DoctorDiatribe

My Obsession With the Casey Anthony Trial

2011-06-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

I have finally succumbed to reality TV. The Casey Anthony trial is what did me in. My philosophy that there is no such thing as a "functional" family (i.e. that we are all from dysfunctional families) is amply demonstrated in the Anthony's, only in their case it was dysfunctionality on steroids. You may cavil with calling a murder trial "reality TV." Yes, it's true that the action reality TV shows in prime time can't get it all in one take. (Like Cops, reality is usually something between what is shown to the public and what is left on the cutting room floor. Reality TV shows are scripted, too, even if much of what we see is ad-libbed on the spot.) But the reality TV we see in the Anthony trial is more akin to the old "Playhouse 90" days, when ninety-minute dramas were presented live in prime time. Unlike reality TV, the Anthony trial cannot be rewound much less edited, but to me it is about as reality TV as I care to get.

The latest turn is that the prosecutor "opened the door" to (mentioned, thus allowed testimony about) evidence of Casey's prior record, including a felony. I think the prosecutor weighed a potential for reversible error against the mounting evidence that the Anthony's are testifying for Casey vicariously. That is, the defense is making its case by having its witnesses say what Casey cannot say, since any testimony by Casey herself would be impeached by the State, e.g. "Are you the same Casey Anthony who was convicted on ____ of the felony crime of _____," and it would be pointed out to the jury that a felony conviction means you cannot trust anything the witness has said since all felonies are, per se, crimes involving moral turpitude.

My feeling is, the jury will convict. The Anthony's story just doesn't add up. I think this silly, warped girl, ill equipped emotionally to handle motherhood, and tiring of its responsibilities -- it interfered with her partying -- suffocated her child and did her best to pin it on a nanny, and when the nanny story blew up in her face, she switched tales and had her being molested by her father and had her child, Caylee, drowning in a swimming pool. The one nagging question I have concerns the autopsies. Since I can only watch summaries of the trial on the news at night, I must have missed testimony about what was found in the stomach and lungs. A drowning leaves its mark. The tape found on the mouth is also very, very troubling. It may boil down to which expert the jury finds more credible.

One thing's for sure: this is the most sensational trial since O.J. took out his wife and a male acquaintance and got off with an acquittal because some gloves didn't fit. On the other hand, Casey Anthony is not a black male with a predominantly African-American jury. I understand that because of the method chosen, the death penalty is on hold in Florida. May I take this opportuny to bloviate a bit about that. Consider this silly girl, a person who harks back to the Butterfly McQueen character in Gone With the Wind (though I am misquoting her), "Missie Scarlet, I don't no nuthin' 'bout bringin' up no baby." What did she does during the 30+ days the child was missing? She partied. The death penalty, with appeals and all, will cost the state more than a life sentence (they feed these people on less than a dollar a day!). The death penalty will put Casey out of all her miseries. Life will have her wasting away while she thinks about the terrible, tragic consequences of what she has done.

I'm convicting the innocent until proven guilty? No, but I am convinced she did it. I think she may be convicted of the lesser included offense of intentional manslaughter, which would save the silly woman's life. But I am convinced the verdict will be guilty of something. As my friend Ellie always said, "Hide and watch!"

Three Little Pigs

2009-04-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

Porky, Hammy, and Chops, official protectors of the tax break for the 2% of Americans who have all the nation's money....

Dick Cheney in Hell

2009-03-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Dick has had his final heart attack and awakens in Hell. Satan comes into his room and welcomes him to Hades, which looks something like a motel room. Satan welcomes Dick and says, "You did some fine things for me up there: casting the tie-breaking vote in favor of that huge tax giveaway to the super rich; sending all those nice young men to die in Iraq; outing that poor Plame woman the way you and Scooter did; talking that silly twit Dubya into torturing all those people. My God, man, you did us proud!"

Cheney smiles and, through the side of his mouth, replies: "Well, I suppose that means I am to be an honored guest here?"

Satan says: "Most decidedly. We're going to party! I've got a lot of blue agave tequila and some fine Culiacan coke, and we can look at some fuck movies and enjoy! We can fuck ourselves, lots of good orgiastic sex."

Cheney says: "You want me to come to your place for the party?"

Satan says: "Oh, no, no, don't bother. We can do it right here. Just gonna be me and you."

Granholm for President

2009-02-22T15:04:00.000-08:00

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is hot. She should be nominated by the Dems for the Top Job.

Pontiactus Non Extantus

2009-02-20T15:56:00.000-08:00

In the mid to late 60's and early 70s, I owned a Pontiac Firebird. It was a classy car. I might have bought it to impress my friend Stephen Silverman, who drove a Datsun 340-Z, which I personally thought a piece of shit but never mentioned it to him, as he let me borrow it a time or two. I liked the Firebird and drove it through the early 70s gas crisis, with the long lines only to arrive at the pump posted with a sign: SORRY, NO GAS. Now that GM is going on the dole (and I don't mean bananas) they've promised to put their Pontiac division to rest. Pontiac had a huge reputation from its manufacture of aircraft engines during the war. The car ran well, but pseudo-sport models of any brand all were gas guzzlers. I eventually sold it to my brother Terry for about $75, informing him that it would cost a lot of money just filling it up with oil: it had a major leak and was virtually irreparable. Such is my experience with Pontiac. Sad, sad, sad....

My Chat With Wen Jiabao

2009-02-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

I had a good long "talk" with the Chinese premier the other night, having stumbled onto him in the chat room, "Pacific Interests" by utter coincidence. I was asking how to make a good kung pao shrimp and he IM'd me with his own version, plus some advice for the United States. He said, "Your country must learn two new rules. One, quit having so many babies. Two, your next war of choice will be at someone else's expense. We can't half-sole Mr. Bush's shoes." When I protested that the economies of China and the U.S. are mutually dependent, he said, "then why are you asking me about kung pao shrimps?"

Wen coaxed said "We are puzzled by democracy. In a country that would re-elect Bush, if that is will of people then you only get president you deserve. Cowboy person. The only reason al Qaeda has not attacked you is because you redirected their attention to problems with Shias in Iraq once the U.S. invaded and allowed a Shia government to execute Saddam. You forget, bin Laden bides his time. He has time and God on his side."

I asked him what he thought of Citizen Dick Cheney's claim that the Obama administration will fumble the ball on security, allowing another mass attack by Jihadists. Wen said: "He knows that is bunk. If terrorists hit you again, look to Mideastern sectarian squabbles. By dividing Shia against Sunni you give Israel a bit of time is all."

The Time Has Come

2009-02-07T07:29:00.001-08:00

It's time we nationalized our banking system in the manner of the Swedes.

The Short Goodbye

2009-01-22T15:08:00.001-08:00

It wasn't even mildly amusing to see George W. Bush almost bump his head, Gerald Ford-style, in the door of the presidential helicopter whilst making his much anticipated departure from the White House lawn; flying to a nearby base, he would there be taken to his last stay at Camp David. It was the departure of a pagliaccio on his way to a final aria, or, if the Italian is inappropriate, then perhaps a bit of Spanish slang, a payaso. (Some might cavil it should be pendejo, but that's another matter.) This was the Bush who couldn't open doors, said "nuculer." and doesn't know the difference between a "character" and a "characteristic." English teachers wanted to cover their students' ears every time Bush gave a speech. He's a good ol' cheerleading boy only a father could love. How else could he get into Yale and actually graduate?

The detritus in his wake manifested itself immediately, with House minority leader John Boehner equating the Gitmo closure (which actually has a 12-month deadline) and criticizing a supposed lack of planning with, e.g., the Iraqi Misadventure, using rhetorical sleight-of-hand in a silly attempt to be the first GOP to draw and fire on Obama. An equally obnoxious Louisianna senator, caught red-handed screwing prostitutes while his wife was home playing trophy mom, dissed Obama's finance nominee. And then there is that smug, sappy-faced Mitch McComical mumbling about one thing and another -- don't the voters in the states that send these people to D.C. realize they're voting for self-serving snake oil salesmen? Their only virtue, these hacks, is bringing home the pork, and that would appear to be overdrawn at the bank, Obama signaling as much with his ban on lobbying by ex-staff members.

Then, there's that jackass John Cornyn. I begged his opponent's staff by email exchange to beg, borrow, or steal the footage of the John McCain photo op where he introduced, and was introduced by, his then "spiritual advisor," the Rev. John Hagee. There was Cornyn, that silver-haired serpent himself, standing all goofy-faced with Hagee and McCain. Shortly thereafter, Johnny Boy would have to throw Hagee under the bus: it came out that the "reverand" thought Hitler was a gift from "God" because the Jewish diaspora brought about the establishment of a Jewish state in the "Holy" land. Hey, folks, that is a necessary step in the Rapture scenario, which about a third of Americans believe. I still want to print a bumper sticker saying, "I DON'T MIND RAPTURE, I JUST DON'T WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT HAPPENS." (Yeah, I know, a rip-off of Woody Allen, but it works.)

It did Michelle no good to kiss Bush. Condi has been doing that for years (as well as other things we may never know). It is hard for some to grasp an administration that holds a meeting to approve of the torture of various specific detainees, enemy combatants, and so forth. Ms. Rice has been quoted as having Freudian slips in which she has imagined George W. to be her husband. Perhaps she could get a job at the Supreme Court, where one of the current justices has the best porn collection outside the Vatican and likes to force himself on co-worker women by saying things like, "Is that a pubic hair on my Coke can?"

God Damn! I am glad to see this bunch take a hike.

Why Obama MUST End the Super Rich Giveaway

2009-01-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

I had not seen the figures before. I had only heard Faux News' claim (that twit Brit Hume was the chief culprit) that the super rich already "pay the most taxes." A Vanity Fair article, "Fairwell to All That" (Feb. 2009) shows just how irrelevant and misleading this statement is: the May, 2001 tax cut was "skewed heavily toward the affluent," and the figures and percentages tell the tale. Persons making $1 million a year paid an average of $53,000 in taxes, while persons making $20,000 a year saw their taxes cut by only $375. Do the math: the million-a-year taxpayer's bill totaled 5%; the $20K taxpayer, 18% (more than three times more). This is fundamentally unfair.

Ronald Reagan introduced the concept of a "trickle-down economy," which he and budget director David Stockman dubbed "supply side economics." It did not work then, and it isn't working now. (In fact, Stockman later quipped that he'd only been joking when he came up with the idea, and had no idea Ronnie Boy would actually put it into effect.) The super rich do not invest their gazillions in anything benefitting the poor and middle class (and that embraces most of us). Instead, they buy toys, like private jets, and invest their gargantuan discretionary monies in hedge funds and other things designed to do nothing but make them richer still. They do not NEED tax breaks.

Obama ran on a platform promising an end to crony cuts in taxes. As the Vanity Fair article pointed out, the loss of tax revenue based on the 13% difference between the two segments of the population resulted in a budget deficit of $400 billion by 2004. This was money that could have improved the infrastructure, funded "No Child Left Behind," and mortgage restructuring. In effect, Bush became a reverse Robin Hood, robbing the poor and middle class and lining the pockets of the filthy rich. Even the fabulously wealthy Warren Buffet said it was a total rip-off.

OBAMA! MAKE TAXES FAIR AND EQUAL!

Put tax reform at the top of your list of priorities and many of our economic problems will be solved. DO IT NOW!

ThinkProgress.org's Take on the GWB Parting Shots

2009-01-13T16:08:00.001-08:00

ThinkProgress.org sat through George W. Bush's final press conference, an orgy of self-promotion and parting gripes with the liberal media, the latest installment in the ongoing magic makeover of the 43rd presidential administration that came on the heels of a Faux News "interview" with Prick Cheney. I thought the report so exceptionally done and keenly observed, I would preserve it here, interspersed with the Doctor's comments, set off in italics.

Bush's 'Ultimate Exit Interview'

Yesterday, President Bush appeared before the White House press corps for his 47th -- and last -- full-scale press conference, taking questions in what he called "the ultimate exit interview." Though the White House had high expectations for Bush's farewell meeting with the media, telling reporters that it would be "standing room only," the last two rows in the seven-row briefing room were empty. Subsequently, a press aide had to tell White House interns to fill the seats.***

Isn't this par for the course? I mean, any administration that gets caught red-handed planting a stud hustler in the press room to ask planned questions designed to make it look good is an administration that would go to any lengths to persuade us that it continues to have the love and respect of the American people even as polls show it in a downward spiral even as the economy heads south as well. Planting a claque into a photo op goes hand in hand with the refusal to allow photographs of the bagged bodies coming in from Baghdad, providing Sean Hannity with the latest GOP talking points, and a myriad of other attempts to manipulate public opinion in an ongoing effort to become the least transparent administration in history.

***Despite job approval ratings around or below 30 percent since February 2007, Bush "seemed largely in good spirits" as he pontificated on his years in office.

A wise choice of words: Remember, this is the president who referred to his "war on terror" as a "crusade," immediately informing those who Bush's good friend Ann Coulter characterizes as "swarthy" Mideastern types that jihad is on the table. Bush was in fact the Pope of Profiteering, as witness all of the army functions that were privitized for the benefit of crony corporations that did not even have to submit to competitive bidding. The only reasons Bush's approval ratings are so high is that Americans are sentimental. Some folks just feel sorry for him.

***Bush "was by turns impassioned and defiant, reflective and light-hearted, even as he conceded that some things 'didn't go according to plan,'" notes the New York Times.

Actually, nothing he did went "according to plan," as even his crony appointments had disastrous blowback for him. First, he praised the "fine work" of "Brownie" of FEMA fame -- the man who learned just what America's school districts found with "No child left behind": the Bush administration was all talk and no substance. No help for Katrina victims, no rebuilding of New Orleans. Brownie became the symbol of Bush's buddy system. One was reminded of the scene in John Ford's The Last Hurrah, where the savvy old Irish pol, running for mayor one last time, talks his opponent's halfwit sun into donning a fire chief's hat so that photographs can be taken for the morning edition. Brownie was made to look like a fool; one imagines him having a stiff drink with Colin Powell following the latter's ultimately humiliating U.N. speech, talking about "weapons of mass destruction."

***"Clearly putting a 'Mission Accomplished' on an aircraft carrier was a mistake," said Bush. "Running the Social Security idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake." Bush continued his administration's efforts to paint his legacy in a positive light, declaring that he had "a good, strong record."

Poor George! He's a person only a father could love. (That tough old broad, Barbara Pierce Bush probably gave up on him years ago.) The "Mission Accomplished" banner was Bush's fire chief's hat, providing anti-war liberals with all the ammo they needed to paint the prez as a village idiot. In fact, it was about this time that sales of a bumper sticker along these lines began to skyrocket: SOME VILLAGE IN TEXAS HAS LOST ITS IDIOT. Even GOPS thought ill of the Social Security overhaul. Oh, sure, the neocons were dead set on dismantling entirely the New Deal reforms of FDR, but the more middle-of-the-road among them thought the idea of privitizing social security a certain way to lose their seat in the next election. Claiming his is a "good, strong recor" is simply laughable.

***Unfortunately for Bush, the American public believes his administration "will be remembered more for its failures than its accomplishments."

Excuse me! WHAT accomplishments.

***Asked if he "made any mistakes" while in office, Bush said he had "thought long and hard about Katrina" and admitted that "things [could] have been done better." However, he denied any problem with the federal response to the disaster, insisting, "Don't tell me the federal response was slow." The fact is that the federal response was disastrously slow. As the White House itself acknowledged in a February 2006 report, "the response to Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of familiarity with incident management, planning discipline, and field-level crisis leadership." A 2006 report compiled by House Republicans slammed what it called "a failure of leadership," saying that the federal government's "blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror." The report specifically blamed Bush, noting that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because the President alone could have cut through bureaucratic resistance. In fact, despite a FEMA official's eyewitness accounts of New Orleans's levees being breached starting at 7 p.m. on Aug. 29, the Bush administration "did not consider them confirmed" until 11 hours later. FEMA did not order the evacuation of New Orleans until 1:30 a.m. on Aug. 31, two full days after Katrina made landfall. Bush even praised the rescue efforts as a "pretty good response."

Yes, and thouands of taxpayer-purchased mobile homes that sat, rotting, in a field -- which, as it turns out, is just as well: those who were given manufactured housing have health problems associated with leaking formaldehyde and other toxic chemicals from the walls of the units. The recent PBS Frontline interview with an elderly African-American who stubbornly refused to leave New Orleans pointed up the lasting human miseries of those affected: the man's large family is now cast to the winds. He struggled to get insurance money, then money from a program designed to pay off what the carriers did not cover, but he continues to have problems, not the least of which is his isolation from relatives. The point is, the Bush administration just did not care about the mostly-black population of New Orleans.

***Asked about President-elect Obama's desire to restore "America's moral standing in the world," Bush bristled at the idea, saying, "I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged."

What parallel universe is this nitwit living in? The so-called "Coalition of the Willing" early on revealed sane nations' reluctance to become involved in a Mideastern misadventure prior to the exhaustion of diplomatic efforts, and it is somewhat questionable that we would have ANY friends other than that girlie man running England at the time once the Big Lies started circulating, e.g. WMD's and an al Qaeda link (the latter simply defying logic, given that bin Laden's jihadist methods in furtherance of theocratic ends were just a little bit incompatible with Saddam's Westernized state.

***"It may be damaged amongst some of the elite, but people still understand America stands for freedom, that America is a country that provides such great hope." But it isn't just "the elite" who question the negative effect that Bush's presidency has had on America's standing in the world. As a Gallup fact-check of Bush's comments points out, 69 percent of Americans believe that the "U.S. position in the world" lost ground under Bush. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, "positive views of the United States declined in 26 of the 33 countries where the question was posed in both 2002 and 2007." "Mounting discontent with U.S. foreign policy over the last eight years has translated into a concern about American power. In the view of much of the world, the United States has played the role of bully in the school yard, throwing its weight around with little regard for others' interests," according to Pew.

As another GOP president was wont to say to debate opponents, "There you go again!" What IS it with this "elites"? Does everyone who takes issue with his Napoleanic ambitions qualify as an "elite"? Since when did "elite" become synomous with most of the press, the anti-war movement and liberals in general, and all those who dared criticize our unilateral, preemptive strike against a country that posed little if any actual threat? Remember, John McShame tried to label Obama as an "elitist": remember the Power Point ad showing Barrack with the likes of Paris Hilton? "Elite" is GOP base code for "liberal." Those international polls speak for themselves. It amazes me to learn that almost eighty percent of the world's peoples thought badly of the U.S.A. due to GWB policies. Clearly, the overwhelming support and good will we enjoyed after 9/11 were simply squandered on Bush's Folly.

***Asked to give his "closing message" to the American people about his economic policies, Bush acknowledged that "obviously these are very difficult economic times" while deflecting much responsibility for the economy's troubles. "This problem started before my presidency, it obviously took place during my presidency," said Bush.

Actually, Bush is right here. But if the Clinton administration put Reaganism on steroids, deregulating financial entities and encouraging bizarre experimentation in the mortage industry even as the White House thwarted all meaningful plans for oversight. Which hardly exonerates Bush. If anything, he exacerbated the problems and revved up the deregulation. Cronies in significant positions had nothing to do.

***He also vigorously defended his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, adding that he "will defend them after my presidency as the right course of action." "There's a fundamental philosophical debate about tax cuts," said Bush. "Who best can spend your money, the government or you? I've always sided with the people on that issue."

He did NOT side with the people. He sided with less than one percent of the country, given huge tax breaks at the expense of the poor and Middleclass America. Trickle-down doesn't work. The super-rich simply hoard or invest their bucks in something they think will bring the biggest bang.

But as the Washington Post noted yesterday, Bush "has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades." The federal government "had a modest budget surplus when Bush took office," but his administration ran up deficits "even as the economy was growing at a healthy pace." When Bush took office, it was projected that the federal government would run a $710 billion budget surplus in 2009. Now, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated that Bush's tax cuts accounted for 42 percent of the fiscal deterioration between 2001 and 2008. Though Bush claims he "sided with the people" through his economic policies, he really just squandered their money.

To say the least.

Eyeless in Gaza: Israel 4, Hamas 1

2008-12-31T10:27:00.000-08:00

I am told that Gandhi's opinion of revenge boiled down to an illustration from Old Testament ideas about "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," the pre-Mosaic desert warlord code, a law that should have ended with the Crusades at the latest but seems to hang about like a bad cold. Gandhi is said to have said something along the lines of: "If every person plucks out the eye of his neighbor, soon everyone will be blind." Demonstrably true given facts on the ground throughout the Mideast, including the new, insane pitting of Hamas and Israel against each other (so what else is new -- shades of Hezbollah's launching of missile attacks against northern Israelis just eight years back).

Frontline has reported on the war between the U.S. and Kabul governments against the Taliban in the outer regions of Afghanistan, in an amazingly insightful program called The War Briefing [of Obama]. The picture looks bleak, especially given the dire economic straits at home and simultaneous rise of a plethora of international problems, each of which poses its own little potential quagmire. One of the interviewees, commenting on a previous experience in that country, said that the tribal leaders of each clan in Afghanistan live in constant dedication to slaughtering the neighboring tribal leader -- a dead giveaway that Afghanistan is roughly analogous to the Balkans during the Christian-versus-Muslim genocides of the Bosnian War of the early 90s.

A very good film was made of the hopelessness of such conflicts with a script from the playwright William Mastrosimone called The Beast. I first thought the title referred to the bestial Afghani and Soviet combatants and to their certain sly slithering and sidewinding in the nature of beasts. But with successive viewings I have decided that the "Beast" of the title is Afghanistan itself. After all, the movie's opening credit is a quotation from Rudyard Kipling:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow our your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

(The Young British Soldier). Combat in Afghanistan is for a chosen few, and the problem is, given the age-old hatreds and mistrusts, and given that the Taliban and the tribes have not changed in virtually 1,400 years, and given the terrain and distance of the tribes from the capital, no matter how many troops we throw into the conflict, it will always be a lose-lose situation.

Worse, we are now caught in a vise. When the Taliban (and al Qaeda) are defeated, they retreat to Pakistan's mountains, there to await the next opportunity to return and exact their toll on those suspected of betrayal or violations of the laws of strict shariah -- and Wahabbist shariah at that. Pakistan will not help us, because not only are there a good many jihadist sympathizers in their Army, the head of state only maintains his power by delicately balancing pro-Western and pro-Jihadist sentiments. The Pakistani Army is a joke. They make their leaders look like the ersatz Nazi prison guards in TV comedy.

On the other side of Afghanistan is Iran. It is possible that we could work a deal with them to keep out of Afghanistan and cease supporting Hezbollah and other Jihadist movements, but given the sanity of their leader, I think this unlikely. If anything, Ahmadinejad is far more insane than Kim Jung Il. At least Kim is not a religious fanatic or theocratic ideologue, and he's having so much fun going through his pornographic movie collection, he seems all but irrelevant. As long as we're negotiating with him, he poses no problem.

The problem is Ahmadinejad. To call him an ideologue would be a gross understatement, tantamount to referring to a rotweiler as a "lap dog."

Ahmadinejad derives his power from the Shia clergy. He can't go wrong so long as he keeps putting pressure on the West, which is both a shaitan and an enemy of Islam. Remember, the Frontline guest talked about age-old hatreds. With Iran, we have our own, which dates to the ouster of the Family Pahlavi a little less than thirty years ago. He was viewed as a puppet and was replaced with an aging Shia ayatollah at the top of the pecking order. A bur remained in the saddle of the Shah's Arabian horse. The Iranian people have mostly forgiven us (and begged our forgiveness for a previous generation's taking hostages at the American embassy). But the government remains an unabashed theocracy.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah take marching orders from Tehran. Althought the economy of Iran are is on the verge of starvation, tossing even massive amounts of aid wouldn't seem to matter much: as long as one is going to Paradise to cohabit with 72 virgins, one can stay hungry a long time. It's a dead-end hopeless situation and it isn't getting any better. Obama's greatest challenge next to the sorry state of our own economy might seem to be the future of the Afghan Expedition. He'd better hop to it.

A Long Goodbye to a Real Dick

2008-12-21T15:05:00.000-08:00

That prick, Cheney, a real Dick, has been making the rounds of the pundit programs, still completely deluded (and deluding, to some), claiming for example that history will judge the last eight years favorably to the Bushies. He justifies torture as a constitutional right and argues with critics who claim he expanded vice-presidential powers far beyond what the founders intended. Now that his "boss" (actually, his ward), George W. has remade himself by trading the Crawford digs (out in the open and easy to block air space) for a trendy Dallas exurb, thus letting down everyone who thought he was a puppet cowboy, Cheney looks for all the world like living proof of the theory that he actually ran the government, while Rove and Dubya plotted their political futures.

In fact, I should think it perfectly obvious that when Obama takes over in January, he is actually taking on powers from a vice-president (or is that President of Vice?), not a president. One thinks back to the days when hemophilic kings were put to things like clock collecting while a regent ran the country. Shrub is now being called "a cheerleader," a reference to this good ol' boy's brewsky broad-hunting days in places like Midland, Texas. Dubya was, in fact, a cheerleader.

Time will tell if Dick is ever brought to the High Court of Justice for his violations both of the Constitution and international law -- waterboarding is just the tip of the iceberg. But if I were he I would not make too many foreign trips. To easy to became the next Pinochet.

Presidential Pardon Time

2008-12-09T16:59:00.000-08:00

Now that George W. Bush has arrived at that moment in his lameness he can pardon anyone in the country for any crime soever, convicted or not even indicted, I have a modest proposal: Why not grant a presidential pardon to former Sen. Larry ("Footloose") Craig? I mean, let's be fair. If you're going to pardon people like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, why not pardon poor old closet queen Craig?

