Unauthorized eavesdropping in U.S. must be stopped
Editorial:
George W. Bush's decision to authorize intelligence agents to electronically eavesdrop on people in the United States without court-approved warrants is a stunning example of the president's apparent disdain for the rights of ordinary people, the Constitution and the rule of law.
According to the New York Times, starting in 2002 Bush turned the National Security Agency loose to monitor the international phone calls and e-mail of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in this country. The president's green light marked a profound shift in the intelligence-gathering practices of the NSA, which has traditionally operated abroad. It was also almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional. Such snooping must be stopped.
The White House, tellingly, has not challenged the Times' account. Officials have instead attempted to justify the eavesdropping, citing the need to move quickly in the war on terror, while insisting that Bush would never order anything illegal.
That rings hollow coming from an administration under fire for abusing detainees and trying to legally redefine torture while insisting it would never torture anyone. It is an administration that placed itself above the law in claiming the power to indefinitely lock up American citizens whom it labeled enemy combatants, without criminal charges, legal representation or a day in court. It is an administration dogged by accusations of ghost detainees, secret prisons and delivering detainees for interrogation in countries known to use torture.
There are people in the world who would like nothing better than to do the United States harm. Washington should work overtime to uncover those plotters and their plots. But that does not justify the NSA's disturbingly un-American violation of the right to privacy.
It was just that kind of unchecked spying on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists in the 1970s that prompted Congress to establish the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which provides a legal, regulated avenue for such monitoring. Intelligence operatives, usually from the FBI, have only to show probable cause to believe that a person is an agent of a foreign power or an international terrorist group to get a warrant to monitor their communications.
The court is readily accessible, able to respond quickly and has granted thousands of warrants over the years. It has, in fact, almost never refused a request. There was no need for an end run around the court and no justification for skirting the law.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
A Ten-Step Program
by Jane Smiley
Is Bush in a bubble? Is Bush a dry drunk? Is Bush a drunk drunk? Is Bush a narcissist? Is Bush an idiot? Is Bush a madman? Does Bush have an “Authority Problem”? Theories abound about why Bush does the things he does, but most of them assume that he is making mistakes that he could or would correct if he understood how misguided he was.
On Monday, there was an editorial in the New York Times lamenting the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the rebuilding of New Orleans, the levees in particular. On Tuesday, there was another editorial, excoriating the shameful behavior of the Bush negotiators at the Montreal conference on global warming. The gist of both editorials was that without national leadership, two chances are about to be lost--the chance to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the chance to mitigate the effects of global warming. Then at the end of the week, we learned that Bush has been wiretapping the phones of his own citizens--an impeachable offense. The Times writes as if it is possible still to alter the direction of Bush administration policy, but obviously it is not. The Bushies have a pattern and they stick to it in spite of every apparent reason to change course. It’s not as if we don’t know what pattern it is, and it’s not as if they haven’t advertised what the pattern will be--it is to break down the government so completely that it can’t be put back together again. Let’s take a look at the “mistakes” the Bush administration is said to have made, and, instead, ask ourselves if they are actually realized intentions:
1. Hobbling the government with debt by combining an expensive, prolonged war with perennial rounds of tax cuts.
2. Destroying the bureaucracy by making it impossible for neutral, expert, or objective bureaucrats to keep their jobs, replacing them with incompetents.
3. Destroying the integrity of the election system, state by state, beginning with Florida and Ohio.
4: Defanging the media by paying fake reporters, co-opting members of the MSM (why did the New York Times refrain from publishing stories unfavorable to the Bush administration before the 2004 election?) and allowing (or encouraging) huge mergers and the buying up of independent media operations by known conservative media conglomerates.
5. Destroying the middle class by changing the bankruptcy laws and the tax laws.
6. Destroying the National Guard and the Army by deploying them over and over in a futile war, while at the same time failing to provide them with armor and equipment.
7. Precipitating Iraq into a civil war by invading it.
8. Accelerating the effects of global warming by putting roadblocks in the way of mitigating its effects.
9. Denying healthcare and prescription medication to an increasing number of Americans, most specifically by ramming the prescription drug legislation through Congress, but also by manipulating Medicare and Medicaid so that fewer and fewer citizens are covered.
10. Encouraging the people in the rest of the world to associate the US with torture, military incursion, and fear, by a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, by vociferously maintaining the right of the US to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and by refusing to accept international laws.
Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US (with most people in the lower tier), and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world.
How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far? As an example, when Bush said, “Heckuva job, Brownie”, outsiders generally assumed he was making a mistake--that he didn’t know what a bad job Brownie was doing. But let’s say that he knew perfectly well that Brownie had abandoned new Orleans to the forces of nature, and that THAT was the essence of the heckuva job he was doing. In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But let’s say that torture and rendition are something that the Bush administration is happy to do, and doesn’t mind others knowing about. Likewise, many observers, let’s say Jack Murtha, for one, assume that the president does not want to destroy the army. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. Let’s say that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have cast their lot not with the draft, or even the volunteer army, but with the mercenary army, which is more profitable, less subject to Congressional and public oversight, and, really, the appropriate army for a rogue state. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight. It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When we get rid of citizen soldiers, then we don’t have to respect them.
When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does. The drowned and strangled government, having ceased to exist, would not only offer no benefits to citizens, it would offer no obstacle to those who wished to break the laws (for example against internal spying), because there would be no law to break. It is for this reason that the Bush administration pays absolutely no attention to the polls--they have already discounted the preferences of the citizens. When the government has been shrunk to nothing and drowned in the bathtub, the citizenry will be entirely powerless--that is the real goal, not an unintended consequence. Norquist and his fellow theorists understand perfectly that in a modern democracy, there are two competing modes of voting: there is “one person, one vote” and there is “one dollar, one vote”. They not only prefer “one dollar, one vote”, they want to entirely get rid of “one person, one vote”.
The outcome of such policies will be a dictatorship or a tyranny. Such policies cannot be reconciled with the US as we know it, or with the vision of the Founding Fathers. It is true that rogue elements have stolen elections before, as the slave interest stole the election in Kansas in 1856 by openly ferrying fraudulent voters across the river from Missouri, and then bullying the Congress into certifying the election in spite of plenty of evidence that the election was corrupt. It is also true that the public has been fed lies in the past so that they would support a questionable war (remember the Maine!). Corrupt administrations probably outnumber clean ones in US history. But the ten “successes” I cite above come together to present, I think, the greatest threat to the US since the Civil War. The US is not like much of the rest of theworld: France has always been France, and England has been England for many centuries, and Russia defined itself during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as Russia in contrast to the Tartars and Europe. Chinese history is, supposedly, the longest continual history of any people in the world, but the US is based on an abstraction--a certain set of ideas that divide up and share out power so that it does not become concentrated in the hands of a single tyrannical entity, either party or person. We are expected to participate as citizens in our government at the local, state, and national level, and our government has been expected, from the beginning, to be a shared enterprise, not an engine of power and wealth for a single oligarchic group. Our government was devised as a set of ideas about how to avoid kings, aristocracies, and tyrannies. If it fails at that, or is manipulated into producing tyranny, then we are no longer living in the US, we are living in a no man’s land, without an actual identity. This set of ideas, political techniques, and beliefs that holds together immigrants from every continent and every culture.
I began considering the possibility that what we see around us might indeed constitute success, as far as the Bushies are concerned, when I read in a post by Karen Kwiatkowski that three witnesses had confirmed that Bush referred to the Constitution as a “just a god damned piece of paper.” Then there was the article in The Guardian in which six American pundits were invited to reflect upon the meaning of the last five years of the Bush administration. Two commentators said interesting things. Howell Raines pointed out that four generations of Bushes and Walkers (since 1850) have shown a willingness to do anything for money and power, but no interest of any kind in the common good. R. Emmett Tyrell implied more than he stated when he maintained that the anger that people like me feel toward Bush is mere psychological projection, expressing “the need of the passing Old Order to have enemies.” What was striking in Tyrell’s section is his assumption that the Old Order (legal elections, citizen soldiers, healthy middle class, commonly agreed upon morality, laws, and regulations, useful beaurocracy) IS passing. He must know something I don’t know, because I had been thinking the country we used to have was still salvageable. In addition to these signs, though, we have several others, among them the fact that Bush and Cheney attempt to communicate only with their base (and remember, in “Farenheit 911”, Bush told a group of wealthy contributors that they WERE his base). Their base is fairly small and getting smaller, but they seem to have no desire, even when campaigning, to enlarge their base. It’s as if they know that the voters don’t matter, and, of course, according to the president of the Diebold Company, the voters don’t matter (see Avi Rubin’s post about voting machine certifcation).
In the face of the administration’s successes, it seems that it is the responsibility of the Democrats to save the republic, and to prevent the government from being shrunken and drowned, but they have been very lax about stepping up to the plate. With the nation beginning to wake up to the injustice and futility of bringing chaos to the Middle East, the most prominent Democrats choose to distance themselves from the citizens and to link themselves more tightly to the administration. Hillary Clinton, for example, refuses to denounce the war and takes up the issue of flag burning! John Kerry refuses to confront the probability that his honor was besmirched and his own election was stolen. The DNC takes the time to denounce the peace movement, even though the peace movement was right about the futility of the war. Bill Clinton seems to be of two minds. He’s willing to speak out about global warming, which is a plus, but every time he takes a stand about any other issue, he soon backpedals. How to understand this? Democrats outside of Washington widely infer that Democrats in Washington are simply cowardly or deluded, but it is also a possibility that they are in on the shift from what Tyrell calls the “Old Order” (democracy) to the “New Order” (what shall we call that?).
We normally think of American political thought running along a single continuum, from right to left, from, let’s say from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Communist Party. Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together. But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power. In the conservative movement today, this split is evident--old-line conservatives distrust the Bush administration because small government, low debt, and isolationism are about circumscribing the power of government. Bush is about enhancing the power of--well, I almost said government. But any government is essentially a smoothly-operating bureaucracy. Bush is about enhancing the power of himself and his cronies and dismantling any countervailing entity. The Bushies are not shy about acting on their craving for power (as in the K Street Project) or about talking about it--”Permanent Republican control of the three branches of government.” In addition, Bush himself tends to express his desire for power when he’s joking about how it’s easier to be a dictator than a president, or how the Chinese sure know how to treat journalists. The only reason the Bushies are called “conservative”, as many conservatives will themselves tell you, is that the theorists of Bushism managed to graft themselves onto the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s, when the Republican party was the party of disgruntled racists, fundamentalists, workers, and farmers left behind by Civil Rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, the end of the manufacturing sector, and the abandonment of a rural way of life. Many of the neo-cons are former leftist student radicals because when they were student radicals, power was what they wanted. They needed to be converted from one ideology (Marxism) to another (capitalism), but the essential goal--gaining power--remained the same.
If we add the power continuum, then, the American political scene starts looking like a coordinate plane. There is the x-axis, from left to right, and the y-axis, from bottom (power dispersing) to top (power consolidating). Institutions and entities that are power dispersing would be the Libertarian Party, the Novel, the blogosphere, and democracy itself. If we plot the Bush administration point, it would be at the top of the y-axis, but not necessarily very far right, in terms of small government, low debt, and isolationism. In fact, it is this apparent moderation in expressed Bush ideas that makes him seem relatively harmless to many Americans. But the ruthless drive for power of Bush and his cronies is really not about ideas, and in fact views ideas as a kind of trash, even, according to witnesses, the ideas expressed in the Constitution. the reason I never support any Bush policy, no matter how “moderate” on the surface is that every Bush policy is designed to enhance thepower of Bush and his cronies. The grab for absolute power must be resisted absolutely. No doubt the Democrats who are in sympathy with the Bush crowd are high on the power axis, too, at least in their own minds.
My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress--poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the “booming economy” is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their “successes”, or, as average Americans might term it, their “failures”, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections.
