more. What happened next speaks volumes about the character of the characters at the highest levels of this administration.
At the very time Rove and Libby were crafting their own Niger retraction, former ambassador Joe Wilson unleashed his "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Suddenly Rove and Libby had another job – a job that was in direct contradiction to the one they were already working on. Only a schizophrenic or patholognical sociopath could pull this one off. But clearly they had found the right two guys to do it. So, even as they polished the wording of Tenet's retraction/mea culpa explaining why he should never have allowed the bogus Niger yellowcake line into the Presidents' speech, Rove and Libby began the work of vilifying and discrediting the very person who tried to tell them that to begin with, Joe Wilson.
Rove and Libby deceminated the talking points to GOP foot-soldiers: Wilson was a liar. Wilson wasted his time in Niger drinking green tea with diplomats. Wilson got it wrong.
But it wasn't working. Wilson came across on TV as a straight-shooter, and when Tenent issued the retraction Rove and Libby had prepared for him, that only made Wilson's position even more credible.
Then Rove and Libby got wind of the secret State Dept. memo disclosing that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Bingo. "Wilson's wife is fair game." Rove declared to a reporter at the time.
So there you have it – a clear and unambiguous character test. Two guys who not only knew the Niger information was wrong and were actually crafting a retraction, were at the same time feverishly working to discredit the only guy who had the guts to say so when it could have averted a war. And, they were prepared to not only ruin Wilson, but his wife as well. (Not to mention putting field agents and sources of Valerie Plame in jeopardy as well.)
Of course the President knows all this. We know he knows because before Karl and Dick clued him in he said he would fire anyone "involved" with the leak of Plame's identity. After he found out who was "involved" he change his standard to "anyone guilty of a crime," which would mean any firings would come only after a trial and conviction -- a likelihood that, even under the best of circumstances would not take place until well after Bush's term ends three years from now. So, he knows. And we know he knows.
This from the White House George Bush promised would "return integrity and honesty to the Oval Office." Bill Clinton lied about getting a hummer from a floozy. I suppose that's what Bush was referring to.
I wish there were a set of scales on which we could pile the lies Clinton told that would measure not only the number of lies, but their gravity and implications for the nation and the world. And, on the other side of the scale, the lies this administration has told, their number and their gravity.
On one scale we have lying about that hummer. No one dies.
Result: Clinton faces impeachment.
On the other side Bush lies about WMD in Iraq, goes to war, at least 25,000 Iraqis die, 1800 US soldiers, so far. Bush lies about the cost of the new Medicare drug benefits endangering the fiscal health of the entire Medicare system. Bush lies about Iraq trying to buy yellow cake from Niger then orchestrates lies about Wilson. Then the administration lies about how or who blew Wilson's wife's CIA cover.
Result: Tenet gets a metal. Rove gets promoted. Bush gets to appoint at least two new Supreme Court Justices and three more years in the Oval Office.
Something is out of whack.
Site of the Day
http://www.sfgate.com/comics/fiore/
Thursday, July 21, 2005
July 20, 2005
House Divided
If Lincoln was right, we're heading for trouble. "A house divided against itself, cannot stand," is what he said. And, at the time he said that, he was in a position to know. The nation was divided between states that wanted to do what they wanted – mainly to maintain slavery -- and states that wanted to impose a national standard of behavior and rule of law – in particular to end slavery.
Southern states bristled at the notion that a bunch of northern Yankees had any right to tell folks in Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi what they could do or not do with what – or who – they owned.
The north won that argument and the house stood. That victory validated the notion that some laws and rights are so fundamental they transcend artificial, political boundaries. Owning other human beings was just as wrong in Georgia as it was in New York or California.
But our nation's founders left a few more loose ends when they were handing out rights and assigning powers. It took a civil war nearly a century later to tie up that little loose end. But slavery was not the only loose end. The Fathers were smart guys, but they were not psychic. They dealt with the human condition as it existed nearly 250 years ago They had no way of knowing what kinds of social relationships would develop.
So new loose ends keep materializing over time. Fighting a civil war over each of them was, thankfully, not the path chosen. Instead those fights have been non-violent, political, battles. Presidents proposed, Congress disposed, and, if that did not tie up the loose end, the Supreme Court cleaned up the mess once and for all.
Sure it took a century after slavery was abolished before blacks had anything like the same rights whites enjoyed, especially in the South. But, thanks to Supreme Court rulings, like Brown v. The Board of Education, that one loose end after another has been woven into the fabric of American law and life. Brown is a perfect example. It was the right decision, a decision Congress should have made decades earlier. But it took the Supreme Court to do it.
All in all, the Court has proven itself wise in its decisions. For example, can you imagine what America would be like today had the Court punted to the states in the 1960s on integration? States would have been left to decide for themselves how they wanted to handle access to public facilities. Some states would still allow white-only schools, pools and drinking fountains. Some states, frightened by terrorism, might now have laws restricting access to public facilities based on religion – Islam. All legal – as long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided for the excluded.
Conservatives backing states rights would say that's wrong. That left to their own devices state governments would have eventually integrated their facilities. They just didn't want "outsiders" telling them what to do.
Maybe. But I lived through the 1960s and I didn't sense the slightest inclination on the part of hardcore southern states to integrate anything, any which way. (And, let's be honest, even today, plenty of white folk would happily re-segregate if they thought they could get away with it.)
No, it's been the US Supreme Court that has kept this otherwise divided house standing for the past century or so. The Court has settled the kind of incendiary cultural and social arguments that in the old days would have been settled with baseball bats, guns and dynamite, the victor usually being the most brutal of the parties.
That's about to change as the Supreme Court shifts to the right. A conservative Court, hostile to the power of a central government, will slowly but steadily return power to the states. The process has already begun. State and local governments can now, thanks to the Court's decision just last month, seize your property and give it to a private developer in order to increase the local tax base. Local politicians seeking tax revenues teaming up with private developers seeking profits. Has there ever been a more unholy alliance sanctified by the Court?
Get ready for more of the same in the years ahead. Conservatives have been waiting fifty years for this moment, when they can begin turning around the ship of state. Just where they think they are taking us is not be entirely clear. They are seeking a return to an America that few of them actually know. They think they know it, but they never lived it. What lures them is a gauzy Norman Rockwell-ish vision, an America where men are men, women are women, kids mow suburban lawns and set up lemonade stands. And, though they would never admit it, a vision in which everyone but waiters, gardeners and doormen, are white.
And what about women in this vision. Well, they stay home, bake stuff, raise kids, go to PTA meetings and arrange church raffles. And, if an unmarried girl should get pregnant? Well, the little tramp!
As this new conservative Court rolls back earlier rulings protecting equal access, personal choice, freedom from religious indoctrination, rights to a speedy trial, even the right to a lawyer, states will fill that vacuum. Citizens of progressive states, like California and New York, will see little change. They will just have be more careful while on vacation in those other states. Don't get caught with a joint while in vacation in Georgia or try to get an abortion for a daughter attending school in Mississippi, for example. Oh, and why did their daughter get pregnant in the first place? Because Mississippi passed a law allowing pharmacists to refuse to sell contraceptives on religious grounds. (Coat hanger, anyone?)
The biggest changes will come in redneck states which will quickly pass redneck-friendly laws. Their public schools will become Christian-oriented madrases. Creationism will be taught as science while doubt provoking science like evolution will be dismissed as godless "theory." School vouchers will again allow white kids - using public money - to attend private all-white schools as their parents exercise embrace their newly returned right of association – association with other white folks. And yes, there will be a copy of the Ten Commandments in every class -- but that would be the least of our worries by then.. Conservative states will reinstate the right of housing developments to have charters that exclude "undesirables," like Jews, blacks, and -- under the rubric of national security -- Arabs would be the newest excludees.
After a century of creating a common house, the new Supreme Court will begin dividing it up once again. In a decade or so it will no longer be one nation, but fifty, each with it's own take on what rights Americans within their boarder have and what rights they no longer have.
Conservatives will accuse me of exaggerating, fear mongering, stereotyping. They will say that Americans are decent people who would never return to that kind of reprehensible behavior. All they want is for the feds to get out of their lives and let them run their own states the way they see fit. Not to worry. All will be well, they say.
Well, maybe, but I have my doubts. Such doubts are only fueled by studies of human behavior, one in particular sticks in my mind.
Scientists assembled a group of subjects. They hooked half of them up to a chair that gave them a jolt of electricity when someone in another room pushed a button.
There were two rooms with a shocking button, one had a window through which the subjects could see each other, the other was windowless.
When the button pushers were in the room with the window through which both would be victim and would-victimizer could see each other, they were reluctant to inflict pain on those looking them in the eye. But when these same people were allowed to push the button anonymously in the windowless room they pushed it with vigor. (Fortunately for the would-be victims, researchers suspected this would happen and had disconnected the victims from their chairs.)
But that study tells us something fundamental about human nature. And it's something that, until now, members of the US Supreme Court understood as well. Beginning next term though a whole lot of Americans are going to be wondering what the folks in their windowless "state's rights" room have in store for us.
If Lincoln was right, we're heading for trouble. "A house divided against itself, cannot stand," is what he said. And, at the time he said that, he was in a position to know. The nation was divided between states that wanted to do what they wanted – mainly to maintain slavery -- and states that wanted to impose a national standard of behavior and rule of law – in particular to end slavery.
Southern states bristled at the notion that a bunch of northern Yankees had any right to tell folks in Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi what they could do or not do with what – or who – they owned.
The north won that argument and the house stood. That victory validated the notion that some laws and rights are so fundamental they transcend artificial, political boundaries. Owning other human beings was just as wrong in Georgia as it was in New York or California.
But our nation's founders left a few more loose ends when they were handing out rights and assigning powers. It took a civil war nearly a century later to tie up that little loose end. But slavery was not the only loose end. The Fathers were smart guys, but they were not psychic. They dealt with the human condition as it existed nearly 250 years ago They had no way of knowing what kinds of social relationships would develop.
So new loose ends keep materializing over time. Fighting a civil war over each of them was, thankfully, not the path chosen. Instead those fights have been non-violent, political, battles. Presidents proposed, Congress disposed, and, if that did not tie up the loose end, the Supreme Court cleaned up the mess once and for all.
Sure it took a century after slavery was abolished before blacks had anything like the same rights whites enjoyed, especially in the South. But, thanks to Supreme Court rulings, like Brown v. The Board of Education, that one loose end after another has been woven into the fabric of American law and life. Brown is a perfect example. It was the right decision, a decision Congress should have made decades earlier. But it took the Supreme Court to do it.
All in all, the Court has proven itself wise in its decisions. For example, can you imagine what America would be like today had the Court punted to the states in the 1960s on integration? States would have been left to decide for themselves how they wanted to handle access to public facilities. Some states would still allow white-only schools, pools and drinking fountains. Some states, frightened by terrorism, might now have laws restricting access to public facilities based on religion – Islam. All legal – as long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided for the excluded.
Conservatives backing states rights would say that's wrong. That left to their own devices state governments would have eventually integrated their facilities. They just didn't want "outsiders" telling them what to do.
Maybe. But I lived through the 1960s and I didn't sense the slightest inclination on the part of hardcore southern states to integrate anything, any which way. (And, let's be honest, even today, plenty of white folk would happily re-segregate if they thought they could get away with it.)
No, it's been the US Supreme Court that has kept this otherwise divided house standing for the past century or so. The Court has settled the kind of incendiary cultural and social arguments that in the old days would have been settled with baseball bats, guns and dynamite, the victor usually being the most brutal of the parties.
That's about to change as the Supreme Court shifts to the right. A conservative Court, hostile to the power of a central government, will slowly but steadily return power to the states. The process has already begun. State and local governments can now, thanks to the Court's decision just last month, seize your property and give it to a private developer in order to increase the local tax base. Local politicians seeking tax revenues teaming up with private developers seeking profits. Has there ever been a more unholy alliance sanctified by the Court?
Get ready for more of the same in the years ahead. Conservatives have been waiting fifty years for this moment, when they can begin turning around the ship of state. Just where they think they are taking us is not be entirely clear. They are seeking a return to an America that few of them actually know. They think they know it, but they never lived it. What lures them is a gauzy Norman Rockwell-ish vision, an America where men are men, women are women, kids mow suburban lawns and set up lemonade stands. And, though they would never admit it, a vision in which everyone but waiters, gardeners and doormen, are white.