What Wouldn't Jesus Do: Dangerous Lunatics, Rap No. 665

2008-11-25T06:17:00.000-08:00

While reading the new issue of Harper's magazine, I came upon one of those display ads for vanity published books that often appear both in that periodical and others (everything from Texas Monthly to The New Yorker). It touts a tome titled Why Jesus Christ Would Never, Ever Vote Republican, written by one Richard John Siviur. Mr. Siviur is of the opinion that the Republican Party is really "the Party of Big Business," or "POBB." Siviur says it is also the "Party of White Males" (though he doesn't acrosticize this latter slogan).

George W. he dubs the "Thief in Chief." And he says that Bush "personally purloined the 2000 election" and, with Cheney, "manufactured a [casus belli] for war with Iraq where absolutely none existed." After pointing out the statistical absence of African-Americans in GOP-held congressional seats, Mr. Siviur devotes a full paragraph of his ad to welcome "our first black President," and inserts a biographical note that he is an 85-year-old, life-long "Liberal Democrat." (I don't know what his thing is with capital letters, unless perhaps a nod to old attention-grabbing ad ploys.)

I shan't buy the book. After all, Mr. Siviur is preaching to my choir. I do wish to take the ad apart and play devil's advocate in part, exegesist for the other. For Mr. Siviur has touched upon themes I have long thought of critical importance, especially the increasingly obvious fact that where once the Republican Party was "the party of big business," it is now the party of bailed-out big businesses and un-Christian evangelical bigots who got sucked into politics by people who thought they were useful idiots (most of the Bush II administration) and who got caught short supporting McCain because they allowed their gullible acceptance of the Arizona senator. As they've sewn, so shall they reap: they got McCain because they wouldn't support a heretic in a suit.

In these pages, I keep writing about someone named Tom, a Republican "friend" with whom I have an on-off relationship based upon a college friendship. We reconciled recently at the death of a mutual friend, and I began to once again exchange emails with him. But the exchange soon degenerated into one of our usual partisan spats, this one revealing more about Tom than I cared to know. The last straw was when he began a sentence: "If Obama survives to be inaugurated...."

Uh-oh! Anyone who is even thinking about the assassination of our president-elect is by definition a racist. Yes, I know, Tom didn't write, "Your guy will never take the oath of office," much less, "We're going to get Obama. He'll never take the oath." But, you see, this was coming from someone who thinks that there was nothing wrong with torturing prisoners even if they're not terrorists. Who thinks Karl Rove is a smart forthright fellow. Who thinks most of our problems in the Mideast are caused by the Israeli Lobby.

For years, I've been telling fellow movie buffs that my favorite Bergman film is Through a Glass Darkly. It is a movie about "God" (who eventually crawls out of a crack in the plaster in his guise as a spider). But it's also a movie about so many other things, including a writer's inability to prevent his analytical study of his daughter's descent into madness. He cannot help her becasue he is so bent on watching her destroy herself. Because of this documentarianist's inclinations. I maintain friendships with people like Tom. I like to find out what makes them tick.

Until he became a lame duck, George W. could not do any harm in Tom's eyes. Only now will he admit that Bush was a lousy president -- and only because "he wasn't a conservative." This is a standard GOP talking point in Republican circles. (One of Tom's heroes is Bill Kristol.) Tom started out a "Goldwater conservative," but thee kind of conservatism he espouses today would make Goldwater cringe. Tom thinks Ronald Reagan was the best president we've had. No matter that a criminal enterprise was being run in the basement of the White House and when he gave a deposition, Reagan couldn't remember...about 25 times. (Yes, I know, given that he "came down" with Alzheimer's once he left office, it's entirely possible he really couldn't remember!) Tom bought every last U.S.P.S. commemorative postage stamp of his friend Ronnie and makes sure he puts them on mail to "liberals." He won't admit it, but I'll bet he's read Ann Coulter and agreed with about 90% of what she says.

Tom is a long-standing Unitarian. He would never see the logic of Sam Harris's claim that membership in any religion, no matter how socially liberal, is enabling (in the A.A. sense of the term: co-dependent and mutually addicted). Membership in any religion enables evangelicals; there is a commonality of purpose in accepting faith as a justification for belief in a god. As Christopher Hitchens demonstrates in God is Not Great (and you can say anything about the author you'd like, even ad hominem attacks on his alcoholism, but he's awfully brave to risk fatwas from the Wahhabists titling a book with so obvious an affront to Allah), religion poisons everything, including (if not especially) politics.

The evangelicals became the definition of GOP-ism this last election. There were no other factions to woo, as renegade Republicans deserted the party like rats from a sinking ship of state. The party came to be defined as right wing nut job, especially religious nut job, to put it country simple: dangerous lunatics. Anyone who believes in creationism is a lunatic by definition. The evangelicals firmly believe the earth was created in six days no longer than 6,000 years ago. They also insist that man walked with dinosaurs, turning a cold shoulder to exhaustive scientific evidence that the earth was born about 4.5 billion years ago and that man showed up no earlier than 400,000 years back. At one time, the D.L.'s of the world insisted that the earth was flat (literally; pace Mr. Friedman) and that the sun moved around us in an orbit.

These were some of the same folks who fought interracial marriage throughout the South (and in other parts, too; as Randy Newman observed, we should all insist on our freedom to discriminate racially). They're the PAC'S fighting gay and lesbian marriage in California. They screw in the missionary position, feel guilty about it later, and firmly believe that woman is a handmaid to her husband, separate and unequal. If you believe Tony Perkins is a Ken doll with red hair, you are onto something vitally important in the ongoing "culture war," which is nothing less than 21st century civilization coming to terms with Medieval notions of ethics, including their favorite of late, Machiavelli, for what is Karl Rove if not Niccolo reincarnated?

Actually -- and here's the point -- asking what Jesus would or would not do amounts to a capitulation to madness. No such person as Jesus Christ ever existed. The only "historical" record is found in the writings of one Yosef Ben Matityahu ("Josephus"), and even his short dictum is now disputed. The Gospels? They were written decades after the Nazz was allegedly crucified. (I say "allegedly" because some Gnostic sects, pointing out that a spirit cannot be nailed to the cross, claimed that he only appeared to die on it.)

At the time of Jesus's alleged existence, the Holy Land was overrun with prophets. We see one in action in the Book of Acts, where Simon of Gitta (a.k.a. Simon Magus) defies gravity and comes up losing. A good many of these louts were mountebanks and masters of legerdemain. Some were Jewish. I do not mind supposing that there was a prophet at this time who was regarded as a rabbi and thus was known as a "reb." Nor do I cavil with insistence that his name was Joshua (not Jesus). Reb Yeshua is OK by me.

But the Christ part is nothing but pure speculation. For one thing, "Christ" comes from Greek, Khristos, or anointed. This has a hand- or man made stamp on it. It is the nomenclature of myth, not of legend. Reb Yeshua was a legendary figure, as were the various probable models. The mythological models were profuse, from Osiris to Mithras, Asclepius, and many more. The dying and resurrected god is perhaps the single most common mythological deity and, again points to man's hand, not divinity. These super beings help explain Death and make us more comfortable with it.

The divinity of "Jesus Christ" was invented not so much by disciples but by Saul of Tarsus and the emperor Constantine, both for similar purposes. There is a superb scene in the Martin Scorsese film of Paul Schrader's script of the Kazantzakis novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Saul (Paul) meets Jesus in a village (following the latter's apparent death on the cross). Jesus tells him he's spreading false reports, that his death is, as Twain put it, highly exaggerated. Saul-Paul rejects his criticism and, in effect, tells him to get lost. "Don't you see?" he asks. "You're no good to us alive!"

If we take the two hot button issues that seem to obsess evangelicals the most, abortion and gay rights, the bigotry of using scripture to defend the indefensible is most obvious. Abortion is older than Soranus, who might be called the world's first OBGY. The only thing new about abortions is that when they are done clinically today, the results are about 99% safe and effective. (When done in dark alleys using coat-hangers, as in pre-Roe v. Wade days, the statistic is somewhat lower.) The problem seems to be entirely theological. So-called "pro-lifers" believe that "human life begins at conception," and that moronic belief has infected evangelicals as well. The absurdity of this position should be obvious: at conception, the only "thing" that results is a fertilized egg. One must presuppose God in order to elevate this "thing" into a human life. Human life can only be said to begin at conception if there is a god who dictates as much.

The behavior of the True Believers, including the lunatic in Florida who shot and killed an abortionist, the loony Eric Rudolf, as well as the ongoing Vatican (and now GOP platform!) insistence that a fetus must be saved even if its birth kills its mother, is not only insane; it is most un-Christian. Jesus is said to have blessed whores. Now, you'd think that no one on earth is more likely to have ingested abortifacients or submitted to anular blades than the Magdelene. Not one red-letter word escapes the Christ's lips concerning abortion. Nor did Reb Yeshua condemn homosexuality, which might have appeared a bit unseemly, given that he partied most often with a dozen men.

George Washington is said to have believed that political parties would be the undoing of American democracy. Had he lived, St. Germain-like, to see today, he would perhaps have revised that to say, instead, "Allowing religion to become a part of political dialogue and the political process will be the undoing of American democracy." Religion poisons everything.

Tom and I poke fun at each other's White House -- and in a parallel universe, McCain won the election -- but the poking sometimes gets rough, in which cases Tom has taken to using cutesy PC lingo like "lol," only he puts it all in caps and says it thrice: LOL LOL LOL. He reminds me of a buddy I knew in film school in the 60's who was fond of saying, "I judge people as individuals, and when it comes to [epithet for African-American beggining with "N") and [epithet for Hispanic person beginning in "S"] and [epithet for Jewish person beginning in "K"], I hate every individual one." He always said it with a grin that would make a crocodile blush. We knew he meant it no matter how many teeth he exposed in contradiction.

I am too old now to tolerate such shenanigans. And much too proud. The defeat of the Republican Party on 11-04-08 was another nail in its coffin. There aren't many nails left. The job is almost done. Alas, poor Yokel, I knew you well. I can rest assured that the Good Old Posterior is irrelevant and on its way into oblivion because I read a piece in www.politico.com by the African-American pol, Michael Steele, who begs to differ with me. In the section titled, "Return to timeless Republican principles," he claims "Our freedom is from God, not government...

"Our prosperity comes from a free people in a free market, not overtaxing, free-spending bureaucrats. We celebrate and protect life, born and unborn...."

Whoa! Since when is murder of physicians, bombings at abortion clinics, &c. a "timeless Republican principle"? And how did "God" give us our freedom and put the bureaucrats in place to overtax and over-spend? You can't have it both ways, Michael. The Australian philosopher John Leslie Mackie took God to task when he used common logic to show that belief in God isn't much better than belief in the Tooth Fairy. If God is all knowing, all powerful and all good, why can't he prevent the murders and bombings at abortion clinics?

If God is punishing the persons involved in abortions because abortion is "wrong," why does Jesus say to turn the other cheek? Don't you say that because they are "from God" and therefore infallible, the Decalogue commands, e.g., "Thou Shalt Not Kill"? Where were you when Republican Texas Governor George W. Bush became the King of Capital Murder, executing more men (and one notable woman) than any other president in the 20th century. Did God prevent the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean? (The evangelical would quickly claim that the hundreds of thousands who were killed were not "saved," as they weren't, in the main, Christians. What a cruel, capricious, arbitrary -- evil -- God!)

It is logically impossible for evil to exist in the world overseen by an omniscient, omnipotent, all good God.

Tony Perkins has much more in common with Osama bin Laden than even some liberals would like to admit. When you stand up and oppose gay and lesbian rights and funnel so much money into a media campaign designed to pass an initiative defining marriage according to some moldy Hebraic code that your PAC almost closes due to drained funds, you are just as fanatical in your way as bin Laden in his. Worse, like bin Laden, your ideas threaten democracy, whose basic premises was written into our Declaration of Independence. It does not say, "We hold [this] truth to be self-evident: that all men -- except homosexuals -- are created equal." (Clever fellows will hasten to add, "Of course not; "homosexual," used to describe same-sex orientation, did not come into existence until the Civil War or later, but that is besides the point.)

George W. Bush and the Republican Party suffered their greatest humiliation when gasoline was up to over $4 a gallon and, hat in hand, W went to ar-Ryadh to bow and scrape and faux cheek kiss the Crown guy and see if, uh, er, please up production or lower price, crudely put, &c. &c. &c. There was poor George, caught on cam, leaving the meeting empty handed. The symbiotic relationship between buyer and seller was tempered by family ties (the long-standing, legendary Bush-Saud thing), but the lame duck left wanting. This was the Ultimate Humiliation, and it may have gone further to explain the 11/4 result than we can imagine.

For years, the Shrub Administration tried to convince us that the Saudis were among our best friends. One can imagine the Crown guy watching the press conference on TV and winking at his yes men. Only in the final days did Bush talk of buying oil from "people who dislike us." I do admire the president's understatement. The Saudis cannot like us, never will like us, especially because the House of Saud must play ball with the mullahs in order to stay in power, a delicate balance struck both for convenience and pocket-lining. At the bread and circuses shopping malls, ordinary Arabians were all eating well and had roofs over their heads, so who is to complain? Doesn't Allah the Merciful look out for his own?

Their children are schooled by clerics of the dominant sect, Wahhabism, the desert warlord equivalent of our evangelicals and the Afghani Taliban as well. These people are so insane they think killing westerners and being killed themselves will immediately send them to Paradise where they will acquire 72 virgin (grapes or ladies, take your translation). This is totally bonkers. It is so insane that a relatively sane person -- he doesn't even have to be an atheist -- wants to stand up and scream: "STOP, FOOLS!" Or, as the late Paddy Chayevsky would have it, throw open their windows and scream to the people in the streets: "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

The Wahhabist "home schooling" consists of indoctrination into jihadism. Why did Arabic parents and friends of the 9/11 terrorists, predominantly Saudi citizens, claim that they had no idea their sons or brothers were involved in such a thing! Why were bin Laden family and friends allowed to fly out of the U.S. when all other aircraft had been grounded? Wahhabism teachest hate. Wahhabists are extreme bigots whose intolerance is an affront to democratic principles.

As spokesman for the loony religious right and the Republican Party, Tony Perkins is emblematic. His fascistic frame of mind is best illustrated by his neo-Nazi past. He supported K.K.K. candidate David Duke but, when found out, quickly did a Claude Rains Casablanca cop routine: he was shocked -- I say, shocked! to learn where his money was going. He has been known to make outrageous, totally illogical statements, such as: "The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is rooted in the order of nature itself....."

Nature? Whose nature? A nature that presents the creation of the planet in six days by Yahweh-Johovah? A nature that has mankind walking amongst tyrannasaurus rex? A nature that combated such notions as a round earth and heliocentric universe? A nature that ignores the overwhelming evidence about our species as revealed by the true prophets of our times, Darwin and Freud? (I would put the Hon. T. H. Huxley among this group, but he only agnosticized, which is "playing chicken.") I am sure that Perkins' understanding of "natural order" makes man superior to woman because "He" created him first. Not only that, but "God" took a rib from Adam to make Eve, so she's an after-thought. How delightfully the ancients disguised their innate misogyny and mistrust of women in justifiable holy writ!

But wait, Perkins gets much more absurd: "['union of one man and one woman] promotes the continuation of the human race and the cooperation of the mother and father in raising the children they produce." Mr. Perkins, let me introduce you to a divorce attorney; you may not need her now, but you can tuck her statistics in your wallet in case you might need it. Half the heterosexual marriages in America end up in divorce courts. Some of your staunchest religionists, e.g. Ted Haggard, have been exposed as homosexual and excommunicated from the High Church of Evangelical Theocracy as a result, or come back feigning overnight orientational conversion, thanking God for delivering them from the English [Italian, &c., take your pick] vice only to keep fan magazines around "for my daughters" so they can peek at them when they're on the toilet.

Or the ones who get caught cheating on their wives, having sex outside their marriages with whores (boys or girls). Or the ones who tell their ignorant, gullible flocks that a gay parade caused God to send Katrina to destroy New Orleans. Or the ones who claim that God caused Hitler's rise to power and the resulting holocaust: it was His way of driving Jews into the Holy Land so that John of Patmos' coded letter to persecuted contemporaries, with its prophecy of a second coming, could come true. I mean, a Final Conflagration between Judeo-Christianith and Islam can just go ahead and kill us all: it's God's Will!

These people are flirting with criminal insanity. Bush used the word "crusade" early in the response to 9/11, and if his war on terrorism continues unabated with a new regime, the Final Conflagration is a foregone conclusion. This will be welcomed by the bin Ladens and the Perkinses of this world. They win themselves by seeing all of us lose.

Max Blumenthal's portrait of Perkins at theNation.com is devastating. Among other curious titbits, Blumenthal shows Perkins:

Addressing the Council of Conservative Citizens, a newly named organization born of the remnants of the old KKK bunch, the White Citizens Council, which Blumenthal characterizes as "America's premier white supremacist organization";
Using useful idiots from African-American and Catholic interest groups to browbeat the Bush administration to nominate only anti-Roe v. Wade candidates for Supreme Court judicial appointments in an effort to halt Democratic senators from "filibustering people of faith";
Being mentored by a Richard Viguerie-direct mail fund-raising strategist, Woody Jenkins, who helped found the theocratic bund known as the Council for National Policy (CNP), whose members included R. J. Rushdoony, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell; Amway founder (and convicted tax evader) Richard DeVos, conservative beer brewer Joseph Coors, &c.
Getting caught red-handed when he made a donation to David Duke, well known white supremacist, to obtain his mailing list, denying Federal Election Committee charges Jenkins tried to hide the Duke payment when, in fact, Perkins' name was on the $82,000 check.
Sponsoring a closed meeting of his Family Research Council at the Plaza Hotel in New York City where insider trading Sen. Bill Frist was given a "Thomas Jefferson Award," an irony of ironies considering Jefferson's well-known adversian to Christianity, his libertarianism, and his rejection of church-state entanglements.

Now, how can I claim can that Perkins is a "terrorist" or no better than one? For one, his campaign to make same-sex marriage illegal, one of many evangelical assaults on human rights. Such campaigns, along with such misguided, Bible-based programs for "curing gays" as Exodus (itself a form of aversion therapy) send a message to young gays and lesbians: "You are not normal. You are abnormal. You need to be treated for your condition," &c. This only makes vulnerable minds assume that what they think or do is a "sin," is "bad," is "sick." This leads to depression and often suicide.

It is a proven fact that gay and lesbian teens are four times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual schoolmates. These persecuted teens also become victims of homophobic violence, which activity is reinforced by the religio-hate messages of the "Family" this or "Family" that. Isn't it interesting that the same politicians pushing for laws that deprive the sexual minorities of basic human rights also vote against inclusion of "sexual orientation" in criminal code definitions of what constitutes a "hate crime." Duh! If you are dressed a bit campy and someone calling you a "f----t" blows your head off with a Saturday night special, it's kind of obvious it's a hate crime, right?

Tony Perkins, Matthew Shepard died for your sins.

Tony Perkins, you ignorant moron! You have blood on your hands. It is not the Blood of the Lamb but the Blood of your brother's gay son and your lesbian aunt. If Jebus really is coming again, He will be pissed. And Tony Perkins is the first person any truly righteous deity would condemn to the bottomless bowels of a hell not even a pervert like Perkins can imagine.

No, make no mistake, God will be revealed to be Perkins' own conscience once it shakes off the cloud of unknowing and awakens him from his deluded, anti-democratic dream. I don't mind you having your Rapture, but do it in another universe.

To Paraphrase Will Rogers

2008-11-23T07:26:00.000-08:00

We're the only nation in the world to go into bankruptcy with our BlackBerries.

Bailing Out General Motors

2008-11-16T11:36:00.001-08:00

The proposed General Motors bailout brings out both the social liberal and fiscal conservative in me; even libertarian conservatives would rather G.M. go in to bankruptcy and, possibly, falter in the end, to no profit to the American people, but my suspicions of hard-line market economics summons up visions of soup lines and Spam (the real kind, not the emails). All those American workers losing their homes and freezing for want of heating oil, which can only go up when O.P.E.C. and Big Oil find a new way to chingle us. (Yes, "chingle." Slang Spanish for "butt fuck," which is what Congress and the multinationals have done to us during the long-running -- pre-Bush II -- laxity in oversight and grossly carte blanch deregulation of the finance industry who probably made all of the last two or three presidents shill men for bullshit and thievery.

So part of me says bankruptcy (where is their stock right now, $4 or something?), and part of me says bailout. This latter is repugnant in the extreme. Each time I pass a pickup or SUV I scream, "Guuuuuuzleeeeer!" I see Arab shiekhs shrieking with laughter, lighting real Havana cigars with hundred dollar bills. So why should we trust anything Congress does. They're just whores for K-Street. When a company has been manufacturing Monster Vehicles for decades, fanning the flames of consumption by massive Madison Avenue ad campaigns, loses ground to smaller, cheaper, less gas-consuming autos and starts bleeding its reserves, why should we come to the rescue? You'd have thought they learning NOTHING by the Volkswagen craze that overtook the entire nation in the 50's. My own father, who once joked that they looked like the object of canine rutting (and had a cartoon of that simile to prove it) bought a Beetle. I got it second hand and only had a relapse once, a Firebird, one of the heaviest autos on the road. Guess what happened to Pontiac?) Who?

Nope, I come down on the bankruptcy unless Congress can aid the workers with low interest loans and extended unempoyment insurance, plus job re-training and severance benefits at some level. I know ecolibs will say, "The Chrysler deal paid us back." That's the point: Chrysler is one of the Big Three asking for bailouts. As Lincoln said (in a different context): "Too many pigs for the teets!"

A Tale of Two Voters

2008-11-02T13:47:00.000-08:00

We are all racists to one extent or another: biologists say it is "hardwired" into our genetic makeup. I hasten to say, "to one extent or another" because, although many of us grew up hearing racial epithets and, out of a sense of identity, some of us -- probably most, at least when young -- went along with the peer group. My grandmother, who died at 101 a decade ago, never made reference to African-Americans without calling them "nigras." Not "niggers," mind you, but "nigras." I think this was not because she didn't mean "niggers," but because her Texas dialect dictated a variant pronunciation. Her daughter, my mother, referred to her only sibling as her "sistah." My ancestors on that side of the family did not come from Alabama or Mississipi but from central Texas: Austin, in fact.

I was predisposed by such upbringing to mistrust and even disrespect "persons of color." My father instilled in me the notion that on some basic level the Declaration of Independence was correct in positing that "all men are created equal," not just all white people. And although I always suspected he had a racist bone or two in his body, I took his position to heart. When I was in college, I defied a city-wide ban on media coverage of a demonstration in front of downtown Fort Worth movie theatres designed to confront the owners' policy of allowing blacks to sit only in the balconies. When I was awarded journalistic society honors that year for my reporting in the college paper, my coverage of the protest was not the subject of my recognition for having penned the "Best Feature" and the "Best News Story." The same people who handed out the honors were employed by the media that agreed on the blackout.

And while I was not exposed to racial diversity in college -- I don't think our "foreign students" included anyone from African and other black-skinned nations -- I did graduate work at UCLA, as racial diverse an institution of higher learning both then and now as could be envisioned. One night I attended an off-campus party where people were smoking marijuana and I was asked if I wanted to share a joint. I said, "No thanks. My parents told me, if you smoke that stuff you'll move on to heroin sure as hell." At which point an African-American came through the kitchen door, ducking to allow his almost-seven-foot frame to miss the top of the sill.

He looked down at me and bellowed, "You talk too much!" I suddenly realized I had been put in my place by a UCLA basketball player named Lew Alcindor, who had just taken to calling himself by his Black Muslim name, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Non-plussed, I could only reply: "I think you're right." I did little talking for the rest of the evening.

A year or two later, I was in the Presidential Suite of the Ambassador Hotel, thanks to the daughter of a huge supporter of the Democratic Party, having drinks with the assembly of folks supporting Robert F. Kennedy, who was giving a speech in the banquet hall downstairs. When word broke on the TV of his assassination and death, the entire room erupted with an almost orgasmic wail of sorrow and grief. I looked about. The suite was liberally populated by African-Americans. I felt what they felt, but in subsequent years I had to reckon with nagging feelings I felt as I had because of the circumstances I had found myself in, that I was grief-struck because I felt it incumbent upon me. This would not diminish the fact that when word of the shooting came, my hand involuntarily gripped my glass so hard that it broke the tumbler, cutting me.

The murder of Martin Luther King did not surprise me, but every time I hear his "I have a dream" speech, I sob. The nomination of Barrack Obama as the Democratic Party's candidate for president is the most thrilling thing that has happened in this country since the election of J.F.K. It is the fulfillment of King's Dream. It is the promise of equality brought to fruition. Obama's speeches move me almost as much as memory of M.L.K. If he actually wins, racial justice will be seen to have advanced exponentially.

Which brings me to two persons I had hoped would both vote for him. Both are friends. Both are in their 70's. One, Marian, was a Hillary supporter; the other, Georgia, an independent who usually votes for Republicans. I had dinner with them prior to the primaries and asked Marian, "If Hillary isn't nominated, will you still vote Democrat?" She said, no, that she couldn't or wouldn't vote for Obama. Georgia said she didn't trust Obama, that he was all talk and no ideas. She would probably vote Republican again, even though it could mean four more years of Bushism.