I also have a philosophical bulletin for the Bush crowd--the “Thousand Year Reich” doesn’t exist, and neither does “permanent Republican control of all three branches of government”, especially if that control is based on stealing elections. Power is the most ephemeral possession of them all because retaining power means exerting ever more control. Control, of course, operates according to the law of diminishing returns. When you threaten and then torture that first guy, it’s shocking and intimidating, not only to the guy himself but to everyone who hears about it. To maintain that level of intimidation, however, requires ever more threats and ever more torture, and pretty soon you have threatened and tortured, and even killed, hundreds (what’s the count on Iraqis who have died in American custody--121?) or thousands of people, and you are actually losing power because the very thing you thought you could toss out the window in your quest for power, namely morality, comes back to haunt you in the form of disgust (the disgust that others feel toward you) and common decency (that quality that others have retained and you have lost). The US has lasted this long, and survived and thrived because of power dispersal, not power consolidation. Which is not to say that the Bushies can’t do a lot of damage--they have and they can. The loss of our moral compass is devastating. The scattering of beaurocratic talent is a huge hidden cost of the Bush plan, as is the destruction of the volunteer army both as a military entity and as a population of young people who have been required to be ruthless themselves and to be ruthlessly preyed upon by the Iraqi insurgency. Our debts to the Chinese are a price we do not yet know the cost of, and our resistance to the idea of global warming might doom us all. Arousing the foot soldiers of the religious right, whipping them up with ideas of “the Rapture”, then arming them with weapons of mass destruction seems on the face of it to be a first class folly. And all for what? Life is short. Reputations are long.
Is Bush in a bubble? Is Bush a dry drunk? Is Bush a drunk drunk? Is Bush a narcissist? Is Bush an idiot? Is Bush a madman? Does Bush have an “Authority Problem”? Theories abound about why Bush does the things he does, but most of them assume that he is making mistakes that he could or would correct if he understood how misguided he was.
On Monday, there was an editorial in the New York Times lamenting the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the rebuilding of New Orleans, the levees in particular. On Tuesday, there was another editorial, excoriating the shameful behavior of the Bush negotiators at the Montreal conference on global warming. The gist of both editorials was that without national leadership, two chances are about to be lost--the chance to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the chance to mitigate the effects of global warming. Then at the end of the week, we learned that Bush has been wiretapping the phones of his own citizens--an impeachable offense. The Times writes as if it is possible still to alter the direction of Bush administration policy, but obviously it is not. The Bushies have a pattern and they stick to it in spite of every apparent reason to change course. It’s not as if we don’t know what pattern it is, and it’s not as if they haven’t advertised what the pattern will be--it is to break down the government so completely that it can’t be put back together again. Let’s take a look at the “mistakes” the Bush administration is said to have made, and, instead, ask ourselves if they are actually realized intentions:
1. Hobbling the government with debt by combining an expensive, prolonged war with perennial rounds of tax cuts.
2. Destroying the bureaucracy by making it impossible for neutral, expert, or objective bureaucrats to keep their jobs, replacing them with incompetents.
3. Destroying the integrity of the election system, state by state, beginning with Florida and Ohio.
4: Defanging the media by paying fake reporters, co-opting members of the MSM (why did the New York Times refrain from publishing stories unfavorable to the Bush administration before the 2004 election?) and allowing (or encouraging) huge mergers and the buying up of independent media operations by known conservative media conglomerates.
5. Destroying the middle class by changing the bankruptcy laws and the tax laws.
6. Destroying the National Guard and the Army by deploying them over and over in a futile war, while at the same time failing to provide them with armor and equipment.
7. Precipitating Iraq into a civil war by invading it.
8. Accelerating the effects of global warming by putting roadblocks in the way of mitigating its effects.
9. Denying healthcare and prescription medication to an increasing number of Americans, most specifically by ramming the prescription drug legislation through Congress, but also by manipulating Medicare and Medicaid so that fewer and fewer citizens are covered.
10. Encouraging the people in the rest of the world to associate the US with torture, military incursion, and fear, by a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, by vociferously maintaining the right of the US to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and by refusing to accept international laws.
Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US (with most people in the lower tier), and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world.
How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far? As an example, when Bush said, “Heckuva job, Brownie”, outsiders generally assumed he was making a mistake--that he didn’t know what a bad job Brownie was doing. But let’s say that he knew perfectly well that Brownie had abandoned new Orleans to the forces of nature, and that THAT was the essence of the heckuva job he was doing. In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But let’s say that torture and rendition are something that the Bush administration is happy to do, and doesn’t mind others knowing about. Likewise, many observers, let’s say Jack Murtha, for one, assume that the president does not want to destroy the army. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. Let’s say that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have cast their lot not with the draft, or even the volunteer army, but with the mercenary army, which is more profitable, less subject to Congressional and public oversight, and, really, the appropriate army for a rogue state. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight. It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When we get rid of citizen soldiers, then we don’t have to respect them.
When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does. The drowned and strangled government, having ceased to exist, would not only offer no benefits to citizens, it would offer no obstacle to those who wished to break the laws (for example against internal spying), because there would be no law to break. It is for this reason that the Bush administration pays absolutely no attention to the polls--they have already discounted the preferences of the citizens. When the government has been shrunk to nothing and drowned in the bathtub, the citizenry will be entirely powerless--that is the real goal, not an unintended consequence. Norquist and his fellow theorists understand perfectly that in a modern democracy, there are two competing modes of voting: there is “one person, one vote” and there is “one dollar, one vote”. They not only prefer “one dollar, one vote”, they want to entirely get rid of “one person, one vote”.
The outcome of such policies will be a dictatorship or a tyranny. Such policies cannot be reconciled with the US as we know it, or with the vision of the Founding Fathers. It is true that rogue elements have stolen elections before, as the slave interest stole the election in Kansas in 1856 by openly ferrying fraudulent voters across the river from Missouri, and then bullying the Congress into certifying the election in spite of plenty of evidence that the election was corrupt. It is also true that the public has been fed lies in the past so that they would support a questionable war (remember the Maine!). Corrupt administrations probably outnumber clean ones in US history. But the ten “successes” I cite above come together to present, I think, the greatest threat to the US since the Civil War. The US is not like much of the rest of theworld: France has always been France, and England has been England for many centuries, and Russia defined itself during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as Russia in contrast to the Tartars and Europe. Chinese history is, supposedly, the longest continual history of any people in the world, but the US is based on an abstraction--a certain set of ideas that divide up and share out power so that it does not become concentrated in the hands of a single tyrannical entity, either party or person. We are expected to participate as citizens in our government at the local, state, and national level, and our government has been expected, from the beginning, to be a shared enterprise, not an engine of power and wealth for a single oligarchic group. Our government was devised as a set of ideas about how to avoid kings, aristocracies, and tyrannies. If it fails at that, or is manipulated into producing tyranny, then we are no longer living in the US, we are living in a no man’s land, without an actual identity. This set of ideas, political techniques, and beliefs that holds together immigrants from every continent and every culture.
I began considering the possibility that what we see around us might indeed constitute success, as far as the Bushies are concerned, when I read in a post by Karen Kwiatkowski that three witnesses had confirmed that Bush referred to the Constitution as a “just a god damned piece of paper.” Then there was the article in The Guardian in which six American pundits were invited to reflect upon the meaning of the last five years of the Bush administration. Two commentators said interesting things. Howell Raines pointed out that four generations of Bushes and Walkers (since 1850) have shown a willingness to do anything for money and power, but no interest of any kind in the common good. R. Emmett Tyrell implied more than he stated when he maintained that the anger that people like me feel toward Bush is mere psychological projection, expressing “the need of the passing Old Order to have enemies.” What was striking in Tyrell’s section is his assumption that the Old Order (legal elections, citizen soldiers, healthy middle class, commonly agreed upon morality, laws, and regulations, useful beaurocracy) IS passing. He must know something I don’t know, because I had been thinking the country we used to have was still salvageable. In addition to these signs, though, we have several others, among them the fact that Bush and Cheney attempt to communicate only with their base (and remember, in “Farenheit 911”, Bush told a group of wealthy contributors that they WERE his base). Their base is fairly small and getting smaller, but they seem to have no desire, even when campaigning, to enlarge their base. It’s as if they know that the voters don’t matter, and, of course, according to the president of the Diebold Company, the voters don’t matter (see Avi Rubin’s post about voting machine certifcation).
In the face of the administration’s successes, it seems that it is the responsibility of the Democrats to save the republic, and to prevent the government from being shrunken and drowned, but they have been very lax about stepping up to the plate. With the nation beginning to wake up to the injustice and futility of bringing chaos to the Middle East, the most prominent Democrats choose to distance themselves from the citizens and to link themselves more tightly to the administration. Hillary Clinton, for example, refuses to denounce the war and takes up the issue of flag burning! John Kerry refuses to confront the probability that his honor was besmirched and his own election was stolen. The DNC takes the time to denounce the peace movement, even though the peace movement was right about the futility of the war. Bill Clinton seems to be of two minds. He’s willing to speak out about global warming, which is a plus, but every time he takes a stand about any other issue, he soon backpedals. How to understand this? Democrats outside of Washington widely infer that Democrats in Washington are simply cowardly or deluded, but it is also a possibility that they are in on the shift from what Tyrell calls the “Old Order” (democracy) to the “New Order” (what shall we call that?).
We normally think of American political thought running along a single continuum, from right to left, from, let’s say from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Communist Party. Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together. But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power. In the conservative movement today, this split is evident--old-line conservatives distrust the Bush administration because small government, low debt, and isolationism are about circumscribing the power of government. Bush is about enhancing the power of--well, I almost said government. But any government is essentially a smoothly-operating bureaucracy. Bush is about enhancing the power of himself and his cronies and dismantling any countervailing entity. The Bushies are not shy about acting on their craving for power (as in the K Street Project) or about talking about it--”Permanent Republican control of the three branches of government.” In addition, Bush himself tends to express his desire for power when he’s joking about how it’s easier to be a dictator than a president, or how the Chinese sure know how to treat journalists. The only reason the Bushies are called “conservative”, as many conservatives will themselves tell you, is that the theorists of Bushism managed to graft themselves onto the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s, when the Republican party was the party of disgruntled racists, fundamentalists, workers, and farmers left behind by Civil Rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, the end of the manufacturing sector, and the abandonment of a rural way of life. Many of the neo-cons are former leftist student radicals because when they were student radicals, power was what they wanted. They needed to be converted from one ideology (Marxism) to another (capitalism), but the essential goal--gaining power--remained the same.
If we add the power continuum, then, the American political scene starts looking like a coordinate plane. There is the x-axis, from left to right, and the y-axis, from bottom (power dispersing) to top (power consolidating). Institutions and entities that are power dispersing would be the Libertarian Party, the Novel, the blogosphere, and democracy itself. If we plot the Bush administration point, it would be at the top of the y-axis, but not necessarily very far right, in terms of small government, low debt, and isolationism. In fact, it is this apparent moderation in expressed Bush ideas that makes him seem relatively harmless to many Americans. But the ruthless drive for power of Bush and his cronies is really not about ideas, and in fact views ideas as a kind of trash, even, according to witnesses, the ideas expressed in the Constitution. the reason I never support any Bush policy, no matter how “moderate” on the surface is that every Bush policy is designed to enhance thepower of Bush and his cronies. The grab for absolute power must be resisted absolutely. No doubt the Democrats who are in sympathy with the Bush crowd are high on the power axis, too, at least in their own minds.
My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress--poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the “booming economy” is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their “successes”, or, as average Americans might term it, their “failures”, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections.