And what about women in this vision. Well, they stay home, bake stuff, raise kids, go to PTA meetings and arrange church raffles. And, if an unmarried girl should get pregnant? Well, the little tramp!
As this new conservative Court rolls back earlier rulings protecting equal access, personal choice, freedom from religious indoctrination, rights to a speedy trial, even the right to a lawyer, states will fill that vacuum. Citizens of progressive states, like California and New York, will see little change. They will just have be more careful while on vacation in those other states. Don't get caught with a joint while in vacation in Georgia or try to get an abortion for a daughter attending school in Mississippi, for example. Oh, and why did their daughter get pregnant in the first place? Because Mississippi passed a law allowing pharmacists to refuse to sell contraceptives on religious grounds. (Coat hanger, anyone?)
The biggest changes will come in redneck states which will quickly pass redneck-friendly laws. Their public schools will become Christian-oriented madrases. Creationism will be taught as science while doubt provoking science like evolution will be dismissed as godless "theory." School vouchers will again allow white kids - using public money - to attend private all-white schools as their parents exercise embrace their newly returned right of association – association with other white folks. And yes, there will be a copy of the Ten Commandments in every class -- but that would be the least of our worries by then.. Conservative states will reinstate the right of housing developments to have charters that exclude "undesirables," like Jews, blacks, and -- under the rubric of national security -- Arabs would be the newest excludees.
After a century of creating a common house, the new Supreme Court will begin dividing it up once again. In a decade or so it will no longer be one nation, but fifty, each with it's own take on what rights Americans within their boarder have and what rights they no longer have.
Conservatives will accuse me of exaggerating, fear mongering, stereotyping. They will say that Americans are decent people who would never return to that kind of reprehensible behavior. All they want is for the feds to get out of their lives and let them run their own states the way they see fit. Not to worry. All will be well, they say.
Well, maybe, but I have my doubts. Such doubts are only fueled by studies of human behavior, one in particular sticks in my mind.
Scientists assembled a group of subjects. They hooked half of them up to a chair that gave them a jolt of electricity when someone in another room pushed a button.
There were two rooms with a shocking button, one had a window through which the subjects could see each other, the other was windowless.
When the button pushers were in the room with the window through which both would be victim and would-victimizer could see each other, they were reluctant to inflict pain on those looking them in the eye. But when these same people were allowed to push the button anonymously in the windowless room they pushed it with vigor. (Fortunately for the would-be victims, researchers suspected this would happen and had disconnected the victims from their chairs.)
But that study tells us something fundamental about human nature. And it's something that, until now, members of the US Supreme Court understood as well. Beginning next term though a whole lot of Americans are going to be wondering what the folks in their windowless "state's rights" room have in store for us.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
July 19, 2005
The Bell Tolled
The bell tolled yesterday for Gen. William Westmoreland.
Did you hear it, Don Rumsfeld?
General Westmoreland was my generation's Don Rumsfeld, a true believer, a warrior on the front line of freedom, at least as he saw it. Back then, some 40-odd years or so ago, the enemy was creeping communism. Gen. Westmoreland's mission was to stop it's advance into Southeast Asia. If he failed, we were told, one Asian nation after another would topple, like dominos.
Well, Westmoreland failed, and no such thing happened. In fact earlier this month the poor old warhorse almost surely watched President Bush gush all over Vietnam's current leader at the White House.
Today China, the biggest Asian domino, is kicking America' capitalist butt around Wall Street.
That just leaves North Korea, the last Asian communist holdout and it can only continue to exist by holding a nuclear weapon to it's head shouting, "One move and the Commie gets it."
When we were chased out of Vietnam by a determined indigenous insurgency Gen. Westmoreland blamed the press for turning the American people against the war. It was a view he stubbornly held to the end. He believed the media not only undercut the war effort, but him as well.
"(It) is not about whether the war in Vietnam was right or wrong," he once said, "but whether in our land a television network can rob an honorable man of his reputation."
Well, not to speak ill of the recently dead, but Westmoreland's reputation is set, a permanent part of world history. And, by the way, that history was written by events, not the media. I can forgive someone for being stubborn and unshakable in face of facts to the contray, just not when such stubborn arrogance is getting people killed unnecessarily.
And, at the end of the day, that's what history tells us happened during Westmoreland's command in Vietnam – an unnecessary war, waged with unnecessary brutality, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of something well over 3 million (full-term) humans on both sides. Late-term abortions on a massive scale.
Westmoreland's passing comes at a time when the nation is again bogged down in an unnecessary war. This time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plays the role of the stubborn wayward warrior, unpersuaded and unpersuadable by the facts.
Terrorism holds the role held 40 years ago by creeping communism. The stakes, we are told, are the same. If we fail in Iraq other Arab nations will fall like dominos, becoming radical Islamic nations hostile to the west. In this script Iran plays the role held during the Vietnam conflict by China. Syria is Laos and Pakistan is Thailand. Fail in Iraq and one by one they will fall, like dominos, into enemy hands and eternal darkness.
Of course, what we learned by losing in Vietnam is that it's never quite as simple as all that. There are alternative outcomes. While China is still antagonistic towards the US, it is also eager to sell American consumers all the crap their cheap labor can produce. Nuking their own customers would be, well, bad for business, and therefore less and less likely as times goes on.
Iran, while hostile to the US, has been making commercial goo-goo eyes at Europe. Iranians don't consider themselves part of the Arab world anyway. They are, Persians, and business is in their genes. As an Israeli friend once told me, "The only people better at business than Israelis are the Iranians. Every time we've treid to do business with those people they've taken us to the cleaners." (A lesson, I might add, learned the hard way by Ronald Reagan.)
I would be willing to bet that 20 years from now workers in France and the UK will be protesting the flood of skilled Iranian workers and products flowing into Europe and Israel will be filing protests with th WTO over Iran's "preditory trading practices."
You see, as in Vietnam, sooner or later a nation has to get down to business, regardless of their religious or ideological bent. They can't feed their populations on ammunition or employ them digging foxholes. They need to do business, first with their immediate neighbors and eventually the wider world community. China learned that. Vietnam learned it. North Korea will learn it eventually - or be acquired by the South.
That will also come to pass in the Middle East. And it will happen whether we leave Iraq sooner rather than later, or stay until we are chased out. In fact, the sooner we leave, the sooner the process can begin.
So, Don, as you reflect on the legacy of the departed General Westmoreland this week, why not reflect on yours as well? How do you want to go down in history? As a leader who got 1800 US soldiers killed unnecessarily? Or one who got several thousand killed unnecessarily?
That bell -- it tolls for you, Don -- for you and for your place in history.
Not Just Wrong – Dead Wrong
I can't leave this issue without mentioning a new report on how many people have died in Iraq over the past two years. According to a tally taken by a UK group that keeps track of civilian war casualties, more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in Iraq during the past 24 months. The group said that of that 11,000 of the dead were in Baghdad alone. (www.iraqbodycount.net)
Now, if I am not mistaken one of the reasons given for going into Iraq was to because Saddam was "killing his own people." Well, so far, so bad on fixing that little problem. In fact, I would be willing to be that even at his worst Saddam never killed 20,000 civilians in 24 months.
Congratulations, George, Dick, Don. You guys have out Saddamed, Saddam.
Listen, if you guys ever hear I'm in danger, don't send help. I'll take my chances on my own.
The bell tolled yesterday for Gen. William Westmoreland.
Did you hear it, Don Rumsfeld?
General Westmoreland was my generation's Don Rumsfeld, a true believer, a warrior on the front line of freedom, at least as he saw it. Back then, some 40-odd years or so ago, the enemy was creeping communism. Gen. Westmoreland's mission was to stop it's advance into Southeast Asia. If he failed, we were told, one Asian nation after another would topple, like dominos.
Well, Westmoreland failed, and no such thing happened. In fact earlier this month the poor old warhorse almost surely watched President Bush gush all over Vietnam's current leader at the White House.
Today China, the biggest Asian domino, is kicking America' capitalist butt around Wall Street.
That just leaves North Korea, the last Asian communist holdout and it can only continue to exist by holding a nuclear weapon to it's head shouting, "One move and the Commie gets it."
When we were chased out of Vietnam by a determined indigenous insurgency Gen. Westmoreland blamed the press for turning the American people against the war. It was a view he stubbornly held to the end. He believed the media not only undercut the war effort, but him as well.
"(It) is not about whether the war in Vietnam was right or wrong," he once said, "but whether in our land a television network can rob an honorable man of his reputation."
Well, not to speak ill of the recently dead, but Westmoreland's reputation is set, a permanent part of world history. And, by the way, that history was written by events, not the media. I can forgive someone for being stubborn and unshakable in face of facts to the contray, just not when such stubborn arrogance is getting people killed unnecessarily.
And, at the end of the day, that's what history tells us happened during Westmoreland's command in Vietnam – an unnecessary war, waged with unnecessary brutality, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of something well over 3 million (full-term) humans on both sides. Late-term abortions on a massive scale.
Westmoreland's passing comes at a time when the nation is again bogged down in an unnecessary war. This time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plays the role of the stubborn wayward warrior, unpersuaded and unpersuadable by the facts.
Terrorism holds the role held 40 years ago by creeping communism. The stakes, we are told, are the same. If we fail in Iraq other Arab nations will fall like dominos, becoming radical Islamic nations hostile to the west. In this script Iran plays the role held during the Vietnam conflict by China. Syria is Laos and Pakistan is Thailand. Fail in Iraq and one by one they will fall, like dominos, into enemy hands and eternal darkness.
Of course, what we learned by losing in Vietnam is that it's never quite as simple as all that. There are alternative outcomes. While China is still antagonistic towards the US, it is also eager to sell American consumers all the crap their cheap labor can produce. Nuking their own customers would be, well, bad for business, and therefore less and less likely as times goes on.
Iran, while hostile to the US, has been making commercial goo-goo eyes at Europe. Iranians don't consider themselves part of the Arab world anyway. They are, Persians, and business is in their genes. As an Israeli friend once told me, "The only people better at business than Israelis are the Iranians. Every time we've treid to do business with those people they've taken us to the cleaners." (A lesson, I might add, learned the hard way by Ronald Reagan.)
I would be willing to bet that 20 years from now workers in France and the UK will be protesting the flood of skilled Iranian workers and products flowing into Europe and Israel will be filing protests with th WTO over Iran's "preditory trading practices."
You see, as in Vietnam, sooner or later a nation has to get down to business, regardless of their religious or ideological bent. They can't feed their populations on ammunition or employ them digging foxholes. They need to do business, first with their immediate neighbors and eventually the wider world community. China learned that. Vietnam learned it. North Korea will learn it eventually - or be acquired by the South.
That will also come to pass in the Middle East. And it will happen whether we leave Iraq sooner rather than later, or stay until we are chased out. In fact, the sooner we leave, the sooner the process can begin.
So, Don, as you reflect on the legacy of the departed General Westmoreland this week, why not reflect on yours as well? How do you want to go down in history? As a leader who got 1800 US soldiers killed unnecessarily? Or one who got several thousand killed unnecessarily?
That bell -- it tolls for you, Don -- for you and for your place in history.
Not Just Wrong – Dead Wrong
I can't leave this issue without mentioning a new report on how many people have died in Iraq over the past two years. According to a tally taken by a UK group that keeps track of civilian war casualties, more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in Iraq during the past 24 months. The group said that of that 11,000 of the dead were in Baghdad alone. (www.iraqbodycount.net)
Now, if I am not mistaken one of the reasons given for going into Iraq was to because Saddam was "killing his own people." Well, so far, so bad on fixing that little problem. In fact, I would be willing to be that even at his worst Saddam never killed 20,000 civilians in 24 months.
Congratulations, George, Dick, Don. You guys have out Saddamed, Saddam.
Listen, if you guys ever hear I'm in danger, don't send help. I'll take my chances on my own.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
July 18, 2005
Am I Crazy?
It's Monday, the start of another week of trying to figure out if I'm crazy or just missing the point.
Weather Or Not
Folks in Florida and along the US Gulf Coast must be wondering if they should just leave the plywood up their windows year round. Ten years ago I never thought twice about spending a couple of weeks in July indulging my passion, sailing around the Caribbean. I wouldn't dream of risking it now.