After Obama was nominated, Marian continued to say she would "just stay home." Then, Obama named Biden as his running mate. That changed Marian's mind. She now planned to vote for Obama-Biden. Georgia's mind was not made up, but she still had serious reservations about voting for Obama. She cited his lack of experience, but I'd heard her refer to African-Americans as "N---rs," so I assumed that nothing Obama could say or do would change her mind. She just doesn't feel comfortable around black people.

In a way, Georgia represents a generation that is fading fast and will be replaced by open-minded, diversity-supportive people. Obama is not only a breath of fresh air, he is a symbol of things to come. He may lose, but his being so close to the White House is itself a sign of the times and a positive promise for the future.

The McCain Mutiny Court Martial

2008-10-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

Now that the GOPS are deserting the sinking ship (of state, or, rather, John McShame's run for the White House), one is reminded of the play and movie, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.. In that story, the chief antagonist ship captain, Queeg, is depicted as lording over a U.S. Navy vessel much in the way the movies have portrayed Captain William Bligh, whose mean-spirited dictates prompted the rebellion aboard the H.M.S. Bounty.

In The Caine Mutiny, Queeg is depicted as going bonkers over who swiped the last servings of fresh strawberries. We soon gather that the man is a service-scarred schizoid with paranoid delusions. When Humphrey Bogart played Queeg in the film version, he used a facial tic and a compulsive habit of squirreling a couple of ball bearings in his palm while he testified at the resulting court martial of the officers who took command of the Caine.

Earlier, I posted a comment saying that the only thing lacking in the Queeg = McShame equation was ball bearings. I now see that I am at least only part incorrect. On Meet the Press today, McShame responded to some tough questions by Tom Brokaw by rolling over and over in his fingers a pen he might have needed for a debate. But this was not a debate; hence, why the writing instrument? Clearly, the pen is McShame/Queeg's set of ball bearings.

It was simply pathetic to sit and listen to his stuttering, illogical, non-sequitrous responses. One heard a desperate man, claiming, for example, that he disagrees with the polls. Duh! What are polls but public expressions of opinion. In effect, McShame disagrees with the public. He claims that it will be a long night November 4th. I don't think so. I think it will all be over by 11 p.m. Eastern. Meanwhile, check out the Great Bogart as Queeg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9KlQPX1qiE

Is the United States Government a Ponzi Scheme?

2008-09-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

For years, I have dutifully paid my taxes and slaved away to save for retirement and almost a third of it has disappeared in two quarters: does that qualify for "recession"? Given that the administration hires experts to make up euphemisms and has been caught red-handed planting yes-men and congressional hearing-style talking pointsmen in White House press conferences, I don't expect anyone to use the "R" word. But if you look at the employment figures, the closures of finance banking institutuions, the once-quirky, now-berserk stock market, and a half dozen or more other indicators, a recession it is.

I am as troubled by the bailouts as much as Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby is. You've seen Shelby on the pundit programs: he's a Republican and the ranking member of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee. Shelby's as smart as a whip and knows a pig in a poke when he sees one. He says the Fed can't go on printing money indefinitely and for every destitute corporation with a hand out for a bailout. What happens is, you're borrowing money that can never really be repaid. Those who will pay are our children. Then, there's the certain inflationary spiral that will be an unavoidable consequence. I am tempted to make an allusion to the Weimar Republic. At a certain point, we won't need gasoline to go to the supermarket: we won't be able to buy food.

Now, the Dems and GOPS are dickering as to further bailouts, billions to fix the mortgage mess. Some GOPS don't want any mortgage bailouts on grounds the guilty shouldn't be rewarded at taxpayers' expense, while the Dems in the main, reminding us that the mortgage industry preyed on the weak and ignorant, believe home mortages should be included in the fix-it. The Dems are even moving for caps on CEO salaries to corporations benefitting from the regurgitation; enough of these damned golden parachutes rewarding anyone contributing to their own company's disaster.

Hey, folks, any way you cut it, this whole shit mess boils down to just this: we're indulging in plain old Biblical proportions borrowing Peter to pay Paul. What, pray tell, served as the collateral for all of those newly printed reserve notes? The collateral is a phantom! The United States of America, Inc., is one giant Ponzi scheme. By the time the little guys just entering the game finally fingure out that all of their money is going to the tip of the population triangle, the top 1% of the nation, the CEO of the USA, Inc. is on his merry way, back to Crawford, the World Capital of Bullshit.

Yes, Ponzi! Read his Wikipedia biography if nothing else. (There's also a biography in print.) Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who came, saw, and conquered. He figured out on his very own, most likely from observing Wall Street, that you could fund a pyramidic "entity" that had newcomers paying off the profits to the top co-players. The more new people with funds, the richer the top folk got. That is the way some multinationals operate today: the CEO'S are the Ponzi's. This was one reason McShame sent packing a woman who single-handedly almost demolished Hewlett-Packard and walked off with millions of dollars.

But I am divided myself about the bailouts.

You're also setting a poor example and inviting both a plethora of other importunities as well as rewarding the very twits who got the corporations into the mess we're in. Everyone is p.o.'d, and the blame game may be only in the fourth inning. One of the chief villains would seem those CEO'S with golden parachutes. But there's much too much fault to limit it to one group of people. Dems are pointing to Sen. Phil Gramm's deregulation of the finance industry, the opening of a Pandora's Box of evil demons in mortgage lending, a what's what's of horrors with not even a glance, much less oversight. But, wait! Some of the Dems voted for that bill!

So we shouldn't be too quick to blame the GOPS. Even Secretary Poulson admits that there was "scant oversight at the federal level," but de-rgulation didn't being with Bush II. But you can bet Obama will make much ado of the fact that all three sponsors of the act de-regulating the banking industry were all Republican. And the subprime recession points to that side of the aisle.

Why Are the Media Attacking Poor Palin?

2008-09-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, everyone who questions Palin on any subject, especially the Bush III platform of the GOP is a sexist. Everyone who questions vetting or the selection itself is an anti-female clod. Everyone who thinks Palin is right when she says the Surge was not an out-and-out Iraqi political failure is a male chauvinist pig. Solution: Have women do the attacks on Palin. Dee Dee Myers should be hired immediately as Biden's sensitivity advisor; I saw her on CNN this morning and although she scolded the Dems for making too big a thing of McShame = Bush III, she basically said Palin paled. Get Hillary involved: she can remind voters that Roe v. Wade will soon be toast, McShame having made promises to the religious right (even that zombie Richard Land) to put anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court in the event a perceived liberal justice dies or retires. She can say that Palin is a good mother and a lousy office-holder, illustrating with the official oppression incident involving a highway patrolman -- shades of Tricky Dick Nixon's "Enermies List"! -- indicative of a Bush-Cheney-Rovian type of reverse cronyism. Get good Dem women to speak on Obama ads talking about being pro-choice and pro-family, pro sex education to prevent teen pregnancies, and how Palin tugs that Down's syndrome baby around to compliment McShame's endless use of None-Verb-POW. Make women's rights an issue, and Palin will pale.

Things to Consider Before The Voting Booth

2008-08-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of things to consider before you pull the lever or electronically record your vote when you go to the polls this November:

1. It will no longer do any good for the Dems to claim that Barack Obama will get us out of Iraq and John McCain will not. Now that the White House has done a 180 and sent Condi to formalize a withdrawal with deadlines, the next president, Obama or McCain, will be stuck with a formal agreement between the U.S. and the Maliki government. These things are not entirely set in stone, especially since the current president wants to sidestep Congress and reach an agreement with Iraq, and the once and future king may decide to shred the document on such grounds. (Treaties have to be ratified. Duh!) This might be unwise, as it could alienate Iraqis eager to see us go, prompting public demonstrations protesting the continuing presence of an imperialist invader.

2. Swiftboating will know no bounds, and most of it will come from GOP operatives. It may be that the party that airs the cleverest TV commercials during the other party's convention, will get a bump. Nobody, not even Jim Carville, can outdo Karl & Co. when it comes to dirty defamations, but rumor has it they're arranging to lure Larry Craig into the Minneapolis Airport, have him arrested in a toilet stall, and held till the convention is over.

3. Although John McShame touts his party's reputation as standing firm against governmental intrusion into our lives, the administration of George W. Bush, a Republican, invaded our privacy in unknown, unknowable, sinister ways that would make Joe McCarthy blush. Now that habeas corpus has been abolished, you can be charged in secret of being a terrorist, arrested, and kept incommunicado without resort to bail, a preliminary hearing, or anything determinative of probable cause. Perhaps Obama will fix that.

(To be continued as the contest rolls on....)

2.

Why I Despise John McShame

2008-08-23T04:47:00.001-07:00

Yes, McShame tries to hide behind his P.O.W. past as refuge from any criticism, as witness the silly "five years in one house" TV commercial, put out in a desperate attempt to justify John and Cindy's score or so of houses, condominiums, and other digs. But even Obama praises his "heroism" and "patriotic" service during Vietnam. What is lost upon both candidates is the fact that some of us thought Vietnam an immoral conflict America had no business getting involved in, and one that gave our generation a clear choice: to serve or not to serve. McShame chose to do so. I, and many others, chose not.

It really didn't matter that we had a draft then. Those of us who objected to the war on pacifistic and moral grounds found ways to stay home. McShame did not. Not even waiting to be drafted, McShame blindly followed his family tradition of signing up: he volunteered to fight a war that was odious to many of his generation. While some of us were participating in protests and sit-in's, Mr. Flyboy eagerly joined the fray. For all I know, he dropped napalm indiscriminately on the Vietnamese people, a latter day Arnaud-Amaury, the papal legate chosen to head the Albigensian Crusade, who, being asked how his troops would recognize a Cathar from an ordinary citizen, said: "Kill them all, the Lord will recognize his own."

Given his willing participation in an immoral war, McShame deserves no respect for his service, nor for his imprisonment. We know that many of our captured troops in that conflict were subjected to far greater deprivations and torture yet refused to cooperate with their captors. McShame was not one of them. He did a few cutesy things like telling his tormentors the names of professional football players when requested to list fellow "imperialists," but so what? He caved. Worse, he learned nothing by the experience. Not only did he support Bush's illegal, imperialist invasion of Iraq, he flip-flopped on the waterboarding issue, which made a mockery of his own captivity.

McShame is a dangerous man who wants to attack Iran, get tough with Russia (although we now know, clearly, the Georgians provoked their invasion of South Ossetia). The last person we need in the White House today is a militaristic, jingoistic, slavering warmonger like John McShame. As for all of his dwellings, I'm surprised he hasn't gone whole hog and, in response to queries some Iraqi vets are homeless, sleeping in underpasses, and going hungry, said: "Let them eat cake."

Wag the Dog?

2008-08-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Has Hollywood repeated itself, or has history done so? It just occurred to me that perhaps when George W. said he'd looked in Putin's eyes and seen his soul, what he really meant was that he'd seen his evil twin. Psychologically, these two blowhards would seem to have been cut from the same cloth, and it may even be that they mutually agreed to be each other's film studio for their very own wag the dog.

Now that attention needs to be taken off Iraq -- although the right wingnut pundits still blab about surge success and goal-accomplishment ("we're winning the war"), there's that nagging question of political success, divvying up the oil monies among various sects and tribes, and reconciling Shia with Sunni so that there's no Balkan style genocide (what a euphemism, "ethnic cleansing"!). These matters can easily be taken off the 24/7 cycle if only....

That's it! Get Vladimir to invade Georgia. Between that spectacle and the Olympics, you outdo the Roman emperors' gifts of bread and circuses. You may think I am paranoid, but if I learned anything from the Sixties, it was the slogan, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean nobody's out to get you." Yeah, I know, lousy grammar, weak syntax, but you get the idea.

Light Sweet Crude

2008-08-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing upsets me so much as seeing a big pickup or SUV with only the driver inside. When she or he pulls into the convenience store and fills the tank, they shell out three to four times what I do to fill mine, which allows me to think they're more responsible for the ongoing energy crisis because I was wise enough to buy a Toyota Corolla. In a post to one of the egroups I subscribe to, a member made reference to SUV's and parenthetically defined them as "Stupid Useless Vehicles." I soon enough entered my hat into the ring for Fool when I told another subscriber about the definition only to be informed that he owned two of them himself.

But, hey, let's face it: SUV's in particular look like dinosaurs, don't they? I mean, notice how many people have simply parked them in the garage, on the driveway, or (as is most often the case in South Texas) on the lawn. And check out what's going on in Detroit: billion dollar quarterly losses. And at your local dealarship. I even heard a commercial by a dealer offering fifteen thousand dollars off the price of a new SUV! And, now that crude has enjoyed a temporary slump in price (all the way down to $125 a barrel the other day), the SUV's and even the big pickups will see slowly rising sales.

It's all psychology -- and mass psychology at that. The current SUV owners are using them less because they dislike paying throught the nose. Amusingly, one wag put his frustrations on his posted price sign: "Regular Unleaded: An Arm and a Leg." I mean, you can only amputate an arm or a leg once. And when the other two have been cut off, there's nothing left but the head and the unmentionable. I am not about to contend that all of these vehicles at all times of the day, all week, all month, and all year have only one person inside and are only headed for the inflation station (read: grocery store). No, of course not. During the week, the pickup might hold the implements or inventory of the breadwinner's small business, and the SUV during the school year is put to use driving the most precious cargo of all to local schools.

But, generally, speaking, big trucks and SUV's chap my ass. Most have "BUSH-CHENEY 2004" bumper stickers. Some have N.R.A. Some have Jebus fish symbols or "In Case of Rapture, This Vehicle Will be Empty." I don't mind their naive notions about cosmogony, biology, &c., I just wish they didn't throw them in my face. (There are some aspects of Islam that I think have great value; for one, visual depictions of the founder of their religion, Mohammed, are strictly forbidden. That's why not-so-radical Islamists made such ado over the publication of cartoons showing their patriarch as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban.) Seems to me, you have a pretty weak religion if you have to run about with such proclamations of faith on your rear window or bumper. Reminds me of that old homily, "Fools' names and fools' faces always appear in public places."

McShame, Obama, and the Real Race Card

2008-08-03T06:11:00.001-07:00

As the presidential race moves through its pre-debate, mudslinging comic opera phase, we see McShame, lacking any innovative ideas of his own and using fear and race as his only weapon, trades barbs with Obama only to further waste time by making an issue of who used the race card first. The answer is simple: Karl Rove. Nobody could have come up with such a seemingly clever, archly ironic TV commercial as the Britney-Paris fiasco. But Barack seems loathe to explain his reasoning in pointing out the true culprit in the who-hit-first debate, perhaps because getting hung up on the race issue is perceived as crippling to his campaign.

Don't believe it? Have you heard about the GOP cash bonanza this one TV commercial brought in? Obviously, McShame's base wants more dirt. Obama probably would have only exacerbated his problem by pointing out that the juxtaposition of himself with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton -- young, svelte, attractive blonde caucasians -- would revive a stereotype that should have gone out, even in the South, with the death of Martin Luther King, the Rodney King riots, and all of the talk show ironing out of age-old recriminations in their wake. I mean, after all, has anyone seen the Gregory Peck movie, To Kill a Mockingbird?

"N-----s rape white wimin!" There, I said it. In the vernacular of the ignorant, the superstitious, the intolerant, the frightened.

When Obama accused McShame of raising the race card, both men knew what he meant (or Rove and Obama knew): all of the old (conscious and unconscious) fears of white voters all over America would be aroused, brought to bear on the current situation, and used to bolster the argument Obama is "elitist." (I actually learned from a white woman that she wouldn't be voting for Obama because "that's all we'll see in the White House is blacks.") McShame's card: fear of the unknown. It's really Bush III just as MoveOn says, only this time, not having fear of Islamists as a viable strategy, McShame is using fear of African-Americans.

The pundits asked their guests whether the race issue should be debated head-on, and since it appears to be an inevitable component of the '08 elections, how fully should it be investigated and reported? CNN has started a "Black in America" series. A few pundits have expressed views. But the bottom line nitty gritty is not being discussed. The pundits and the pols seem to be saying, "Don't go there." But maybe it's time we should.

The Strange Odyssey of T. Bone Puckins

2008-07-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

T. Bone Puckins has addressed a subcommittee headed by Joe Lieberman and advanced his precis for what he calls "the Puckins Plan." There, in his most resplendent sartorial splendor, was T. Bone telling us we should wean ourselves of foreign oil by going green: wind turbine electricity in the main, with appropriate tax credits and investment allowances for those who invest.

Lieberman sat and listened, then complimented the speaker's statement as if he were a sworn secret member of the Bush-Cheney energy cabal. To judge by the questioning and answering between GOP senators and T. Bone, the hearing smacked of nothing so much as a prearranged direct approach the better to avoid potential problems by moving obliquely via K-Street.

Wouldn't it be an amusing coincidence if T. Bone owns a lot of land in West Texas, where wind is hardly lacking and doing nothing for the time being but blowing along the tumbleweeds. Oh, wait, later TV commercials tout putting natural gas into our car tanks. Now, I'm certain T. Bone owns a lot of land in West Texas. And North Texas. And East Texas. And.....

Huffpost's Bete Noir and the McBush-Hagee Connection

2008-06-04T16:57:00.000-07:00

Why the hell isn't Max Blumenthal of huffpost running for office? He has pegged the McBush-Hagee connection so precisely, I got jealous reading it. I wish every American would try this one experiment. Pssssst, pass it on! It is this: (1) seat yourself close enough to the TV to take it all in but not waste much space going from face to face; (2) listen carefully to McBush in those sound bites and speech segments in which either Lieberman or Graham (as in Linsie) appears, and WATCH Leiberman's and/or Graham's demeanor, reactions, &c. carefully. You learn a couple of things right off the bat. Lieberman is there to assist McBush in delivering information as needed as well as, in all likelihood, reminders of what McBush can't remember, while Graham is there to look like the rival politician's halfwit son in the wonderful John Ford movie, "The Last Hurrah," with Spencer Tracy playing the wily, almost Machiavellian pol running for his last time.

Candidate McBush and His Creepy Clerics: Worse Than Wright?

2008-05-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

Senator John McBush (R-Arizona) has accumulated a couple of creepy Christer clerics who make Rev. Wright look like Gandhi. I speak of John Hagee and Rod Parsley, a couple of cracker evangelicals who follow in the footsteps of Pat Robberson and Jerry Falwell and spew the same hateful venom from their snake oil seller's forked tongues. And although McBush claims he doesn't subscribe to everything these two fundamentalist rubes sermonize on, he's given no specifics, so that, for all we know, he disagrees with their claim that there is "a living God." It is time the media forced McBush to reveal his true beliefs about the inane, unconstitutional, and un-American positions taken by this dynamic duo of theocrypto-fascists.

An AP article in today's paper brings news that Hagee ("Catholicism = Whore of Babylon") has apologized the U.S. Catholics and that this is fine with McBush: "[McBush] has said he does not agree with some of Hagee's past comments, but did not reject his support." OK, John, WHICH past comments? You're beginning to sound guilty of the same transgression you blamed on Obama: pretending to have been unawares. Of course, hypocrisy is the lubricant of political intercourse. As for Hagee, may I echo the Consul in Lowry's Under the Volcano, who observed: "There are some things you can't apologize for." Hagee was quoted as saying that the Catholic Church is the Great Whore of the Book of Revelations; that the Church urges "a Godless theology of hate that no one dared stop for a thousand years...."; and that Hitler worked together with the Roman Church to "shape the policy of the Third Reich." Apparently, the Catholic Church isn't buying the apology. But Hagee's own theology of hate seems boundless. An AP story on the McBush-Hagee Connection accurately summed it up when it said Hagee has made "controversial" comments about "Islam, homosexuality, women, blacks, and hurricane Katrina."

Hagee's eagerness to judge the behavior of others amazes when you consider the following highlights of the man's own sordid career:

Resignation under duress from his San Antonio-based Trinity Church in 1975, explaining years of moral impropriety by stating, "My marriage had collapsed and I became immoral in my personal conduct." (Remember Jimmy Swaggart?)
Divorce from his wife of 15 years, the mother of his two children.
Re-marriage to a congregation member 12 years his junior (his paramour, perhaps?).
Violation of the Assemblies of God by-laws, resulting in his excommunication; to put it country simple: defrocked.
Politically, supports a joint U.S.-Israeli preemptive military strike on Iran. (McBush must be salivating like Pavlov's dog.)
A "hellfire and brimstone" preacher, he has been known to liken J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter to "contemporary witchcraft."
Has referred to the Koran as "a mandate to kill Christians and Jews," and likened Arabic peoples and other followers of Islam to Nazis when he said, "[They have] far more than Hitler and Japan and Italy and all of the axis powers in World War II had under arms." (Like me, you may be thinking this dangerous lunatic is a dominionist. They're the most dangerous lunatics around.)
Having heard about N'awlins' notorious Southern Decadence gay parade (more outre' than anything at Mardi Gras!), he used his hot line to ascertain that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on the Delta for "a level of sin that is offensive to God." The "homosexual parade" was given as one of the indicia of the offensiveness level.

Although the so-called Christ was known to have said that a rich man will no sooner enter the kingdom than a camel shall pass through the eye of a needle, Rev. Hag draws an annual salary of over ONE MILLION a year, the combined pay from donor-supported ministries including his church and TV ministries. (Like most of those being investigated by the Senate, he probably hides at least the same amount using a twin set of books.)

JOHN McBUSH! I call on you to denounce Rev. Hagee and his rantings as those of a Dangerous Lunatic!

Obama had his cross to bear (you should pardon the expression): Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But Wright wasn't completely WRONG. Hag is. Worse, it isn't enough for McBush to have one "spiritual advisor" (read: pander to evangelicals, including dominionists, who all have bumper stickers reading, "In Case of Rapture, This Car Will Be Empty"), he has to be one up on Barack: he has TWO.

The other one is Rod Parsley, and folks, he's just as much a piece of work as The Hag. A Pentecostal, he claims presidency of the Center for Moral Clarity. I'm not kidding you. That is the name of it. He has just as many subsidiaries and fingers in the evangelical pie as The Hag, and his pedigree includes a degree from Falwell University. His cable ministry is as big as Tammy Faye before the Fall. Here are a few of his biographical attainments:

He had his conversion/revelation/epiphany when he witnessed the signing of the Partial Birth Abortion ban.
He is opposed to the concept of separation of church and state and claims it cannot be found in the Constitution. (Shhhhhh!, don't wake up Thomas Jefferson!)
He criticized Sweden for imprisonment of a Pentecostal preacher, Ake Green, when the latter sermonized snarkily on homosexuality, which Green likened to "an abnormal, horrible cancerous tumor in the body of society," and called homosexuals "perverts, whose sexual drive the Devil used as his strongest weapon against God," finally concluding that "a person cannot be a Christian and a homosexual at the same time." (Don't tell Troy Perry and his Metropolitan Community Church congregations!) Oh, the Parsley-Green animus is exacerbated by the fact that, in Green's words, "homosexuality is chosen, not inborn," in spite of scientific evidence showing exactly the opposite.
He used his pulpit to help Ohioans pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and woman, and likened same-sex educational materials to racism. (Huh? That one escapes even me.)
He believes that Planned Parenthood commits genocide against African-Americans because it helps them arrange abortions.
He supported John Roberts for the Supreme Court.
He's said that Islam is a "false religion" and that "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing [it] destroyed." (Gee, Rod, I hope you don't tell all those Arab-speaking monarchies we've armed to the hilt!)
He's a card carrying member of the dominionists, who are as dangerous as jihadists in their misguided belief in a Neo-Calvinist eschatology: the Final Battle will end Planet Earth as we know it; after all, the Bubble tells us it will happen in the Holy Land and Russia will be a major player. (This perhaps explains the dominionists' slow reluctance to admit there's anything such as global warming; since everything is written and the elect have nothing to worry about, do nothing to turn the tide. This is the same dangerous propaganda Tim LeHaye and Cronies have been peddling as science fiction for Christers. One wee problem: when you treat things as foregone conclusions, you can justify anything to bring them about, including suicide bombings abroad and attacks on democratic ideals at home. It turns one fallacy these morons are famous for -- post hoc, ergo propter hoc -- on its head, inviting an effect to produce its cause.)

Parsley's tax-exempt status has been called into question, in part for crossing the line between religion and politics, which is a Constitutional concept Rev. Parsley would not understand.

Sen. Grassley, DO YOUR DUTY!)

JOHN McBUSH! I call on you to denounce Rev. Parsley and his rantings as those of a Dangerous Lunatic!

CALLING ON ALL MEDIA: DEMAND THAT JOHN McBUSH DENOUNCE HAGEE AND PARSLEY!!!

Crooks, Liars, and Why the Dems May be in Trouble

2008-05-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Crooks and Liars (url: crooksandliars.com) is a favorite blogging/comment site. Its liberal-leftist orientation provides me a perfect home for my thoughts. The items posted daily (and replaced by breaking eventualities) cover politics in a way Joseph Pulitzer never fantasized about. Right now, they appear to be partial to Obama. A listing in their Sunday Talking Heads schedule: "NBC’s 'Meet the Press' - Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; McAuliffe," seemed to me a bit partisan until I realized John Amato and crew had identified the chairman of the Clinton campaign in an earlier listing. I realized: these guys are on top of their game.

Ruster asked McAuliffe why Hillary was running such a negative campaign, shocking party bigwigs and GOPS alike. Why, for example, one should not conclude Hillary has lost her marbles: caught on a reporter's mic and groggy from stumping, she pronounced what the statistics and exit poll interviews were showing (and, duh!) what everyone already knew: that African-Americans are going for Obama; working class whites, for Clinton.