I also have a philosophical bulletin for the Bush crowd--the “Thousand Year Reich” doesn’t exist, and neither does “permanent Republican control of all three branches of government”, especially if that control is based on stealing elections. Power is the most ephemeral possession of them all because retaining power means exerting ever more control. Control, of course, operates according to the law of diminishing returns. When you threaten and then torture that first guy, it’s shocking and intimidating, not only to the guy himself but to everyone who hears about it. To maintain that level of intimidation, however, requires ever more threats and ever more torture, and pretty soon you have threatened and tortured, and even killed, hundreds (what’s the count on Iraqis who have died in American custody--121?) or thousands of people, and you are actually losing power because the very thing you thought you could toss out the window in your quest for power, namely morality, comes back to haunt you in the form of disgust (the disgust that others feel toward you) and common decency (that quality that others have retained and you have lost). The US has lasted this long, and survived and thrived because of power dispersal, not power consolidation. Which is not to say that the Bushies can’t do a lot of damage--they have and they can. The loss of our moral compass is devastating. The scattering of beaurocratic talent is a huge hidden cost of the Bush plan, as is the destruction of the volunteer army both as a military entity and as a population of young people who have been required to be ruthless themselves and to be ruthlessly preyed upon by the Iraqi insurgency. Our debts to the Chinese are a price we do not yet know the cost of, and our resistance to the idea of global warming might doom us all. Arousing the foot soldiers of the religious right, whipping them up with ideas of “the Rapture”, then arming them with weapons of mass destruction seems on the face of it to be a first class folly. And all for what? Life is short. Reputations are long.
On Hill, Anger and Calls for Hearings Greet News of Stateside Surveillance
By Dan Eggen and Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 17, 2005; A01
Congressional leaders of both parties called for hearings and issued condemnations yesterday in the wake of reports that President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 allowing the National Security Agency to spy on hundreds of U.S. citizens and other residents without court-approved warrants.
Bush declined to discuss the domestic eavesdropping program in a television interview, but he joined his aides in saying that the government acted lawfully and did not intrude on citizens' rights.
"Decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people," Bush said on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
Disclosure of the NSA plan had an immediate effect on Capitol Hill, where Democratic senators and a handful of Republicans derailed a bill that would renew expiring portions of the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law. Opponents repeatedly cited the previously unknown NSA program as an example of the kinds of government abuses that concerned them, while the GOP chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said he would hold oversight hearings on the issue.
"There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who favored the Patriot Act renewal but said the NSA issue provided valuable ammunition for its opponents.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence and judiciary committees, called the program "the most significant thing I have heard in my 12 years" in the Senate and suggested that the president may have broken the law by authorizing surveillance without proper warrants.
"How can I go out, how can any member of this body go out, and say that under the Patriot Act we protect the rights of American citizens if, in fact, the president is not going to be bound by the law?" she asked.
Officials across the government yesterday declined to publicly acknowledge the presidential order. But they defended, in general terms, the administration's aggressive strategies in attempting to combat terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and said that all programs have been lawful and protective of individual rights.
"Let me just say that winning the war on terror requires winning the war of information," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters. ". . . And so we will be aggressive in obtaining that information, but we will always do so in a manner that's consistent with our legal obligations."
Government officials credited the new program with helping to uncover and disrupt terrorist plots, including plans by Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who pleaded guilty in 2003 to planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Faris's attorney, David B. Smith, said he and his client were never informed about the NSA surveillance and had presumed that the monitoring of his cell phone had been authorized by a court-issued warrant.
The existence of the NSA domestic surveillance program was reported late Thursday by the New York Times and confirmed by U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials.
The Washington Post, citing an informed U.S. official, reported that the NSA's warrantless monitoring of U.S. subjects began before Bush's order was issued in early 2002 and included electronic and physical surveillance carried out by other military intelligence agencies assigned to the task.
Since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s, the NSA has adhered to tight restrictions on its activities in the United States and has devoted its efforts almost exclusively to obtaining intelligence overseas. Domestic spying, much of which is handled by the FBI, is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by a special and highly secretive court that meets at Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
The order issued by Bush in 2002, however, allowed the NSA to monitor without a warrant international telephone calls, e-mails and other communications between people in the United States and those overseas. The Associated Press reported last night that Bush reauthorized the order 36 times.
A government official familiar with the NSA order said the president urged that the change be explained to only a very limited group of people on a "need-to-know" basis. That meant that, for nearly four years, only two people in the judicial branch of the U.S. government knew about the warrantless searches: U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who presided over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and rotated off the court in May 2002, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.
The official said that then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and top officials in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review first briefed a few key officials on the plans to change the 25-year prohibition on most domestic surveillance. In a series of meetings, officials also answered Lamberth's questions about what some informally called "the president's program," and they asserted that no information gained through warrantless surveillance would be used to gain the court's authorization for secret wiretaps and warrants.
Under the president's plan, only the presiding judge of the secret court was allowed to hear cases in which warrantless surveillance may have played a role, the government official said.
Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly declined to comment yesterday. According to the government source, both raised questions about whether the program was constitutional but neither suggested they had a basis for asserting that Bush did not have the authority he claimed. They focused, instead, on the integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Lamberth had previously expressed grave doubts about the White House's post-Sept. 11 interest in mixing the investigative powers of intelligence agents with those of criminal detectives and prosecutors. A showdown over the issue resulted in the only decision ever issued by the secret court's appellate panel, which ruled against Lamberth and said the president had broad powers to authorize eavesdropping to fight terrorism.
After Kollar-Kotelly became presiding FISA judge in 2002, she became concerned in the course of one case that warrantless eavesdropping in the NSA collection program could be used to develop information to be presented in the FISA court, the government source said. There appeared to be no evidence that it had happened, only an indication that it could.
As a result of her complaint to the Justice Department, an intelligence source said, the department agreed to have high-ranking officials certify -- under threat of perjury -- that information presented to the FISA court was totally independent of any information gleaned in warrantless surveillance. The New York Times reported that the NSA program was stalled while this debate took place.
The NSA program highlights an ongoing and often tense legal debate over the boundaries of presidential power. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer whose legal opinion helped support the creation of the NSA surveillance program, was also instrumental in the preparation of other memos that argued that Bush had nearly unfettered authority in areas related to the war on terrorism.
Former CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith said he was "not shocked" by the program or the legal arguments underpinning it, because "the theory or the belief that the president had this constitutional power has been around for a long time."
But Smith also said: "These programs always have a way of being abused, of expanding beyond the purpose for which they were created. If the president believed it, he could have gotten authority to do it in the Patriot Act. By avoiding that course, in so doing, he may ultimately wind up eroding the very power he seeks to assert."
Some prominent Republicans defended the surveillance, arguing it was necessary to combat terrorism. "I don't agree with the libertarians," said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). "I want my security first. I'll deal with all the details after that."
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 17, 2005; A01
Congressional leaders of both parties called for hearings and issued condemnations yesterday in the wake of reports that President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 allowing the National Security Agency to spy on hundreds of U.S. citizens and other residents without court-approved warrants.
Bush declined to discuss the domestic eavesdropping program in a television interview, but he joined his aides in saying that the government acted lawfully and did not intrude on citizens' rights.
"Decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people," Bush said on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
Disclosure of the NSA plan had an immediate effect on Capitol Hill, where Democratic senators and a handful of Republicans derailed a bill that would renew expiring portions of the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law. Opponents repeatedly cited the previously unknown NSA program as an example of the kinds of government abuses that concerned them, while the GOP chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said he would hold oversight hearings on the issue.
"There is no doubt that this is inappropriate," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who favored the Patriot Act renewal but said the NSA issue provided valuable ammunition for its opponents.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence and judiciary committees, called the program "the most significant thing I have heard in my 12 years" in the Senate and suggested that the president may have broken the law by authorizing surveillance without proper warrants.
"How can I go out, how can any member of this body go out, and say that under the Patriot Act we protect the rights of American citizens if, in fact, the president is not going to be bound by the law?" she asked.
Officials across the government yesterday declined to publicly acknowledge the presidential order. But they defended, in general terms, the administration's aggressive strategies in attempting to combat terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and said that all programs have been lawful and protective of individual rights.
"Let me just say that winning the war on terror requires winning the war of information," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters. ". . . And so we will be aggressive in obtaining that information, but we will always do so in a manner that's consistent with our legal obligations."
Government officials credited the new program with helping to uncover and disrupt terrorist plots, including plans by Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who pleaded guilty in 2003 to planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Faris's attorney, David B. Smith, said he and his client were never informed about the NSA surveillance and had presumed that the monitoring of his cell phone had been authorized by a court-issued warrant.
The existence of the NSA domestic surveillance program was reported late Thursday by the New York Times and confirmed by U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials.
The Washington Post, citing an informed U.S. official, reported that the NSA's warrantless monitoring of U.S. subjects began before Bush's order was issued in early 2002 and included electronic and physical surveillance carried out by other military intelligence agencies assigned to the task.
Since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s, the NSA has adhered to tight restrictions on its activities in the United States and has devoted its efforts almost exclusively to obtaining intelligence overseas. Domestic spying, much of which is handled by the FBI, is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by a special and highly secretive court that meets at Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
The order issued by Bush in 2002, however, allowed the NSA to monitor without a warrant international telephone calls, e-mails and other communications between people in the United States and those overseas. The Associated Press reported last night that Bush reauthorized the order 36 times.
A government official familiar with the NSA order said the president urged that the change be explained to only a very limited group of people on a "need-to-know" basis. That meant that, for nearly four years, only two people in the judicial branch of the U.S. government knew about the warrantless searches: U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who presided over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and rotated off the court in May 2002, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.
The official said that then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and top officials in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review first briefed a few key officials on the plans to change the 25-year prohibition on most domestic surveillance. In a series of meetings, officials also answered Lamberth's questions about what some informally called "the president's program," and they asserted that no information gained through warrantless surveillance would be used to gain the court's authorization for secret wiretaps and warrants.
Under the president's plan, only the presiding judge of the secret court was allowed to hear cases in which warrantless surveillance may have played a role, the government official said.
Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly declined to comment yesterday. According to the government source, both raised questions about whether the program was constitutional but neither suggested they had a basis for asserting that Bush did not have the authority he claimed. They focused, instead, on the integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Lamberth had previously expressed grave doubts about the White House's post-Sept. 11 interest in mixing the investigative powers of intelligence agents with those of criminal detectives and prosecutors. A showdown over the issue resulted in the only decision ever issued by the secret court's appellate panel, which ruled against Lamberth and said the president had broad powers to authorize eavesdropping to fight terrorism.
After Kollar-Kotelly became presiding FISA judge in 2002, she became concerned in the course of one case that warrantless eavesdropping in the NSA collection program could be used to develop information to be presented in the FISA court, the government source said. There appeared to be no evidence that it had happened, only an indication that it could.
As a result of her complaint to the Justice Department, an intelligence source said, the department agreed to have high-ranking officials certify -- under threat of perjury -- that information presented to the FISA court was totally independent of any information gleaned in warrantless surveillance. The New York Times reported that the NSA program was stalled while this debate took place.
The NSA program highlights an ongoing and often tense legal debate over the boundaries of presidential power. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer whose legal opinion helped support the creation of the NSA surveillance program, was also instrumental in the preparation of other memos that argued that Bush had nearly unfettered authority in areas related to the war on terrorism.
Former CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith said he was "not shocked" by the program or the legal arguments underpinning it, because "the theory or the belief that the president had this constitutional power has been around for a long time."
But Smith also said: "These programs always have a way of being abused, of expanding beyond the purpose for which they were created. If the president believed it, he could have gotten authority to do it in the Patriot Act. By avoiding that course, in so doing, he may ultimately wind up eroding the very power he seeks to assert."
Some prominent Republicans defended the surveillance, arguing it was necessary to combat terrorism. "I don't agree with the libertarians," said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). "I want my security first. I'll deal with all the details after that."
Friday, December 16, 2005
Everyone had the same intelligence on Iraq? Not exactly
by Tim Grieve
When Democrats had George W. Bush on the defensive about prewar intelligence last month, the White House kept insisting that Congress saw the "same intelligence" the president saw and made the decision to go to war, too.
We said that it wasn't true then, and now a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service seems to provide confirmation. At the request of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the CRS compared the intelligence that is available to the White House with that which is available to members of Congress. The conclusion: There's really no comparison.