Why all the hurricanes all of a sudden? Could it be global warming?
Right wing global warming deniers say no way, continue to scoff at the notion and continue to fight even the most reasonable proposals to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"A public dispute has flared between two Republican House committee chairmen over an inquiry one of them began last month into the integrity of an influential study of global temperature trends...The study, published in 1998 and 1999, meshed data from modern thermometers and evidence of past warmth or cold, like variations in tree rings. The result was a curve showing little variation for nearly 1,000 years and then a sharp upward hook in recent decades." (Full Story)
These folks are going to go down in history alongside the criminals who spent a quarter century casting aspersions on the thousands of scientific studies showing smoking caused cancer.
Of course anyone who saw a friend or family member die from smoking hardly needed scientific studies. Anecdotally it was pretty friggin clear that smoking was killing millions of people every year. All one had to do was to open their eyes.
Well, same goes for global warming. What we see happening in the south Atlantic is the Mother Nature's version of hot flashes. Hurricanes and cyclones are Mother Nature's way of dissipating excess heat in the atmosphere. The hotter the water, the hotter the atmospher, the more hurricanes. You do the math.
So, I read articles like the one above and scratch my head. Am I crazy, or are they crazy? Am I missing something here? Hot air, you see, comes in many forms.
(Big) Brother, Where Art Thou?
As a child of the 60's I have my very own FBI file. I know this for a fact because "they" showed it to me back in 1970 when I was organizing anti-war rallies in San Francisco.
I was in the Marine Corps reserve at the time and that really drove them nuts. So one weekend my C.O. called me into his office. There were two guys in gray suits there too, a thick manila folder was on his desk.
"Son, " he said to me as I stood at attention, "we just want to show you how you are ruining your life with these activities."
At which point he opened the file and began showing me 8 x 10 glossy black and white photos. There I was, leaving my apartment. There I was again leaving the basement meeting room of the local Catholic church where we held our meetings. There I was going to work. There I was coming home from work. There were dozens of similar incriminating photos.
Well, they had me dead to rights. I did all those things and there was no denying it. They had it all on film. None of it was illegal, of course or, for that matter, even "subversive," - at least First Amendment wise. But they sure had a lot of photos, notes, names, addresses and phone numbers in that file. Busy, busy, busy.
After showing me all the stuff, my C.O. asked me what I thought.
"Well sir," I said, "I think the government should spend less time taking pictures of me and more time coming up with a shape of a negotiating table both sides can agree on so we can wrap this war up." (Those of you of a certain age will understand my response. Those of you who don't... just never mind.)
While that remarkable little show and tell session changed neither my mind or behavior, it did give me a window into the hopeless nature of government surveillance. What I saw was a wholesale collection operation run amok, and run by the kind of people who in grammar school begged to be hall monitors. They had no idea what they doing. Neither did their bosses -- or their bosses. They just gave them cameras and recorders and sent them out to suck up information, and suck they did.
And now, they're at it again. If you have been raising hell about the war in Iraq, there's likely a manila folder on some civil service cubical-rat's desk with your name on it.
WASHINGTON: FBI agents monitored Web sites calling for protests against the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston on behalf of the bureau's counter terrorism unit, according to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act....A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention." (Full Story)
This is how governments behave when they go mad. When the highest offices in the land are populated by scheming paranoids, the kind who keep enemy lists, the kind who leak information to smear opponents. Such people have an insatiable appetite for information on what ordinary folks like you and I are up to out here. They worry far more about the "enemies within" than terrorists from abroad, because we demonstrate, rebel-rouse and vote.
The trouble is that when governments go on a paranoid information gathering jag they end up collecting way too much information. They end up with so much trivial, unless crap they can't separate the mundane from the dangerous.
When East Germany collapsed and Stazi's surveillance files were thrown open, what a mess it was. They had collected so much useless information on ordinary folk, their relatives, their bosses, even their pets it filled a warehouse with boxes. They couldn't have found a real subversive in that mess if their lives depended on it. (Oh, and did I mention East Germany collapsed anyway? Turned out the guys collecting all that information were the real subversives.)
The same problem already plagues this new American Stazi-style information gathering campaign designed, we are told, to fight terrorism. The FBI has already wasted nearly $1 billion trying to build a computer system capable of sorting out all the data field agents are sending in. They will waste a lot more as they try again. But it won't ever work, because it can't. Human behavior is just too nuanced, too complex, too unpredictable for machines to sort out.
Just ask the folks at MI5 in the UK. They have 4 million closed circuit cameras installed all over Britain. They say the average person just going about his or her normal rounds will be on camera an average of 300 times a day. Among all those millions of videos they found pictures of the four train bombers – AFTER they killed 55 people and wounded 700 more. You see, people who are about to blow themselves up really don't give a fig how many photos you have of them. Duh...
Oh, BTW, if my old commanding officer is still out there, would someone please inform him that my anti-war activities did not, as he predicted, ruin my life. I did just fine thank you. But something else that was going on back then sure did ruin the lives of some 60,000 other kids from my generation. Their names will not be found on dusty old FBI files.Their names are on a black wall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Nevertheless, here we are spending billions of dollars on useless wholesale domestic spying. Am I crazy, or are they crazy? Am I missing something here?
Caste a Spell, Go to Hell
The new Harry Potter book is out and kids by the millions are wallowing in the magic that only reading a ripping good yarn can provide. For the first time in a generation television, video games and the Internet have a competitor they can't match.
So, one would think everyone would just delighted, especially those bible thumping, home-school loving born-agains. After all, reading is one of the R's they keep complaining public schools don't emphasize enough.
Wrong. Harry Potter, you see, represents a competing brand of superstition. And if there is anything a religious nut hates it's someone else's superstition. They are in hand-waving, lord-praising, bible-quoting panic over Harry.
Sadly enough, this blatant witchcraft has been endorsed by well-known and respected "Christian" leaders, such as Dr. James Dobson and Chuck Colson, who have proven themselves to be modern day Judas Iscariots. Nothing could be more obvious than that Harry Potter books are pure witchcraft and of the devil. Pastor David J. Meyer -- Last Trumpet Ministries International.
(Religious fundamentalist always turn on their own kind sooner or later. Who would have thunk, Colson and Dobson, bleeding heart sorcerer lovers!)
And then there's this:
Young Harry is given a strange marking on his forehead. 'Through the sacrificial goddess magic of his mother's love, baby Harry is saved and his blood is given magical powers....The problem is, witchcraft is not fantasy; it is a sinful reality in our world. '
That from "Christiananswers.com" which has its own book out on the subject entitled, Harry Potter: Making Evil Look Innocent."
So, let's see... "a strange marking on (Harry's) forehead." Could be he was just back from church on Ash Wednesday. I see people with strange marks on the foreheads all over the damn place on Ash Wednesday. But, wait, that's a good superstition. Harry's forehead mark is from a bad superstition. Hindu women have mark on their foreheads too – a red dot – got a problem with that too? You can bet they do.
(Read this too if you want to see what you get when you mix religion and public money.)
I have said it before, and I will say it again – if you think politicians are a nuisance just mix in a healthy helping of religion into the political mix and you will see crazy at its worst.
Nevertheless this administration and its supporters on the right keep pushing for just that, federally funded "faith-based" programs. By which they mean Christian faith-based programs, not Scientologist faith-based programs or Muslim faith-based programs or Wicca faith-based programs. No way. Their own wizard, J.C. Potter, would not approve.
So, am I crazy, or are they crazy? I will stipulate I may be crazy. I certainly have done my share of crazy things. But I never was so crazy as to, at once, believe the earth is only 6000 years old and that Noah really got two of every animal on earth onboard a boat he built in his backyard and then claimed I saw the work of the devil in a kid's adventure novel.
Now THAT's crazy.
It's Monday, the start of another week of trying to figure out if I'm crazy or just missing the point.
Weather Or Not
Folks in Florida and along the US Gulf Coast must be wondering if they should just leave the plywood up their windows year round. Ten years ago I never thought twice about spending a couple of weeks in July indulging my passion, sailing around the Caribbean. I wouldn't dream of risking it now.
Why all the hurricanes all of a sudden? Could it be global warming?
Right wing global warming deniers say no way, continue to scoff at the notion and continue to fight even the most reasonable proposals to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"A public dispute has flared between two Republican House committee chairmen over an inquiry one of them began last month into the integrity of an influential study of global temperature trends...The study, published in 1998 and 1999, meshed data from modern thermometers and evidence of past warmth or cold, like variations in tree rings. The result was a curve showing little variation for nearly 1,000 years and then a sharp upward hook in recent decades." (Full Story)
These folks are going to go down in history alongside the criminals who spent a quarter century casting aspersions on the thousands of scientific studies showing smoking caused cancer.
Of course anyone who saw a friend or family member die from smoking hardly needed scientific studies. Anecdotally it was pretty friggin clear that smoking was killing millions of people every year. All one had to do was to open their eyes.
Well, same goes for global warming. What we see happening in the south Atlantic is the Mother Nature's version of hot flashes. Hurricanes and cyclones are Mother Nature's way of dissipating excess heat in the atmosphere. The hotter the water, the hotter the atmospher, the more hurricanes. You do the math.
So, I read articles like the one above and scratch my head. Am I crazy, or are they crazy? Am I missing something here? Hot air, you see, comes in many forms.
(Big) Brother, Where Art Thou?
As a child of the 60's I have my very own FBI file. I know this for a fact because "they" showed it to me back in 1970 when I was organizing anti-war rallies in San Francisco.
I was in the Marine Corps reserve at the time and that really drove them nuts. So one weekend my C.O. called me into his office. There were two guys in gray suits there too, a thick manila folder was on his desk.
"Son, " he said to me as I stood at attention, "we just want to show you how you are ruining your life with these activities."
At which point he opened the file and began showing me 8 x 10 glossy black and white photos. There I was, leaving my apartment. There I was again leaving the basement meeting room of the local Catholic church where we held our meetings. There I was going to work. There I was coming home from work. There were dozens of similar incriminating photos.
Well, they had me dead to rights. I did all those things and there was no denying it. They had it all on film. None of it was illegal, of course or, for that matter, even "subversive," - at least First Amendment wise. But they sure had a lot of photos, notes, names, addresses and phone numbers in that file. Busy, busy, busy.
After showing me all the stuff, my C.O. asked me what I thought.
"Well sir," I said, "I think the government should spend less time taking pictures of me and more time coming up with a shape of a negotiating table both sides can agree on so we can wrap this war up." (Those of you of a certain age will understand my response. Those of you who don't... just never mind.)
While that remarkable little show and tell session changed neither my mind or behavior, it did give me a window into the hopeless nature of government surveillance. What I saw was a wholesale collection operation run amok, and run by the kind of people who in grammar school begged to be hall monitors. They had no idea what they doing. Neither did their bosses -- or their bosses. They just gave them cameras and recorders and sent them out to suck up information, and suck they did.
And now, they're at it again. If you have been raising hell about the war in Iraq, there's likely a manila folder on some civil service cubical-rat's desk with your name on it.
WASHINGTON: FBI agents monitored Web sites calling for protests against the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston on behalf of the bureau's counter terrorism unit, according to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act....A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention." (Full Story)
This is how governments behave when they go mad. When the highest offices in the land are populated by scheming paranoids, the kind who keep enemy lists, the kind who leak information to smear opponents. Such people have an insatiable appetite for information on what ordinary folks like you and I are up to out here. They worry far more about the "enemies within" than terrorists from abroad, because we demonstrate, rebel-rouse and vote.
The trouble is that when governments go on a paranoid information gathering jag they end up collecting way too much information. They end up with so much trivial, unless crap they can't separate the mundane from the dangerous.
When East Germany collapsed and Stazi's surveillance files were thrown open, what a mess it was. They had collected so much useless information on ordinary folk, their relatives, their bosses, even their pets it filled a warehouse with boxes. They couldn't have found a real subversive in that mess if their lives depended on it. (Oh, and did I mention East Germany collapsed anyway? Turned out the guys collecting all that information were the real subversives.)
The same problem already plagues this new American Stazi-style information gathering campaign designed, we are told, to fight terrorism. The FBI has already wasted nearly $1 billion trying to build a computer system capable of sorting out all the data field agents are sending in. They will waste a lot more as they try again. But it won't ever work, because it can't. Human behavior is just too nuanced, too complex, too unpredictable for machines to sort out.