So why is everybody so shocked -- I say, SHOCKED! -- that Hillary was telling the truth? Some of her supporters -- I, myself, included -- think she has gone to unfortunate extremes to win and that by now she should have seen the handwriting on the wall. But I'll tell you one thing, that woman is one hell of a presidential candidate! I am as proud of her run as I am weary of her sometimes unsavory tactics. Barack isn't going to ask her to join his ticket -- he'd do well to pick a running mate from the ethnic and economic class forming Hillary's base: white, low-middle class, working men. They didn't much appreciate Obama's "bitter" remarks; they didn't like his bowling game; they don't drink Starbucks lattes, and they don't drive Volvos.

One is left with a gnawing fear one had at the beginning of the debates: do the GOPS want an African-American or a woman opposing their candidate of choice? Let me illustrate an element of the equation, first pointing out that I, the Great Jimminy, told anyone reading my Crooks and Liars comments, at least since last fall, that the GOP wants Obama on the ticket. That impression only strengthened my convictions as the Hillary-Barack slugfest really got going.

My reasoning was simple: The GOPS think that an African-American cannot be elected President. Let me offer at least anecdotal evidence as to why this is so. Remember, first, that Karl Rove is working for McBush, as an advisor. That guy might be a scum sucking pig, but he's a master player in the Machiavellian sense. He's also about as legitimate as a sociopathic lunatic bastard turning up at Mother's Day. These sleazoids will play every race card that comes their way; if it's too off the wall for the candidate, Rove McBush will see to it that it's sponsored by a rogue surrogate group over which they have no control. It's Patriotic Christians of America (PCA) vs. "the guy who listens to Rev. Wright."

My friend Rebecca is a 70-something liberal. She is a Hillary supporter. I asked her why she didn't support Obama and she used the usual anti-Barack talking points (lack of experience and lacking in substance are a couple) in taking the position that the Dems have but one candidate and she doesn't hail from Chicago. Now that the primary campaign is beginning to look like a slight Obama victory -- far short of a mandate -- I wanted to know if Becky had changed her position. That is, will she at least support Obama or would she vote for McSame?

"I'll stay home," she said.

W. C. Fields, Where Are You Now That We Need You?

2008-03-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

One of the more famous sayings of the late vaudeville and movie comedian W. C. Fields had it that "anyone who hates children and dogs can't be all bad." A concomitant, to my way of thinking, might be, "anyone who uses children or dogs in TV commercials can't be any good."

Commercials featuring children and dogs for infant formula, diapers, and dog food are OK: they don't exploit children and dogs except insofar as their use of them is to sell the very product they're hawking. This type of commercial is almost exclusively limited to a nationwide audience and pays for programming on the broadcast and cable networks. It is local advertising that exploits children and dogs to sell products having little or nothing to do with the goods or services they're selling. This is odious -- shameless exploitation.

Take our local mattress retailer, who calls his business "Chubby's Mattress Company." A chubby little man himself, the owner is shown sitting next to a bed, holding a medium-sized shaggy dog in his lap. That's Chubby. (The owner has also been shown snoozing on one of his mattresses, and the dog has, too.)

I've been tempted to drop by his store and ask if I can see Chubby. More than likely, the pet is at home where, no doubt, the owner beats him regularly, feeds him 25-cent canned dog food, and never lets him in the house. When the salespersons tells me that Chubby is not there, I will go back to my office and and prepare a petition for deceptive trade lawsuit; after all, the TV ads imply that I will get to see Chubby if I stop by the mattress store. Lest you wonder if such a suit might be "frivolous," asking, for example, "How have you been damaged?" I respond: "Like George W. Bush, are you totally ignorant about the cost of gasoline?"

The same could be said of a local automobile tire dealer, Delta. The owner himself started out appearing as a child on his dad's TV ads. Now grown up and a father himself, he regularly holds up his 3- or 4-year-old son, a cute little blond boy, to hype "lowest tire prices in town." I used to enjoy this guy's commercials, but now that he's selling his son on TV, I can't bear to watch them. And that is precisely what he's up to: selling his son. If you have a good product or services, you shouldn't have to rely on cutesy pets and offspring to sell what you're offering. It cheapens the product or services, and it prostitutes dogs and children.

I wouldn't trade with this mattress store or tire outlet if they were the last such establishment in town. I'd drive 140 miles north to the next large city where, hopefully, they eschew use of small beings to sell merchandise. Oh, by the way, there is another mattress store in town that features the son of the owner, directly competing with Chubby's dog. As ours is a South Texas city with a disproportionately Hispanic population ("Anglos" being in the minority), the commercial itself is in English; but when it ends, a small boys beams, saying, "Donde su compra con mucho gusto!" I'd rather shop elsewhere, thank you.

The Face on John McCain's Door Knocker

2008-02-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Ronnie was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial in Simi Valley was signed by representatives, senators, and supreme court justices. McCain himself signed it: and McCain's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Ronnie was dead as a door-nail.

And so it was that McCain was greatly surprised to see the face of Ronnie on the door-knocker of his Phoenix residence one Christmas eve, coming home from a round of stumping, including ingestion of the customarily inedible stump food. He muttered "Bah! Humbug!" at seeing Ronnie's visage on the door-knocker, attributing it as he did to something he'd eaten, a bit of gristle perhaps, in stump food mystery meat.

But upon going up to bed (Cindy Lou was away), McCain was startled by the sound of clanking metal and a heavy banging at his boudoir door and more startled still when the door was opened by someone or something that looked like -- no, it couldn't be -- Ronnie! Disbelieving his eyes, McCain again protested: "Humbug I say!" and reiterated aloud his hunch that the phantasm was caused by indigestion. "You may be an undigested bit of fajita I had at Hispanics for John McCain, or a crumb of chitlin's from the rally of African-American Republicans.

At this, the ghostly specter before him expressed disagreement with this conclusion by rattling a heavy chain wrapped 'round his body, a chain with life-sized bracelet "charms" attached. These included AK-47's, large tape-wrapped packs of Colombian cocaine, and VHS cassettes of Senate testimony pertaining to the Iran-Contra affair. When McCain inquired of Ronnie why he bore such burdens even in death, Ronnie replied almost angrily: "This is the chain I forged in life...." and then, he warned: "You will be haunted by Three Spirits. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls One, the second the next night at the same time, and the third the following night just past twelve," and with that, the spirit floated out the window.

McCain went to bed and, sure enough, at the stroke of one, the curtains of his bed were drawn back by a spirit. McCain squinted, thinking the figure before him bore a resemblance to someone he knew (or knew of); yes, it was the nose: long, with an odd upward curve at the end -- and the lips and chin which, despite being closely shaved, looked like they had a perpetual five o'clock shadow and glistened with tiny beads of perspiration. The spirit announced: "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Long past?" McCain asked.

"No. Your past." The spirit bade McCain to touch his robe and, with that, the two of them floated away to the senator's childhood in the Panama Canal Zone (which would, years later, be bombed mercilessly by a GOP president using capture of Noriega as an excuse)...."I see a student playboy at the Naval Academy, graduating last in his class..." Fades and dissolves to other high points in McCain's life, such as dissing America on threat of torture by his Vietcong captors (and, later, relenting on demands that the U.S. cease torturing suspected terrorists at an American military installation in another Latin American country, betraying the very ideals he claimed to stand for, the better to tow the party line and, perhaps, pass muster with the party's neocons).

The spirit went on: "I see a young senator interfering with the orderly administration of justice to help out a campaign contributor and crony named Keating...." And on: "I see a tireless advocate for the tobacco industry though he knows cigarettes cause cancer and that when Americans wake up to the fact that the industry regards them as 'nicotine delivery devices,' the multinationals will start hooking Asians and Africans on them...." And on: "I see a fat-faced, double-chinned man doing a hatchet job on a Dem candidate for president and after giving lip service to the notion that it's dirty tricks, the now-older senator lets it happen for the good of the party...."

"I see a skin cancer patient enjoying the benefits of free medical treatment as a senatorial perk but doing nothing to aid millions of Americans who can't afford health insurance...." By now, McCain was feeling a bit guilty; however, hidebound hack that he was, he smirked , but it was a nervous smirk. After all, one cannot be too careful around ghosts. "Leave me!" he asked the spirit. "Take me back! Show me no more!"

The second spirit arrived on time -- at the stroke of one the following day. It was ensconced upon a sort of throne and surrounded by all manner of cakes and ale, succulent fruit and Christmas fare: a turkey and all the trimmin's as well as a huge horn of plenty with rich candies and nutmeats spilling from it. The spirit sat atop all this, a jolly giant bidding McCain: "Come in! and know me better, man!...I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me!...Touch my robe!"

They were now transported to New Orleans, to a house in the lower Ninth Ward. A family is having a Christmas dinner of canned Perdue chicken (processed by illegal aliens), dressing made of last week's cornbread, and some hand-out peas from the Food Bank. The family, squatting, has no roof overhead as the woodframe house has been marked for demolition. The youngest male child, Li'l Tim, has a severe cough from drafts (makeshift tarps for windows, odd bits of shredded plywood for a ceiling). The father says, "A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!," to which the family echoes, and Li'l Tim, last of all, says: "God bless us every one!"

"Spirit," McCain inquires, "tell me if Li'l Tim will live."

"I see a vacant seat in the poor corner. If these shadows remain unaltered by FEMA and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the child will die."

The last of the spirits arrived exactly on time, but he was the most frightening apparition of all: a phantom in black whose cowl concealed his face. His presence filled McCain with a solemn dread. He tried to speak to the spirit, but it merely motioned him onward, ignoring his question, "Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?" Now, they were in the U. S. Senate during a short recess. A Dem was talking to a GOP, saying, "He had a nasty temper didn't he?" To which the GOP answered: "Beastly! When that man got in your face, his facial veins bulged, he turned red as a beet, and you could almost see smoke coming out his ears and nostrils."

The phantom took McCain to the house in Phoenix where Cindy Lou was weeping in a room adjacent to the study. There, an auctioneer was selling off McCain's personal effects. The ghost then ushered McCain to the National Cemetery at Arlington, where it pointed a finger at a particular gravestone. McCain said, "Before I draw nearer to that stone, answer me one question; are these the shadows of things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?" Still, the phantom pointed to the gravestone, which read:

JOHN SIDNEY McCAIN III (August 29, 1936 - November 3, 2008)

"Spirit!" McCain said, trembling, "why show me this if I am beyond hope? No, Spirit! Oh, no, no! Spirit, hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Your nature intercedes for me and pities me. I promise to quit pandering to the fanatical religious right, currying the favor of the neocons at CPAC. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life! I will honor Christmas in my heart. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

McCain thought he had grasped the phantom's robe, but he soon enough realized it was his bed curtains. He was awake and heard the sound of cathedral bells. He went to the window and inquired of a small boy passing in the street, "What day is this?" to which the puzzled boy answered, "Today? Why, it's Christmas day!"

After dancing and prancing about the room, giggling like a schoolgirl, he went downstairs, raised his undocumented Salvidorian domestic's salary from $1.50 an hour to $2.25, and, calling the broker of his blind trust, ordered him to sell all of his stock in Perdue Farms. And, with that, John McCain let go a self-satisfied sigh. He thought, at least it was a start.

Moments later, though, he said, again, "Bah, humbug!" for now he was certain the spirits had been nothing but a bit of gristle from stump food. He called his broker back and said to cancel the Purdue Farms sell order.

Why Brecht & Weill Matter More Than Ever

2007-12-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

I have an erstwhile friend from college days (the 1960's) who insists that the early, socially-conscious works of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) are "irrelevant," and that all of Brecht's later plays were somehow diminished in stature by the end of the Cold War, the demise of Communism as we knew it, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I say "erstwhile friend" since I ceased all communication with this person about six months ago. My late mother once told me, "In mixed company, avoid all discussions involving three subjects: sex, politics, and religion." I later learned that there was an exception to that rule. One may discuss such things freely and openly with friends; in fact, one cannot truly count as a friend anyone who so completely disagrees with you on matters sexual, political, and religious that they take issue with your every pronouncement on the matters.

This erstwhile friend -- let's call him Tom -- was a person I looked up to in my undergraduate years in college. He was a year ahead of me and well-read, and I mistook his opinionated loquatiousness for erudition. But, then, to me he was erudite. Not only had I come as a freshman to a buy-your-degree "play" university in North Texas from a small city on the Gulf Coast almost 400 miles south, I virtually threw away my three years in high school in favor of playing class clown. (In retrospect, I think I had A.D.D., but now that we know a lot more about the drugs used to treat it at the time, I am glad that some wise synapse in my mother's brain told her to avoid such things as Ritalin, which might have made me "behave.")

Tom had superior knowledge of the very things that interested me most: film, theatre, literature, and the performing arts. But I soon enough learned that these were the only intellectual pursuits we had in common, for we were, politically, diametrically opposite. He was a Goldwater Republican and I was a Kennedy liberal. Sex and religion did not at the time enter into our discourse. Only later in life would those subjects rear their heads and become for me insurmountable obstacles to maintaining a friendship. To make a long story short, it was Tom's politics that dictated his feelings about Brecht and Weill, politics that seemed to me to have degenerated from Goldwater's libertarian, states' rights brand of conservatism to what I can only describe as the crypto-fascist wingnutiness of the neo-cons.

As the recent PBS broadcast of the L. A. Opera production of Aufsteig und Fall der Standt Mahagonny demonstrated, Brecht and Weill are alive and well in a "City of Nets" near you. Productions of the opera are relatively rare, so it's odd that 2007 saw not one but two of them. One was mounted at the Charleston Spoleto festival (founded in honor of Carlo Menotti); the other, recorded for PBS, at Los Angeles. Reviewing the Spoleto version, opera critic Fernando Rivas wrote in the Charleston City Paper that Mahagonny was a "Marxist scream of defiance against capitalism" and wondered why this particular work had turned up at a music festival that 'is in so many ways the product of a solidly capitalist system."

Rivas then went on to speculate that the schisms between the haves and have-nots that were always at the heart of the Brech-Weill collaborations were possibly prophetic. He asks, "why does that final scene of Armageddon [in Mahagonny] when people unhappy with Mahagonny carry protest signs and kill each other seem so...contemporary?" Then, Rivas asks, "Is it possible that Brecht's larger message, not about socialism and capitalism, but about humanity's inability to resolve conflict and its inability to cope with its own fears and violent appetites is still relevant?"

He also wonders why the subplot of a "hurricane barely missing a city" manages to "hit such a responsive chord" in a place like Charleston? Was the Spoleto audience recalling how our federal big brother mishandled the Katrina disaster even as the nation was bogged down in a preemptive invasion in Iraq? Apropos the invasion, ironically the first Gulf War was called "Desert Storm." Instead of claiming that 9/11 was God's wrath visited upon a wicked nation populated by homos and abortion doctors, perhaps the fundamentalist preachers should have speculated on a different cause: Iraq. But God forbid the fundamentalists should ever engage in arguments from post hoc, ergo propter hoc analysis of events. It would seem to me that if we hadn't been spending so much money in the Mideast, we might have had more resources to aid New Orleans. It is commonly known that many rescues in that city, post-Katrina, had to be called off due to a shortage of helicopters.

Brecht and Weill began their association during the Weimar Republic, a time that has come to be "synonymous with political instability, inflation, and decadence," as one Kurt Weill biographer, C. J. Schuler, has written. It might be observed that these same ills mark early 21st century America, especially if, by "political instability" one points to partisan deadlock in Congress, and by "inflation," the rising cost of all goods and services spurred on by oil selling at record prices, and by "decadence" the gross disparity between the middle class and the super rich. For all their troubles, the Nazi's blamed the Jews, while the Republican Party, in appeals to its base, blames homosexuals, illegal aliens, and pro-choicers. It is the use of fear itself that leads to the sort of insanity seen in the Third Reich, and fear has become the ruling politicians' weapon of choice. All we need now is a Beer Hall Putsch.

Schuler noted that the Reichstag Fire, blamed on Jews and Communists, "led to the suspension of civil liberties." Today, we have our "Patriot" Act -- just possibly the least patriotic legislation ever created and passed by Congress, given that it suspended many civil liberties, including that most important right: habeas corpus. Substitute "Islamic fascism" for Communism in almost any account of the transition from the Weimer Republic to the Third Reich and the parallels are easily seen.

My erstwhile friend Tom's contention that Brecht is "irrelevant" would seem to be based almost entirely on the notion that since Brecht was a Marxist, and since Communism collapsed with the Wall, the message of Brecht is either no longer necessary or meaningful in the context of today. I beg to differ. For one thing, equating Communism with Marxism is misguided if not downright silly. The English Catholic essayist, G. K. Chesterston observed that there was "nothing wrong with Christianity, it's just never been tried." Neither has Marxism been tried. After the death of Lenin and the assassination of Trotsky, the Stalinists and, later, the Maoists, made a mockery of Marxism by justification of all manner of evils, including pogroms that made the Nazi's look like amateurs, in defense of Communism's lifeblood.

As I am forever reminding the fabulously wealthy pastors of so called "Christian" superchurches, Jesus also said that the rich would no sooner enter the Kingdom of Heaven than a camel will pass through the eye of a needle. The early Christians were communists in the finest sense of the word: they held no property in private and shared all wealth, and especially food, clothing, and shelter, with their fellow Christians. Far too many Christians today, perhaps the greater majority, have not only forgotten what the founder of the faith stood for, they've made as much a mockery of his principles as Mao and Stalin did those of Marx.

The "Armageddon" critic Rivas discusses as forming the climax of the opera's second and final act, comes after a collage of set pieces involving the "decadence" of the Men of Mahagonny, consisting of drinking, eating, boxing, and fornicating. (It's not for nothing that Brecht and Weill, when reunited in America after escaping Nazi persecution, immediately collaborated anew on a "sung ballet," The Seven Deadly Sins. Isn't it strange that Brecht, an avowed Marxist, would be so obsessed with the Christian concept of "sin"?) Now, take each of the subjects of the Mahagonny set pieces and one does not have to think long and hard to see our modern parallels: widespread use of alcohol and recreational drugs; a nation with so large a population of obese gourmandizers the government has named it a national health problem; major sports figures convicted of staging dog fights, and sex, sex, sex all over TV, magazines, and DVD'S.

No, Brecht and Weill are just as relevant today as in the '30s. They serve as living reminders of the ultimate fate of those who allow themselves to be distracted by mundane, self-indulgent pursuits while their government is robbing them blind, taking them into evil wars, and stripping them of their liberties.

"Unforgivable": Mitch McComical

2007-08-31T17:07:00.000-07:00

Sen. Mitch McComical (R-Ky.) has weighed in on the Craig controversy, saying that what Sen. Larry Craig (R-Id.) did (solicitation of sex in an airport men's room) was "unforgivable." This comes from a Baptist, mind you. What always blows me away is how so many professed Christian people refuse to forgive their fellow man for what the Bible views as "sinful." Forget that if the prophet who gave the religion its name stood for anything it was forgiveness.

Of course, when he condemned his fellow legislator, Mitchie Boy may have had in mind the damage the Toilet Incident may have done to the GOP, which of course really was unforgivable. At least in McComical's eyes. Forget that Reb Yeshua said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." But then, Mitchie Pooh, having never committed a sin himself, no doubt believes that the stoning parable couldn't possibly apply to him.

To express belief in a religion and its moral principles, then behave in utter, complete opposition to them is even more hypocritical than Craig's voting for anti-gay measures then seeking gay sex in a john. Why do these twits insist on piling one hypocrisy on another?

Craig Flynted by Airport Security

2007-08-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

Great story in Roll Call (an online Beltway insider publication) about Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) being arrested by an airport security officer after the pol played footsies under a toilet partition, which the cop recognized as "a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct." Craig, in typical Republican fashion, flashed his senatorial I.D. in an attempt to escape arrest, saying, "What do you think of that?" The officer invited him to go quietly, as "I didn't want to make a scene."

I am reading Larry Flynt's Sex, Lies, and Politics, one of the funniest books I have come across in many years. In it, Flynt claims to have coined the word, "Flynted," a reference to his Clinton-era practice of paying informants for dirt on politicians who decry abortion, pornography, and same-sex marriage and attempt to pass Constitutional amendments against such things even as they patronize prostitutes, suck cock, and engage in various other hypocritical activities. The Craig incident is yet another example of why Flynt claims that hypocrisy is the norm in legislative circles -- that such two-faced conduct is the rule rather than the exception. As Flynt likes to say, "I'm accused of being a bottom feeder, which is true...but look what I find there."

And although Larry didn't have to pay a dime for the Craig "Flynting," he really should send a few bucks to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport police -- at least enough to pay for their annual Christmas party at the A. P. Operations Center, where Craig was led in handcuffs to be interrogated. That's where he flashed his senatorial credentials in a moment of patrician pride and arrogance. Such gestures have become commonplace in Republican ranks, but that party hardly has a monopoly on them. Craig's insistence that he only pled guilty to a lesser offense than he could have been convicted of in order to make the incident go away expeditiously and without bruhaha doesn't make the facts of the airport bust go away at all; if anything, his remarks only make things worse for him.

And what facts! As the TV pundits have all noted (save Fox Noise, which didn't even identify Craig as Republican!), the airport security offense report was both detailed and extensive. It has Craig standing in front of the plainclothes officer's stall, pacing in front of it, peeping into the crack between the door and the partition wall, then entering the stall next to it, where he not only played footsies, edging his oxford under the partition, but used his finger, under the partition, to signal he wanted sex. Later, when Roll Call outed him, Craig told a press conference his actions had been misinterpreted by the officer, that when he squats on the potty, he spreads his legs out, and that he was only reaching his hand neath the partition to recover a piece of paper he'd dropped. The cop noted that no piece of paper was found. He also said that all of Craig's movements were consistent with what he knew of men who are seeking sex.

So here is this conservative Republican senator from one of the most solid red states, a man who sings in a quartet with Sen. Trite Loot and ex-A.G. John Asscrap, who voted for the no gay marriage act, and became a vociferous defender of that euphemism of euphemisms, "family values," soliciting sex in a public toilet. For the secular liberals, Craig is a godsend (you should pardon the expression): a fine example of how "family values" = hypocrisy. Here is this hopelessly closeted tearoom queen blabbing to the media about how he only pled out because he didn't consult a lawyer (when, as everyone knows, any lawyer would have insisted he plead out), and saying -- with a straight (again, you should pardon the expression) face: "I am not gay."

Duh! Oh, really? Then why did you all but out yourself a few years back when congressional pages were going public with tales of wild parties featuring coke and cocksucking, hashish and homosex, marijuana and maricons? You must have anticipated that one of those pages would be naming names and that your own would be batted about. Conscience doth make confessors of us all. Come on, Larry, do the right thing. Tell the truth -- that you are a sneaky cocksucking faggot who doesn't have the guts to go public when caught with his foot loose.

Faggot? Yes, I know, a no-no. A politically incorrect epithet on the same order as "nigger" with reference to a person of color. But guess what? An African-American like Obama deserves to be called an "African-American." O. J. does not. O. J. is a nigger pure and simple. Larry Craig is not a bisexual (he only married immediately after the page scandal, and to a woman who already had children; it was a marriage of convenience if ever there was one). He lends support for the conclusion of Gore Vidal that "there are no bisexuals, there are only uncommited homosexuals." But Craig isn't even that. Craig is a faggot. Craig is a cocksucking homo queer. And the sooner he admits it to himself, the sooner he will be forgiven for his pecadillo in the pee room.

The fallout has been almost immediate and dramatic. Once the senatorial point-man for GOP presidential candidate Mitt ("Varmints") Romney, Craig was quietly removed from that role, and when the beady-eyed Mitt was asked for a comment on the airport incident, he said only, "I don't know the circumstances of his setting." No, no, no, Mitt! It's not the circumstances of Craig's "setting," it's the circumstances of his "sitting."

Now, no one wants to have anything to do with Craig. He has no friends "on either side of the aisle." He is anathema to straights, who shun him as a pansy, a fudge-packer, a queer. And gay people regard him as a closet queen, the worst epithet to those who are "out," either because they choose to be or because they are flamboyantly so. Craig's deep denial serves as an object lesson in proof of the old gay liberationist claim of the 60's, that Freudian projection and self-rejection are the hallmarks of "internalized homophobia" -- rejection of one's very essence, the end result of self-oppression, self denial, and a mindset bordering on schizophrenia. If ever one wondered why gays feel the need to declare their orientation, if ever gay rejection of the policy of "don't ask, don't tell" were clearer, Craig's story explains it all.

To those who would join the chorus proclaiming the efficacy of "family values," Craig's outing cries back the acronym of another 60's phenomenon, the union of prostitutes in San Francisco calling themselves "COYOTE": Come Off Your Tired Old Ethics.

Amen!

It Ain't a Surge!

2007-08-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know why everyone is calling the troop increase and Petraeus-led "new strategy" in Iraq a "surge." It ain't a surge, it's a splurge! And, like most splurges, it's a commitment we can ill afford. BRING THE TROOPS HOME N-O-W!!!

Scoots & Bill

2007-06-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

Political pundits are weighing in on the likelihood of Dubya pardoning Scoots Libby and, not unexpectedly, there is ample polarization and partisanship, conservatives taking the position that the charges were trumped up and that the prosecution was a farce, a show trial, while liberals point out that the much-talked-about Rule of Law requires punishment for Libby just as it requires punishment for Paris. (Perhaps it was more than just coincidence -- a synchronicity? -- that both of these people were brought before judges inclined to make them do the time for having done the crime.) As one TV pundit put it earlier in the day on one Sunday news and views program, it would seem the "height of hypocrisy" for the Neo Con crowd to lobby for Libby's release when that same, vociferous lot screamed for the head of Bill Clinton during Monicagate.