“The president and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level officials, including the vice president -- in contrast to members of Congress -- have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods," the CRS says in a report distributed by Feinstein's office. Unlike members of Congress, the report says, the president and those who work for him "have the authority to more extensively task the intelligence community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for follow-up information. As a result, the president and his most senior advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the community’s intelligence more accurately than is Congress."
Generally speaking, the report says, the executive branch withholds from Congress four types of intelligence: the identities of intelligence sources; the methods used to collect and analyze intelligence; "raw" or "lightly" evaluated intelligence; and "certain written intelligence products tailored to the specific needs of the president and other high-level executive branch policymakers," including the President's Daily Briefing.
In releasing the report, Feinstein said that it puts the lie to the administration's "we all saw the same intelligence" argument and underscores the need for completion of the second phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation. "When the Senate voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002, it was based on a more limited scope of prewar intelligence than was available to the administration," Feinstein said. "I believe that Congress and the American people deserve to know what precisely was known by the president and the administration before the use of force in Iraq. If the Senate Intelligence Committee is to produce a credible and useful report for its ongoing 'Phase II' investigation, it must have access to all the same intelligence as the administration that it was previously denied, particularly the PDBs."
When Democrats had George W. Bush on the defensive about prewar intelligence last month, the White House kept insisting that Congress saw the "same intelligence" the president saw and made the decision to go to war, too.
We said that it wasn't true then, and now a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service seems to provide confirmation. At the request of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the CRS compared the intelligence that is available to the White House with that which is available to members of Congress. The conclusion: There's really no comparison.
“The president and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level officials, including the vice president -- in contrast to members of Congress -- have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods," the CRS says in a report distributed by Feinstein's office. Unlike members of Congress, the report says, the president and those who work for him "have the authority to more extensively task the intelligence community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for follow-up information. As a result, the president and his most senior advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the community’s intelligence more accurately than is Congress."
Generally speaking, the report says, the executive branch withholds from Congress four types of intelligence: the identities of intelligence sources; the methods used to collect and analyze intelligence; "raw" or "lightly" evaluated intelligence; and "certain written intelligence products tailored to the specific needs of the president and other high-level executive branch policymakers," including the President's Daily Briefing.
In releasing the report, Feinstein said that it puts the lie to the administration's "we all saw the same intelligence" argument and underscores the need for completion of the second phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation. "When the Senate voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002, it was based on a more limited scope of prewar intelligence than was available to the administration," Feinstein said. "I believe that Congress and the American people deserve to know what precisely was known by the president and the administration before the use of force in Iraq. If the Senate Intelligence Committee is to produce a credible and useful report for its ongoing 'Phase II' investigation, it must have access to all the same intelligence as the administration that it was previously denied, particularly the PDBs."
Dingell's Holiday Jingle
Congressman John D. Dingell (MI-15) recited the following poem on the floor of the US House of Representatives concerning House Resolution 579, which expressed the sense of the House of Representatives that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected. “Preserving Christmas” has been a frequent topic for conservative talk show hosts, including Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.
Twas the week before Christmas and all through the House
No bills were passed ‘bout which Fox News could grouse;
Tax cuts for the wealthy were passed with great cheer,
So vacations in St. Barts soon would be near;
Katrina kids were nestled all snug in motel beds,
While visions of school and home danced in their heads;
In Iraq our soldiers needed supplies and a plan,
Plus nuclear weapons were being built in Iran;
Gas prices shot up, consumer confidence fell;
Americans feared we were on a fast track to…well…
Wait--- we need a distraction--- something divisive and wily;
A fabrication straight from the mouth of O’Reilly
We can pretend that Christmas is under attack
Hold a vote to save it--- then pat ourselves on the back;
Silent Night, First Noel, Away in the Manger
Wake up Congress, they’re in no danger!
This time of year we see Christmas every where we go,
From churches, to homes, to schools, and yes…even Costco;
What we have is an attempt to divide and destroy,
When this is the season to unite us with joy
At Christmas time we’re taught to unite,
We don’t need a made-up reason to fight
So on O’Reilly, on Hannity, on Coulter, and those right wing blogs;
You should just sit back, relax…have a few egg nogs!
‘Tis the holiday season: enjoy it a pinch
With all our real problems, do we honestly need another Grinch?
So to my friends and my colleagues I say with delight,
A merry Christmas to all,
and to Bill O’Reilly…Happy Holidays.
Twas the week before Christmas and all through the House
No bills were passed ‘bout which Fox News could grouse;
Tax cuts for the wealthy were passed with great cheer,
So vacations in St. Barts soon would be near;
Katrina kids were nestled all snug in motel beds,
While visions of school and home danced in their heads;
In Iraq our soldiers needed supplies and a plan,
Plus nuclear weapons were being built in Iran;
Gas prices shot up, consumer confidence fell;
Americans feared we were on a fast track to…well…
Wait--- we need a distraction--- something divisive and wily;
A fabrication straight from the mouth of O’Reilly
We can pretend that Christmas is under attack
Hold a vote to save it--- then pat ourselves on the back;
Silent Night, First Noel, Away in the Manger
Wake up Congress, they’re in no danger!
This time of year we see Christmas every where we go,
From churches, to homes, to schools, and yes…even Costco;
What we have is an attempt to divide and destroy,
When this is the season to unite us with joy
At Christmas time we’re taught to unite,
We don’t need a made-up reason to fight
So on O’Reilly, on Hannity, on Coulter, and those right wing blogs;
You should just sit back, relax…have a few egg nogs!
‘Tis the holiday season: enjoy it a pinch
With all our real problems, do we honestly need another Grinch?
So to my friends and my colleagues I say with delight,
A merry Christmas to all,
and to Bill O’Reilly…Happy Holidays.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
The Rock Star's Burden - New York Times
The New York Times
December 15, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor
The Rock Star's Burden
By PAUL THEROUX
Hale'iwa, Hawaii
THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African
development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think
of
one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into
Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls
himself
"Bono" -
as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village
of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries
to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging
schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the
while
badgering people for money.
It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and
public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can
be
saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity
concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who
committed ourselves
to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are
dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has
been
reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are
more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.
I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or
affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts
like
the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform:
the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor
and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private
money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was
accounted
for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not
only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious
points.
If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services,
poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is
not for
lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many
thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of
financial
aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.
In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be
self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that
rather than sending
a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept
on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the
pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach
in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's
university
was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced
by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from
elsewhere.
Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain
and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were
needed
in Malawi.
When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of
dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was
charged
with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what
happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief
and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in
Botswana,
compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement
by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper
reasons
these countries are failing.
Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of
billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send
computers
to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils
and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them
badly.
I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay
and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a
solemn
promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's
expense to work in their own countries.
Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is
now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with
sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees
that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence
crops.
Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac
who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official
act
was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika,
inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of
Maybachs,
one of the most expensive cars in the world.
Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered
with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not
fix
this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my
children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.
Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best
things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My
Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and
Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to
volunteer
in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of
educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater
difference
than Peace Corps workers.
Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient
and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually
portrayed.
But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the
world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it
attracts
mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such
people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying
in
Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently
in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity,
the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.
Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that
he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other
people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had
lunch
at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and
how African countries are uniquely futile.
But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an
earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized
for centuries
by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan
chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and
fickle
weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by
absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.
Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could
you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily
available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of
inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the
Malawi
of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.
It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to
New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is
a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian
border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia
is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is
still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent
World
Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people
from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.
Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The
patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in
itself, but
even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have
proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for.
Again,
Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing
themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational
government,
people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic
basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr.
Hewson?
- the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.
Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari:
Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."
Possted by Miriam V.
Does 30,000 Mean Anything to Bush
by Matthew Rothschild
On Monday, for the first time, Bush acknowledged that his Iraq War has taken a large toll on the Iraqi people. But he fobbed it off as if it were nothing.
Taking questions after his speech at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, Bush was asked right out of the chute how many Iraqis have died.
Here’s the exchange:
“Q: Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I’d like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators.”
“Bush: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say, 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We’ve lost about 2,140 of our own troops.”
Bush may have severely underestimated the total number of Iraqi dead.
Iraqbodycount.net estimates that a minimum of between 27,383 and 30,892 civilians alone have died as a result of Bush’s war. But it recognizes that this civilian count, which it bases on published news reports, is lower than the actual figure. “Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths, which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war.”
Then there is the Johns Hopkins study from November 2004 in the Lancet that puts the death toll above 100,000. If that figure is correct, Bush is off by at least a factor of three.
While it’s a relief, I suppose, to know that Bush understands that his war has killed at least 30,000 Iraqis, does even that figure mean anything to him?
He acted as though it was a totally acceptable number.
In fact, as David Sirota has noted, Bush in the very next breadth made a joke as he interrupted the next questioner to say, “I’ll repeat the question. If I don’t like it, I’ll make it up.” The White House transcript reads: “(Laughter and applause.)”
That is the definition of obscenity.
To segue from the deaths of 30,000 Iraqis and 2,140 U.S soldiers to a poor attempt at humor is to reveal a frightening callousness.
What will it take for Bush to grasp the meaning and the magnitude of 2,140 dead U.S. soldiers and 30,000 dead Iraqis or more?
He has said over and over again that he came to liberate the people of Iraq and deliver them the gift of freedom.
But he didn’t liberate those 30,000 or those 100,000. They didn’t get to unwrap their gift, or if they did, it blew up in their faces.
Each dead Iraqi has a name.
Each dead Iraqi leaves a family that will never be the same again.
At what point does the President acknowledge the horrific pain he has inflicted on the people of Iraq?
Mentioning a mere number and then blithely moving on does not cut it.
Such indifference permitted their mass killing in the first place.
It should not be blanketed over them again..
On Monday, for the first time, Bush acknowledged that his Iraq War has taken a large toll on the Iraqi people. But he fobbed it off as if it were nothing.
Taking questions after his speech at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, Bush was asked right out of the chute how many Iraqis have died.
Here’s the exchange:
“Q: Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I’d like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators.”
“Bush: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say, 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We’ve lost about 2,140 of our own troops.”
Bush may have severely underestimated the total number of Iraqi dead.
Iraqbodycount.net estimates that a minimum of between 27,383 and 30,892 civilians alone have died as a result of Bush’s war. But it recognizes that this civilian count, which it bases on published news reports, is lower than the actual figure. “Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths, which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war.”
Then there is the Johns Hopkins study from November 2004 in the Lancet that puts the death toll above 100,000. If that figure is correct, Bush is off by at least a factor of three.
While it’s a relief, I suppose, to know that Bush understands that his war has killed at least 30,000 Iraqis, does even that figure mean anything to him?
He acted as though it was a totally acceptable number.
In fact, as David Sirota has noted, Bush in the very next breadth made a joke as he interrupted the next questioner to say, “I’ll repeat the question. If I don’t like it, I’ll make it up.” The White House transcript reads: “(Laughter and applause.)”
That is the definition of obscenity.
To segue from the deaths of 30,000 Iraqis and 2,140 U.S soldiers to a poor attempt at humor is to reveal a frightening callousness.
What will it take for Bush to grasp the meaning and the magnitude of 2,140 dead U.S. soldiers and 30,000 dead Iraqis or more?
He has said over and over again that he came to liberate the people of Iraq and deliver them the gift of freedom.
But he didn’t liberate those 30,000 or those 100,000. They didn’t get to unwrap their gift, or if they did, it blew up in their faces.
Each dead Iraqi has a name.
Each dead Iraqi leaves a family that will never be the same again.
At what point does the President acknowledge the horrific pain he has inflicted on the people of Iraq?
Mentioning a mere number and then blithely moving on does not cut it.
Such indifference permitted their mass killing in the first place.
It should not be blanketed over them again..
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Terminator In Deed
by Naomi Foner
My brother died in June. Taken by cancer. Too young. Full of hope and possibility.
Last night another cancer killed a man about the same age. The paraphernalia familiar. IVs and gurneys. Lethal drugs dripping into his veins. Ending a life that had found redemption. But this time the cancer was on the outside.