Just ask the folks at MI5 in the UK. They have 4 million closed circuit cameras installed all over Britain. They say the average person just going about his or her normal rounds will be on camera an average of 300 times a day. Among all those millions of videos they found pictures of the four train bombers – AFTER they killed 55 people and wounded 700 more. You see, people who are about to blow themselves up really don't give a fig how many photos you have of them. Duh...
Oh, BTW, if my old commanding officer is still out there, would someone please inform him that my anti-war activities did not, as he predicted, ruin my life. I did just fine thank you. But something else that was going on back then sure did ruin the lives of some 60,000 other kids from my generation. Their names will not be found on dusty old FBI files.Their names are on a black wall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Nevertheless, here we are spending billions of dollars on useless wholesale domestic spying. Am I crazy, or are they crazy? Am I missing something here?
Caste a Spell, Go to Hell
The new Harry Potter book is out and kids by the millions are wallowing in the magic that only reading a ripping good yarn can provide. For the first time in a generation television, video games and the Internet have a competitor they can't match.
So, one would think everyone would just delighted, especially those bible thumping, home-school loving born-agains. After all, reading is one of the R's they keep complaining public schools don't emphasize enough.
Wrong. Harry Potter, you see, represents a competing brand of superstition. And if there is anything a religious nut hates it's someone else's superstition. They are in hand-waving, lord-praising, bible-quoting panic over Harry.
Sadly enough, this blatant witchcraft has been endorsed by well-known and respected "Christian" leaders, such as Dr. James Dobson and Chuck Colson, who have proven themselves to be modern day Judas Iscariots. Nothing could be more obvious than that Harry Potter books are pure witchcraft and of the devil. Pastor David J. Meyer -- Last Trumpet Ministries International.
(Religious fundamentalist always turn on their own kind sooner or later. Who would have thunk, Colson and Dobson, bleeding heart sorcerer lovers!)
And then there's this:
Young Harry is given a strange marking on his forehead. 'Through the sacrificial goddess magic of his mother's love, baby Harry is saved and his blood is given magical powers....The problem is, witchcraft is not fantasy; it is a sinful reality in our world. '
That from "Christiananswers.com" which has its own book out on the subject entitled, Harry Potter: Making Evil Look Innocent."
So, let's see... "a strange marking on (Harry's) forehead." Could be he was just back from church on Ash Wednesday. I see people with strange marks on the foreheads all over the damn place on Ash Wednesday. But, wait, that's a good superstition. Harry's forehead mark is from a bad superstition. Hindu women have mark on their foreheads too – a red dot – got a problem with that too? You can bet they do.
(Read this too if you want to see what you get when you mix religion and public money.)
I have said it before, and I will say it again – if you think politicians are a nuisance just mix in a healthy helping of religion into the political mix and you will see crazy at its worst.
Nevertheless this administration and its supporters on the right keep pushing for just that, federally funded "faith-based" programs. By which they mean Christian faith-based programs, not Scientologist faith-based programs or Muslim faith-based programs or Wicca faith-based programs. No way. Their own wizard, J.C. Potter, would not approve.
So, am I crazy, or are they crazy? I will stipulate I may be crazy. I certainly have done my share of crazy things. But I never was so crazy as to, at once, believe the earth is only 6000 years old and that Noah really got two of every animal on earth onboard a boat he built in his backyard and then claimed I saw the work of the devil in a kid's adventure novel.
Now THAT's crazy.
Monday, July 18, 2005
July 16, 2005
Tale of Two Lies
You may have heard – former US Ambassador Joe Wilson is a liar. That's why Karl Rove blew Wilson's wife's CIA cover, to warn reporters that Wilson's report that Saddam was not trying to buy uranium yellow cake from Niger, was a cooked up lie engineered by him and his bleeding heart liberal CIA agent wife.
I was skeptical. I mean this White House has been caught lying themselves so many times how could I take their charges against Wilson seriously. Of course it could be just as simple as, "it takes one to know one." But I was still not sure.
But then it dawned on me. The White House's full-court press to discredit Joe Wilson suffers two fatal flaws – lies actually -- and easily penetrated lies at that.
Lie #1
White House damage control teams are making the rounds of the talk shows claiming Wilson's report was not just wrong but a big cooked up lie. Okay, the next time one of these GOP hit men roll that charge out reporters need to follow up with this:
Q. So you say that Saddam was in fact trying to buy uranium yellow cake from Niger?
Liar. Yes, there is evidence that he was trying to acquire yellow cake from Niger and Wilson just ignored that evidence.
Q. And wasn't it Vice President Dick Cheney who repeatedly claimed that Saddam had reconstituted – had, not wanted to, but had reconstituted his nuclear program?
Liar. Well, I think a lot of people thougth Saddam had reconstituded. his nuclear program, not just the Vice President.
Q. And wasn't it the Vice President who asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to check out the yellow cake story?
Liar. Ah, yes, but it was Wilson's wife who suggested her husband be that person, not the Vice President.
Q. Okay, but then we attack and occupy Iraq and what do we discover? We discover, and it has now been confirmed, that Saddam dismantled his nuclear programs ten years earlier. We have not found a single piece of nuclear program related equipment or materials in the entire country. Which begs the question... and this is biggie... If Wilson was lying, as you guys claim, and Saddam was trying to buy tons yellow cake from Niger, can you tell us what he planned doing with it? Was he going to pile it in the Iraqi desert and let it bake, have his photo taken next to it? Was he going to sprinkle it from the air on the Kurds? Was he going to pave his palace courtyards with the stuff? Why on earth would he buy tons of stuff he had no use for it whatsoever?
See, there you have it. It makes no sense, even for a madman dictator, to buy tons of uranium yellow cake when he had no centrifuges, no processing facilities and no prospects of getting them. Doing so would not just be putting a cart before a horse, but buying a million carts for country that had no stables or horses -- at all.
Ask them that one the next time they claim Wilson was lying in his Niger report.
The fact that won't go away for the White House is that Wilson's report jived with everything we now know about Iraq and its non-existent WMD. They were just a facade, a figment of two mad-men's imaginations -- Saddam's and Dick Cheney's.
The "Wilson is a liar" offensive shows more clearly than anything this administration has done in the past the extent they go to save their own skins. It was known even before Bush used the Niger line in the State of the Union, that yellow cake story was based almost entirely on phony forged documents. Who cooked the documents up remains a mystery, but that they were phony was well known. Months before Bush used the line an Italian magazine pointed out that the official from Niger who's forged signature appears on the documents had been out office for years.
Nevertheless the Bush administration is still out there claiming it's Wilson who lied. These people are either the most shameless folks on earth or pathological sociopaths.
Who's really the liar in this case? Forgive me if I put my money on the square marked, "Liars with a track record."
Lie #2:
Here's another hole in the White House alibi the media has missed. It's a hole any reporter of any experience should have spotted right out of the gate.
Karl Rove wasn't on a mission to smear Wilson when he revealed to Matt Cooper of Time that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. In fact Matt Cooper had called Rove for comment on a completely different story, something about changes in welfare laws. It was only at the end of that conversation that Rove brought the Wilson matter up "as an aside "at the end of that phone conversation – a kind of "Oh, by the way Matt....a friendly heads up."
That's their story, and they are sticking to it.
If I've learned anything after a quarter century of interviewing government sources its that when of them goes out of the way to make an "aside" that's way off subject, they are up to something, peddling something and/or planting a seed they hope I will water for them.
So, here was poor little chubby Matt Cooper working on a boring-ass welfare story and Rove hands him this sizzler, right out the blue. The Bush hit men want us to believe it was just a "friendly aside" -- a "throw away" line -- from ultra-savvy, serial hatchet man, Karl Rove. Give me a break.
If you are stupid enough to believe that, then you probably also believe Saddam was trying to buy tons of yellow cake he had no use for at the very moment the US was trying to convince the UN to let us blow his head off. Give me a second break.
The Big Why
Why? That's the question that hangs in the air. Why is this White House -- which has succesfully survived many lies -- so worried about this one? Why are they exposing themselves with such transparent and desperate follow up lies? Why are they pulling out all the stops to steer the focus away from the White House on onto Wilson?
Because, it's not Karl Rove they are trying to protect, it's Dick Cheney.
It was, after all, Cheney who had climbed the furthest out on the WMD limb to justify the war. It was Cheney who is on the record – and videotape – assuring the world that Saddam not only had chemical and biological weapons stacked up like cordwood, but had "reconstituted his nuclear program" as well. We know he has them, he said, we even have a pretty good idea where they are hidden.
Then we occupied Iraq and, lo and behold, no WMD. Then Joe Wilson fired off his New York Times editorial – "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Holy moly, the Niger story was Cheney's Gulf of Tonkin justification for war. With no nuclear facilities or gear surfacing in Iraq as Cheney had predicted before the war, the Niger caper was the final fig leaf covering the administration's false justification for war. And, to make matters worse, Chency had had it put in the State of the Union too boot. Now this guy Wilson was pulling the curtain back exposing Wizard Dick wildly flailing at the controls of the smoke machine.
What to do? If Cheney headed a New Jersey mob family the disloyal, ratting Wilson would have been whacked and found with a dead canary stuffed in his mouth. What we are witnessing now is the political equivalent of hit. If the attacks on hun and his wife get any more vicious they will qualify for the federal witness protection program.
But why did Bush get himself out on a limb by saying he would fire anyone who leaked a CIA agent's name to the press?
That's the easiest one of all to answer. Because Cheney cooked this all up with Rove when the Wilson editorial broke. Bush was not in that loop. (Maybe he was off riding his bike or busy trying to dislodge another would-be pretzel-assassin.) In any case, it was not a "need to know" detail to share with George.
Cheney told Rove to get the story out that Wilson and his CIA-agent wife were liars and therefore Wilson's report was not crediable. Robert Novak says he had two top administration sources for his story outing Wilson's wife. We now know Rove was one of those sources. Mark my words, Cheney's right hand man, Scooter Libby was the other one.
So, it's Cheney's chestnuts in the fire Wilson set. That -- and only that -- explains the ferocity of the attacks on Wilson and his wife. Remove Rove and Cheney from the administration and that leaves George, Forest Gump's evil twin, in running the show. And the Neocons know better than most that it would be only a matter of days before an un-mentored George would run amok.
But I don't want to leave this subject without a slap at Joe Wilson and his hottie spy-wife, Val. Both knew the stakes in this game. Both knew what was going to happen when Wilson decided to blow away the last shreds of the administration's WMD lie in his NYT op-ed piece. Wilson's one smart cookie. He's been around Washington a long time and he knew how the town works. He had – in his own words "earned his bones" playing high-stakes political poker with the likes Serbian and Iranian dictators. And so he knew how important perception was in the game.
So, why did the Wilson's agree to that embarrassing Vanity Fair photo shoot after the shit hit the fan? Jesus H. Christ that was dumb. I cringed when I saw that photo of two of them, mugging in their Mercedes convertible, trying with all their might to look like a modern-day Thin Man and Mrs. Thin Man. What were they thinking? It played right into the administration's claim they were just a couple of shamelss self-promoters. It was a dumb move. Really dumb.
But dumb is not the same as "liar." Wilson told the truth. And, for this administration, that's grounds for getting whacked.
You may have heard – former US Ambassador Joe Wilson is a liar. That's why Karl Rove blew Wilson's wife's CIA cover, to warn reporters that Wilson's report that Saddam was not trying to buy uranium yellow cake from Niger, was a cooked up lie engineered by him and his bleeding heart liberal CIA agent wife.
I was skeptical. I mean this White House has been caught lying themselves so many times how could I take their charges against Wilson seriously. Of course it could be just as simple as, "it takes one to know one." But I was still not sure.
But then it dawned on me. The White House's full-court press to discredit Joe Wilson suffers two fatal flaws – lies actually -- and easily penetrated lies at that.
Lie #1
White House damage control teams are making the rounds of the talk shows claiming Wilson's report was not just wrong but a big cooked up lie. Okay, the next time one of these GOP hit men roll that charge out reporters need to follow up with this:
Q. So you say that Saddam was in fact trying to buy uranium yellow cake from Niger?
Liar. Yes, there is evidence that he was trying to acquire yellow cake from Niger and Wilson just ignored that evidence.