Taking the bait later in the day, on Fox's Chris Wallace program (examined more closely in an earlier blog of mine) was, again not unexpectedly, Bill Kristol, who condemned the trial of Scoots as a shameless and despicable spectacle, completely without merit. It's like saying, "We're all for the Rule of Law so long as it is only applied to 'Democrat' [sic] party people." Two-facedness never knew such outrages. Double standards have reached a new highpoint. Hypocrisy is alive and well on Fox 'News.' (In quotes because, as a "news organization," Fox is a joke.)

Now, wouldn't it be nice if Scoots was put in the same cell as Paris? He could tell her how to lie to the F.B.I. and a United States grand jury, and she could tell him how to bullshit a county sheriff into sending you home to your palacial 4,000 square foot mansion in Beverly Hills. But, hey, as the fall guy for his boss, Prick Cheney, and for the White House's eminence gris, K.R., Scoots will at least leave the slams to find a huge wad of Halliburton money on deposit for him in an offshore bank. John Dean had it right when he titled one of his books, Worse Than Watergate. It really is!

The Vicarious Life of an American Wife

2007-06-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

Boo hoo, Paris Hilton has to GO BACK TO JAIL! How silly of her to think her rich parents could bribe a county sheriff into letting her out for some feigned illness, as it's well known the only sickness she has is terminal boredom -- a malaise that, unfortunately, is spreading. After spending less than six days in the slammer in a cell with about 1/100th of the floor space of her two million dollar mansion, deprived of her swimming pool, wet bar, coke snorting room (it used to be a study), &c., &c., &c., she has decided she is better than anyone else and deserves to stay at home with an ankle brace.

There was just one wee problem. The publicity on which she thrives backfired on her, a torrent of abuse claiming she shouldn't be treated any different than anyone else, and after all, the judge who sentenced her to thirty days in jail for violation of conditions of probation for DUI, signed an order to that effect containing a line about home lockdowns being a no-no. Poor, poor Paris. Boo hoo.

The trouble with cunts like Ms. Hilton is that she forgets that this is a democratic country and nobody is supposed to be treated any differently than anybody else. Had the judge sentenced almost anyone else for probation violation, he probably would have given them 90 or even 180 days. She should consider herself lucky and take the medicine. You do the crime, you do the time. Reminds me of the hapless residential burglar who stood before the court on his third conviction. Sentenced to thirty years in prison, he said, "But, your honor, I can't do that much time!"

To which, the judge replied: "Do what you can, son."

Ms. Hilton may have a famous name and tons of money and celebrity status in a country that lives vicariously in the papparazi world of movie and TV stars, sports figures, and American Idols, but she's managed to forget the simple fact that when she deposits turds in the crapper, it stinks up the bathroom. This is clearly a woman who will do just about anything to get attention, even fuck on video, pretending it was just horrible, horrible I say, how those thieves made off with the production and sold it to the porno producers. It was a trick she'd learned from Tommy Lee and that other slut from Baywatch he porked on video. And, who knows, maybe Tommy learned it from Rob Lowe.

Although Ms. Hilton has had more than her 15 minutes of fame -- quite undeserved, since she hasn't a talented bone in her body and seemingly can't do anything but flash that mouth full of carefully cultivated, perfectly capped dentition, she apparently takes pride in being a poor little rich girl and a bad one at that. But she manages to forget something we all have to learn the hard way: in America, we are free to fuck up, but whatever we do has consequences. The consequences of drunk driving sometimes include incarceration. If you are lucky enough to get probation, don't drink or use dope and drive -- at least while you're still on probation. Everyone knows that!

Congressional Sleight of Hand

2007-05-13T01:31:00.000-07:00

The U. S. Postal Service (Postal Department until Reagan partially privatized it) almost with clockwork ups the price of an ounce of first class postage, almost always by two cents. The explanations given always sound suspicious, and the current increase, going into effect May 14, 2007, is no exception. It sees a 39-cent stamp increasing to 41 cents. (At least the increase is exactly the same as the previous one; I still have plenty of two-cent stamps and now have a use for them again.) The apologia this time concerns a vaguely-stated necessity of upgrading equipment or procedures to keep up with the competition.

But, all this stuff about the USPS charging more for stamps because it struggles to compete with rival free market services (UPS, Air Express, &c.) is a lot of hokem and bunk. By law, NO carrier BUT the Postal Service can move first class letter mail. The government has given them a monopoly on it. If the rival, private services are more efficient at parcel movement and other services, perhaps the USPS should simply bow out of the market entirely.

Each time they raise postal rates, the services remain the same. In fact, some wags claim that you can always tell when an increase in postage is coming by the way the services decline. Also, from time to time, they change the names of some services, e.g. "library materials rate" to "media mail," but they don't bring us mail on Sundays, in fact threatening perennially to drop Saturday deliveries altogether. They continue to under staff their counter service, causing long waiting lines and great consternation, although it is to be admitted that the clerks at least seem to have had some training in people skills.

And they still refuse to give us the benefit of the doubt when it comes to postage due, again causing consternation when, sometimes, mail is returned to sender for an additional penny or two. The consternation in this event can be extreme, as the postage-due recoil can cause charge-backs by banks, stiff late fees on unpaid bills, and emotional let-downs for things as simple as a missed birthday card. The USPS simply do not give value for the added costs of mailing.

Now, here is the Big Secret about the USPS: the additional stamp money doesn't all go to improvements in equipment, &c. A hefty hunk of it goes to their boss, the U.S. government. It is then spent in such stupid, misguided activities as building bridges across rivers to connect a few hundred persons on both sides of a river; funding studies to determine if the Wisconsin newt actually has the ability to alter its sex at will, and sending young men to die in colossally misguided misadventures in the Mideast. If the USPS were not the best mail service in the world (and, actually, one of the cheapest) the government might privatize first class letter mail, too. But, then, they wouldn't have all that extra revenue to fund their boondoggles.

The new "forever" stamp, which you can buy for a one-time price of 41-cents, and which you can use till Hell freezes over, is a silly idea. It may seem economically sound for some; after all, with these every-two-or-three-year increases of two to three cents, paying 41 cents when others are paying 43, 46, or 49, could bring to your face the kind of smug smile one gets when buying low and selling high in the stock market. "Ha! I told you so!" But, think about it, let's say you're a business person and mail at least 500 first class letters a year. That's going to cost you $205 for each year you figure you will remain in business.

You may die in a year or two. Or you may retire. Congress might throw in the towel and let UPS or some other carrier deliver first class letter mail, in which your cache of USPS forever stamps will be worthless. Assuming the 41-cent rate will be good for at least two years, perhaps you can wait until 2009 before buying the priceless franking. (Again, to borrow from stock market analogies, you might have, within the Postal Service, a tipster, aiding you in some insider trading.)

Then, again, you might do a bit more correspondence by fax or email. Come to think of it, these may put the USPS out of business. How will you get value for all your leftover forever stamps when the seller winds up in bankruptcy?

No, I think I will buy a roll of 41-centers at a time. Somehow I don't trust this forever stamp ploy.

"Jesus Don't Like Killin' No Matter What the Reason Is...."

2007-05-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

I just watched on DVD the docudrama, The Road to Guantanamo by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, which won mostly positive critical praise when released here theatrically. Essentially, it's the story of four young British-Pakistanis who head for the Mideast to attend a wedding only to be caught up in the Afghan War and wind up on troop transport planes bound for Cuba. It's a tale of almost unbelievable cruelty perpetrated by the very people who once claimed to cherish the noble and egalitarian ideals of democracy, but now, in the name of "security," practice the same evils attributed to the Nazi S.S. and other infamous despots throughout history.

I was reminded of a saying we had during the Vietnam Era, actually the title of a book by Edmund Snow Carpenter, a friend of Marshall McLuhan and teacher of anthropology at the University of Toronto and other academic venues. The title was: We Became What We Beheld. I am very much afraid that somewhere along the road to our becoming the world's greatest superpower, the U.S. became what it beheld, and as Guantanamo illustrated so perfectly well, what we beheld was tyrrany in the name of a better night's sleep. I know it is by now a cliche and that saying it invites accusations of traitorous betrayal, but I will repeat it anyway: We are the New Nazis.

What good is torture when it only produces lies and forced confessions not worth the breath that uttered them? There is a beautiful, telling documentary snippet in the Winterbottom-Whitecross movie -- a blend of TV news footage, reconstructed events, and interviews with the three young Islamic Brits who survived. It comes when the groundwork for the interrogation and imprisonment of hostages flown from Afghanistan to Gitmo is being laid and the then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is heard to remark that the captor-interrogators (first the Marines, then the FBI and CIA) would be "following the Geneva Conventions...for the most part...."

I am afraid Rummy now belongs to that select group of Americans who cannot safely travel outside the United States due to the ever-growing membership ranks of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. (No wonder the U.S. has denounced the World Court and refused to participate in its doings.) Like Nixon's architect of war, Henry Kissenger, Rumsfeld risks being snatched on the streets of one member nation or another and taken, Milosevich-like, before the Tribunal.

If I had any doubt that what happened at Guantanamo violated the Geneva accords if not to the letter, then certainly in spirit, The Road to Guantanamo removed any veil of doubt that remained. Worse, the later Iraqi misadventure, an unprovoked escalation of hostilities against both guilty and innocent Iraqis at Abu Graib saw wholesale flouting of the accords. We have indeed become what we beheld.

Winterbottom and Whitecross's movie ends with the surviving Islamic Brits being flown home, eventually joining their friends in Pakistan for the long-planned wedding. But all three men tell the camera they've been permanently changed. Actually, it is amazing they remained sane, much less capable of going on with their lives. I am afraid it just won't do for our leaders and our national security people to perpetuate a wicked twist on the old saying that it is better to set one guilty man free to protect all who remain innocent. The modus operandi at Guantanamo turned this notion on its head, insisting as it did on imprisonment and psychological torture of many innocents in often vain hopes of sussing out one or two members of bin Ladin's al Qaida.

There was a bit of talk in the film about the differences between Islamic and American "values." That became the buzzword for the Neo-Cons who put George Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, the latter at least, it's now known, already with plans to invade Iraq. One is left to wonder, "Whose values?" The same glib value talk held sway at the recent MSNBC Republican "debate." The values they mean -- those of Romney, Tancredo, Huckabee, and Brownback -- are clearly Christer values, which are really bigot values, church-state union values, undemocratic values, hypocrite values. If this is not the case, why did John McCain denounce the two leading Christer fundamentalists months ago only to suck up to them more recently as the time came for his hat to go into the ring?

As I watched the DVD, I was reminded of another saying from the Vietnam Era. One of our finest folk singers, John Prine, a master of irony and the "protest" song, wrote and recorded a little ditty titled "Flag Decal," on the singer's brilliant debut album. The song is too long (not to mention copyright-covered) to repeat at length here, but fair usage might allow me to quote the refrain:

Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason is
And your flag decal won't get you
Into heaven any more.

You know, I kinda doubt Jesus would like torture, either. But you certainly see a lot of those yellow ribbon decals on vehicles these days. Do those drivers think their Iraq Era decals will get them past Saint Pete? It amuses me to see that some people, perhaps feeling guilty about the non-WMD, non-al Qaida link, non Saddam nuclear-capability revelations of late, have been trying to scratch their decals off...only to discover that the shitheads who marketed them forgot to make them car paint- friendly. Even if you manage to remove the decal, your paint job is ruined.

To those drivers who've left the the decals in place thinking they'll get them through the Pearly Gates...well, they've got another think coming.

Stewed Newt, Very Tasty With Mustard

2007-05-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

Poor Newtie (that's his mom's name for him, not mine). As the first GOP "debates" (the news channel's name for them, not mine) were winding down on MSNBC, Newtie was telling Sean Hannity on rival Fox News he thought it absurd to hold what amounted to a "joint press conference" (NOT a debate) some 20 months before the next president moves into the oval office. Newtie appeared to be turning a bit green. All of the attention was on announced candidates and there was Newtie, still with no hat in the ring, grumbling like a small child running home to blubber, "Nobody wants to play with ME!" Of course not, stupid. You're not running yet.

All the same, these introductory chit chats really do seem not only premature but calculatedly civil. Like the Dems before them, the announced GOP candidates avoided jibes at each other; unlike the Dems, none of them dared criticize the current occupant of the White House, AWOL from some village missing an idiot. To paraphrase an old Marlon Brando movie, the assembled hacks at the GOP "debate" "coulda been contenders," but they were too busy pretending that all is right with the world, that nothing in American is broken, so there's no use in talking about having anything fixed.

There was a decidedly Christer tone to the proceedings. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said that the reason politics and religion should mix is that "religion influences all of us. We all have values...." It is a perennial complaint of agnostics and atheists from Huxley to Harris (with Madalyn Murray O'Hair thrown in) that this observation carries an inherent argument that if one is not religious, one has no values. Although a fairly obvious fallacy, it's nevertheless one most TV audiences are not likely to grasp.

But that was the least of the logical fallacies. Indeed, one of the worst was delivered by the hands-down (if unofficial) winner of the debate, Fmr. Gov. Mitt Romney. Discussing his flip-flopping on abortion, Romney said that he was pro-choice until he got enmeshed in the controversy over stem cell research in his home state, Massachusetts. Stem cell research, he said, "was caused by Roe v. Wade"! I kid you not. He actually said it!

Of all the preposterous foreign policy positions of the night, one "took the cake": Rep. Tom Tancredo's insistence that sending troops into Iran was inevitable because Ahmadinejad believes in the return of the "Last Imam," who will bring about the Islamic equivalent of the Second Coming. (The 12th Imam of the Shiites, Ali ibn Muhammad Simmari, is sometimes referred to as the"Hidden Imam," and many believe he did not die but will return, Jesus-like, in the Shiite version of the Apocalypse.)

This religious-based "fear" of Iran is central to the beliefs of such ultra-fundamentalist groups as the Remnant Church, which you can google if you want to have nightmares. Many ultra-evangelical organizations are in a hurry to bring about World War III because, just as Jihadists see suicidal martyrdom as a swift trip to Paradise, so do the fundies view Armageddon as a promise of their just desserts. It's sickening to think that an Apocalyptic War to the death might be waged over differing eschatological beliefs. (Me, I kinda like living in the here and now, and I wish the Tancredos of this world would simply disappear , and take their goddamned fucking Rapture with them!)

In view of Tancredo's credo, it shouldn't be a bit surprising that when a reader of Politico.com sent in a question to Sen. John McCain asking if he believed in evolution, he hesitated noticeably before admitting that he did. But when the same inquiry was put to all the other candidates on the dais, three said no, that they did not believe in evolution. Naturally, one of them was Tancredo, but it surprised me that Fmr. Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas agreed; he's appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, hardly a seeming haven for creationists. (It did not surprise me at all that Brownback held up his hand. See my earlier blog about this lunatic.)

Until he back-tracked from social liberalism to quasi-conservatism in an obvious effort to curry the GOP right wing base, I had some hope that Rudy Giuliani (fmr. mayor, N.Y.C.) might be someone I could support, at least in the primaries. But his performance during the debates was pathetic. Not only did he join the phoney homage-payment to Ronald Reagan (I kept expecting someone to quip, "I knew Ronald Reagan, Governor, and you're no Ronald Reagan"), he delivered the most preposterous remark of the night when we finally negotiated release of hostages taken from our embassy in Tehran, their Iranian captors took one look into Reagan's eyes and released their hostages two minutes later.

Yeah, sure, but only after Lt.-Col. Oliver North's little White House basement operation put lies to Ronnie's promises to Americans that there would be "no arms for hostages." Is this the kind of president Giuliani will be? Will he conveniently forget important events and/or statements when the chips are down, as Scooter Libby learned from Reagan?

Worse, Giuliani came off as both slippery and ingnorant. He could not adequantely explain the historic differences between the Sunnis and the Shiites. After five years of Iraqi War, degenerated now into a sectarian battle of attrition, that Giuliani is so poorly versed in Islanic history shows a weakness in foreign policy issues that, increasingly, determine the course for America's future. We can't have another man who needs on-the-job training. Even Hillary would have the edge in that department.

The only candidate who emerged as someone I could cross party lines and votes for in the primary is Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a libertarian Republican whose views hark back in some ways to Goldwater. He is a fiscal conservative, which is good. But when it comes to government's involvement in quotidian, purely personal matters (e.g. abortion), he is a hand's-off individualist. It's a throw-away vote, of course, but worth it all the same.

The participants, for the record:

Fmr. Gov. James Gilmore (R.-Va.); Fmr. Mayor Rudy Giuliana (R.-N.Y.C.); Fmr. Gov. Mike Huckabee (R.-Ark.); Rep. Duncan Hunter (R.-Cal.); Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.); Rep. Ron Paul (R.-Tex.); Fmr. Gov. Mitt Romney (R.-Mass.); Rep. Tom Tancredo (R.-Col.), and Fmr. Gov. Tommy Thompson (R.-Wis.).

A Rat Deserting a Sinking Ship of State

2007-04-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Here comes another George (Tenet), hawking his book about the build-up to the second Iraqi war when he was C.I.A. director in the 9/11 era, giving V.P. Cheney his most famous quotation, a claim that the consensus of the intelligence community of the potential for a successful invasion was, to quote Tenet, "a slam dunk." Tenet now claims that the words were taken out of context. (Hey, you're dealing with a Bushite: what else is new?) He now claims that all available intelligence at the time showed that there were no WMD's, there was no Saddam-al Qaida link, there was no nuclear threat, and that sanctions were, to an extent, working. So why the War?

Making the rounds of the talk shows to promote his book, Tenet is armed to the teeth with self-serving, face-saving recollections that are belied by video clips showing his behavior at the time. For example, he claims he had grave misgivings about accepting the Medal of Freedom from the President in a ceremony full of pomp and circumstance, but there he is on the dais, shit-eating grin from ear to ear, gobbling up the moment as if it were fine buluga on those tiny pumpernickel rounds only served at the finest festivities. Worse, who can forget Colin Powell, Bush's dupe, trying to sell the United Nations General Assembly on Saddam's threat to world peace, Tenet sitting right behind him all the while?

No, George, it simply won't do. Instead of doing the right thing -- speaking out to let the American people know that Bush's propaganda campaign about Saddam was a huge lie -- you kept your mouth shut. You accepted the Medal of Freedom in the spirit in which it was given: to buy your silence until the nation had turned 2/3rds against the administration and overwhelmingly demanded bringing home the troops. You sat by and said nothing while 3,400 troops died, to say nothing of the 30,000 or so Iraqi citizens.

If the Christers are right about Hell, Mr. Tenet, there is a very special corner of it waiting for you. With any luck you will first be tried for war crimes. You and Rove and Cheney and, yes, Bush. Move over Milosevic. You have new rivals for infamy.

Tito and Hussein: A Useful Comparison

2007-04-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

The year I was born, Josip Broz became Marshal of the confederation of Balkan countries we used to refer to as Yugoslavia. Known as "Tito," he was a Croatian by birth, but during World War II, he joined the Serbian-dominated, communist-allied Partisans. They were opposed to the Quisling-style traitorous state Croatia had become under the nominally Catholic government of Fascists known as the Ustasha. (Led by a bloodthirsty maniac, Anton Pavelic, Croatia welcomed Nazi invaders and engaged in a pogrom against Serbians, Jews, and gypsies. Some say the genocide that ensued claimed upward of a million lives.) After the war, Tito rose to power, first as premier, then as president, and although he was a dedicated communist himself, his defiance of the U.S.S.R. led, eventually, to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform. (It's entirely possible that Tito, unlike some die hard card-carriers in the West, knew that Stalinist Russia had more in common with Nazi Germany than with any utopia envisioned by Marx and Lenin.)

Tito ruled the confederated Balkan states with an iron hand. He was hardly a tyrant, though. Under his leadership, faithful followers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam lived and worshiped side by side in peace and harmony. Although frequently critical of the United States, Tito kept the Soviets distracted and was an unexpected if only de facto ally during the Cold War. When Tito died in 1980, I knew Yugoslavia would disintegrate into chaos, and I was soon proved prescient. (In the 1970's, I had researched Serbo-Croatian relations extensively for a magazine article I did about a Croatian war criminal living in the U.S. with Justice Department complicity.) The rise of Serbian hegemony and subsequent "ethnic cleansing" (a euphemism for genocide) saw takeovers of Bosnia and Croatia, all-out warfare throughout most of the '80's, and the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands, including untold numbers of Muslims. Yet today Milosevic is all but forgotten. We must repeat history when we fail to learn from it.

In some ways, the Second Iraqi War is a repetition of history. For all his evil and anti-democratic ways, Saddam was the only thing between civil war by the two major factions in the Islamic faith: the Sunnis and the Shiites. Saddam is said to have copied his personal Qu'ran from his own blood, but despite the claims of some Neo Con hard liners, the Butcher of Baghdad was a non-sectarian thug whose only allegiance was to the ruling minority party in Iraq, the Baathists. He was shrewd enough to know that imposition of Shari'a on his "subjects" was inimical to the illusion of democracy he wished to perpetuate, and his wars against Iran and Kuwait were not waged for ideological differences but for territorial and economic ambitions.

Yet, so long as he was in power, Saddam protected the Sunni population of Iraq -- and, by extension, the majority of Islam -- from the Shiite revolutionary goals of the Iranians. The latter deeply trouble not only the Saudis but many other countries in the region. The toppling of his regime may have freed the Kurds to live in peace in Northern Iraq and to extend to the majority Shiites rights they'd envied in their Sunni masters, but it provoked a civil war in Iraq that endangers stability in all of the Mideast.

This is precisely what Osama bin Laden wanted, and it has resulted in the Balkanization of Iraq. The stupidity and hard-headedness of the Bush administration has them emulating Cold War East Germany and modern-day Israel in the construction of barriers and walls in hopes of separating the U.S. from Mexico and Sunni Baghdad from their Shiite neighbors. Although the administration labels this "part of the new strategy in Iraq," as if the last-ditch efforts of the "surge" had envisioned it all along, it was only instituted after martyrs blew up part of the legislature's meeting hall within the Green Zone. This sent a double signal to anyone paying attention: not only is the zone of security in Baghdad vulnerable to attack, the surge has only exacerbated the many problems in Iraq. Now-minority Sunnis have already said that they prefer risking Shiite militiamen to being "imprisoned" in their own city -- in a word, ghetto-ized.

After religiously watching a full week of one-hour documentaries on Jihadism on PBS, titled America at a Crossroads, I've come to the conclusion that democracy and Islam are mutually exclusive, which perhaps explains the passivity of Iraq under Saddam, just as it mirrors the fatalistic attitude of the Muslim faith: 'Mshallah is more resignation than blessing. One by one, the Jihadists interviewed said pretty much the same thing, that while democracy emphasizes the freedom of the individual, Islam emphasizes individual submission to Allah. This is at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, opposed to everything Western, everything "liberal" and democratic.

George Bush began lying to the American people long before the notorious "WMD" and "911-al Quaida" propaganda campaign. He lied during the televised debates when he told the electorate that he did not believe in "nation building." When the nuke and terrorist excuses were exposed, Bush switched to the very thing he had eschewed in the campaigning: imposing democracy on people who can't handle it.

What Bush and the Neo Cons don't seem capable of understanding is that Sen. Harry Reid is right: we really have lost the war in Iraq. Although Reid has backtracked in typical Demo fashion, his heart if not mind was in the right place; what he meant, I think, is that the loss is only military in nature. We may have lost the war, but we can still "win" the peace. The solution is entirely political in nature, and the Bush administration seems completely disinterested in finding a political solution. The Bushites now claim that the war in Iraq must be perpetuated to prevent Jihadists from fighting us on our own soil. This is a phoney line since, as intelligence experts already tell us, Jihadist cells including al Quaida and Hezbollah terrorists are already set up in the U.S., biding their time until a propitious time to strike.

What the Bush argument suggests is that the administration had ulterior motives for going to war in the first place. My wise older brother once told me, "America plans to deplete all the oil of foreign countries before we resume development of our own resources." Time has proved him right.

"My Name...ith Alberto Gonzales Gonzales Gonzales"

2007-04-16T17:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, I am using the old Bill Dana shtick as well as the B-movie stereotypical actor, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez to characterize the halfwit who currently occupies the office of Attorney-General. Events appear to occur "in unison" these days. Scheduled to go before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about the politicization of the Justice Department, Alberto (VO-5) was said to be having trouble answering questions posed by a mock hearing team when, approximately 24 hours prior to his testimony before Congress, a campus shoot-out in Virginia provided him with the perfect excuse to bow out of the engagement.

Not only that, but just a few days earlier, another case of politicization of public office occurred in North Carolina when that state's highest prosecutor announced that all charges would be dropped against a trio of Duke lacross students charged with the kidnapping and rape of a mentally-imbalanced, drug addicted, topless dancer, a woman who really does merit the description of a "nappy headed ho."

Mike Nifong, the D.A. and Alberto (VO-5) appear to have much in common. Nifong was seeking re-election as D.A. of his county when the Duke fraternity incident went down. Instead of thoroughly investigating the claims of the ho, Nifong used her for his political purposes, taking a tough-on-crime-no-matter-who-the-criminal stance in order to sway the electorate, which may have been thinking the other candidate offered the better of two necessary evils.