Racism killed Tookie Williams.
I don't know enough about his case to argue the fine points, but I do know that Charlie Manson is still incarcerated in a California prison. One man is white, the other Black. I do know that Williams grew up in black ghetto where gang violence was a response to screaming inequity and lack of possibility.
So we punish the victim. We repeat the act that we condemn him for and congratulate ourselves on closure and righteousness.
Our governator feels he is able to decide the moral and legal culpability of a human life. What if the lack of remorse he cited in his refusal to grant clemency is really based on innocence? Has he no self doubt? Would that make him a girlie man? Or a human being? So many cases on death row in Illinois were found to be faulty that the governor there emptied the holding cells, aware of his inability to make such judgments.
And what of the death penalty itself. It is not a deterrent. Only a perverse sick spectacle.
We are one of the few nations left on earth who still conduct executions. Who continue to put to death people who have actually been reformed and changed by their time in prison. No one benefits from an inhuman practice that institutionalizes the very crime it is supposed to be punishing. It makes us all killers.
How different in the end is our governor from Tookie Williams? Yesterday he committed murder and by his own report he feels no remorse.
My brother died in June. Taken by cancer. Too young. Full of hope and possibility.
Last night another cancer killed a man about the same age. The paraphernalia familiar. IVs and gurneys. Lethal drugs dripping into his veins. Ending a life that had found redemption. But this time the cancer was on the outside.
Racism killed Tookie Williams.
I don't know enough about his case to argue the fine points, but I do know that Charlie Manson is still incarcerated in a California prison. One man is white, the other Black. I do know that Williams grew up in black ghetto where gang violence was a response to screaming inequity and lack of possibility.
So we punish the victim. We repeat the act that we condemn him for and congratulate ourselves on closure and righteousness.
Our governator feels he is able to decide the moral and legal culpability of a human life. What if the lack of remorse he cited in his refusal to grant clemency is really based on innocence? Has he no self doubt? Would that make him a girlie man? Or a human being? So many cases on death row in Illinois were found to be faulty that the governor there emptied the holding cells, aware of his inability to make such judgments.
And what of the death penalty itself. It is not a deterrent. Only a perverse sick spectacle.
We are one of the few nations left on earth who still conduct executions. Who continue to put to death people who have actually been reformed and changed by their time in prison. No one benefits from an inhuman practice that institutionalizes the very crime it is supposed to be punishing. It makes us all killers.
How different in the end is our governor from Tookie Williams? Yesterday he committed murder and by his own report he feels no remorse.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Dope, dope, dope.....
ABC News
Judge Allows Subpoenas of Limbaugh Doctors
Judge Allows Subpoenas of Commentator Rush Limbaugh's Doctors in Painkiller Investigation
The Associated Press
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Prosecutors can subpoena Rush Limbaugh's doctors as part of an investigation into whether the conservative radio commentator illegally bought painkillers, a judge ruled Monday.
Judge David F. Crow ruled that Florida laws do not prevent doctors from talking with prosecutors if the discussion is relevant to the prosecution of a crime.
The decision gave prosecutors permission to subpoena doctors and their staff, but it also protected confidential material in Limbaugh's medical records. The judge noted that Florida law prohibits the discussion of a patient's medical condition and information disclosed by a patient during treatment.
Prosecutors and an attorney for Limbaugh both said they benefited from the ruling.
"The court allowed us to proceed, within the constraints of present law," said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney in Palm Beach County.
Roy Black, Rush Limbaugh's attorney, said in a statement that the decision upheld "our argument that the state cannot breach doctor-patient confidentiality just because it has obtained some medical records," Black said.
Prosecutors seized Limbaugh's records after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion. They contend that Limbaugh engaged in "doctor shopping" by illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions.
Limbaugh has not been charged with any crime and maintains his innocence. He has acknowledged he became addicted to pain medication, blaming it on severe back pain, and took a five-week leave from his radio show to enter a rehabilitation program in 2003.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures
Tookie Dies, So Arnold Can Live
by ANDREW GUMBEL
Nobody should be surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger has denied clemency to Stanley "Tookie" Williams. Politicians rarely suffer for taking the toughest possible stance on questions of criminal justice, and Arnold is in quite enough trouble with his Republican Party grassroots not to want to go looking for more -- which is what he would have been doing if he had decided the one-time leader of the Crips deserved a second chance at life.
That said, the five-page statement released by his office today is staggering in its callousness and cynical disregard for anything other than the need to find arguments to bolster a foregone conclusion. Tookie Williams' clemency petition was based on the argument that he is a redeemed man -- as evidenced by his output of speeches, articles and children's books over the past decade urging young people away from the destructive gang life he led, and by the peace protocols he has authored that have been used to broker truces between street gangs from New Jersey to South Africa. He has been nominated numerous times for the Nobel Peace Prize, notably by a group of Swiss parliamentarians, and earlier this year was awarded a Presidential Call to Service Award for demonstrating what George W. Bush, in the citation, called "the outstanding character of America."
How does Schwarzenegger respond to all that?
First, he says the awards and nominations do not carry "persuasive weight." (Actually, he relegates this to a mere footnote, without so much as discussing the fact that Williams has a dedicated international following of prestigious supporters.)
Secondly, he says Williams' anti-gang activities are "hard to assess," but that the continuing pervasiveness of gang violence "leads one to question the efficacy of Williams' message." This is an astonishing line of argument: essentially, it says that because Tookie Williams has not single-handedly ended all gang violence everywhere, he deserves to die.
And that's not all. Predictably, Schwarzenegger berates Williams for failing to acknowledge guilt in the four murders for which he was sent to Death Row. But he also dismisses the written apology Williams issued in 1997 for the damage done by himself and his fellow Crips as mere "innuendo and inference" -- even though Williams has been entirely true to his concluding vow "to spend the rest of my life working toward solutions."
Most staggering of all is the argument that Williams may not in fact be a reformed character at all. The document says this judgment is based on "a close look at Williams' post-arrest and post-conviction conduct," but it provides just two instances. The first is a plan Williams made -- but never carried out -- to break out of jail before his trial. We're talking about a non-incident from 25 years ago, more than a decade before Williams claimed to have turned his life around.
The second instance is the dedication Williams included in his 1998 book Life In Prison -- to "Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the countless other men, women, and youths who have to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars".
The governor's statement comments: "The mix of individuals on this list is curious. Most have violent pasts and some have been convicted of committing heinous murders, including the killing of law enforcement." In particular, the inclusion of George Jackson, founder of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang, "is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems."
It says something about the quality of Schwarzenegger's argument that he had to go foraging in a book dedication to find even a hint of dirt against the man he has decided to send to the gallows tonight. The argument is absurd, anyway: Williams is merely espousing the well-worn line that men of color imprisoned by a predominantly white social order are worthy of support, regardless of the circumstances. You don't have to agree with Williams' point of view to see there is absolutely no criminal intent in it.
The real truth of Schwarzenegger's document is inadvertently demonstrated by its very absurdity: that there are no good arguments to deny the genuineness of Tookie Williams' redemption. That, in turn, tells us just how political the clemency decision is: Arnold has a career to resuscitate, so Tookie has to die.
Nobody should be surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger has denied clemency to Stanley "Tookie" Williams. Politicians rarely suffer for taking the toughest possible stance on questions of criminal justice, and Arnold is in quite enough trouble with his Republican Party grassroots not to want to go looking for more -- which is what he would have been doing if he had decided the one-time leader of the Crips deserved a second chance at life.
That said, the five-page statement released by his office today is staggering in its callousness and cynical disregard for anything other than the need to find arguments to bolster a foregone conclusion. Tookie Williams' clemency petition was based on the argument that he is a redeemed man -- as evidenced by his output of speeches, articles and children's books over the past decade urging young people away from the destructive gang life he led, and by the peace protocols he has authored that have been used to broker truces between street gangs from New Jersey to South Africa. He has been nominated numerous times for the Nobel Peace Prize, notably by a group of Swiss parliamentarians, and earlier this year was awarded a Presidential Call to Service Award for demonstrating what George W. Bush, in the citation, called "the outstanding character of America."
How does Schwarzenegger respond to all that?
First, he says the awards and nominations do not carry "persuasive weight." (Actually, he relegates this to a mere footnote, without so much as discussing the fact that Williams has a dedicated international following of prestigious supporters.)
Secondly, he says Williams' anti-gang activities are "hard to assess," but that the continuing pervasiveness of gang violence "leads one to question the efficacy of Williams' message." This is an astonishing line of argument: essentially, it says that because Tookie Williams has not single-handedly ended all gang violence everywhere, he deserves to die.
And that's not all. Predictably, Schwarzenegger berates Williams for failing to acknowledge guilt in the four murders for which he was sent to Death Row. But he also dismisses the written apology Williams issued in 1997 for the damage done by himself and his fellow Crips as mere "innuendo and inference" -- even though Williams has been entirely true to his concluding vow "to spend the rest of my life working toward solutions."
Most staggering of all is the argument that Williams may not in fact be a reformed character at all. The document says this judgment is based on "a close look at Williams' post-arrest and post-conviction conduct," but it provides just two instances. The first is a plan Williams made -- but never carried out -- to break out of jail before his trial. We're talking about a non-incident from 25 years ago, more than a decade before Williams claimed to have turned his life around.
The second instance is the dedication Williams included in his 1998 book Life In Prison -- to "Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the countless other men, women, and youths who have to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars".
The governor's statement comments: "The mix of individuals on this list is curious. Most have violent pasts and some have been convicted of committing heinous murders, including the killing of law enforcement." In particular, the inclusion of George Jackson, founder of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang, "is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems."
It says something about the quality of Schwarzenegger's argument that he had to go foraging in a book dedication to find even a hint of dirt against the man he has decided to send to the gallows tonight. The argument is absurd, anyway: Williams is merely espousing the well-worn line that men of color imprisoned by a predominantly white social order are worthy of support, regardless of the circumstances. You don't have to agree with Williams' point of view to see there is absolutely no criminal intent in it.
The real truth of Schwarzenegger's document is inadvertently demonstrated by its very absurdity: that there are no good arguments to deny the genuineness of Tookie Williams' redemption. That, in turn, tells us just how political the clemency decision is: Arnold has a career to resuscitate, so Tookie has to die.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Which is why she's a FOX news regular
Coulter Cuts Speech Short Amid Audience Boos, Jeers
Thursday, December 08, 2005
STORRS, Conn. — Conservative columnist Ann Coulter cut short a speech at the University of Connecticut amid boos and jeers, and decided to hold a question-and-answer session instead.
"I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am," Coulter told the crowd of 2,600 Wednesday.
Before cutting off her speech after about 15 minutes, Coulter called Bill Clinton an "executive buffoon" who won the presidency only because Ross Perot took 19 percent of the vote.
Coulter's appearance prompted protests from several student groups. About 100 people rallied outside the auditorium where she spoke, saying she spread a message of intolerance.
"We encourage diverse opinion at UConn, but this is blatant hate speech," said Eric Knudsen, a 19-year-old sophomore journalism and social welfare major who heads campus group Students Against Hate.
It wasn't the first time Coulter has had trouble at a university speech. In October 2004, two men ran onstage and threw custard pies as she was giving a speech at the University of Arizona.
UConn junior Kareem Mohni, 20, said he was disgusted by his peers' reaction to Coulter.
"It really appalled me that we're not able to come together as a group and listen to a different view in a respectful environment," Mohni said.
© Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 ComStock, Inc.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright 2005 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
All market data delayed 20 minutes.
Dictionary of Republicanisms
by KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL
Over the past few decades, the radical right has engaged in a well-funded, self-conscious program of Orwellian doublespeak, transforming the American political discourse to suit its ends. Think tanks like the Cato Institute routinely market phrases for their political resonance, like "personal" vs. "private" accounts. Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, lexicographer and MSNBC pundit who combines Madison Avenue techniques with K Street connections, sends out regular missives informing Republican operatives and politicians on how to spin conservative policy proposals. (He was on The Daily Show demonstrating his talents, defining "manipulation" as "explanation and education.") Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that "weapons of mass destruction" was agreed upon as the reason to go to war with Iraq because it was the most salable rationale. And we all know how that turned out.