Q. And wasn't it Vice President Dick Cheney who repeatedly claimed that Saddam had reconstituted – had, not wanted to, but had reconstituted his nuclear program?
Liar. Well, I think a lot of people thougth Saddam had reconstituded. his nuclear program, not just the Vice President.
Q. And wasn't it the Vice President who asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to check out the yellow cake story?
Liar. Ah, yes, but it was Wilson's wife who suggested her husband be that person, not the Vice President.
Q. Okay, but then we attack and occupy Iraq and what do we discover? We discover, and it has now been confirmed, that Saddam dismantled his nuclear programs ten years earlier. We have not found a single piece of nuclear program related equipment or materials in the entire country. Which begs the question... and this is biggie... If Wilson was lying, as you guys claim, and Saddam was trying to buy tons yellow cake from Niger, can you tell us what he planned doing with it? Was he going to pile it in the Iraqi desert and let it bake, have his photo taken next to it? Was he going to sprinkle it from the air on the Kurds? Was he going to pave his palace courtyards with the stuff? Why on earth would he buy tons of stuff he had no use for it whatsoever?
See, there you have it. It makes no sense, even for a madman dictator, to buy tons of uranium yellow cake when he had no centrifuges, no processing facilities and no prospects of getting them. Doing so would not just be putting a cart before a horse, but buying a million carts for country that had no stables or horses -- at all.
Ask them that one the next time they claim Wilson was lying in his Niger report.
The fact that won't go away for the White House is that Wilson's report jived with everything we now know about Iraq and its non-existent WMD. They were just a facade, a figment of two mad-men's imaginations -- Saddam's and Dick Cheney's.
The "Wilson is a liar" offensive shows more clearly than anything this administration has done in the past the extent they go to save their own skins. It was known even before Bush used the Niger line in the State of the Union, that yellow cake story was based almost entirely on phony forged documents. Who cooked the documents up remains a mystery, but that they were phony was well known. Months before Bush used the line an Italian magazine pointed out that the official from Niger who's forged signature appears on the documents had been out office for years.
Nevertheless the Bush administration is still out there claiming it's Wilson who lied. These people are either the most shameless folks on earth or pathological sociopaths.
Who's really the liar in this case? Forgive me if I put my money on the square marked, "Liars with a track record."
Lie #2:
Here's another hole in the White House alibi the media has missed. It's a hole any reporter of any experience should have spotted right out of the gate.
Karl Rove wasn't on a mission to smear Wilson when he revealed to Matt Cooper of Time that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. In fact Matt Cooper had called Rove for comment on a completely different story, something about changes in welfare laws. It was only at the end of that conversation that Rove brought the Wilson matter up "as an aside "at the end of that phone conversation – a kind of "Oh, by the way Matt....a friendly heads up."
That's their story, and they are sticking to it.
If I've learned anything after a quarter century of interviewing government sources its that when of them goes out of the way to make an "aside" that's way off subject, they are up to something, peddling something and/or planting a seed they hope I will water for them.
So, here was poor little chubby Matt Cooper working on a boring-ass welfare story and Rove hands him this sizzler, right out the blue. The Bush hit men want us to believe it was just a "friendly aside" -- a "throw away" line -- from ultra-savvy, serial hatchet man, Karl Rove. Give me a break.
If you are stupid enough to believe that, then you probably also believe Saddam was trying to buy tons of yellow cake he had no use for at the very moment the US was trying to convince the UN to let us blow his head off. Give me a second break.
The Big Why
Why? That's the question that hangs in the air. Why is this White House -- which has succesfully survived many lies -- so worried about this one? Why are they exposing themselves with such transparent and desperate follow up lies? Why are they pulling out all the stops to steer the focus away from the White House on onto Wilson?
Because, it's not Karl Rove they are trying to protect, it's Dick Cheney.
It was, after all, Cheney who had climbed the furthest out on the WMD limb to justify the war. It was Cheney who is on the record – and videotape – assuring the world that Saddam not only had chemical and biological weapons stacked up like cordwood, but had "reconstituted his nuclear program" as well. We know he has them, he said, we even have a pretty good idea where they are hidden.
Then we occupied Iraq and, lo and behold, no WMD. Then Joe Wilson fired off his New York Times editorial – "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Holy moly, the Niger story was Cheney's Gulf of Tonkin justification for war. With no nuclear facilities or gear surfacing in Iraq as Cheney had predicted before the war, the Niger caper was the final fig leaf covering the administration's false justification for war. And, to make matters worse, Chency had had it put in the State of the Union too boot. Now this guy Wilson was pulling the curtain back exposing Wizard Dick wildly flailing at the controls of the smoke machine.
What to do? If Cheney headed a New Jersey mob family the disloyal, ratting Wilson would have been whacked and found with a dead canary stuffed in his mouth. What we are witnessing now is the political equivalent of hit. If the attacks on hun and his wife get any more vicious they will qualify for the federal witness protection program.
But why did Bush get himself out on a limb by saying he would fire anyone who leaked a CIA agent's name to the press?
That's the easiest one of all to answer. Because Cheney cooked this all up with Rove when the Wilson editorial broke. Bush was not in that loop. (Maybe he was off riding his bike or busy trying to dislodge another would-be pretzel-assassin.) In any case, it was not a "need to know" detail to share with George.
Cheney told Rove to get the story out that Wilson and his CIA-agent wife were liars and therefore Wilson's report was not crediable. Robert Novak says he had two top administration sources for his story outing Wilson's wife. We now know Rove was one of those sources. Mark my words, Cheney's right hand man, Scooter Libby was the other one.
So, it's Cheney's chestnuts in the fire Wilson set. That -- and only that -- explains the ferocity of the attacks on Wilson and his wife. Remove Rove and Cheney from the administration and that leaves George, Forest Gump's evil twin, in running the show. And the Neocons know better than most that it would be only a matter of days before an un-mentored George would run amok.
But I don't want to leave this subject without a slap at Joe Wilson and his hottie spy-wife, Val. Both knew the stakes in this game. Both knew what was going to happen when Wilson decided to blow away the last shreds of the administration's WMD lie in his NYT op-ed piece. Wilson's one smart cookie. He's been around Washington a long time and he knew how the town works. He had – in his own words "earned his bones" playing high-stakes political poker with the likes Serbian and Iranian dictators. And so he knew how important perception was in the game.
So, why did the Wilson's agree to that embarrassing Vanity Fair photo shoot after the shit hit the fan? Jesus H. Christ that was dumb. I cringed when I saw that photo of two of them, mugging in their Mercedes convertible, trying with all their might to look like a modern-day Thin Man and Mrs. Thin Man. What were they thinking? It played right into the administration's claim they were just a couple of shamelss self-promoters. It was a dumb move. Really dumb.
But dumb is not the same as "liar." Wilson told the truth. And, for this administration, that's grounds for getting whacked.
Friday, July 15, 2005
July 14, 2005
Ever wonder why empires don’t last forever? After all, by definition an empire holds all the cards. They dominate trade, education, science, literature, quality of life and so on.
So, why do they all inevitably whither? Because, nothing quite fails like success.
Here’s two examples from the world’s current Imperial office holder -- the U.S. of A.
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a turkey.
And there it was yesterday, all dressed and no place to go. America’s only manned space vehicle, the Space Shuttle, steaming off liquid oxygen like a giant upright turd in the Florida sun.
The Space Shuttle is the actualization of the old joke; “An elephant is mouse designed by a committee.”
The reason I choose the Space Shuttle as proof the US is on the down slope of the empire bell curve is because, of all the ways we could have explored space we chose to invest all our marbles into bolting an 18-wheeler to rockets.
Sending a Mack truck into orbit required some very complicated and expensive engineering contortions. Satellites sent up on the Shuttle cost $25 million a ton. Compare that with the cost of sending the same payload up on simpler Russians or Chinese rockets, $3-6 million a ton.
It costs upwards of $10,000 per pound to launch anything, including the crew, into orbit on the Shuttle, a cost which is more than triple that charged by the workhorse expendable launch vehicles of our NASA’s heyday Apollo era.
What happened to NASA’s own “right stuff?”
"Once we won the Space Race in 1969, NASA morphed from a can-do, risk-taking, think out-of-the-box organization, to Just Another Tax-Fed Federal Bureaucracy, that, instead of playing to "win", was instead playing "not to lose". (Thomas Andrew Olson, Libertarian Institute)
The Space Shuttle is a mind bogglingly expensive example of this process. It’s too damn big, too damn expensive, too damn dangerous and too damn unreliable. It was designed in the 40 years ago. If it were a car it would be spending its days being lovingly polished in the garage by some old geezer trying to recapture his youth.
But no, instead the folks now running NASA decided to put a garage in orbit, call it a space station, and send the shuttle there to polish their own image.
There are a lot of cheaper ways to put people in space. The Russians, who can barely run their own country, do it regularly. Thanks to the Russian's simple and reliable Soyuz capsules we didn’t end up with three skeletons floating aroung the space station after the shuttle crash two years ago.
With any luck a bolt of lightenng will reduce the next shuttle to a pile of tile on its way to the launch pad. That would leave just two shuttles. We could put one in the Smithsonian and sell the other to Disney World.
Then turn NASA over to Bert Rutan and Richard Branson. They seem to be the current possessors of the right stuff. Imagine what they could do with just a fraction of NASA's $16 billion annual budget. We'd be orbiting earth sipping diet cola and munching peanuts in cramped coach seating within five years. (But please remember to return your seat backs to the full upright positon for re-entry. Items in overhead compartments may have shifted in weighless conditions.)
Bad Medicine
What good is an empire if it can't provide affordable medical care for its own citizens? Good question, and one that confronts Americans now.
President Bush and Big Medicine would have you believe that the skyrocketing cost of medical care is the fault of lawyers who sue. But a study released yesterday disputes that, noting that malpractice suits have a miniscule impact on medical costs.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Americans pay more for health care per person than citizens anywhere else in the world, doling out half again as much in medical expenses each year as the second-highest-cost country, according to a new study.
According to Dr. Gerard Anderson, lead author of a report just issued by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “We pay for drugs and hospital stays and doctor visits 2 to 2.5 times as much as other countries pay.”
And why, you ask? Malpractice suits? Nope. According to the study lawsuits add less than 1% to health care overhead. Another 8% in increases come from so-called “defensive medicine -- doing lots of unnecessary tests to avoid being sued.
The remaining 91% of increases are price, not cost increases. Americans are being financially disemboweled by the pharmaceutical/health care industries. The average American paid $5267.00 on health care in 2002, compared with an average $1821.00 in other industrialized nations.
The Bush administration and GOP-controlled Congress have actually sanctified such price gouging. They insisted that the new Medicare drug benefit program contain a explicit prohibtion again allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug makers. (So much for their oft-stated mantra that we should “let the magic of the marketplace” control prices.)
I thought the “fun” part of being an empirical power was in exploiting the citizens of other countries. When an imperial power joins forces with multi-national companies to exploit its own citizens it causes those subjects to begin wondering if it's not time for some changes at home.
After all, time is getting short -- for me.. I’m a Baby Boomer. I’m not getting any younger, or for that matter, any healthier. Oh, and, BTW, there are lots of us, and we are decidedly not your father’s old codgers. We are not sitting in rocking in chairs, sharing photos of our grandkids, going to square-dance classes and just hoping the AARP is keeping a close eye on our Social Security benefits.
We are the hands-on generation, a generation of aging former hippy, draft card burning, anti-war protestors. We are already not a bit happy about getting old and not about to go quietly.
We have not forgotten how to make the evening news when we have a bone up our collective ass about something. If you thought we were a cranky bunch when we were young and healthy just wait until we are unhappy with federal policies AND suffering from hemorrhoids, arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome.
It won't be pretty. So my advice to Washington is to get on with creating a single-payer national health insurance system. You have less than ten years. And that's assuming I don't get sick before then.
Have a groovy day
So, why do they all inevitably whither? Because, nothing quite fails like success.
Here’s two examples from the world’s current Imperial office holder -- the U.S. of A.
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a turkey.
And there it was yesterday, all dressed and no place to go. America’s only manned space vehicle, the Space Shuttle, steaming off liquid oxygen like a giant upright turd in the Florida sun.