Not only did Nifong neglect to interview the alleged victim, he went forward with prosecutorial plans with exculpatory evidence withheld from defense counsel and nothing more to go on than a police report. Nifong also held many press conferences with liberal sprinklings of references to the arrests, characterizing the actually innocent schoolboys as "thugs," &c. , putting them through what one would describe as "a living hell." Alberto (VO-5) may successfully delay the inevitable for a week or two, but Nifong will not escape almost certain disbarment and lawsuits, either civil or criminal or both. Would that we could put Alberto (VO-5) to trial as well!

Horns of the (Bush) Dilemma

2007-04-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

A shooting rampage today at Virginia Tech saw a lone killer murder 30 students and wound some 21 others. Bush goes to the microphone for a press conference and tells the nation that we can take comfort in a "loving God." Quaere: If he exists and he's a "loving God," why does he allow such bad things to happen to good people. Balderdash and hocum! The current occupant of the White House is a dangerous lunatic, believing as he does in supernatural mumbo jumbo. This logical fallacy was thoroughly examined by J. L. Mackie in his essay in Mind, a University of Sydney journal (Vol. 64, No. 254, 1955), which you can read for yourself at: http://spot.colorado.edu/~kaufmad/courses/Mackie.pdf

Basically, what Mackie argued was that theism is logically (or internally) inconsistent. He posits that the premises that God is omnipotent, omniscent, and totally good and (or yet) evil (nevertheless) exists presents an affront to logic since the two are inconsistent and not capable of harmonization. A good analysis of Mackie's position is James Still's paper, "Argument Against God From Evil," found at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/evil.html

I won't delve into the matter so thoroughly as Still, but he says that Mackie's argument against God suggests two additional premises: (1) that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good being always eliminates evil as far as possible, and that (2) there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do. Again, if there is a God and He is omnipotent, he would have stopped the Korean student from murdering his fellow pupils at Virginia Tech. Each time I argue this position with a theologian, I am told that "God is omnipotent, but He gave Man the power of free will, and that explains the presence of evil."

Still examines this response in light of the writings of Alvin Plantinga, who argues that because we possess freedom of will, we are free to choose "morally significant actions," as Still puts it, and "[s]ome of us spoiled the party by freely choosing the evil rather than the good and these choices are the source of moral evil." Mackie would seem to counter by pointing out that God could just as easily "have chosen to create that one logically-possible world in which everyone who is created choose only the good." As you can see, Mackie, Plantinga, and Still have dived into the deep end of the pool.

So the thought remains: Who is this "loving God"? Due to health concerns, I have been confined to my home for about three weeks, with nothing to do but watch TV. I'd be wealthy if I had a dime for each time a TV reporter or pundit referred to what the Korean student did as "pure evil." The question keeps nagging me. If what he did was evil, why didn't George's "loving God" prevent his doing it?

POSTSCRIPT (04-18-07)

As the "manifesto" mailed to NBC by the Korean now shows, he suffered from paranoia and a persecution complex. What he did was objectively evil, but in his mind, "it was my only option." At that point he certainly fit the narrow definition of insanity in the legal sense, which allows a claim of innocent by reason of madness if it be shown that, because of mental illness or defect, he either did not know the difference between right and wrong, or he was incapable of conforming his behavior to what is required by the law. Pitiable, really.

After the Fox

2007-04-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

Fox News continues to amaze -- and to discombobulate. Murdoch's fabulous wealth allows extraordinarily thorough coverage of world events, but the slant is so heavily right-wing it gives laugh to the cable network's claims of being "fair and balanced," and its political pundit programs are so blatantly rightist as to merit the claim they're crypto-fascist (a term I first heard from the lips of Gore Vidal in his famous live debate with William F. Buckley at a national party convention). As anyone familiar with the books, I Hate Ann Coulter and The Republican Noise Machine, and the documentary film, Out-Foxed can attest, Fox opinion programming is like a poker game with the cards stacked in favor of Murdoch's fundie-fascist convictions.

One need not consult such studies to reach this conclusion. I did so after spending some time viewing and analyzing three shows: the weeknightly Hannity and Colmes, the Saturday evening Beltway Boys, and the Sunday evening Fox News Sunday, featuring Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, and a panel of "experts" made up of Brit Hume, Mara Liasson, William Kristol, and Juan Williams, respectively. David Brock's Noise Machine put the bee in my bonnet when the author suggested that the token "liberals" featured on such programs (Colmes, Kondracke, and Williams) are either dumb as posts, suckup sycophants, or less than fully palatable. That is, Colmes comes off as a myopic spoil-sport (the kind of guy Nixon V.P. Spiro Agnew once called "a pointy-headed intellectual"), while Kondracke simply sucks up to his more self-assured partner, and Williams is portrayed as a lone (and of color) dissenter pitted against three wise ones.

It's pathetic! If it weren't so transparent, one might actually swallow the "fair and balanced" bit. Sean Hannity's tack when interviewing anyone with centrist/liberal views is to interrupt them the moment they indicate having an opinion at odds with his extreme right wing philosophy, and the producer and director allow him much longer dialogues with such guests than they afford the mealy-mouthed Alan Colmes. The result is this: Colmes comes off as ineffectual and, by comparison, less worthy of belief. One is sometimes led to the conclusion that Hannity would defend Hitler if he were a 21st century Neo-Con. But he's not only blindly allied with the Right, he's completely humorless and so smug he reeks of self-righteousness.

Kondracke plays the Colmes role on Beltway Boys, only less effectively, he seems so enamoured of the more self-righteous Barnes. Although Kondracke once stuck his neck out for gay rights in one show, he almost always quickly backtracks and shifts position when he encounters opposing views from Barnes, who plays an avuncular mentor role. Kondracke is even more insipid than Colmes because he comes off as spineless, and the producer and director see to it that he is never allowed to stray too far from the Neo-Con point of view. Again, pathetic! The technique might be called "seeing to it that the liberal debates with half his mouth tied behind him."

It took me a while to figure out that the presentation of views on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday is much more devious than the simple three-against one lineup (actually four to one considering Wallace's own pro-Neo-Con stance). As Brock and others have noted, Juan Williams is racially handicapped. At the risk of sounding like a cracker bigot, I must say that Williams will be subjected to audience turn-off among those who cannot yet accept the fact that an African-American has sufficient intelligent to warrant hearing. Many viewers if not the whole of the Archie Bunker bunch, will look at the Wallace panel like a crime victim at a police lineup, so amusingly illustrated by an old cartoon familiar to defense attorneys, depicting a dog surveying a sextet of domestic animals: five other dogs and one cat. The victim dog, pointing at the miscreant cat says, "That's the one, officer! That's the one!"

Hume is just as intractably, blindly rightist as Hannity, and he sometimes gets so impatient with the lone liberal (Williams), he loses his cool, as when he lashed out against Rep. John Murtha with a torrent of blatantly ageist ejaculations, the Neo Con anti-elder equivalent of Don Imus's "nappy headed ho's." Mara Liasson might, considering her background at Public Radio, seem a balancing factor on the panel, someone to compliment Williams, but she appears to have been tainted by the attempted takeover of Public Broadcasting by Paul Gigot et al., or perhaps, being the only female on the panel, she suffers from some form of penis envy. In any case, the moment she departs from the right wing line, she is corrected by Kristol, and this nifty technique is a clue to the producer-director secret that I didn't quite grasp until a short time ago.

The modus operandi is deceptively simple. Wallace stacks the deck by going "down the row" from left to right, with Hume always in the first chair, Liasson in the second, Kristol in the third, and Williams last, sitting next to Wallace himself. The first question is almost always, if not always (I miss the show now and then) addressed to Hume, who is the Arch Crypto-Fascist of Fox. He gives his familiar extremist views, leaving an intimidated Liasson to more or less agree, Kristol to take a similar position (sometimes even more extreme), and Williams to half-heartedly disagree. When the next question is addressed to Liasson, she's caught between two extremists and she usually tows the line in answering, with, again, only Williams to voice moderate dissent. By the time a question is addressed to Williams, Brit takes over like a master inquisitor, backed up to an extent by Liasson, and a more sceptical Kristol. Watch it if you don't believe me.

Worse, when Williams says something even marginally liberal, the cameraman is told to cut to Hume, revealing a scowling, scoffing countenance, intermixed with two-shots of Kristol and Williams during the latter's comments. Pay particular attention to the expressions of Kristol at all times. If he is in agreement with someone, he smiles or dead-pans, but when Williams is talking, he smirks as if he thinks the statements unbelievable or unworthy of an intelligent person's consideration. His smirk outdoes that of Bush! (Kristol is also the worst-dressed of the lot. Some of his neckties look as if he bought them in 1960, a sure indication he's a thorough- going anal retentive, he's so tight with his shekels. But, hey, that's an ad hominem remark, isn't it?) It's the smirk that disgusts me.

These are but three of the Fox lineup of unfair and unbalanced bullshit pundit programs. I do not have time to analyze all of them, but I recommend highly the two books and documentary DVD mentioned above. After the Fox, give me Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC, or Real Time with Bill Maher. They don't even pretend to be fair and balanced, but at least they're honest about it.

"Jihadists and Bush: Common Ground Redux"

2007-04-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

A new documentary on PBS, *America at a Crossroads,* dealing with the origins of Jihadism and especially bin Laden and al Quaeda, features extensive interviews with Lawrence Wright and others, including the remarkably well-informed, extremely articulate former CIA bin Laden unit member Michael Scheuer. It is Scheuer who answers the question I asked in an earlier blog about the commonality of motive and/or unintended consequences of our misguided invasion of Iraq, confirming all my worst suspicions.

Scheuer says that by invading one of the Mideast's secular Islamic states, the U.S. played right into the hands of bin Laden and his Jihadist ideologues. From Zawahairi, bin Laden gleaned that the equivalent of a third world war "ranging from China to Iran to North Africa" would be brought about no later than 2020 c.e., and although our first taste of the bait in Afghanistan "did not go as bin Laden had expected," our misadventure in its southern neighbor -- first on bogus warnings of WMD'S, then on the excuse that without Saddam the world is a better place -- gave bin Laden exactly what he wanted.

In speeches even today, the Neo Cons, led by Cheney, continue to insist that by taking war to the terrorists, we trap terrorism in the lands they're known to occupy. This betrays blatant ignorance (or obfuscation) of the obvious fact that Saddam did not tolerate or encourage terrorists at any time, seeing them as potential enemies by proxy. Terrorists, Saddam believed, would only "bring on the heat." Apparently Cheney takes to heart his predecessor Goebels's advice that a lie told often enough will eventually be clothed as Truth. (Earlier, on one of the Sunday pundit shows, one of the architects of the War, Richard Perle, reiterated that even if the invasion was not carried out as well as hoped, it was worth it. There is a marvelous irony in the news that his "twin," Wolfie, has been exposed as a cronyist looter of the World Bank, apparently employing a personal secretary at a grossly inflated salary because it was the only way the ugly motherfucker could get laid!)

It's a myth that waging the Iraq War will keep terrorists at bay in Muslim nations. Scheuer -- who just happens to identify himself as "a Republican" -- says that it is just a matter of time before al Quaeda strikes again in the U.S. The worst development of all is the nativity of home-grown, al Quaeda-identified cells having no direct links to bin Laden but learning by his example. My prediction is that the next attack on our own soil will be in the nature of a dirty bomb, probably a nuclear device (or devices, set to go off simultaneously in several major cities) that release chemical agents or epidemic diseases into our waters or the air. It is just a matter of time. It may not have been ordered directly by al Quaeda, as was the 9/11 attack, but it will have that group's earmarks all the same. There are copycat cells all over the world.

The PBS documentary resumes next Sunday. It is a harrowing thing to see. It's to be hoped that the Right people watch it, but then they only place value of what they see and hear on Fox.

Nuthatch vs. Leahy re: Alberto VO-5

2007-04-01T08:46:00.000-07:00

On Meet the Press this morning, Senators Orin Nuthatch and Patrick Leahy debated the current flap about Attorney-General Alberto (VO-5) Gonzales. The subject of political-vs.-performance reasons for the firing of eight U. S. Attorneys came up, Nuthatch so defensive on the topic he almost seemed to go temporarily looney. It's hard to put spin on something as blatantly wrong. At one point, Nuthatch, claiming that none of the firings was politically motivated, insisted that one of the axed lawyers "was a law school professor who had no prosecutorial experience." I expected Leahy to respond with what I was thinking, but he didn't. Alberto VO-5 had -- and still has -- no prosecutorial experience. In fact, some wags point out hes's never tried a case!

I also expected Leahy to bring up the Dominici affair, but the program host had to do that. When Sen. Pete Dominici complained about one of the attorneys who wasn't doing what the senator wanted, Rove and VO-5 sent the lawyer packing. Nuthatch kept insisting that nothing illegal could be proved, and he reiterated the by-now wearisome GOP line, "The U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president." Yes, but the Justice Department is not supposed to be a political organization. I doubt VO-5 is long for this administration now that the Demo attack dogs are on the prowl. The only difference between Pelosi, Conyers, and Leahy and a pack of pit bulls is that sometimes the pit bulls turn loose.

She's Baaaaaaaaack

2007-03-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought it was all right to watch the pundit shows, they're now talking about the comeback of Ann Colder after months of relative obscurity and absence from the talk show scene. The news peg? Her speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., where, in closing remarks about Demo prexy candidate John Edwards, she quipped, "I was going to have a few comments about [him] but it turns out you have to go to rehab if you use the word, 'faggot,' so I -- so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

In its online report on the speech, *Editor & Publisher* noted that Colder has had similar concerns about the sexual orientation of Bill and Hillary as well as Al Gore. It's beginning to look like all the Colder detractors who claim she is "an obvious lesbian" just may be right. Didn't Freud, in discussing his theory of "projection," point out that people who go about claiming others are gay are really "projecting" their own homosexual orientation, albeit latent, onto others? I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Colder doesn't have a lesbian crush on Hillary. Interestingly, one of her copycats, Michelle Malkin -- the Dragon Lady herself -- dissed Colder for the remarks.

Also interesting is the fact that both Veep Cheney and candidate Rudy Giuliani also spoke at the CPAC event. The former has a lesbian daughter who is partnered and planning a family. The latter once shared a flat in Manhattan with a gay couple since he had nowhere else to stay and he's having to spin his pro-gay social liberal attitude to earn the vote of the crypto-fascist crowd, including CPAC. Seems hypocrisy knows no bounds.

I once advocated stalking Colder at her speeches the better to get close enough and at a moment of distraction to pelt her with cream pies. This won't do now, though, now that she has used the "F" word. I think it's time to put a contract out on her life.

Casus Belli by Counter-Terrorism

2007-01-14T09:03:00.000-08:00

How ironic that within 24 hours of George Bush's speech announcing a change of policy in Iraq (call the 20 thousand "new" troops what you will, a turnover or an escalation), coalition forces in that country bombed an Iranian consulate in the northeaster Iraqi city of Irbil, located quite close to Kurdish-held areas of the trouble-plagued nation. Although Condomliza Reece is certainly correct in her explanation that it has long been known that the Iranian regime has been supplying I.E.D.'s and other materiel to the Shiite militias and other warring Iraqis, why did Bush-Cheney time its first provocation of a casus belli for the day after the "surge" speech?

The Iranians have formally protested, but they're too cagey to be so easily provoked. (It is entirely possible that they believe pan-Muslim -- if not worldwide -- opinion will side with them, perhaps considering the attack as belated revenge for the taking of American hostages in the infamous Tehran embassy raid as the Shah went out and the Ayatollah Koumeni went in.) Historians have already drawn a parallel to the Peloponnesian War. But it should be remembered that a more modern, American incident reveals, at least in retrospect, how easily a casus belli can be whipped up by a nation bent on attacking another.

I speak of the "Tampico Incident," which the Woodrow Wilson regime utilized as an excuse to invade Mexico at Veracruz in order to overthrow a Sadam-like tyrant, Victoriano Huerta, becase Wilson thought it about time that "we teach the Mexcians to elect good men." Wilson demonstrated that if one is simply patient, an opportunity will eventually present itself to manipulate public opinion for support of a misguided (and unjustified) attack on another sovereign state.

The Bush-Wilson parallels are almost striking. On April 20, 1914, Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress in an attempt to obtain blanket approval of actions designed to restore American dignity in the eyes of the world. The papers had been full of the Tampico Incident. Reduced to the few facts contained in Wilson's speech, it boiled down to a misunderstanding borne of a visit to the Gulf port city of Tampico by a U.S. Naval ship, the Dolphin, which sent a long boat ashore at the Iturbide Bridge for supplies. Two sailors were forcibly removed from the boat and taken prisoner (though soon released) by Huerta's troops. At the time of the incident, the usurperous Huerta regime, dominant in southern Mexico, was engaged in a prolonged war with the Constitutionalist, rebel forces of the Division del Norte (led by Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza) and the southeastern followers of Emiliano Zapata. It was no secret that the U.S. supported the Constitutionalists, and it is quite possible that the Tampico troops thought the Dophin's landing a preliminary to international warfare.

In any case, the Huertistas apologized, but the "special ceremony" they conducted, complete with salute to the American flag, did not satisfy Wilson, who quoted Admiral Henry Mayo in his speech and made vague references to Tampico's not being an "isolated" episode but one of "a series of incidents" (shades of W.M.D. and a mythical al-Qaida-Saddam connection!). Wilson had imposed an arms embargo on munitions deliveries to Mexico and, again ironic, at precisely the time of the Tampico incident, a vessel bearing American-made arms, the Ipiranga, was under steam, bound for Veracruz. Interestingly enough, the arms of the Ipiranga had been shipped first to northern Europe, offloaded, then taken aboard another ship for Mexican delivery -- a ruse designed by U.S. multinationals to get around the embargo. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Wilson's response to a "Yea" vote from Congress was to invade Veracruz, with much resulting death to Mexican troops stationed there. Veracruz was the railhead for shipments of arms and ammunition to the capital (the Distrito Federal, i.e. Mexico City), and by seizing it, Wilson and his cabinet assumed they would curtail such importations. The ease with which such good intentions can pave the way to hell is clearly indicated by the fate of the Ipiranga munitions. Upon learning of the landing of the Marine Corps, the Ipiranga simply changed course, landed in Puerto Mexico (a.k.a. Coatzacoalcos, some 150 miles away, as the crow flies). There, the arms were offloaded without complications and sent overland to the capital. Huerta must have delighted in the success of the ruse, especially since he would soon be firing on the Constitutionalists -- supported by the U.S. -- with American-made weapons. No doubt he celebrated the occasion with his usual toast: brandy and marijuana.

Will Bush go before Congress, wrap himself in the flag as did his predecessor, and ask for an extention of hostilities, an expansion of the Mideast Conflict into Iran? Will the U.S. withdraw from Iraq and simultaneously march toward Tehran? Will U.S. Navy warships sail into the Straits of Hormuz in ever-increasing numbers and end up bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in the same manner as the Israelis in Iraq?

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the U.S. is looking for a casus belli to launch an attack on Iran, which is most likely just what their lunatic leader Ahmadinejad wishes. It is well known that a significant portion of Iranians dislike his leadership and long for the secularism and democcratic freedoms of the West. These people, mostly young, will be polarized by a U.S. attack, which, again, is just what the Iranian leadership hopes to bring about. Secretary Rice justifies attacks on Iranians in Iraq as "protection of American troops," but Iran (and perhaps the rest of the Islamic World) may regard it as provocateurism, a form of anti-terrorist terrorism.

The Wrong Rev. Phred is at it Again

2007-01-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

Our esteemed and beloved man of the cloth, the Rev. Fred Phelps, is in quite a quandary. Locally, the TV news people have announced that his Kansas church group, 100 strong, plans to picket the funeral of a local man killed in Iraq. They would, as in the past, hold up signs saying (I kid you NOT), "GOD LOVES I.E.D.'S." But the graveside picketing might not come to pass, since Fred also wants pickets a-plenty at the Gerald Ford funeral in Michigan. What's a fundamentalist geek to do?

You *do* remember Fred, don't you? The slavering twit who showed up at the funeral for Matthew Shepard after the latter's bashing in Laramie, Wyoming, where Felps's group held up placards claiming that "GOD HATES FAGS!" Actually, if there were a god, he or she would hate Fred Phelps, who, incidentally, has a rap sheet of his own and was disbarred from law practice. (Apparently, it is actually possible to be so nasty you're unfit to be an attorney!)

Interestingly, when, later this evening, CNN interviewed former Sect'y of Defense (under Clinton) William Cohen; following a news story that Gen. John Shallikashvilli has recommended doing away with "don't ask, don't tell," Wolf Blitzer asked what chance there is to get such a policy carted off to the dungheap of American history. And Cohen answered that some high-ranking military people are seriously considering it, if only because the all-volunteer army cannot afford to turn any qualified men and women away. (That's nice, we are not good enough to marry, but we are good enough to be blown to bits by I.E.D.'s in Baghdad.) Owning up to the fact that plenty of gays and lesbians already serve, silently, Cohen suggest that a re-thinking is much in order, and he's not unaware that European armies have never made any distinction between gay and straight troops and have had none of the problems with the integrated policy that are usually predicted here.

But he had a caveat. Cohen says that the decision to do it should come from military leaders, not politicians. If the matter is politicized, he points out, it will inevitably become a wedge issue, just as it did for Clinton. It can only be hoped that Rev. Phred Felps had a massive coronary when he heard this news, for if there is a hell, I am certain he is going to it.

Islamic Jihadists and George Bush: Common Ground?

2006-12-31T11:16:00.000-08:00

I somehow missed a New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright titled "The Master Plan." Subtitled, "For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning," the piece appeared in the September 11, 2006 issue of the magazine. In it, Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," basically says that Al Qaeda is defunct, or at least irrelevant, because even though the U.S. failed to capture bin Laden and even, for all practical purposes, abandoned its search, the type of indiscriminate slaughter espoused by Al Qaeda type groups is seen by jihadist ideologues as counter-productive. The jihadists have extended plans for action that cause less collateral damage and destroy the economy of the infidels.

One of these "new theorists," Abu Musab al-Suri, is certainly not "new" to Al Qaeda or bin Laden. In fact, the Syrian-born jihadist has been a member of the organization's "inner council," but he has deeply-held differences with Al Qaeda on how to proceed. He also has a shrewd take on U.S. policies and goals in the region. For example, he claims that the American attack on Afghanistan was, in Wright's words, "not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law" -- Shari'a. Since Suri published his sixteen hundred page book, Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistence, on the Internet in 2004, he already knew about the invasion of Iraq the previous year, so his views don't exactly qualify as prescience, but history has nevertheless born out their truth. In fact, one of the primary flaws even Americans found in the Bush Doctrine was its eagerness to abandon the search for bin Laden and withdraw significant numbers of American troops from Afghanistan for re-deployment in Iraq.

Wright further portrays Suri as viewing the invasion of Iraq as "pos[ing] a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics." In retrospect, this gives lie to the claims of Cheney and the rest of the neo-con team who justified the offensive incursion by claiming a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Our politicians should have known better. (Is Hillary Clinton so ignorant about what is going on in the Mideast, and especially among Islamic peoples? She must be. She voted for the war.)

Another of the jihadist ideologues is Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Palestinian sheikh, who mentored the bloodthirsty, cruel killer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but disagreed with him on such tactics as suicide bombings, like the one in Madrid, in which Zarqawi had a hand. Maqdisi condemned "vengeful acts which terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them" and advised jihadists to steer clear of Iraq. Jihadist involvement in the Iraqi civil war would, in Maqdisi's words, be an "inferno...by God, the biggest catastrophe." To which warning Zarqawi responded that he took orders only from God. And this, as Sam Harris and others have observed, just happens to be the same claim made by George Bush. In a world where everyone and his brother commits slaughter on orders from God, somebody's got to be lying.

Abu Bakr Naji, another jihadist theorist, actually draws sustenance from Western thinkers, including a Yale historian named Paul Kennedy. It seems that Naji has quoted Kennedy in an Al Qaeda website article based in part on the professor's book, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In this 1987 tome, Kennedy observed that imperial overreach leads to the downfall of empires. If the semi-literate Bush had read enough history, he might have revisited Tsar Nicholas and the conditions in imperial Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Nicholas's downfall -- indeed, the end of Tsarist Russia altogether -- was brought about by preemptive, offensive, and above all costly foreign incursions, first in the East, then in Europe. He bankrupted Russia and brought about mass starvation and political unrest, leading ultimately to his undoing. But, no, Bush knows nothing and doesn't want to learn anything either. Early on, commentators fretted over his "total lack of curiosity," but they scarcely could have anticipated Bush's "reading contest" with Karl Rove! When Bush announced he was reading Herman Hesse, I had to laugh. Reading is one thing. Understanding is something else.

Finally, there is Fouad Hussein, who met both Zarqawi and Maqdisi in a Jordanian prison, interviewed them extensively (I mean, what else is there to do?!), and ended up writing what Wright terms a book about Al Qaeda's "apocalyptic agenda." It is indeed scary. The key to Al Qaeda's strategy, Hussein says, is "dragging Iran into conflict with the United States," since
"[e]xtending the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces." In turn, in retaliation, Iran will likely cripple or destroy oil installations in the Persian Gulf, "which would cut off sixty percent of the world's oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies." That scenario seems right out of Doctor Strangelove.