Before we can win the great battle of ideas, we must debunk the right's political discourse, a veritable code of encrypted language that twists common usage to deceive the public for the Republicans' purposes. The key to their linguistic strategy is to use words that sound moderate to us but mean something completely different to them. Their tactics range from the childish use of antonyms ("clean" = "dirty") to the pseudo-academic use of prefixes ("neo" is a favorite) to the pernicious and very expensive rebranding of traditional labels ("liberal" as an insult).
We decided we needed to break the code by building a Republican dictionary. Skewer their deceptions with the fine-tipped sword of satire. Lies melt away in the face of mockery.
Unlike Republicans, who rely on rich old cranks and intellectuals-for-hire to do their dirty work, we opened up the process to the people. For six months, thenation.com accepted suggestions from everyone who wanted to participate. The result was an overwhelming grassroots groundswell of hilarious submissions from citizens who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. Thousands of definitions were entered from all over the country, forty-four states in all, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. (We even received a few from outraged Canadians, Australians and Brits.)
As momentum for the project grew, friends and allies joined the effort. TomDispatch.com asked its readers and writers to submit their own definitions. Reviewing the submissions from our website, we found that certain trends became apparent. "Compassionate conservative" and "ownership society" were the most popular targets. "No Child Left Behind" was the most common riff. The disaster in Iraq was the subject of the most outrage. The results have been compiled in a new book, Dictionary of Republicanisms (Nation Books). Here are some of my favorites. I hope they inspire you to action, to take back this great nation from those who are doing it such harm.
abstinence-only sex education n. Ignorance-only sex education [Wayne Martorelli, Lawrenceville, NJ].
alternative energy sources n. New locations to drill for gas and oil [Peter Scholz, Fort Collins, Colo.].
bankruptcy n. A punishable crime when committed by poor people but not corporations [Beth Thielen, Studio City, Calif.].
"burning bush" n. A biblical allusion to the response of the President of the United States when asked a question by a journalist who has not been paid to inquire [Bill Moyers, New York, NY].
Cheney, Dick n. The greater of two evils [Jacob McCullar, Austin, Tex.].
China n. See Wal-Mart [Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, Calif.].
class warfare n. Any attempt to raise the minimum wage [Don Zweir, Grayslake, Ill.].
climate change n. The blessed day when the blue states are swallowed by the oceans [Ann Klopp, Princeton, NJ].
compassionate conservatism n. Poignant concern for the very wealthy [Lawrence Sandek, Twin Peaks, Calif.].
creationism n. Pseudoscience that claims George W. Bush's resemblance to a chimpanzee is totally coincidental [Brian Sweeney, Providence, RI].
DeLay, Tom n. 1. Past tense of De Lie [Rick Rodstrom, Los Angeles, Calif.]. 2. Patronage saint [Andrew Magni, Nonatum, Mass.].
democracy n. A product so extensively exported that the domestic supply is depleted [Michael Schwartz, unknown].
dittohead n. An Oxy(contin)moron [Zydeco Boudreaux, Gretna, La.].
energy independence n. The caribou witness relocation program [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
extraordinary rendition n. Outsourcing torture [Milton Feldon, Laguna Woods, Calif.].
faith n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary [Matthew Polly, Topeka, Kans.].
Fox News fict. Faux news [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
free markets n. Halliburton no-bid contracts at taxpayer expense [Sean O'Brian, Chicago, Ill.].
girly men n. Males who do not grope women inappropriately [Nick Gill, Newton, Mass.].
God n. Senior presidential adviser [Martin Richard, Belgrade, Mont.].
growth n. 1. The justification for tax cuts for the rich. 2. What happens to the national debt when Republicans cut taxes on the rich [Matthew Polly, Topeka, Kans.].
habeas corpus n. Archaic. (Lat.) Legal term no longer in use (See Patriot Act) [Josh Wanstreet, Nutter Fort, WV].
healthy forest n. No tree left behind [Dan McWilliams, Santa Barbara, Calif.].
homelandism n. A neologism for love of the Homeland Security State, as in "My Homeland, 'tis of thee, sweet security state of liberty..." [Tom Engelhardt, New York, NY].
honesty n. Lies told in simple declarative sentences--e.g., "Freedom is on the march" [Katrina vanden Heuvel, New York, NY].
House of Representatives n. Exclusive club; entry fee $1 million to $5 million (See Senate) [Adam Hochschild, San Francisco, Calif.].
laziness n. When the poor are not working [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
leisure time n. When the wealthy are not working [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
liberal(s) n. Followers of the Antichrist [Ann Wegher, Montello, Wisc.].
Miller, Zell n. The man who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton after a particularly tough interview on Hardball [Drew Dillion, Arlington, Va.].
neoconservatives n. Nerds with Napoleonic complexes [Matthew Polly, Topeka, Kans.].
9/11 n. Tragedy used to justify any administrative policy, especially if unrelated (See Deficit, Iraq War) [Dan Mason, Durham, NH].
No Child Left Behind riff. 1. v. There are always jobs in the military [Ann Klopp, Princeton, NJ]. 2. n. The rapture [Samantha Hess, Cottonwood, Ariz.].
ownership society n. A civilization where 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth [Michael Albert, Piscataway, NJ].
Patriot Act n. 1. The pre-emptive strike on American freedoms to prevent the terrorists from destroying them first. 2. The elimination of one of the reasons why they hate us [Michael Thomas, Socorro, NM].
pro-life adj. Valuing human life up until birth [Kevin Weaver, San Francisco, Calif.].
Senate n. Exclusive club; entry fee $10 million to $30 million [Adam Hochschild, San Francisco, Calif.].
simplify v. To cut the taxes of Republican donors [Katrina vanden Heuvel, New York, NY].
staying the course interj. Slang. Saying and doing the same stupid thing over and over, regardless of the result [Suzanne Smith, Ann Arbor, Mich.].
stuff happens interj. Slang. Donald Rumsfeld as master historian [Sheila and Chalmers Johnson, San Diego, Calif.].
voter fraud n. A significant minority turnout [Sue Bazy, Philadelphia, Pa.].
Wal-Mart n. The nation-state, future tense [Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, Calif.].
water n. Arsenic storage device [Joy Losee, Gainesville, Ga.].
woman n. 1. Person who can be trusted to bear a child but can't be trusted to decide whether or not she wishes to have thechild. 2. Person who must have all decisions regarding herreproductive functions made by men with whom she wouldn't want to have sex in the first place.
Over the past few decades, the radical right has engaged in a well-funded, self-conscious program of Orwellian doublespeak, transforming the American political discourse to suit its ends. Think tanks like the Cato Institute routinely market phrases for their political resonance, like "personal" vs. "private" accounts. Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, lexicographer and MSNBC pundit who combines Madison Avenue techniques with K Street connections, sends out regular missives informing Republican operatives and politicians on how to spin conservative policy proposals. (He was on The Daily Show demonstrating his talents, defining "manipulation" as "explanation and education.") Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that "weapons of mass destruction" was agreed upon as the reason to go to war with Iraq because it was the most salable rationale. And we all know how that turned out.
Before we can win the great battle of ideas, we must debunk the right's political discourse, a veritable code of encrypted language that twists common usage to deceive the public for the Republicans' purposes. The key to their linguistic strategy is to use words that sound moderate to us but mean something completely different to them. Their tactics range from the childish use of antonyms ("clean" = "dirty") to the pseudo-academic use of prefixes ("neo" is a favorite) to the pernicious and very expensive rebranding of traditional labels ("liberal" as an insult).
We decided we needed to break the code by building a Republican dictionary. Skewer their deceptions with the fine-tipped sword of satire. Lies melt away in the face of mockery.
Unlike Republicans, who rely on rich old cranks and intellectuals-for-hire to do their dirty work, we opened up the process to the people. For six months, thenation.com accepted suggestions from everyone who wanted to participate. The result was an overwhelming grassroots groundswell of hilarious submissions from citizens who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. Thousands of definitions were entered from all over the country, forty-four states in all, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. (We even received a few from outraged Canadians, Australians and Brits.)
As momentum for the project grew, friends and allies joined the effort. TomDispatch.com asked its readers and writers to submit their own definitions. Reviewing the submissions from our website, we found that certain trends became apparent. "Compassionate conservative" and "ownership society" were the most popular targets. "No Child Left Behind" was the most common riff. The disaster in Iraq was the subject of the most outrage. The results have been compiled in a new book, Dictionary of Republicanisms (Nation Books). Here are some of my favorites. I hope they inspire you to action, to take back this great nation from those who are doing it such harm.
abstinence-only sex education n. Ignorance-only sex education [Wayne Martorelli, Lawrenceville, NJ].
alternative energy sources n. New locations to drill for gas and oil [Peter Scholz, Fort Collins, Colo.].
bankruptcy n. A punishable crime when committed by poor people but not corporations [Beth Thielen, Studio City, Calif.].
"burning bush" n. A biblical allusion to the response of the President of the United States when asked a question by a journalist who has not been paid to inquire [Bill Moyers, New York, NY].
Cheney, Dick n. The greater of two evils [Jacob McCullar, Austin, Tex.].
China n. See Wal-Mart [Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, Calif.].
class warfare n. Any attempt to raise the minimum wage [Don Zweir, Grayslake, Ill.].
climate change n. The blessed day when the blue states are swallowed by the oceans [Ann Klopp, Princeton, NJ].
compassionate conservatism n. Poignant concern for the very wealthy [Lawrence Sandek, Twin Peaks, Calif.].
creationism n. Pseudoscience that claims George W. Bush's resemblance to a chimpanzee is totally coincidental [Brian Sweeney, Providence, RI].
DeLay, Tom n. 1. Past tense of De Lie [Rick Rodstrom, Los Angeles, Calif.]. 2. Patronage saint [Andrew Magni, Nonatum, Mass.].
democracy n. A product so extensively exported that the domestic supply is depleted [Michael Schwartz, unknown].
dittohead n. An Oxy(contin)moron [Zydeco Boudreaux, Gretna, La.].
energy independence n. The caribou witness relocation program [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
extraordinary rendition n. Outsourcing torture [Milton Feldon, Laguna Woods, Calif.].
faith n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary [Matthew Polly, Topeka, Kans.].
Fox News fict. Faux news [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
free markets n. Halliburton no-bid contracts at taxpayer expense [Sean O'Brian, Chicago, Ill.].
girly men n. Males who do not grope women inappropriately [Nick Gill, Newton, Mass.].
God n. Senior presidential adviser [Martin Richard, Belgrade, Mont.].
growth n. 1. The justification for tax cuts for the rich. 2. What happens to the national debt when Republicans cut taxes on the rich [Matthew Polly, Topeka, Kans.].
habeas corpus n. Archaic. (Lat.) Legal term no longer in use (See Patriot Act) [Josh Wanstreet, Nutter Fort, WV].
healthy forest n. No tree left behind [Dan McWilliams, Santa Barbara, Calif.].
homelandism n. A neologism for love of the Homeland Security State, as in "My Homeland, 'tis of thee, sweet security state of liberty..." [Tom Engelhardt, New York, NY].
honesty n. Lies told in simple declarative sentences--e.g., "Freedom is on the march" [Katrina vanden Heuvel, New York, NY].
House of Representatives n. Exclusive club; entry fee $1 million to $5 million (See Senate) [Adam Hochschild, San Francisco, Calif.].
laziness n. When the poor are not working [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
leisure time n. When the wealthy are not working [Justin Rezzonico, Keene, Ohio].
liberal(s) n. Followers of the Antichrist [Ann Wegher, Montello, Wisc.].
Miller, Zell n. The man who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton after a particularly tough interview on Hardball [Drew Dillion, Arlington, Va.].
neoconservatives n. Nerds with Napoleonic complexes [Matthew Polly, Topeka, Kans.].