The Space Shuttle is the actualization of the old joke; “An elephant is mouse designed by a committee.”
The reason I choose the Space Shuttle as proof the US is on the down slope of the empire bell curve is because, of all the ways we could have explored space we chose to invest all our marbles into bolting an 18-wheeler to rockets.
Sending a Mack truck into orbit required some very complicated and expensive engineering contortions. Satellites sent up on the Shuttle cost $25 million a ton. Compare that with the cost of sending the same payload up on simpler Russians or Chinese rockets, $3-6 million a ton.
It costs upwards of $10,000 per pound to launch anything, including the crew, into orbit on the Shuttle, a cost which is more than triple that charged by the workhorse expendable launch vehicles of our NASA’s heyday Apollo era.
What happened to NASA’s own “right stuff?”
"Once we won the Space Race in 1969, NASA morphed from a can-do, risk-taking, think out-of-the-box organization, to Just Another Tax-Fed Federal Bureaucracy, that, instead of playing to "win", was instead playing "not to lose". (Thomas Andrew Olson, Libertarian Institute)
The Space Shuttle is a mind bogglingly expensive example of this process. It’s too damn big, too damn expensive, too damn dangerous and too damn unreliable. It was designed in the 40 years ago. If it were a car it would be spending its days being lovingly polished in the garage by some old geezer trying to recapture his youth.
But no, instead the folks now running NASA decided to put a garage in orbit, call it a space station, and send the shuttle there to polish their own image.
There are a lot of cheaper ways to put people in space. The Russians, who can barely run their own country, do it regularly. Thanks to the Russian's simple and reliable Soyuz capsules we didn’t end up with three skeletons floating aroung the space station after the shuttle crash two years ago.
With any luck a bolt of lightenng will reduce the next shuttle to a pile of tile on its way to the launch pad. That would leave just two shuttles. We could put one in the Smithsonian and sell the other to Disney World.
Then turn NASA over to Bert Rutan and Richard Branson. They seem to be the current possessors of the right stuff. Imagine what they could do with just a fraction of NASA's $16 billion annual budget. We'd be orbiting earth sipping diet cola and munching peanuts in cramped coach seating within five years. (But please remember to return your seat backs to the full upright positon for re-entry. Items in overhead compartments may have shifted in weighless conditions.)
Bad Medicine
What good is an empire if it can't provide affordable medical care for its own citizens? Good question, and one that confronts Americans now.
President Bush and Big Medicine would have you believe that the skyrocketing cost of medical care is the fault of lawyers who sue. But a study released yesterday disputes that, noting that malpractice suits have a miniscule impact on medical costs.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Americans pay more for health care per person than citizens anywhere else in the world, doling out half again as much in medical expenses each year as the second-highest-cost country, according to a new study.
According to Dr. Gerard Anderson, lead author of a report just issued by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “We pay for drugs and hospital stays and doctor visits 2 to 2.5 times as much as other countries pay.”
And why, you ask? Malpractice suits? Nope. According to the study lawsuits add less than 1% to health care overhead. Another 8% in increases come from so-called “defensive medicine -- doing lots of unnecessary tests to avoid being sued.
The remaining 91% of increases are price, not cost increases. Americans are being financially disemboweled by the pharmaceutical/health care industries. The average American paid $5267.00 on health care in 2002, compared with an average $1821.00 in other industrialized nations.
The Bush administration and GOP-controlled Congress have actually sanctified such price gouging. They insisted that the new Medicare drug benefit program contain a explicit prohibtion again allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug makers. (So much for their oft-stated mantra that we should “let the magic of the marketplace” control prices.)
I thought the “fun” part of being an empirical power was in exploiting the citizens of other countries. When an imperial power joins forces with multi-national companies to exploit its own citizens it causes those subjects to begin wondering if it's not time for some changes at home.
After all, time is getting short -- for me.. I’m a Baby Boomer. I’m not getting any younger, or for that matter, any healthier. Oh, and, BTW, there are lots of us, and we are decidedly not your father’s old codgers. We are not sitting in rocking in chairs, sharing photos of our grandkids, going to square-dance classes and just hoping the AARP is keeping a close eye on our Social Security benefits.
We are the hands-on generation, a generation of aging former hippy, draft card burning, anti-war protestors. We are already not a bit happy about getting old and not about to go quietly.
We have not forgotten how to make the evening news when we have a bone up our collective ass about something. If you thought we were a cranky bunch when we were young and healthy just wait until we are unhappy with federal policies AND suffering from hemorrhoids, arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome.
It won't be pretty. So my advice to Washington is to get on with creating a single-payer national health insurance system. You have less than ten years. And that's assuming I don't get sick before then.
Have a groovy day
Thursday, July 14, 2005
July 13, 2005
Generalisemo Pizzo's
Solution For Iraq
Bush’s ill-conceived and poorly executed war in Iraq has become a quagmire. There’s no longer any denying it. And arguing over how we got there and why will not get us out of the mess either. It is equally clear that fighting that war the way we are fighting will not get us out any time soon either. So, what’s needed is a whole new plan, which I just happen to have here in my knapsack.
This is how to salvage Bush’s failed Iraq policy, as my old Marine Corps drill instructor used to say, “by the numbers.”
1) Alert Iraqi authorities they have until January 2006 to get their own troops ready to take over all operations inside Iraq’s borders.
2) Begin now preparing temporary bases, at roughly 100-mile intervals, along Iraq’s borders with Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia. (The math: 2000-mile plus border would require roughly 25 bases. If we used just half the 160,000 US troops in such an operation that would be 40 soldiers to patrol each mile of the border. )
3) Come this January US and other coalition forces are moved to these border bases where their mission – their only mission -- would be to seal their 100-mile section of border.
4) Each border base would be equipped with drones, helicopters, sensors and whatever other gear needed to seal their section of border -- but no Iraqi troops. The reason for that should be clear. The Iraq military is heavily infiltrated with insurgents and insurgent sympathizers. The last thing we need is them pointing out the weak spots in our sealed borders strategy. Border bases would have to be manned, supplied and run entirely by coalition forces. (And of course Halliburton. There's no escaping Halliburton.)
5) The only US troops that would remain in Iraq’s interior would be a handful of U.S. military advisors serving with the Iraqi military and Special Forces teams collecting intelligence or involved in surgical operations.
6) The US would agree to continue providing close air support when requested by Iraqi troops -- but only with the clear understanding that, if civilians are injured or killed in an Iraqi-ordered air strike, Iraqi commanders on the ground take the rap – the whole rap, immediately and publicly. Otherwise our planes are a no-show the next time they dial 911.
This plan would fundamentally change the current dynamic. Right now the insurgency supported from the outside and from within, is eternally sustainable. This plan would shuffle the deck.
1) It would severly cut the supply of fresh jihadist recruits streaming into Iraq from neighboring countries.
2) It would force Iraqi troops to stop relying on US military backup when the going gets tough.
3) It would then just be a matter of the Iraqi military killing off insurgents trapped inside Iraq or convincing the rest to put down their arms and join the political process.
4) It would greatly reduce US casualties beginning immediately on January 2. (I would bet it would reduce US casualties by up to 90% simply because they would no longer be in urban settings where car and roadside bombs have proven so lethal.)
5) Finally, it would mark the beginning of the end of US occupation. No longer would ordinary Iraqis have to see westerners frisking Iraqis or invading the privacy of their homes and mosques. They would like that. But the message to the Iraqi people would also be as clear and unambiguous as it could be: we are leaving, and sooner rather than later. So, you guys better get your own act together.
Even if this plan were not entirely successful, how much worse could it be than what we have now? If nothing else it would serve cut the class size of what has become the Islamic terrorist world's equivalent of West Point. Our border-based troops would either kill or capture such terrorists-in-training before they even get to their first class. And, as the chances of making it into Iraq alive dim the number of those trying would dwindle.
Finally, sealing the borders with Iran and Syria would also disrupt a myriad un-wholesome and unhelpful cross-border activities by those two antagonistic, un-wholesome and unhelpful players.
Of course this plan could fail too. But if it does at least our troops would be just a few feet away from the exits. Besides if in the end a finite number of insurgents trapped within a sealed Iraq defeat US-trained and lavishly supplied Iraqi government forces, then they probably don’t deserve their own country anyway.
At that point Iraqis would enter a new phase of their troubled history -- the Yugoslavia-ization of Iraq. The Kurds would go their own whey (sorry, couldn't resist) and lay claim to the northern part of the country they already govern, and well. There would be a fight for Kurkuk and the oil fields around it, but if the Shiites could not defeat Sunni insurgents they wouldn’t have a prayer against the Kurds.
Then, what we now call the “Sunni Triangle,” would become Sunniland with Baghdad as its capital. The southern part of Iraq would become Shiiteland, and ultimately an Iranian ward. Ethnic cleansing would, of course, be rampant as Sunnis force Shiites out of their areas and visa versa and the Kurds throw everyone else out of Kurdland. It would be very, very messy – Serbian-style messy.
These new, roughly drawn, self-declared boarders separating these three antagonistic entities would remain unsettled for decades, especially in oil-rich areas. (“That’s ours!”.. “Is not.”… “Is too!”… “Is NOT!” bang, bang… etc, etc.)
For guidance and help the Kurds would look west, towards Europe. The Sunnis would look west too, but only as far west as Syria. The Shiites would look east to Iran. Hilarity would NOT ensue.
That’s “the other option” -- Plan B, facing Iraqis if they let Plan A slip from their grasp. And the sooner Iraqis are confronted with it the better.
So, move our troops to the Iraqi borders and keep them there until the Iraqis either defeat the insurgents or lose to them.
In either case, we’re outta there.
Solution For Iraq
Bush’s ill-conceived and poorly executed war in Iraq has become a quagmire. There’s no longer any denying it. And arguing over how we got there and why will not get us out of the mess either. It is equally clear that fighting that war the way we are fighting will not get us out any time soon either. So, what’s needed is a whole new plan, which I just happen to have here in my knapsack.
This is how to salvage Bush’s failed Iraq policy, as my old Marine Corps drill instructor used to say, “by the numbers.”
1) Alert Iraqi authorities they have until January 2006 to get their own troops ready to take over all operations inside Iraq’s borders.
2) Begin now preparing temporary bases, at roughly 100-mile intervals, along Iraq’s borders with Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia. (The math: 2000-mile plus border would require roughly 25 bases. If we used just half the 160,000 US troops in such an operation that would be 40 soldiers to patrol each mile of the border. )
3) Come this January US and other coalition forces are moved to these border bases where their mission – their only mission -- would be to seal their 100-mile section of border.
4) Each border base would be equipped with drones, helicopters, sensors and whatever other gear needed to seal their section of border -- but no Iraqi troops. The reason for that should be clear. The Iraq military is heavily infiltrated with insurgents and insurgent sympathizers. The last thing we need is them pointing out the weak spots in our sealed borders strategy. Border bases would have to be manned, supplied and run entirely by coalition forces. (And of course Halliburton. There's no escaping Halliburton.)
5) The only US troops that would remain in Iraq’s interior would be a handful of U.S. military advisors serving with the Iraqi military and Special Forces teams collecting intelligence or involved in surgical operations.
6) The US would agree to continue providing close air support when requested by Iraqi troops -- but only with the clear understanding that, if civilians are injured or killed in an Iraqi-ordered air strike, Iraqi commanders on the ground take the rap – the whole rap, immediately and publicly. Otherwise our planes are a no-show the next time they dial 911.
This plan would fundamentally change the current dynamic. Right now the insurgency supported from the outside and from within, is eternally sustainable. This plan would shuffle the deck.
1) It would severly cut the supply of fresh jihadist recruits streaming into Iraq from neighboring countries.
2) It would force Iraqi troops to stop relying on US military backup when the going gets tough.
3) It would then just be a matter of the Iraqi military killing off insurgents trapped inside Iraq or convincing the rest to put down their arms and join the political process.
4) It would greatly reduce US casualties beginning immediately on January 2. (I would bet it would reduce US casualties by up to 90% simply because they would no longer be in urban settings where car and roadside bombs have proven so lethal.)
5) Finally, it would mark the beginning of the end of US occupation. No longer would ordinary Iraqis have to see westerners frisking Iraqis or invading the privacy of their homes and mosques. They would like that. But the message to the Iraqi people would also be as clear and unambiguous as it could be: we are leaving, and sooner rather than later. So, you guys better get your own act together.