But that's not all. It gets even more nightmarish. In fact, Al Qaeda almost seems to be maneuvering American foreign policy in the Mideast. Hussein predicts that the U.S. and Israel will first rid the region of Hezbollah, then go after Iran on one front and Syria on the other, Syria being "Iran's principal ally in the region...." It seems that Al Qaeda has long wanted to infiltrate Syria, so removal of the Assad regime, "a longtime goal of jihadis," will at long last put them in proximity to Israel. Knowing this, how can the Bush administration continue to ignore those who, like James A. Baker and the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, argue that it's time we involved both Syria and Iran in our discussions of the Iraqi situation. Both nations have vested interests in the outcome of the situation at hand. But, no, Bush stubbornly continues, ostrich-like, to stick his head in the ground and go his own way. He reminds me of the old laundry detergent ad depicting a young man whose mother keeps trying to help him wash his clothes. Frustrated, he says, "Mother! I'd rather do it myself!"

But wait, there's more! Attacks on the Mideastern petroleum industry will continue as the circle of confrontation will expand. Eventually, Al Qaeda will destroy our electronic infrastructure by hacking into government and banking websites and undermining our economy world-wide. By then, secular Arab governments will be under attack or already dismantled, Turkey dealt the same fate as Syria and the final conflict with Israel begun. Such plotting alarms European jihad-watchers; for example, the Dutch, following the jihadist assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, launched exhaustive studies of radical Islamist plans for world domination. One of the Dutch studies, titled "From Dawa to Jihad," classifies radical Islamics to include a "new generation" whose ideology "is alarmingly vague" but includes a facile division of the world into "sons of darkness" and "sons of light."

Jihadists also believe that a fight to the finish between these two groups "is the will of God." Now, the parallel to Bush is complete. Although he may not be a member of the same whacko fundamentalist sect taking the supposed eschatology of The Revelations of John quite literally (unless I am mistaken, former Rep. Tom DeLay belongs to the group), Bush nevertheless espouses a "born-again" or evangelical belief system. Just like this new generation of jihadists, such people believe in the inevitability of the Apocalypse. No matter that sane people think -- i.e. those who do not believe in Santa Claus, much less the elves -- such views are only held by loonies. Unfortunately, we're helpless to stop the march of the monotheists' self-fulfilling prophecies. As Sam Harris has argued in his insightful, brilliant The End of Faith, the world's monotheisms all have ulterior motives for bringing about The Final Conflict. To the Christers, it is the Rapture. To jihadists, it's virgins in Paradise.

Wright concludes with the scariest realization of all: "Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the works of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following...."

Oh? Really? How "inadvertently"?

The President's Analyst?

2006-12-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

One of the vogue definitions of insanity is repeatedly performing the same task and expecting a different result. George W. Bush needs a psychiatrist. He appears to be the only guy in the world who actually thinks "victory" is possible in Iraq. And he refuses to follow the sage advice of a non-partisan blue ribbon investigatory committee joining those who say that it is time to get out of Iraq. Bush appears to be getting truly desperate, employing an old Vietnam era trick designed to convince the skeptics that the war is winable: the body count.

Standing in front of the joint chiefs in the Pentagon press room, Bush announced that during a ten-week period from October, 2006, until the second week of December, some 5,900 enemy had been killed. He did not say who had killed them -- U.S. troops, Iraqi forces, Shiite militiamen, or Baghdad's pathetic police. This is critical in that without knowing the political alliances of those who died and who, exactly, pulled the trigger, there is no way for us to know whether the feckless Iraqi government played any part soever in the kill. As any trial attorney knows, sometimes a half truth is the worst form of lie.

Worse, body counts proved counterproductive in Vietnam. For one thing, as the My Lai massacre demonstrated, soldiers saddled with a phoney goal of wiping out just so many enemy troops are much more likely to shoot first and find out who's been killed later on. Routinely, collaterals are counted right along with the insurgents and al-Quaida types, just to satisfy the quota. The tendency of Vietnam officers to inflate the figures became almost legendary. Fibbing about the kill was the norm rather than the exception.

It also spawned perhaps the only levity to come from the Vietnam war, the spoofing of the military leadership by merry jesters who'd turn up at sit-in's, peace rallies, and even Renaissance Pleasure Faires. I personally met two of these Dadaist clowns: "Gen. Wastemoreland" and "General Hersheybar," after the commanding officer in Vietnam (Westmoreland) and the chief draft architect (Hershey), respectively. Dressed up like South American dictators bearing so many ribbons and medals you wondered how they walked, they would show up at any gathering where they could expect to boost the morale of the anti-war forces. At first, the latter were mostly dope-smoking longhairs, peaceniks. Later, though, especially after the Kent State "police riot" and, later still, Walter Cronkite's reports on what he'd seen overseas, the numbers included all manner of consciencious citizens. It was a genuine pleasure, and a great honor, to meet these generals poseurs.

But the falsifying of numbers is also redolent in a way of another, earlier ugly episode in our policitical history: the McCarthy era. Will Bush be telling the press tomorrow that, during the same period, "over 6,000 enemy were killed," and, in January, that during the same period "9,000 enemy were killed" -- during the same ten weeks? There's no sure way to "prove" that exactly 5,900 "enemy" were killed, nor do we know, from Bush, who is or is not an "enemy." In the kind of civil war going on now in Iraq, everyone would seem to be an "enemy" under a given set of circumstances.

As for Bush, I say the guy's a certifiable looney. I might advocate having him committed to a mental institution were I not more eager to see Congress bringing articles of impeachment. Among the grounds they might allege, I would certainly include the fact that he has failed to learn the lessons of history, for by such willful ignorance, Bush has condemned the American people to relive it.

Why?

2006-11-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

Am I missing something? Why are we still debating whether to "stay the course" or "cut and run"? Koffee Annan says that the U.S. cannot win in Iraq, nor can we leave. I say we should leave before we lose...more U.S. troops. We are clearly caught in the middle of a fight-to-the-finish religious civil war, Sunnis against Shias. We dare not arrest Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but he's using Irani money and materiel to wage war on the Sunnis. In short, he's nothing but a terrorist. The situation is even more absurd when one considers the helplessness (or refusal) of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to end Shia militia violence and/or arrest al-Sadr. Maliki knows that his fragile coalition government (which is really a Shiite government with a few Sunnis and Kurds around to pick up the crumbs) could never survive a crack-down on the Shia clergy. Dissolution of the coalition would be the price to pay for getting rid of al-Sadr. It's ridiculous for military leaders, pundits, and pols to go on saying the situation is not yet a civil war when every indication is otherwise. I understand that the Shias are now claiming that the Sunni insurgents are backed by the U.S., understandable given the background of Shia-U.S. relations, and especially the Shia majority of Iran. With that kind of mistrust rampant in the majority of Iraqis, the idea that our presence is still welcome there is just plain stupid. The notion that leaving now will admit defeat and weaken us world-wide is simply ridiculous. When all of the phony, data-mined, cherry-picked "justifications" for going into Iraq turned out to be bogus, the administration claimed that regime change was sufficient reason to invade. OK, been there, done that. It's only a short time now before Saddam is hung. Now, let's get the fuck out. Who gives a damn whether the Sunnis and Shias slaughter each other? I'd rather redeploy the troops to the Sudan and stop the "ethnic cleansing" (read: genocide) in Darfur than try to help a bunch of ragheads whose religion is repugnant to me and who show no signs of being deserving of anything akin to democracy. Saddam may have slaughtered a lot of Shias and Kurds, but at least he kept order. Like Mussolini, he kept the trains running on time.

P.S. The Real John McCain

2006-11-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

A while back, noting that Sen. John McCain made a commencement speech at Larry Faultwell's so-called "university," and pointing out that, earlier, he had denounced Faultwell for his crypto-Nazi sentiments, I suggested that this was an instance of McCain showing his true colors -- those of a colossal hypocrite. I kept wondering why no one -- at least, none of the pundits -- brought this to McCain's attention, confronting him on the flip-flop, which was so obviously made to curry favor in the ranks of the religious (and bigoted) right. When I wrote the blog, I had to cast about for a paraphrase of exactly how McCain had put it. He had linked Faultwell, Robber'sson, and one or two other Jesus freak loonies together and characterized their behavior as downright anti-American. This morning, however, McCain appeared on Meet the Press, and, finally, someone confronted his hypocritical turn, Tim Russert. Russert reminded us of what it was McCain had said about Faultwell &c. -- that they were "agents of intolerance." And he pointed out that McCain had flip-flopped when he made his appearance on stage with Faultwell. McCain's lame-ass answer: "He came by my office in Washington and wanted to make amends." Yeah, sure.

Rudeness & Punditure, or Why I Love to Hate Ann Colder

2006-07-09T07:14:00.000-07:00

Right off, I will confess that there is no way I can write a blog dealing with Ms. Ann Colder without injection of ad hominem remarks. The exposé of plagiarisms in her latest asinine attempt to be amusing at liberals' expense, Godless, has produced a bonanza of bellicose blogging designed to point up her foolishness and, at long last, her journalistic dishonesty. In response to an article about Colder's plagiarism, appearing online at the Raw Story site, a reader who signs on as "goingsnake," wrote (tongue obviously planted firmly in cheek), "[A]nn [C]oulter is a man, right? [O]r a transvestite or maybe an alien from like Jupiter. [H]e has a great [A]dam's apple, dog ugly though." My sentiments exactly! But I wouldn't denigrate drag queens or extraterrestrials by such a comparison. (In case you wish to read Raw Story's take on the Colder plagiarism flap, check it out: www.rawstory.com -- really informative stuff.)

Yes! Of course, it is possible for some of us to think Colder ugly and mannish. In fact, when she appeared on the cover of a national news magazine, sitting with boney legs splayed out to the bottom corners of the page, she looked like nothing so much as an anorexic transsexual (although I wouldn't want to denigrate those folks, either!). Part of my philosophy holds that beauty really is skin deep, which means that if you cannot admit that Ms. Colder is ugly as puke, you're probably a neocon ideologue who thinks George II is the Second Coming and, as Ms. Colder has actually suggested, all liberals should be sent to concentration camps and eventually exterminated. (Yeah, I know, she didn't say exactly that, except in so many other words, but I demand the right to fight fire with fire. As the primary tool most commonly used by right wing pundits is the Big Lie -- they got it from Joe Goebbels who knew that if you bullshit people long enough and often enough, they forget what was really true -- I demand the right, as a Flaming Liberal, to tell a few whoppers of my own.)

Initially, though, I confess. In all honesty, I think Colder is ugly as spit. No, not one of those mucusy little bits of expectorant, but a big gob of oyster-like, sidewalk goo you'd avoid stepping on even if it meant jumping into the street in front of a speeding truck. Ann is plug ugly. She's as putrid as poop. She tries, though. When she goes on the talk shows (fewer of them lately, I note), she keeps using her long falling wig as a prop, wiping it out of her eyes, the better to reveal what she obviously believes to be a sort of classic beauty: high cheekbones, a long rather than round face, puckered liptation, Revlon blush, Clairol mop, and so forth. (You didn't really think that was Colder's own hair, did you?! I'll even wager it was fellow right wing pundit Fucker Harlson who put her onto the wigmakers. I hear he's bald as a post.)

Her demeanor constantly reminds the viewer with any insight into fallacious argument and compassion for one's fellows that Colder is a Cunt. She has gotten to the point where, politician-like, she avoids answering difficult questions by mid-sentence changes of subject and silly little snappish swipes at her detractors designed to demean them by implying that they're not worthy of expressing an opinion about her, much less world affairs. Someone should strap her down to an "old sparky" chair (complete with wrist shackles), administer a hefty, mailine injection of LSD, and play a droning tape of "Sister Ray" with a new vocal track: Bill Clinton repeatedly barking: "Opinions are like assholes, Ann: everyone has one."

What astonished me was that after the bruhaha over her observation, in Godless, that the 9/11 widows of police and firemen were "harpies" meeting with Hilary for personal gain (and had been on the verge of dissolving their marriages before the Twin Towers attack), almost all, if not all, GOP and neocon ideologue talk show guests refused to condemn Colder for this latest instance of her insouciant evil mentation. They claimed that Colder was only speaking the truth, because the heroes' widows really had met with liberals. My Webster's defines "harpy" as a "relentless, greedy, or grasping person." My, my, Ann, this sounds more like YOU! YOU make your living by being a lying, vicious, perverted, total Cunt.

She actually pretends to relish going to college campuses to speak and being attacked, sometimes only by hissing and booing; other times, by attempts to paste her ugly mug with banana- or coconut cream pies. On the talk shows, she simply laughs off these incidents of "liberal" stupidity, but five will get you twenty she's had no end of hate letters, life-threatenign phone calls, and close shaves (oops, you should pardon the pun) involving a bit more than whipped cream or meringue in the face. In fact, I would be even more astonished to learn that the woman has no full-time bodyguards. After all, an assailant could break one of those skinny, ugly legs with the fingers and thumbs of one hand.

Hannibal Lecter, where are you now that we need you?

As for the plagiarism itself, the allegations surfaced in a New York Post piece by a plagiarism expert, John Barrie, who employed some sort of computer software to run checks on works suspect of, well, er, uh, borrowing from others. Called "iThenticate," the program can dig up instances of literary theft faster than a speeding bullet. As it happened, the software revealed that, among other things, Colder lifted verbatum "a list of adult stem cell treatments from a Right to Life website," says Ron Brynaert of Raw Story. Several other publications and many bloggersites jumped on the bandwagon and faster than Colder could pop a hormone pill (you didn't think those tits were real did you?), and now, Brynaert says, Colder's press syndication distributor, U.P.S. (a Rev. Son Hung Poon organization, it should be pointed out) promised to "look into" the charges.

Again, as Brynaert notes, Colder's publisher, Crown, responded to the allegations by claiming that, "as an experienced author and attorney, Ms. Colder knows when attribution is appropriate...." That's interesting. Since when did the populace put any faith in anything an attorney says? The old joke asks, "How do you know when an attorney is lying?" and the usual answer is: "when she's opening her mouth." As Rude One of http://rudepundit.blogsport.com/ observes, the claim of Colder's people that Godless has extensive endnotes is besides the point. "To say that her endnotes prove her innocence is not unlike saying that the guy next door went his whole life without killing anyone until he blew a brain gasket and went on a ten-state hobo-stabbing spree...." The endnotes take up 19 pages and include hundreds of attributions. Rude One points out that "The entire book has page after page of uncited material, no matter how much [Colder] actually cites stuff elsewhere." It's certainly ingenuous -- silly, really -- to claim that extensive footnotes prove lack of cribbing.

Colder's crew obviously believes that holding their ground in the current climate of neo-fascist aggrandizement and appeasement will soon put the boiling controversy on a cold back burner. They may be right. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole affair is that some bloggers, anti-Colder pundits, and news hounds appear to be missing a very important point. Not only does the crypto-fascist neocon far right wing religious bigot bunch spread filth and lies, they engage in endless hypocrisy. One does not need to be a Korzybski to uncover all of the semantic fallacies in a work by such as Colder, or to see that she is hardly above employment of double standards.

Take for example the following Colder rip-off from the Illinois Right to Life website. In the seventh chapter of her latest tome, Colder says that the "Church of Liberalism" devotes itself to a "war on science" that prompts liberals to lie about stem cell research, saying that "...the science...is working," when Colder-IRL know that it is not. She claims that the reason liberals perpetuate this lie is "to elevant [a] science that has produced nothing." Perhaps she has not heard the latest medical news about how stem cell applications promise victory over spinal cord injuries! But that inconsistency pales, too, upon consideration of the truly bogus junk science promulgated by Ronald Reagan and mythologized rhapsodically by the GOP and especially their military-industrial complex campaign contributors in the entire post-Reagan era -- the missile-thwarting technology nicknamed (probably faceciously, or so Fred Barnyard claims on The Beltway Boys) "Star Wars." For years now, this cabal has insisted that the technology works, although every non-lobbying scientist insists that Star Wars is only a ruse, an unworkable folly. The tests have been so fraught with failure that almost all the other TV pundits admit that the system could not be counted upon if and when Dim Dumb-Ill shoots off intercontinental bowel movements from North Korea. Even if he did have the ability to arm his ICBM's with nuclear or other mass-destructive warheads, our Star Wars technology could not stop Dim from turning the West Coast into toast. Whew! Glad I no longer live in L.A.!

I only hope that the boiling controversy over Colder's lies and larcenies does not overshadow discussion of her use of a common tool of the cabal: repeated insistence that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander -- or vice-versa. That is, it is OK for the Colders of this world to condemn one science as unworkable but ignore overwhelming evidence that a science they favor, despite its proven unworkability, is perfectly good and can justify the waste of a gazillion dollars.

When all is said and done, I still believe Colder is an ugly Cunt.(1)

(1) I apologize to all the ladies out there if they are offended by this word. It has ancient and honorable origins; in fact, it most likely has its etymological foundation in the worship of an Oriental Great Goddess "known as Cunti, or Kunda, the Yoni of the Universe," as George Ridley Scott says in his Phallic Worship. (For some interesting insight and comment, see http://blogmark.mg.co.za/index.php?q=node/4789.) I only refer to women as cunts when they're being shits or doing anything deserving of the epithet. I also refer to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a nigger. Honi soi qui mal y pense!

Dim and Diane: An Afterword

2006-07-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

The pace of geopolitical developments makes one giddy. The consensus of the political pundits, even those inclined to denigrate if not demonize Dubya, is that the only way out of the current crisis between Dim Dumb-Ill and the U.S. is for China to intervene. Unfortunately, China is disinclined, in part because North Korea is a trading partner, and in part, as was pointed out by right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, because the fall of Dim and his slavish subjects could lead to a mad dash of refugees into a country already vastly overpopulated. And before we accept the answer that "the U.S. is a trading partner, too," Sino-American relations should be a bit more closely examined.

To begin with, just exactly what can the U.S. use to persuade China into intervening, into putting pressure on its neighbor to the Southeast? Those who reply, "Why, a warning of trade sanctions, of course!" take the position that China needs the U.S. to function, to stay fully operative, but it's a two-way street; to mix metaphors, a double edged sworn. Initiation of trade sanctions cannot stay unilateral for long. I don't know about you, but the last time I was in Wal-Mart, about 70% of the goods had "Made in China" stamped on the stickers. Fact is, Wal-Mart has earned a rep for putting a lot of American manufacturers out of business because its purchase of Chinese goods keeps U.S. companies from being competitive. And if the Chinese can make acceptable products for less, perhaps their U.S. competition should fade into bankruptcy. Those of us who regularly shop at Wal-Mart know that the Chinese brands are not only acceptable, they're a whole lot cheaper.

It almost goes without saying, too, that the U.S. cannot stand a trade war with China for an even more important reason. China is a major financier of our trillion-dollar deficit, which means, in effect, that they're helping, indirectly, to finance the Iraqi War. Helping to finance the Iraqi War makes the Veep's "blind" trust Halliburton stock go up and increases the sales of Humvees. We've already seen what the yuan can do on the international oil market. China imports few commodities that other nations indifferent if not hostile to the U.S. cannot supply, mainly, machinery and equipment, plastics, iron, steel, and various chemicals. Don't look now, but they've been very chummy with their neighbor to the northeast can supply most if not all of those goods, and the Chinese have already become a major player in the oil game. In fact, it's safe to say that our $3.00-a-gallon petroleum got that expensive, in part, because of competition from the Chinese. China has the fourth-largest economy in the world.

My hunch is that the U.S. would utterly lose any trade war with China. It's like a Mafia loan-shark or bookie "calling in the chits." Beijing says to Shrub: "Fock you!, give us our money. NOW!" China votes against us in Security Council resolutions almost routinely. Take their reluctance to assist us with attempts to isolate Iran. Why would the Chinese want to alienate a twerp like Ahmadinezhad and his mullah puppetmasters when they're importing Irani oil and gas? (For that matter, Iran and North Korea are cosy trading partners, too. If only to diehard conspiracy buffs, it's beginning to look like these countries are set to lock the U.S. in a vise!)

Years ago, circa 1980, I saw Texas pickups driving around with an ironic -- and prophetic -- bumper sticker. At the time, the redneck nation was making a big whoop-de-do about how Yankee snobs were sucking up cowboy oil. The high cost of energy was planted firmly on the shoulders of Northeasterners, whose long, cold winters sent heating oil prices skyrocketing. The cowboy bumper sticker read, "Let's Turn Off Their Oil and Freeze 'Em All to Death!" Not only the silliest, most geocentric sentiment imaginable, but one certain to come back to roost and haunt the clods who made the boast since it failed to take into account that our energy problems are universal. They're every American's problem. I must be a diehard conspiracy buff myself because I believe that we invaded Iraq not only to guarantee its sale of cheap oil, but because we wanted to establish a foothold in the Mideast, nation-hopping, as it were, with Afghanistan giving us an initial staging area, leading to a jump into Iraq, then a move on Iran.

I don't think we should be as worried about the lack of full U.N. Security Council support for our position on North Korea as we should wake up to the fact that the leadership of most other nations is hardly so naive as to miss the implications of such bullying. The greatest failure of the administration of King George II is its inability to lie its way out of a wet paper bag. None -- let me repeat, NONE -- of the reasons Dubya has given us to justify the Iraqi invasion bears out factually or withstands the cold light of truth. It should not be necessary to, and I don't want to bore the reader with, the litany of justifications for the unprovoked attack. The neocons continue to perpetuate all of the myths -- from Saddam's harboring al-Qaida terrorists, to plans for going nuclear (as if the WMD controversy wasn't resolved two or three years ago!), but none of it will wash. It's all b.s. Right wing neocons really do look like Nazis when they practice ol' Joe Goebbels's favorite trick: telling a lie often enough people no longer remember the truth.

The fact of the matter is, once the world powers tire of U.S. bullying and big stick political machinations, they're bound to unite to smite us. In a certain sense, we have become the new Nazis. And if we aren't careful, the nations with oil will cut ours off and freeze US all to death.

Dim and Diane: The Odd Couple

2006-07-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

Now that the North Koreans have used the occasion of our nation's celebration of independence to rattle the sabres and fire off seven defective I.C.B.M.'s (intercontinental bowel movements), we witness strange bedfellows crawling out of the Murphy bed woodwork, as witness California Senator Diane Finegrind (D-Cal.), with her insistence that the U.S. should agree to direct talks with the representatives of North Korea's lunatic dictator Dim Dumb-Ill (S. -- for Stalinist -- Pyongyang). For once, I side with the opposing view of Dubya and the GOP, that only resumption of the six-nation talks exclusively represented by Pacific Rim and Russian diplomats, is acceptable, direct talks being a kind of reward for the posturing and provocations of Dim, carried out without question by his millions of blind, brainwashed followers, who think him a God ("Dear Leader").

Finegrind is an idiot and doesn't know her history. England and, to an extent, the U.S., tried to appease Adolf Hitler in the 1930's to the result that they did just what Dim Dumb-Ill has done to the six nations: violate their solemn word. The Germans invaded eastern Europe and the North Koreans, after promising to curtail uranium enrichment proceedings, simply racheted up the threat to obtain more concessions. Giving into Dim now is tantamount to throwing in the appeasement towel. Shrub, and his U.N. man, John Bolton, refuse to kowtow to Dim's demands, feeling that giving in to North Korea at this point would only encourage additional threats later on. Holding direct, bilateral talks at this point is rather like paying off a blackmailer. You can't be assured he won't come around again with new demands.

And although the U.S. leadership would like us to believe that it has the man- and firepower to keep on the negotiating table an armed attack on this "axis of evil," North Korea probably has the largest standing army in the world and could attack, say, Japan, or, more likely, South Korea, its prosperous peninsular neighbor, which would certainly draw us into an apocalyptic scenario. There is a relatively narrow window of advantage (if it can be called that): the interim between these failed missile tests and North Korea's actual ability to deliver nuclear warheads. Nevertheless, insisting that Dim and Crew deal only with the six powers in talks just makes sense. The most obvious reason is that South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, et al., are neighbors. They have the most to lose.

Since when does the U.S. respond to the threats of terrorists? We never caved in to the demands of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar al-Qaddafi, or Hafez al-Assad (unless you count the criminal activities of Lt.-Col. Oliver North's arms-for-hostages exchange as such), we have consistently given terrorist rulers the peeled banana. And if anyone doubts Dim Dumb-Ill's qualifications for the title of "terrorist," I recommend the www.slate.com article by Brendan I. Koerner, "What Kind of Terrorism Does North Korea Sponsor?" (Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.) He claims that the North Koreans (1) sold weapons to separatist groups, (2) did an arms deal with the Moto Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, (3) bombed a (South) Korean Air Lines flight, (4) attempted to assassinate a South Korean president, (5) killed of a South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok, and (6) gave comfort and shelter to exiled Japanese terrorist groups like the Communist League-Red Army Faction, and so forth.

Add to this the growing intelligence revealing how North Korea treats its own. Literally millions have died of starvation and forced labor in Dim's gulags. Some Dim apologists like to claim he's "crazy like a fox" and is actually a shrewd and savvy leader, but in my opinion, he's just plain nuts -- and I 'm not even taking into account his having a perennial bad hair day. We know that this nitwit had secret agents kidnap movie stars and film crews from places like China so that he could feed his ego by indulgence in a favorite pastime: motion pictures. (He boasts the biggest film library, presumably on VHS or DVD, but maybe in 35mm. prints, as he can afford them, anywhere in the world. He is said to be particularly partial to James Bond movies and such slasher fare as the Hallowe'en franchise.) And if we're to believe www.newsmax.com, Dimmy Boy drinks a lot, regularly injects himself with pain killers, and stages banquets with an "Entourage of Delight" -- disco dancers ordered to strip nude and provide a floorshow for his banquet guests. (Although the dictator allows his guests to "look," they are not permitted to touch the dancers, "for these are my children.")