9/11 n. Tragedy used to justify any administrative policy, especially if unrelated (See Deficit, Iraq War) [Dan Mason, Durham, NH].
No Child Left Behind riff. 1. v. There are always jobs in the military [Ann Klopp, Princeton, NJ]. 2. n. The rapture [Samantha Hess, Cottonwood, Ariz.].
ownership society n. A civilization where 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth [Michael Albert, Piscataway, NJ].
Patriot Act n. 1. The pre-emptive strike on American freedoms to prevent the terrorists from destroying them first. 2. The elimination of one of the reasons why they hate us [Michael Thomas, Socorro, NM].
pro-life adj. Valuing human life up until birth [Kevin Weaver, San Francisco, Calif.].
Senate n. Exclusive club; entry fee $10 million to $30 million [Adam Hochschild, San Francisco, Calif.].
simplify v. To cut the taxes of Republican donors [Katrina vanden Heuvel, New York, NY].
staying the course interj. Slang. Saying and doing the same stupid thing over and over, regardless of the result [Suzanne Smith, Ann Arbor, Mich.].
stuff happens interj. Slang. Donald Rumsfeld as master historian [Sheila and Chalmers Johnson, San Diego, Calif.].
voter fraud n. A significant minority turnout [Sue Bazy, Philadelphia, Pa.].
Wal-Mart n. The nation-state, future tense [Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, Calif.].
water n. Arsenic storage device [Joy Losee, Gainesville, Ga.].
woman n. 1. Person who can be trusted to bear a child but can't be trusted to decide whether or not she wishes to have thechild. 2. Person who must have all decisions regarding herreproductive functions made by men with whom she wouldn't want to have sex in the first place.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
a Potemkin Village - New York Times
The New York Times
December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
It Takes a Potemkin Village
By
FRANK RICH
WHEN a government substitutes propaganda for governing, the Potemkin village
is all. Since we don't get honest information from this White House, we must
instead, as the Soviets once did, decode our rulers' fictions to discern
what's really happening. What we're seeing now is the wheels coming off: As
the
administration's stagecraft becomes more baroque, its credibility tanks
further both at home and abroad. The propaganda techniques may be echt
Goebbels,
but they increasingly come off as pure Ali G.
The latest desperate shifts in White House showmanship say at least as much
about our progress (or lack of same) in Iraq over the past 32 months as
reports
from the ground. When President Bush announced the end of "major combat
operations" in May 2003, his Imagineers felt the need for only a single
elegant
banner declaring "Mission Accomplished." Cut to Nov. 30, 2005: the latest
White House bumper sticker, "Plan for Victory," multiplied by Orwellian
mitosis
over nearly every square inch of the rather "Queer Eye" stage set from which
Mr. Bush delivered his oration at the Naval Academy.
And to no avail. Despite the insistently redundant graphics - and despite
the repetition of the word "victory" 15 times in the speech itself -
Americans
believed "Plan for Victory" far less than they once did "Mission
Accomplished." The first New York Times-CBS News Poll since the Naval
Academy pep talk,
released last Thursday, found that only 25 percent of Americans say the
president has "a clear plan for victory in Iraq." Tom Cruise and evolution
still
have larger constituencies in America than that.
Mr. Bush's "Plan for Victory" speech was, of course, the usual unadulterated
nonsense. Its overarching theme - "We will never accept anything less than
complete victory" - was being contradicted even as he spoke by rampant
reports of Pentagon plans for stepped-up troop withdrawals between next
week's Iraqi
elections and the more important (for endangered Republicans) American
Election Day of 2006. The specifics were phony, too: Once again inflating
the readiness
of Iraqi troops, Mr. Bush claimed that the recent assault on Tal Afar "was
primarily led by Iraqi security forces" - a fairy tale immediately unmasked
by Michael Ware, a Time reporter embedded in that battle's front lines, as
"completely wrong." No less an authority than the office of Iraq's prime
minister,
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promptly released a 59-page report documenting his own
military's inadequate leadership, equipment and training.
But this variety of Bush balderdash is such old news that everyone except
that ga-ga 25 percent instantaneously tunes it out. We routinely assume that
the
subtext (i.e., the omissions and deliberate factual errors) of his speeches
and scripted town meetings will be more revealing than the texts themselves.
What raised the "Plan for Victory" show to new heights of disinformation was
the subsequent revelation that the administration's main stated motive for
the address - the release of a 35-page document laying out a "National
Strategy for Victory in Iraq" - was as much a theatrical prop as the stunt
turkey
the president posed with during his one furtive visit to Baghdad two
Thanksgivings ago.
As breathlessly heralded by Scott McClellan, this glossy brochure was "an
unclassified version" of the strategy in place since the war's inception in
"early
2003." But Scott Shane of The New York Times told another story. Through a
few keystrokes, the electronic version of the document at
whitehouse.gov
could be manipulated to reveal text "usually hidden from public view." What
turned up was the name of the document's originating author: Peter Feaver, a
Duke political scientist who started advising the National Security Council
only this June. Dr. Feaver is an expert on public opinion about war, not war
itself. Thus we now know that what Mr. McClellan billed as a 2003 strategy
for military victory is in fact a P.R. strategy in place for no more than
six
months. That solves the mystery of why Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey of the Army,
who is in charge of training Iraqi troops, told reporters that he had never
seen this "National Strategy" before its public release last month.
In a perfect storm of revelations, the "Plan for Victory" speech fell on the
same day that The Los Angeles Times exposed new doings on another front in
the White House propaganda war. An obscure Defense Department contractor,
the Lincoln Group, was caught paying off Iraqi journalists to run upbeat
news
articles secretly written by American Army personnel and translated into
Arabic (at a time when American troops in harm's way are desperate for
Arabic
translators of their own). One of the papers running the fake news is Al
Mutamar, the Baghdad daily run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. So now we
know
that at least one P.R. plan, if not a plan for victory, has been consistent
since early 2003. As Mr. Chalabi helped feed spurious accounts of Saddam's
W.M.D. to American newspapers to gin up the war, so his minions now help
disseminate happy talk to his own country's press to further the illusion
that
the war is being won.
The Lincoln Group's articles (e.g., "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a
Democratic Iraq") are not without their laughs - for us, if not for the
Iraqis, whose
intelligence is insulted and whose democratic aspirations are betrayed by
them. But the texts are no more revealing than those of Mr. Bush's speeches.
Look instead at the cover-up that has followed the Los Angeles Times
revelations. The administration and its frontmen at once started
stonewalling from
a single script. Mr. McClellan, Pentagon spokesmen, Senator John Warner and
Donald Rumsfeld all give the identical answer to the many press queries. We
don't have the facts, they say, even as they maintain that the Lincoln Group
articles themselves are factual.
The Pentagon earmarks more than $100 million in taxpayers' money for various
Lincoln Group operations, and it can't get any facts? Though the 30-year-old
prime mover in the shadowy outfit, one Christian Bailey, fled from Andrea
Mitchell of NBC News when she pursued him on camera in Washington, certain
facts
are proving not at all elusive.
Ms. Mitchell and other reporters have learned that Mr. Bailey has had at
least four companies since 2002, most of them interlocking, short-lived and
under
phantom names. Government Executive magazine also discovered that Mr. Bailey
"was a founder and active participant in Lead21," a Republican "fund-raising
and networking operation" - which has since scrubbed his name from its Web
site - and that he and a partner in his ventures once listed a business
address
identical to their Washington residence. This curious tale, with its trail
of cash payoffs, trading in commercial Iraqi real estate and murky bidding
procedures
for lucrative U.S. government contracts, could have been lifted from
"Syriana" or "Glengarry Glen Ross." While Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. McClellan
valiantly
continue their search for "the facts," what we know so far can safely be
filed under the general heading of "Lay, DeLay and Abramoff."
The more we learn about such sleaze in the propaganda war, the more we see
it's failing for the same reason as the real war: incompetence. Much as the
disastrous
Bremer regime botched the occupation of Iraq with bad decisions made by its
array of administration cronies and relatives (among them Ari Fleischer's
brother),
so the White House doesn't exactly get the biggest bang for the bucks it
shells out to cronies for fake news.
Until he was unmasked as an administration shill, Armstrong Williams was
less known for journalism than for striking a deal to dismiss a messy
sexual-harassment
suit against him in 1999. When an Army commander had troops sign 500
identical good-news form letters to local newspapers throughout America in
2003, the
fraud was so transparent it was almost instantly debunked. The fictional
scenarios concocted for Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman also unraveled
quickly,
as did last weekend's Pentagon account of 10 marines killed outside Falluja
on a "routine foot patrol." As the NBC correspondent Jim Miklaszewski told
Don Imus last week, he received calls within hours from the fallen's loved
ones about how the marines had been slaughtered after being recklessly sent
to an unprotected site for a promotion ceremony.
Though the White House doesn't know that its jig is up, everyone else does.
Americans see that New Orleans is in as sorry shape today as it was under
Brownie
three months ago. The bipartisan 9/11 commissioners confirm that homeland
security remains a pork pit. Condi Rice's daily clarifications of her
clarifications
about American torture policies are contradicted by new reports of horrors
before her latest circumlocutions leave her mouth. And the president's
latest
Iraq speeches - most recently about the "success" stories of Najaf and
Mosul - still don't stand up to the most rudimentary fact checking.
This is why the most revealing poll number in the Times/CBS survey released
last week was Mr. Bush's approval rating for the one area where things are
going
relatively well, the economy: 38 percent, only 2 points higher than his
rating on Iraq. It's a measure of the national cynicism bequeathed by the
Bush
culture that seeing anything, even falling prices at the pump, is no longer
believing.
List of 11 items
. Copyright 2005
The New York Times Company
Posted by Miriam V.
Bush Meets St. Peter - New York Times
The New York Times
December 11, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush Meets St. Peter
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
If a meteorite crashed down on the White House today, the conversation at
the Pearly Gates might go something like this.
"Oh-h-h. Where am I? St. Peter?"
"Welcome, Mr. President. I just need to see if you belong here."
"Well, St. Peter, you know I'm a born-again Christian. I pray every day. I'm
very religious. I brought Bible study classes to the White House."
"That's terrific. And have you helped any lepers lately?"
"Not exactly. But my cuts in the top tax rates will create wealth that will
trickle down and help lepers. I'm getting there indirectly, instead of
barging
through the eye of a needle."
"Hmm."
"And St. Peter, I've been upstanding in defending Christian values. We made
sure that we call the tree at the White House a Christmas tree, not a
holiday
tree. And we sent out 1.4 million White House Christmas cards!"
"Wow! But I don't suppose any Christmas cards went to lepers. Or to
prostitutes or beggars."
"I don't send cards to Democrats."
"Mr. President, our checklist doesn't have anything about sending out
Christmas cards, or putting up Christmas trees. It's more about feeding the
hungry,
clothing the naked and housing the homeless."
"Well, my administration spent $8,000 for a drapery that was used for years
to cover up a breast of a female statue. That was clothing the naked."
"That was so silly that Lady Godiva went on a ride to protest it. We always
get irritated with religious blowhards who proclaim that faith is just a
matter
of covering up, saying grace, looking dour and denouncing others for being
lax - the Taliban approach. This latest culture war over Christmas is a
perfect
example of religion based on denouncing others instead of loving them."
"But St. Peter, they're just trying to put Christ back into Christmas. They
see how faith is threatened by people saying 'Happy Holidays,' instead of
'Merry
Christmas.' Fox News has covered 'Christmas Under Siege,' and one of its
anchors has a new book called 'The War on Christmas.' The American Family
Association
is boycotting Target, and the Catholic League threatened a boycott against
Wal-Mart. This hasn't been my issue, but these are my people, St. Peter.
They're
doing this to glorify Christ."
"Frankly, Mr. President, here in Heaven, I say 'Merry Christmas,' but others
prefer 'Happy Holidays.' Gandhi prefers it. And a Jewish rabbi told me that
his family felt more comfortable with that as well. ..."