Even if this plan were not entirely successful, how much worse could it be than what we have now? If nothing else it would serve cut the class size of what has become the Islamic terrorist world's equivalent of West Point. Our border-based troops would either kill or capture such terrorists-in-training before they even get to their first class. And, as the chances of making it into Iraq alive dim the number of those trying would dwindle.
Finally, sealing the borders with Iran and Syria would also disrupt a myriad un-wholesome and unhelpful cross-border activities by those two antagonistic, un-wholesome and unhelpful players.
Of course this plan could fail too. But if it does at least our troops would be just a few feet away from the exits. Besides if in the end a finite number of insurgents trapped within a sealed Iraq defeat US-trained and lavishly supplied Iraqi government forces, then they probably don’t deserve their own country anyway.
At that point Iraqis would enter a new phase of their troubled history -- the Yugoslavia-ization of Iraq. The Kurds would go their own whey (sorry, couldn't resist) and lay claim to the northern part of the country they already govern, and well. There would be a fight for Kurkuk and the oil fields around it, but if the Shiites could not defeat Sunni insurgents they wouldn’t have a prayer against the Kurds.
Then, what we now call the “Sunni Triangle,” would become Sunniland with Baghdad as its capital. The southern part of Iraq would become Shiiteland, and ultimately an Iranian ward. Ethnic cleansing would, of course, be rampant as Sunnis force Shiites out of their areas and visa versa and the Kurds throw everyone else out of Kurdland. It would be very, very messy – Serbian-style messy.
These new, roughly drawn, self-declared boarders separating these three antagonistic entities would remain unsettled for decades, especially in oil-rich areas. (“That’s ours!”.. “Is not.”… “Is too!”… “Is NOT!” bang, bang… etc, etc.)
For guidance and help the Kurds would look west, towards Europe. The Sunnis would look west too, but only as far west as Syria. The Shiites would look east to Iran. Hilarity would NOT ensue.
That’s “the other option” -- Plan B, facing Iraqis if they let Plan A slip from their grasp. And the sooner Iraqis are confronted with it the better.
So, move our troops to the Iraqi borders and keep them there until the Iraqis either defeat the insurgents or lose to them.
In either case, we’re outta there.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
July 12, 2005
The Log
Here’s a little something the born-again’s in the White House need to chew on:
"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own?" -- Luke 6:41
Yep, there it is. Right out of the book they claim is the be-all, end-all and the final word on all matters cosmic to human – God’s own inspired advice writ large.
So why do they ignore it? These of all folks -- the same party -- (and in some cases the very individuals) -- who endlessly obsessed and chased every real and perceived speck in the eye of the Clinton administration -- now blissfully ignoring the log in their own.
Yes, I am talking about Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s Rasputin, the man behind The Man. (Some would say the ventriloquist behind The Man.)
Do you see the same double standard I do? (Yeah, it’s a rhetorical question.)
Here, look at this and try to guess what it is:
Be it resolved that:
1. The (Blank) made false statements concerning his reprehensible conduct…
2. The (Blank) took steps to delay discovery of the truth;
3. No person is above the law, and (Blank) remains subject to criminal and civil penalties;
4. (Blank) by his conduct has brought upon himself and fully deserves the censure and condemnation of the American people and the Congress…
Who’s “Blank?” Rove? You could be excused for thinking so. No those words are directly from the Dec 9, 1998 resolution by House Judiciary Committee Democrats censuring their own President.
We have not seen a similar censure resolution offered by House Republicans on the CIA leak scandal, so lets just apply the same standards the Dems used against Clinton and see how the White House stacks up:
Count One – The making of false statements:
Rove lied about his involvement in blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame. We know he lied from Pillsbury Doughboy, White House spokesman, Scott McClellan who said two years ago that he asked and Rove personally assured him he had no involvement in the disclosure. Now we know that was a lie. But who was lying? Rove or Scotty? Since WH press secretaries only repeat what they are told by their bosses the order to lie came from either George W. Bush or Karl. There’s no “maybe” here. Either the President or Rove gave Scotty information they know was false and instructed him to provide that information to the press.
Count Two – Delaying discovery of the facts:
Even though the administration and/or Rove have known for two years that the leak was from the highest levels at the White House, they stuck to their story. That’s called “obstruction of justice,” and it’s a felony. (A felony is well within the “high-crimes and misdemeanor” criteria for impeachment. Just ask Bill.)
Count Three - No person is above the law: Except in this administration, apparently.
Count Four - his conduct has brought upon himself and fully deserves the censure and condemnation of the American people and the Congress:
We’re still waiting…. Hello you highly-moral, values-abiding, Republicans in Congress.. anyone in there?
But Republicans now control virtually all three branches of government; so don’t expect anything close to what the Democrats did when Clinton misbehaved in office. It would be like John Gotti making a citizen’s arrest of Sammy the Bull. Forgetaboutit.
But, just to annoy them, I want to remind everyone that just six years ago the standards Republicans used to decide what justified a full administration colonoscopy were far lower than they are today.
The Travelgate Caper: On May 19, 1993, several employees of the White House Travel Office were fired. Republicans alleged that friends of President Bill Clinton had engineered the firings in order to get the business for themselves. What came of the Travelgate scandal? Not much. After a long investigation a special prosecutor ruled, in effect, “no harm, no foul.”
(Travelgate – now there was a real scandal! Imagine, people in high office giving government contracts to friends and supporters. Nothing like that would happen in the current administration, I’m sure. But I can’t help wonder how much money Clinton’s friends might have made arranging White House travel? A few hundred grand, maybe? Which leads me to wonder how much Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton have netted so far on their no-bid contracts in Iraq? A few hundred million, maybe? Just wondering. )
The Filegate Flap: During 1996 the head of White House Security in the Clinton White House improperly requested personnel files from the FBI without asking permission of the subject individuals. Estimates range from 350 to 900 unauthorized file disclosures. The incident caused a firestorm of criticism because many of the files covered White House employees from previous Republican administrations. In March 2000 the Independent Counsel determined that there was no credible evidence of any criminal activity.
The Monicagate Affair: I need not remind anyone what this scandal was all about – sex and perjury. Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down, so to speak, and then lied about it under oath. I never really blamed Bill for lying about such a thing – what married man with a teenage daughter wouldn’t lie about such despicable behavior. But I did blame him for being such a self-indulgent, amoral, cheating putz. And I will never forgive him for that.
" Rove and his lawyer's denials that he was involved in telling reporters about Plame now appear to be at best based on Clintonian hairsplitting about whether he literally used (Plame's) name and identified her as covert or he simply described her as the CIA-employed wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the administration critic that White House was eager to discredit at the time." (Full Story)
My point should be clear: If Republicans believed that Travelgate and Filegate called for full-court investigations, why not Rovegate? In fact, Filegate has a lot in common with Rovegate; a White House official revealing classified information without the knowledge or permission of the victim.
But where’s the outrage on the political right today? Maybe they haven’t noticed. After all they’ve had their hands full lately enforcing rightwing fatwas; fighting to keep a brain-dead woman in Florida alive against her will, trying to give voting rights to discarded embryos so they could not be used to harvest potentially life-saving stem cells and working to insure that Christians can erect monuments to Ten Commandments -- which they don’t follow -- on government property. Busy, busy, busy. Too busy to notice the moral, ethical and legal lapses afoot just up the block at the White House.
All I’m saying is that what was sauce for the gooser should be sauce for the gander. Had this happened in the Clinton White House a special prosecutor would still be spending taxpayer money sifting the ashes. Republicans would have demanded it. We would have been deluged on the talk shows with “outraged” Republicans excoriating the administration. They would pound the table denouncing the administration for allowing one of its own to blow the cover of a covert CIA operative, putting lives at risk and endangering national security, all for crass, naked political purposes.
Can’t you just hear them?
So, there you have it. The party of “morality” and “values” can’t quite seem to get their pompous, pontificating, holier-than-thou balls in an uproar over Rovegate… the log in their own eye.
Footnote: If you missed yesterday's White House briefing you missed a zinger. It would appear White House reporters have finally decided to stop being chumps and to actually challenge this administrations double-talk. I have posed the transcript of the relevant parts HERE for those of you that missed it. Enjoy.
Site of The Day
Sign the Fire Rove Petition
http://votelouise.com/page/petition/rove
Here’s a little something the born-again’s in the White House need to chew on:
"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own?" -- Luke 6:41
Yep, there it is. Right out of the book they claim is the be-all, end-all and the final word on all matters cosmic to human – God’s own inspired advice writ large.
So why do they ignore it? These of all folks -- the same party -- (and in some cases the very individuals) -- who endlessly obsessed and chased every real and perceived speck in the eye of the Clinton administration -- now blissfully ignoring the log in their own.
Yes, I am talking about Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s Rasputin, the man behind The Man. (Some would say the ventriloquist behind The Man.)
Do you see the same double standard I do? (Yeah, it’s a rhetorical question.)
Here, look at this and try to guess what it is:
Be it resolved that:
1. The (Blank) made false statements concerning his reprehensible conduct…
2. The (Blank) took steps to delay discovery of the truth;
3. No person is above the law, and (Blank) remains subject to criminal and civil penalties;
4. (Blank) by his conduct has brought upon himself and fully deserves the censure and condemnation of the American people and the Congress…
Who’s “Blank?” Rove? You could be excused for thinking so. No those words are directly from the Dec 9, 1998 resolution by House Judiciary Committee Democrats censuring their own President.
We have not seen a similar censure resolution offered by House Republicans on the CIA leak scandal, so lets just apply the same standards the Dems used against Clinton and see how the White House stacks up:
Count One – The making of false statements:
Rove lied about his involvement in blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame. We know he lied from Pillsbury Doughboy, White House spokesman, Scott McClellan who said two years ago that he asked and Rove personally assured him he had no involvement in the disclosure. Now we know that was a lie. But who was lying? Rove or Scotty? Since WH press secretaries only repeat what they are told by their bosses the order to lie came from either George W. Bush or Karl. There’s no “maybe” here. Either the President or Rove gave Scotty information they know was false and instructed him to provide that information to the press.
Count Two – Delaying discovery of the facts:
Even though the administration and/or Rove have known for two years that the leak was from the highest levels at the White House, they stuck to their story. That’s called “obstruction of justice,” and it’s a felony. (A felony is well within the “high-crimes and misdemeanor” criteria for impeachment. Just ask Bill.)
Count Three - No person is above the law: Except in this administration, apparently.
Count Four - his conduct has brought upon himself and fully deserves the censure and condemnation of the American people and the Congress:
We’re still waiting…. Hello you highly-moral, values-abiding, Republicans in Congress.. anyone in there?
But Republicans now control virtually all three branches of government; so don’t expect anything close to what the Democrats did when Clinton misbehaved in office. It would be like John Gotti making a citizen’s arrest of Sammy the Bull. Forgetaboutit.
But, just to annoy them, I want to remind everyone that just six years ago the standards Republicans used to decide what justified a full administration colonoscopy were far lower than they are today.
The Travelgate Caper: On May 19, 1993, several employees of the White House Travel Office were fired. Republicans alleged that friends of President Bill Clinton had engineered the firings in order to get the business for themselves. What came of the Travelgate scandal? Not much. After a long investigation a special prosecutor ruled, in effect, “no harm, no foul.”
(Travelgate – now there was a real scandal! Imagine, people in high office giving government contracts to friends and supporters. Nothing like that would happen in the current administration, I’m sure. But I can’t help wonder how much money Clinton’s friends might have made arranging White House travel? A few hundred grand, maybe? Which leads me to wonder how much Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton have netted so far on their no-bid contracts in Iraq? A few hundred million, maybe? Just wondering. )
The Filegate Flap: During 1996 the head of White House Security in the Clinton White House improperly requested personnel files from the FBI without asking permission of the subject individuals. Estimates range from 350 to 900 unauthorized file disclosures. The incident caused a firestorm of criticism because many of the files covered White House employees from previous Republican administrations. In March 2000 the Independent Counsel determined that there was no credible evidence of any criminal activity.
The Monicagate Affair: I need not remind anyone what this scandal was all about – sex and perjury. Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down, so to speak, and then lied about it under oath. I never really blamed Bill for lying about such a thing – what married man with a teenage daughter wouldn’t lie about such despicable behavior. But I did blame him for being such a self-indulgent, amoral, cheating putz. And I will never forgive him for that.