"But St. Peter, that's one rabbi. ..."
"Whose name is Jesus."
"Oops."
"Jesus says Christmas shouldn't be about picking fights and organizing
boycotts. All that legalistic nitpicking just reminds him of the Pharisees.
Do you
really think that if Jesus returns to Earth tomorrow, his priority is going
to be organizing a boycott of Target stores? You think he's going to appear
on Fox to say, 'Worry about genocide and hunger later - first, let's battle
with liberals over what holiday greeting to use'?"
"But St. Peter, I increased aid to Africa hugely. I launched a major program
to fight AIDS."
"Yes, your aid programs have been almost divine. And your administration
helped lead the way in fighting sex trafficking. On the other hand, Jesus
has a
particular thing about genocide, and you and Congressional leaders just cut
out $50 million that was supposed to go to stop the slaughter in Darfur."
"Sorry, but it's been so hectic this month with 26 Christmas parties at the
White House. I've just been too busy to deal with genocide."
"Which Gospel did you say you read each day? Up here, we canceled our
Christmas party, and held a vigil for the victims of Darfur."
"St. Peter, you don't mean to say - how do I ask this? Jesus isn't ... isn't
a Democrat, is he?"
"No, no. He's nonpartisan. His gripe isn't with conservatives or liberals;
it's with blowhards. We're always cheering the National Association of
Evangelicals
because it spends its time fighting genocide, battling sex trafficking,
struggling for religious freedom. And there are so many others, like Senator
Sam
Brownback, who win respect from everybody because their humanitarian work
shows they are trying to live the Gospels, not play charades. They're the
conservative
Christians who make God look great."
"I guess I was just too busy with Christmas to pay attention to any of
this."
"Up here, we just pray that Christmas could be more than cards, trees and
greetings. Jesus is so upset that he's talking of suing the blowhards to
regain
control of Christmas."
Posted by Miriam V
Conspiracy to Torture
Torture is about acts: the blow to the head, the scream in the ear, the scar-free injuries whose diagnosis has become an international medical subspecialty. But torture is also very much about words: the whispered or shouted questions of the interrogator; the muddled confession of the prisoner; the too rarely tested language of laws protecting prisoners from "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment.
Consider just two words: "command responsibility." Those words stand among the most resolutely enduring principles established after World War II by the Nuremberg Tribunals. Today they pose a special threat to President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the other officials who actively promote what Secretary of State Rice, in Germany, insisted the Administration "does not authorize or condone." To carry out physically and psychically brutal interrogations outside all international norms has required the Administration to corrupt the ordinary meaning of language itself. "We do not torture" (Bush). "What we do does not come close to torture" (Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss). Such denials continue despite twelve reports from the Defense Department documenting the opposite--never mind Congressional testimony, journalistic investigations and NGO reports making common knowledge of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, near-fatal beatings and mock executions.
Indeed, there is no point in arguing about whether US policy condones cruel, degrading or torturous treatment of prisoners. Practices authorized by Rumsfeld on a small scale in Afghanistan have now metastasized into a worldwide network of prisons, detention centers and surrogates ranging from private contractors to authoritarian foreign governments. What Rice defended to European critics--and what has Cheney at loggerheads with John McCain--is not merely a desire to take the gloves off in the occasional back room in Bagram or Baghdad, as the Administration's apologists insist. Rather, it is a wide-ranging conspiracy to facilitate torture, in which many sectors of American society are now implicated. The new torture complex--centered in the executive branch of the government but with tentacles throughout the country--is the subject of this special issue, which spotlights both collusion and resistance in key American institutions: the military, the law, medicine, media, the academy.
The Administration's adherence to systematic torture and extralegal imprisonment not only accelerates the race to the bottom in human rights; it is even tying anti-terrorism policy in knots. Take the case of José Padilla, the US citizen imprisoned as an enemy combatant for his supposed participation in a "dirty bomb" plot. In November the Administration finally indicted Padilla on charges unrelated to any dirty bomb. Why? At least in part because Padilla was arrested on the basis of information extracted from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whose interrogation included waterboarding. The case is a colossal failure in terms both moral and pragmatic: Either Padilla was never part of a bomb plot, in which case Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's original statement demonstrates the unreliability of confessions obtained under torture, or effective anti-terrorism prosecution was undermined by reliance on illegal methods.
The question is not whether the United States instigates torture but how to put this evil genie back in the bottle. The first step is to confront the culture of denial. Where, for instance, are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah? It has now been two years since those Al Qaeda operatives were "disappeared" into the netherworld of CIA "black sites." It is time to puncture the secrecy bubble, to ascertain the whereabouts of these men and charge them criminally for September 11. Human Rights Watch has identified twenty-four additional "ghost detainees." So long as Congress gives implicit permission to keep such detainees under wraps, the principles that facilitate torture are kept alive.
The McCain defense appropriations amendment is a crucial step. His amendment is a powerful reaffirmation of the nation's responsibilities under domestic war crimes law and international anti-torture covenants. It's imperative that the House of Representatives, where the White House enjoys more leverage, not dilute the McCain amendment in the appropriations conference negotiations. It's just as important that the conference committee reject Lindsey Graham's amendment, which would strip Guantánamo prisoners of habeas corpus rights--and thus their ability to protest effectively their "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in US custody.
The acceptance of torture amounts to a crisis of democratic culture, requiring patient cultivation of outrage on the part of the antiwar movement and human rights campaigners. Activist groups beyond the human rights lobby, like MoveOn.org, are beginning to focus on torture as a political issue, a welcome development. Whether from activists or Congress, few steps matter as much as encouraging and protecting whistleblowers at all levels of the military and intelligence agencies. Truth-telling by soldiers, officers, intelligence operatives and Administration officials is the best hope for dismantling the torture regime. That Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, is now denouncing Cheney for providing "philosophical guidance" for torture is evidence of how high whistleblowing can go. To everyone with knowledge of the torture system, the message is simple: As Daniel Ellsberg wrote last year, "Do what I wish I had done in 1964: Go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims."
More than enough evidence has already accumulated to justify a criminal investigation of the renditions, secret prisons and interrogations, which together amount to a conspiracy to violate a host of federal statutes and constitutional procedures. Senator Carl Levin and many human rights advocates make the case for a 9/11-style truth commission. But the torture conspiracy is crying out for a special prosecutor, as Anthony Lewis argues forcefully on page 13. The Justice Department and Attorney General, so deeply and personally implicated in the torture conspiracy, cannot be trusted to investigate themselves. And the military's criminal-investigation system in torture cases is woefully inadequate, as Tara McKelvey reveals on page 15. It's time for an outside authority to step in--one vested with power to hold military higher-ups and White House officials criminally liable.
If American institutions don't act, prosecutors and parliaments abroad will. Already, kidnappings and renditions have spawned criminal inquiries in Italy, Sweden and Canada, while the EU and Council of Europe investigate the black sites. In many European nations, victims of human rights violations enjoy broad standing to bring legal action--as General Pinochet learned in England. The more information leaks out, the less frivolous is the fantasy of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Attorney General Gonzales and other complicit officials unable to travel to Europe without fear of being served with papers. The Administration may be scornful of international human rights covenants. But in recent death-penalty and gay-rights cases, the Supreme Court majority has taken pains to indicate that international human rights standards do matter in American law, in the noble tradition of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" articulated by the Declaration of Independence.
If the twentieth century proved anything, it is that no nation, no constitutional system, is immune from the downward human rights spiral signified by torture--as Britain, France and Israel, among other nations, learned at great political cost. The purpose of this special issue is to confront the sweeping moral seriousness of the American torture crisis of the twenty-first century. The point is not so much that we are "better than our enemies," as Senator McCain and others have argued, but that our democratic institutions are vulnerable to erosion. The outline of the torture conspiracy is clear, but the full facts need to be exposed and the chain of responsibility definitively established. History will judge the Bush Administration's torture policy in the same harsh light as Jim Crow, McCarthyism and the Japanese-American internment. The conspirators must be held accountable.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Can Mommy Know Best? - New York Times
The New York Times
December 10, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Can Mommy Know Best?
By
MAUREEN DOWD
Can the network nightly news anchor evolve from the Daddy chair to the Mommy
chair?
Will Americans ever trust a petite, pretty woman in jewel tones to deliver
the news as much as they trusted tall men with dark suits and deep voices,
like
Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw? Can high heels match the
venerable trench coat?
The network news anchor career path is laden with the same sort of gender
tripwires as the one for the presidency. Who do we want to lead us through a
crisis?
"Does Mommy know best?" a longtime TV industry analyst mused. "If there's a
gigantically frightening news event, people want to turn on the TV and see
someone
guiding them through it. Will they be comfortable with Elizabeth Vargas or
even Katie Couric?"
Last summer, when ABC needed a replacement for Peter Jennings, I asked a top
network executive whether the 43-year-old Ms. Vargas had a shot to be the
first
woman to get a solo network anchor gig. Shouldn't that barrier have been
broken long ago? I mean, women can read off a teleprompter as well as men.
At first he sounded optimistic: she is not a news division heavyweight, but
she is a lovely, competent Hispanic woman, which could mean a more diverse
audience.
And she might draw in younger viewers, instead of the dinosaur evening news
demographic that mostly attracts sponsors like Viagra and Depends.
Within 30 seconds, though, the executive got jittery. "I know this is going
to sound really sexist," he admitted with breathtaking candor, "but if there
were another 9/11, I'm not sure if she has the gravitas to hold that anchor
chair. ... Maybe it's not even sex. Maybe it's age. I just think we'd need
someone with a little gray in their hair." (The network pushed Ms. Vargas
out of the anchor seat in favor of Charlie Gibson when terrorists bombed
London
twice in July 2005, even though his day job was doing fluff on "Good Morning
America.")
I pointed out that Brian Williams was only three years older than Ms.
Vargas, and not noticeably gray. Network executives hire babes, not old
ladies with
wrinkles. Now that high-definition TV makes faces with plastic surgery look
so weird, the women will have to be even younger.
"He's not 50?" the exec asked about Mr. Williams. "But doesn't he have some
gray? ... Maybe we could let Elizabeth do it Monday through Friday and then
someone else could do it if there was a crisis."
I had to laugh. They'd allow a woman to present the news as long as there
wasn't any news. If serious news breaks out, send for the guy in pants.
So this week, it all came to pass. Despite the track record of the other two
women who had to co-anchor the evening news with resentful men - Barbara
Walters
and Connie Chung - ABC teamed Ms. Vargas with the pretty-boy android Bob
Woodruff.
TV and newspaper moguls are trying a less authoritarian news format. Brian
Williams, who broke out of android status with his brilliant coverage of the
administration's attention deficit disorder during Katrina, blogs to show
he's a man of the people. Anderson Cooper knocked off Aaron Brown by emoting
during Katrina, and being fetching enough to make People's Sexiest Man Alive
list.
Les Moonves, head of CBS, is looking for pizazz. "On the one hand," he told
The Times's Lynn Hirschberg, "we could have a newscast like 'The Big
Breakfast'
in England, where women give the news in lingerie. Or there's 'Naked News,'
which is on cable in England. I saw a clip of it. It's a woman giving the
news
as she's getting undressed. And then, on the other hand, you could have two
boring people behind a desk. Our newscast has to be somewhere in between."
Mr. Moonves has been wooing Katie Couric to succeed Dan Rather - she seems
itchy to move on from making eggnog with Martha Stewart. Like Barbara
Walters,
she'd get withering scrutiny for earning a record-breaking paycheck (even
though a man probably wouldn't).
But even if Katie breaks this barrier, presumably with her clothes on, will
it be an important milestone for women? She is already the most important
breadwinner
for her news division, with morning chat shows outearning nightly newscasts.
By the time women get to take over something - like Hollywood or Bush
administration
diplomacy - the thing is already devalued beyond recognition.
TV evening news is so feminized and soft-focus now - brimming with features
on animals, diets and new "age defying" skin treatments - that Katie may
forget
she's not still working the sunrise crowd.
Posted by Miriam V.
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