" Rove and his lawyer's denials that he was involved in telling reporters about Plame now appear to be at best based on Clintonian hairsplitting about whether he literally used (Plame's) name and identified her as covert or he simply described her as the CIA-employed wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the administration critic that White House was eager to discredit at the time." (Full Story)
My point should be clear: If Republicans believed that Travelgate and Filegate called for full-court investigations, why not Rovegate? In fact, Filegate has a lot in common with Rovegate; a White House official revealing classified information without the knowledge or permission of the victim.
But where’s the outrage on the political right today? Maybe they haven’t noticed. After all they’ve had their hands full lately enforcing rightwing fatwas; fighting to keep a brain-dead woman in Florida alive against her will, trying to give voting rights to discarded embryos so they could not be used to harvest potentially life-saving stem cells and working to insure that Christians can erect monuments to Ten Commandments -- which they don’t follow -- on government property. Busy, busy, busy. Too busy to notice the moral, ethical and legal lapses afoot just up the block at the White House.
All I’m saying is that what was sauce for the gooser should be sauce for the gander. Had this happened in the Clinton White House a special prosecutor would still be spending taxpayer money sifting the ashes. Republicans would have demanded it. We would have been deluged on the talk shows with “outraged” Republicans excoriating the administration. They would pound the table denouncing the administration for allowing one of its own to blow the cover of a covert CIA operative, putting lives at risk and endangering national security, all for crass, naked political purposes.
Can’t you just hear them?
So, there you have it. The party of “morality” and “values” can’t quite seem to get their pompous, pontificating, holier-than-thou balls in an uproar over Rovegate… the log in their own eye.
Footnote: If you missed yesterday's White House briefing you missed a zinger. It would appear White House reporters have finally decided to stop being chumps and to actually challenge this administrations double-talk. I have posed the transcript of the relevant parts HERE for those of you that missed it. Enjoy.
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http://votelouise.com/page/petition/rove
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
July 11, 2005
Bubba Muslims?
Remember earlier this year when Newsweek reported that US interrogators at Gitmo might have flushed a Koran down a toilet? Most reasonable folks assumed the story was, at best, overblown. After all, unless the offended Koran one of those miniatures written on a grain of rice there was not way it got flushed down any toilet I’ve ever sat on.
But never mind that little engineering detail. In a matter of hours Muslim crowds filled the streets in protest. All hell broke loose. The crowd even killed a few of their fellow Muslims to let the world know how seriously they took this matter.
T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) once observed, “Arabs are children of the idea.” His point being that it didn’t take much to get them in the mood for a party, a Haage or a fight. All it took was the right “idea.” Just the “idea” that a Koran might have been mistreated was all it took to send tens of thousands of Muslims to the streets in protest – violent protest. I know because I saw it on the evening TV news.
Forty years of personal (TV news) observation on all things Middle Eastern have confirmed Lawrence’s observation for me. Hardly a night passes without at least one story showing crowds of amazingly pissed off Muslims burning Israeli and US flags, chanting violent threats and slogans and promising the object of their ire’s hours were numbered.
That is except for one “idea.” That would be the idea of terrorism against Western civilian targets. On that particular “idea” I have yet to see footage of throngs of angry Muslims filling streets or chanting snappy slogans of outrage. I have not seen one burn a photo of bin Laden or Zarkawi or damning their souls in the name of Allah.
Oh I know it’s terrible for me to mention this. It's the most politically incorrect item on the PC Top Ten right now, you know. Sorry, but someone has to. The mainstream media won’t touch this subject with a ten-foot vaccinated crowbar. Even Tony Blair and George Bush go out of their way to deny there is an issue.
But, it is true. It’s demonstrably, certifiably and measurably true. It would take less than a week for even the dimmest CNN or NY Times intern to collect the data for a story documenting it. It’s just laying there, but it would be ever so rude and insensitive to notice it.
But notice it – sooner or later – we must. Because the West is learning – as Israelis learned long ago and the Iraqis are learning now – that there is no real protection against random radical Muslim terrorism. The solution to this growing problem resides almost solely in the hands of Muslims themselves. This wave of terror will not abate until the “idea” that it is wrong finds resonance on the “Arab street.” So far it clearly has not.
We can help that along but only if we, our governments and media to stop pretending this enormous disconnect not only exists but is not some kind of cultural or religious subtlety non-Muslim westerners should not be expected to grasp. It's an enabler.
Muslims, we are told, do hate terror, just not enough to protest it in large numbers. But, why not? Clearly they know how to organize large street demonstrations, just not against Islamic terror.
Muslims are conflicted, that’s why. My intent here is not to whip up hatred of Muslims. My purpose in breaking this politically incorrect taboo is to get it on the table, not as a passing mention, but as a pressing issue Muslims worldwide – but particularly those living in the West – need to get… Get this idea and get it fast.
The problem plaguing Muslims is not new. I've seen it before, right here at home. White southern Christian folk suffered the same kind of “confliction” during the last century. I’m talking about all those ever-so-proper white bible thumping, church-going southerners who lived through America's civil rights era. They too kept their own council as members of their communities and congregations bombed and burned black churches and lynched black men. They too were, you see, conflicted. Oh,, sure, they said they were appalled, but they secretly supported white terrorism against civil rights activists and blacks.
Like today’s Muslims today, white southern Christians back then believed a way of life was at stake, their unique traditions and culture, even their religion. So most of them did nothing to stop the violence against blacks, hoping somehow it might put the brakes on social change and allow the old ways to coexist with the more palatable aspects of progress and modernity.
Complicit silence did not work for white southern Christians and it won’t work for Muslims either – because it can’t work. Their silence and inaction in the face of criminal behavior was wrong then, just as it is for Muslims today.
Memo to Muslims: Remember how angry you felt when you thought US soldiers had flushed a Koran down a toilet? Remember the anger you felt – and feel – when you see Israeli bulldozers destroying Palestinian homes? Remember the anger that drove you to the streets when the US attacked Iraq? Got that?
Okay, now begin asking yourselves, those in your community and Mosques, why it is you couldn’t seem to muster the same level of outrage when 3000 innocent people died at the hands of radical Muslims on 9/11. Or again when hundreds died when fellow Muslims bombed trains in Madrid? Or now, as we mourn the 52 people who died in London’s subway last week, again at the hands of fellow Muslims? Where’s all that good-ole Muslim outrage now? Where are the throngs of angry “peaceful Muslims” in the streets of Riyadh, Karachi, Cairo, and Tehran demanding justice for the innocents killed? Huh? You see the problem?
Wrong is as wrong does. Western philosopher, John Locke, put a fine point on this when he noted – correctly, that, “The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
So, Muslims, here, in Europe and world-wide -- stop telling me Islam is a ‘peaceful religion” in the wake of each new radical Muslim attack. I am no longer interested in hearing that. I am no longer watching your lips but your feet. I am watching your actions to determine your true thoughts.
Quote of the Day
"Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington, and they tracked her calves to their stalls? But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country?
Maybe we should give them all a cow. "
(George Carlin)
Site of the Day
How much as the Iraq war cost your community.
Find out here
www.costofwar.com
Remember earlier this year when Newsweek reported that US interrogators at Gitmo might have flushed a Koran down a toilet? Most reasonable folks assumed the story was, at best, overblown. After all, unless the offended Koran one of those miniatures written on a grain of rice there was not way it got flushed down any toilet I’ve ever sat on.
But never mind that little engineering detail. In a matter of hours Muslim crowds filled the streets in protest. All hell broke loose. The crowd even killed a few of their fellow Muslims to let the world know how seriously they took this matter.
T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) once observed, “Arabs are children of the idea.” His point being that it didn’t take much to get them in the mood for a party, a Haage or a fight. All it took was the right “idea.” Just the “idea” that a Koran might have been mistreated was all it took to send tens of thousands of Muslims to the streets in protest – violent protest. I know because I saw it on the evening TV news.
Forty years of personal (TV news) observation on all things Middle Eastern have confirmed Lawrence’s observation for me. Hardly a night passes without at least one story showing crowds of amazingly pissed off Muslims burning Israeli and US flags, chanting violent threats and slogans and promising the object of their ire’s hours were numbered.
That is except for one “idea.” That would be the idea of terrorism against Western civilian targets. On that particular “idea” I have yet to see footage of throngs of angry Muslims filling streets or chanting snappy slogans of outrage. I have not seen one burn a photo of bin Laden or Zarkawi or damning their souls in the name of Allah.
Oh I know it’s terrible for me to mention this. It's the most politically incorrect item on the PC Top Ten right now, you know. Sorry, but someone has to. The mainstream media won’t touch this subject with a ten-foot vaccinated crowbar. Even Tony Blair and George Bush go out of their way to deny there is an issue.
But, it is true. It’s demonstrably, certifiably and measurably true. It would take less than a week for even the dimmest CNN or NY Times intern to collect the data for a story documenting it. It’s just laying there, but it would be ever so rude and insensitive to notice it.
But notice it – sooner or later – we must. Because the West is learning – as Israelis learned long ago and the Iraqis are learning now – that there is no real protection against random radical Muslim terrorism. The solution to this growing problem resides almost solely in the hands of Muslims themselves. This wave of terror will not abate until the “idea” that it is wrong finds resonance on the “Arab street.” So far it clearly has not.
We can help that along but only if we, our governments and media to stop pretending this enormous disconnect not only exists but is not some kind of cultural or religious subtlety non-Muslim westerners should not be expected to grasp. It's an enabler.
Muslims, we are told, do hate terror, just not enough to protest it in large numbers. But, why not? Clearly they know how to organize large street demonstrations, just not against Islamic terror.
Muslims are conflicted, that’s why. My intent here is not to whip up hatred of Muslims. My purpose in breaking this politically incorrect taboo is to get it on the table, not as a passing mention, but as a pressing issue Muslims worldwide – but particularly those living in the West – need to get… Get this idea and get it fast.
The problem plaguing Muslims is not new. I've seen it before, right here at home. White southern Christian folk suffered the same kind of “confliction” during the last century. I’m talking about all those ever-so-proper white bible thumping, church-going southerners who lived through America's civil rights era. They too kept their own council as members of their communities and congregations bombed and burned black churches and lynched black men. They too were, you see, conflicted. Oh,, sure, they said they were appalled, but they secretly supported white terrorism against civil rights activists and blacks.
Like today’s Muslims today, white southern Christians back then believed a way of life was at stake, their unique traditions and culture, even their religion. So most of them did nothing to stop the violence against blacks, hoping somehow it might put the brakes on social change and allow the old ways to coexist with the more palatable aspects of progress and modernity.
Complicit silence did not work for white southern Christians and it won’t work for Muslims either – because it can’t work. Their silence and inaction in the face of criminal behavior was wrong then, just as it is for Muslims today.
Memo to Muslims: Remember how angry you felt when you thought US soldiers had flushed a Koran down a toilet? Remember the anger you felt – and feel – when you see Israeli bulldozers destroying Palestinian homes? Remember the anger that drove you to the streets when the US attacked Iraq? Got that?
Okay, now begin asking yourselves, those in your community and Mosques, why it is you couldn’t seem to muster the same level of outrage when 3000 innocent people died at the hands of radical Muslims on 9/11. Or again when hundreds died when fellow Muslims bombed trains in Madrid? Or now, as we mourn the 52 people who died in London’s subway last week, again at the hands of fellow Muslims? Where’s all that good-ole Muslim outrage now? Where are the throngs of angry “peaceful Muslims” in the streets of Riyadh, Karachi, Cairo, and Tehran demanding justice for the innocents killed? Huh? You see the problem?
Wrong is as wrong does. Western philosopher, John Locke, put a fine point on this when he noted – correctly, that, “The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
So, Muslims, here, in Europe and world-wide -- stop telling me Islam is a ‘peaceful religion” in the wake of each new radical Muslim attack. I am no longer interested in hearing that. I am no longer watching your lips but your feet. I am watching your actions to determine your true thoughts.
Quote of the Day
"Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington, and they tracked her calves to their stalls? But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country?
Maybe we should give them all a cow. "
(George Carlin)
Site of the Day
How much as the Iraq war cost your community.
Find out here
www.costofwar.com
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