The NewsMax story is based on a published account by the tyrant's personal chef of 13 years, a Japanese named Kenji Fujimoto, who claims that Dim indulges in such pricey delicacies as Iranian caviar and sips such expensive imported liquors as Johnny Walker scotch, noting that an estimated 2.8 million of his subjects starved during a single three-year famine. (Apparently, this claim has been authenticated by the BBC, which produced a documentary about Dim.) It seems that the North Korean military built up rice reserves on Dim's orders even as hordes of peasants were withering into skeletal non-existence.

The worst aspect of the situation is the notorious unpredictability of the man. No one knows what he will do next, or even what outrages he is capable of. But for a twit like Findgrind to suggest that we humor this fool in an attempt to resolve the "missile crisis" is misguided at best...and insane at worst.

Will the Real John McCain Please Stand Up?

2006-05-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to think that the reason McCain has been guarded in his criticism of the Bush administration is not just that he is towing the party line; it's that he's not that much different from Bush. Both of them are liars, phoneys, and hypocrites. During a speech some time ago, he virtually lambasted Pat Robber's Son and Jerry Faultwell as dangerous lunatics whose pronouncements were an affront to mainstream America. Now, he goes to Faultwell's "university" and gives a speech.

No wonder the New School commencement class hissed, boo'ed, and gave McCain their fannies. He doesn't stand for anything but the so-called principles Bush embraces. Meaning that there will be almost no change if McCain is elected. He, too, will have to mollycoddle the Far Right bigot bull moose loonies who are down on everything from abortion to stem cell research. (At least one GOP stalwart has already declared that the party will NEVER support a Pro Choice candidate.) McCain, then, will have to put a lie to every middle of the road principle he has espoused.

Sure, pandering is hardly the exclusive domain of the GOP; in fact, Dems do it more blatantly, if anything. But McCain seemed a breath of fresh air when he jumped on religious fundamentalists beford turning 180 degrees to seemingly embrace their lunacy. I once thought that if the Dems put up a knee-jerk liberal with ideas a little left of Lenin, I might vote for McCain if he's running on the Republican ticket, but no more. The Dems can run anyone now -- maybe even a yellow dog -- and I will pull their lever. McCain is a phoney hypocritical twerp.

Bush's Big Gamble

2006-05-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

Dubya's oval office primetime speech on immigration reform was his best, ever. Mindful, one assumes, of Lincoln's famous observation that you can fool some folks part of the time, some folks all of the time, but never all the folks all of the time, George II craftily used a carrot and stick approach that allows National Guardsmen to be stationed on the Mexican border at least temporarily, while about 6,000 new customs officers are trained, a provision certain to please the conservatives in hopes they'll go along with the "guest worker" program that will, eventually, legitimate the 11 to 12 million illegals currently living and working in the US. Bush has learned the old adage that politics is the art of compromise, and the fact that there are far right elements resolutely refusing to pass any bill with an "amnesty" program suggests that the Prez is on the right track.

His form of "amnesty" -- it isn't even fair to call it that -- calls for illegals standing in line behind those who are here legally and working on green cards and, ultimately, nationalization, as well as payment of penalties/taxes, making a good faith effort to learn some English, and other demands quite unlike the program set up by Ronald Reagan earlier. Hardliners will continue to insist that amnesty by any other name is still amnesty, but the Bush administration points out that a country founded and developed by immigrants has no business rounding up 11 million people and deporting them wholesale. Bush was so passionate about it, it seemed to me that it was the first and only evidence of his campaign promise/slogan, "compassionate conservatism." Even Karl Rove strode over to the congressional office building to implore votes in favor of the reform proposal.

Unfortunately, the agenda falls short of tackling what I personally feel to be the Number One roadblock -- and it's not on a highway across the Rio Grande. Like drug legislation designed to fight the importation of controlled substances from places like Mexico -- which fails because we spend little or nothing to reduce the demand (e.g. treatment programs) -- illegal immigration mainly exists and grows because there are too many employers here (including major corporations) willing to look the other way when hiring, sometimes with the excuse, "Well, he showed me a Social Security card," a piece of identification so easily forged it might have been dummied up by a blind man. Enforce the permissive hiring laws and word might get around in places like Mexico that the job market is so poor in the US, one might as well stay home.

Conservatives always argue that illegals are taking jobs away from Americans, but liberals -- and Vincente Fox -- insist that Mexican workers come to the US to take jobs we Americans are unwilling to do. This almost always leads to a chicken-egg argument. Do the Mexicans take the jobs because their standard of living is low, allowing them to work for minimum wage (or less!). or have the salaries for like employment dropped to take advantage of the "slave wages"? Labor leaders gripe about illegal immigration lowering the wages of the American worker, but would the employer be able to stay afloat at all without the illegals?

In my posts to egroups devoted to such topics, I have pointed out that a reduced illegals labor force would inevitably increase the cost of goods and some services. I asked fellow members, "Would *you* pick onions, potatoes, or other ground produce bent over all day with a tool guaranteed to give you carpal tunnel syndrome?" It's a rhetorical question but an increasingly important one. All indications are that the spiraling cost of gasoline at the pump is being passed on to the consumer by retailers who utilize the transportation industry (almost everything we buy!), which translates to the most dreaded word in the language: inflation. In turn, inflation is bad for the 401-K. Seems to me, it is the wrong time be reforming immigration. For what most employers are paying the illegals, most American workers could not live, especially when a five-ounce ground sirloin patty selling in a butcher shop here yesterday at 75 cents was going for 79 cents today.

A One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding

2006-05-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

Fist and Factotum are at it again -- that is, Senators Bill Fist and Rick Factotum. They were the prime movers behind the silly, ultimately insidious bill to give all Americans a one-time hundred dollar "rebate" equivalent to about nine months of gasoline taxes. That was their response to voter complaints that the major oil companies are gouging and that the government should pass a windfall profits tax, hold hearings on overreaching by Exxon et al., and come up with some sort of plan to deal with the damage being done by three dollar gas at the pumps of America.

Why should anyone be surprised to learn that this plan had "linkage"? Yep, as the wire services explained, "Frist (sic), last week linked the $100 rebate to an energy-relief package that included...a call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal the Senate frequently rejects." Boy, does all this SMELL, and not just of "sweet" crude. It stinks of nothing less than bribery. That's right. Approve the "rebate" and the Senate gets to award special interests (read: big oil) with more than a windfall, a veritable motherlode of black gold. In all likelihood, Fist has Exxon et al. in his blind trust of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and what about Kerr-McGee, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Whose blind trust is going to swell in the wake of passage of the proposed rape of Alaskan wildlife? Why, none other than Prick Chaney.

Surprisingly, the new majority leader (no stranger to K Street type graft him), John Boehner, made reference to the Fist plan as "insulting." He didn't clarify that remark so far as I know, but presumably he saw the tit for tat for what it was: a brazen attempt to get the American tax-payer predisposed to the same shenanigans practiced by their elected officials. Exchange of rebates for environment-busting oil exploration is precisely the sort of thing Jack Abramoff was up to. At least some Republicans are smart enough, and sensitive enough, to recognize a scam when they see it. Boehner was expected to be just as corrupt as Tom Relay, but he's a lot smarter it seems.

"Open Borders"? Really, Now!

2006-04-13T05:05:00.000-07:00

I belong to an e-group, newsgroup, or whatever they're called, devoted to the subject of gay Mexico. Not unexpectedly, a string began a debate on the current legislative push for criminalization of illegal border breaking and other stringent, even draconian measures. One group contributor, who uses the screen name of "vanycle2000," said: "I'm for an open border with Mexico and Canada. This road to nationalism is well trod and perilous." The following is my response:

If you mean by "open borders" unchecked, unmonitored crossings, I am afraid I cannot disagree more. Unfortunately, the one good argument the hardliners have in this national debate is the spectre of 9/11. Just because bin Laden has not attacked people or places on our soil since the initial Al Qaida airplane suicide doesn't mean the terrorist group (and possibly others) have no plans for other hits or means of carrying them out.

It is characteristic of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists that they can and do lie in wait with the patience of Job until "just" the right time to hit. Many of the 9/11 loony-thugs who brought down the Twin Towers crossed over the Canadian-U.S. border on their way to Boston, where they boarded the planes. And, given that not only the smugglers but organized crime is involved in the border breaking, few questions are asked, *dinero* being the only consideration. A mideasterner or two with terrorism on their minds are not going to have *that* much trouble finding someone to help them make it across the Rio Grande into one of the border states. My bet is that it has already happened -- more than once.

Yes, I know, 9/11 has been used as an excuse to plan such silly ass actions as building a wall across the Mexican border and stationing National Guard troops on the Rio Grande. Fear is a potent weapon when wielded by the bigots who want all illegals charged with a felony offense (where do they think they'll find prison space for those of the 11 million illegals they now routinely return to their native soil?!), but if you were living in a place like Corpus Christi, as I am, you would be frightened with or without the fear mongering of the Mitch McConnells, Bill Frists, and Tom Tancredos.

Our seaport is the nation's fifth largest, and just happens to be the primary port for onloading of military materiel bound for Iraq. I get spooked every time I hear an airplane go over the city. It's depressing as hell, a kind of perpetual rendition of what Americans went through in October of '62, without the empty shelves at the local supermarkets, only now it is bin Laden instead of Khruschev. In my idyllic liberal youth I saw borders as necessary evils at best, thinking it silly that when my train passed from Germany to Switzerland, customs inspectors boarded my wagonlit to inspect passports and stamp them with visas. I held more or less the same bemused skepticism until 2001, but I can hold it no longer.

I get tired of hearing that dumb-ass clown from Crawford go on about 9/11's having "changed everything." But guess what? He's right about that one thing. (Not that he can legitimately use it to justify such a pre-emptive use of force as the invasion of Iraq!) No, I am afraid I cannot agree that policing of U.S.-Mexican and Canadian borders should be abolished. Those Border Patrolmen help me sleep better nights.

God and Country - Part II

2006-03-17T21:20:00.000-08:00

During the Terry Schiavo fiasco, when a small number of reckless politicians, ignorant or disdainful of the Constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, sought to derail judicial reiterations of the right to privacy and the right to die, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback was right there in the forefront, along with Sen. Rick Santorum (a blithering halfwit with the morals of a slug) and Rep. Tom DeLay (an unscrupulous, degenerate bigot who'd sell his mother for a golf junket), and, lurking in the wings, Brownback's buddy and Operation Rescue founder, Randall Terry. In a blog supplement to his mammoth Rolling Stone portrait of Brownback, Jeff Sharlet pointed up the inconsistencies -- double standards, really -- that characterize Brownback and Company's position on capital punishment, on the one hand, and such end-of-life issues as discontinuance of life-sustaining treatment on the other.

Brownback co-sponsored, with another of his Prayer Breakfast group senators, a bill called the Streamlined Procredures Act, which would short-circuit -- foreclose, actually -- the right of a person convicted of capital punishment to appeal from state courts to federal by way of writ of habeas corpus. (Curiously, Brownback is a "reformed evangelical," having switched from fundamentalist protestantism to Catholicism at some point, and, like a majority of American -- if not worldwide -- Catholics, conveniently ignores the Vatican's condemnation of the ultimate penalty.) As Sharlet points out, habeas corpus was appropriate for intervention in the Shiavo Affair to keep a basket case alive, but not for a convicted murderer, no matter how weak (or even trumped up) the evidence.

But Brownback's Number One Pet Peeve, hands down, is homosexuality and especially the attempts of gays and lesbians to attain "special rights." Special rights are nothing more than the same privileges and perks enjoyed by stright people, including marriage. If the Sam Brownbacks have their way (and they have to a great extent), gays could never marry; a gay or lesbian partner cannot keep vigil with their significant other in a hospital room; they cannot become beneficiaries of retirement plans, and so on and on ad infinitum. The only justification offered by such bigots is that the sacred American Family must be protected, which is what marriage is all about, isn't it? The Brownbacks of this world want to have their cake and eat it, too. Gays and lesbians are unstable and can't maintain longterm relationships, so it's best to deprive them of the main thing that tends to cement relationships, the commitment of religious vows. The instability argument, vis-a-vis denial of the right to marry, just won't wash. About 50% of all straight marriages end in divorce. So, just exactly who is unstable?

The right wing religious nuts' positions on homosexuality boil down to one thing and one thing only: bigotry. They claim that gays have an "agenda" that is designed to recruit youth and initiate young people into a perverted lifestyle. This ignores medical science just as creationism ignores biology. Granted, nurture plays at least some role in the process of becoming gay, but nature dictates a genetic predisposition. One cannot "make" another person gay. Neurobiology says otherwise. But, then, no one ever accused the Brownbacks of this world of being educated or intelligent. They would rather wallow in ignorance and superstition than subject their silly notions to the cold light of scientific experimentation and confirmation of theory by statistical analysis.

The Brownbacks include such Senator Sam associates as Robert Wasinger, his chief of staff, who led a college crusade to rid Harvard of gay and lesbian faculty members, writing in a student review -- sponsored by the right wing Heritage Foundation -- that he was anti-gay because he hated to see sperm cells "swimming in feces." Perhaps aware that Biblical condemnations of homosexuality have been questioned as mistranslations of Aramaic and outright distortions, Brownback claims that his negative position on the matter is dictated by "natural law." This concept, as it is used by Brownbacks, derives from an epistle of Paul. Paul was the greatest misongynist in history and a sexually crippled closet queen who interiorized the homophobic attitudes of his fellow Zealots and illegitimated the religion he founded by perverting the Truths of its prophet. Although you might think that the word, "natural," is intended in the sense meant when someone refers to a practice as "unnatural," Paul meant an innate ability to discern between right and wrong. (Aquinus took it up, too, but it was thoroughly, wittily, devastatingly examined by Robert Anton Wilson, in Natural Law, or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy.) Suffice to say, natural law is about as sensible a justification for being down on queers (you should pardon the expression) as a preference for tea makes Coca-Cola unpotable.

Finally, Brownbacks view the Revelations of John of Patmos as self-fulfilling prophecy -- easily the scarriest and most dangerous idea they maintain, much worse that their desire to see women go back to coat hanger abortions in dark alleys and gays put in concentration camps or simply executed, &c. To the Brownbacks (I was going to call them Brown Shirts, but that one has already been taken), Armageddon will be the final conflict of Muslims on the one hand and a Judeo-Christer coalition on the other. Hey, I always suspected a nuclear holocaust would ensue sooner or later, burning the planet into a cinder. I just don't think Brownbacks should hurry it up.

God and Country - Part I

2006-03-14T16:49:00.000-08:00

I may only be showing my age, and it is entirely possible that such things are no longer taught in American history or "civics" classes, but I seem to recall my grade school teachers informing us that the First Amendment's anti-establishment clause (no "official" religion) grew out of the Founding Fathers' fresh recollections of the persecution (even, in some cases, the forced conversion) of religious minorities. France may have been the Champeen pogromist, slaughtering Huegenots, Cathari, and witches during what the latter, after the favorite method of execution, called "the Burning Times."

In a mere 230 years since the forefathers brought forth a more perfect (read: free) union, a nation taking pride in its freedom from religion, we are witnessing an unprecedented clamor for theocracy, a movement marked by hypocritical lip service to the idea of religious freedom, but with unmistakable subtexts of Christian fundamentalism. Maybe fundamentalist Christers are by nature reactionary, and the more we assert our right to be agnostics or atheists, the more they push an agenda that is little more than a thinly disguised plot to make the USA the Jesus Freak equivalent of Iran. Fundamentalism is bad no matter who the prophet and what the gospel. A right wing evangelical with a "pro-family" agenda is no different than an obdurate Shi'a mullah who finds in Shari'a law an agenda for keeping great numbers of the world's population firmly ensconced in the 18th century.

When this sort of thing is allowed to flourish, unabated, it results in things like the mutaww'un, or "enforcers of obedience" of Wahhabism, who've been characterized as "a kind of private religious police, monitoring not only public but also private conformity to Islam." (The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, emphasis added.) With the establishment of a Christer theocracy in the USA, we may see the return to such early American practices as hitting people with rods when they doze off in church, and putting them in stocks on proof they worked on the Sabbath. Who are the front men for this nonsense? Would it surprise you to know that the Number One Bull Moose Looney just happens to be a United States senator?

Yep. He's Sen. Sam Brownback, GOP, Kansas. (Where else?) Senator Sam plans to run for chief exec, and he's got most of the Christer voting block -- the same evangelicals who helped put Dubya in the White House -- backing his efforts. If any one individual epitomizes the follies and evils of theocratic political philosophy, it's Brownback. A February 9th Rolling Stone portrait of the man had me screaming and puking at turns, as Brownback represents everything sick and evil in post-Vietnam America. The author of the "National Affairs" piece in Rolling Stone, Jeff Sharlet, a New York University professor, says that Brownback (1) held off on signing Newtie's contract on America "not because it was too radical but because it was too tame," (2) once told a group of businessmen "he wanted to be the next Jesse Helms -- 'Senator No.' who operated as a one-man demolition unit against godlessness," and (3) compared Roe v. Wade to the Dred Scott decision, although the former legalized abortion -- an expansion of freedom -- while the latter legitimated slavery, a curtailing of it.

Sharlet portrays Brownback and spouse as plain vanilla Americans, she in the kitchen while he is fiddling with the remote to block those channels on TV deemed "too sexual," including, at times, the nightly news. After all, it was Brownback who, in the wake of Janet Jackson's unfortunate tit-plop at Super Bowl halftime, introduced $325,000 fines for such shenanigans in his Broadcast Decency Reform Act! Senator Sam is a member of the Promise Keepers, portrayed by Sharlet as proselytizers not only for Christeranity but worldwide conversion. Theirs is "a vision of manly Christianity dedicated to the expansion of American power as a means of spreading the gospel," Sharlet writes. So this is what the Bush Bunch are up to in the Mideast! And just when one is starting to wonder how dangerous such twits can really be, Sharlet lays The Biggie on us. He claims that Brownback is a member of a secret group called The Fellowship, headed by a lunatic named Doug Coe.

"They [strive] ultimately, for what Coe calls 'Jesus plus nothing,' a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future...everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not by democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the annointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God...." (Emphasis added.) I've highlighted some select clauses in this part of Sharlet's report in hopes you'll note that this scenario is already being followed by Rev. Robber's Son and Rev. Faultwell. When disaster strikes, it's God's punishment on America for our sinful ways. Never mind that such thinking commits the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, best illustrated by reference to the aboriginal tribe whose chief kicked the bucket during a total solar eclipse. Lest the Gods look down unfavorably on them, they made sure that later chiefs were whacked whether sick or well.

Wait, there's more. But I will reserve it for Part II. (Although I dearly love Mr. Google's Blogger, longish pieces become cumbersome, difficult to edit, and hard to keep stable. It's probably easier to break a long blog into parts.)

The Stark Frist of Removal

2006-03-13T21:48:00.000-08:00

One certainly hopes Sen. Bill Fist doesn't really think he can take over where Dubya left off in 2008! (Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Frist with an "r," but I've gotten into the habit of playing around with the surnames of boobs, nits, crooks, and swindlers, as witness my fondness for "the Rev. Jerry Faultwell," "the Rev. Pat Robber's Son," and so forth.) Sen. Fist bussed in hordes of Republicans so he could win a straw poll in Memphis, beating off a challenge by John McCain, considered by some an early front runner and the man to beat in the GOP primaries in '08.

Silly John McCain. Didn't he learn his lesson in the 2000 race, when he allowed Rove-inspired rabbit punches to humiliate him in debates with Bush? Haven't the more astute pundits hinted that McCain's mainstream middle-of-the-road pronouncements cannot get him ahead in Republican primaries because the party itself has been hijacked by far right wing nut cases who think that the First Amendent means nothing and it's high time we established a theocracy of blithering idiot snake oil salesmen pounding Bibles and denouncing everything from abortion to gay rights.

No, McCain would best be advised to take the Perot route and start a third party with a platform appealing to sensible folk. I really cannot see McCain stumping at places like Bob Jones University (as Shrub did in '00). Many of McCain's positions on various issues place him in a position of anathema to bussed-in bigots from the rabid religious right -- abortion, for example. At least two other participants in the Memphis poll stand a better chance in the long run: sappy, half-witted Sen. George Allen, and Sen. Sam Brownbeck of Kansas, a liberal's worst nightmare, the epitome of the nuclear-familied Christer breeder geek eager to junk the Constitution, initiate forced conversions, and round up anyone who believes differently than he does, putting them in concentration camps. (See the wonderfull -- if harrowing -- Rolling Stone portrait of Brownbeck if you question my suppositions. Penned with surprising objectivity by Jeff Sharlet, it nevertheless manages to skewer "God's Senator," surely the religious right's man with a theocratic plan and a very likely nominee if the party fails to see the light of reason.)

Fist has some moderate views as well, but his straw poll front-run begs the question of whether the GOP thinks it can keep its House majority in '06 and win in '08 by maintaining the status quo, by conducting business as usual. The lessons of K-Street, DeLay, Abramoff, &c. have already been lost, and the Republican Party seems condemned to repeat their own sordid history. Fist, too, is part of the Culture of Corruption that Sen. Nancy Pelosi spoke of. Fist's own cultural contribution concerns his insider trading of family-owned for-profit hospital stocks that were supposed to be in blind trusts, so that no communication could be had by beneficiary to trustee. Then why, when HCA stocks were set to take a tumble due to lowered earnings announcements in June, 2005, did Fist order his trustee to sell off all his HCA shares -- two weeks before a 15% drop in value. Seems to me that this is just the sort of thing for which Martha Stewart narrowly avoided conviction (although, of course, she was sent to prison -- for obstruction of justice).

The point is simply this. Sneaky little twits like the flaccid Sen. Lindsey Graham are saying that of all the participants in the Memphis straw poll, McCain alone can expand the party's base to embrace Democrats and independents. "[The straw poll voters] are looking at electibility. Republicans are smart enough to know that the trends right now are not favorable for us." This is as disingenuous as it is miscalculating. McCain has no appeal to the neo-conservative element of the GOP, the people who make such hoopla over that nebulous sillyness called American family values -- and especially the people Rove pulled into the polling places to cast ballots for Dumb-Ass Dubya: the religious right. Now that both the S.E.C. and United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York are looking into Fist's follies, it's almost certain that he will be so besmurched in coming months -- if not pilloried to prison -- he will lose any chance of beating even the despised Hillary in '08. Besides, he takes stands on some issues at odds with the Christer bigots as well, e.g. stem cell research.

It's going to be interesting to say the least! Five will get you ten that Fist will not set foot in the Oval Office as chief executive.

Guess Who's NOT Coming to Dinner

2006-03-12T11:14:00.000-08:00

It took me a day or two to get over the slight of seeing a cloying, manipulative, "safe" film like Trash -- oops, I mean Crash -- win the Best Picture Oscar a few nights back (03-05-06). There, I had been thinking, I was fairly certain, that this particular Academy Award belonged to the gay-themed Brokeback Mountain. I should have guessed the outcome when the voting members handed out the Best Screenplay award to Crash, many of my objections to it having their basis in the movie being an annoying concatenation of unlikely, unbelievable plot twists, "coincidences" that called attention to their own improbability. But of equal concern to me was the "dated," almost anachronistic subject matter. I mean, Crash would have been daring and even radical in, say, 1967. That's when the studios gave us Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a cloying, manipulative, "safe" picture (which, incidentally, did not get the Best Picture Oscar, either). No wonder the hype for Crash emphasized that it was "years in the making." It might have been groundbreaking 20-30 years ago.

Although it initially suffers a tad from the sort of wishful thinking and wouldn't-it-be-pretty-if... tone of optimism that mars some "gay lib" rhetoric today (an equal amount of it being marred by shrill, "bruised fruit" rhetoric), the following in some respects sums up my feelings about Oscar's slighting of the story of Ennis and Jack ("Homo on the Range," as one wag dubbed it). That is to say, the posting (I was not informed if it came from a blog, an email, whatever) sums up my feelings about why the skittish Academy members ignored the mountain for the hills of racist Los Angeles. I suspect this will come as a bit of a surprise to right wing pundits and fundamentalist religious bigots, but Hollywood remains a bastion of homophobia. In any case, this missive was written by someone named Lamar Damon, and it came to me from a friend of a friend under the subject line, "Could Not Have Said it Better Myself." Neither could I. Here it 'tis:

"Sometimes you win by losing, and nothing has proved what a powerful, taboo-breaking, necessary film 'Brokeback Mountain' was more than its loss Sunday night to 'Crash' in the Oscar best picture category.

"Despite all the magazine covers it graced, despite all the red-state theaters it made good money in, despite (or maybe because of) all the jokes late-night talk show hosts made about it, you could not take the pulse of the industry without realizing that this film made a number of people distinctly uncomfortable.

"More than any other of the nominated films, 'Brokeback Mountain' was the one people told me they really didn't feel like seeing, didn't really get, didn't understand the fuss over. Did I really like it, they wanted to know. Yes, I really did.

"In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who've led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed 'Brokeback Mountain.'

"For Hollywood, as a whole laundry list of people announced from the podium Sunday night and a lengthy montage of clips tried to emphasize, is a liberal place, a place that prides itself on its progressive agenda. If this were a year when voters had no other palatable options, they might have taken adeep breath and voted for 'Brokeback.' This year, however, 'Crash' was poised to be the spoiler.

"I do not for one minute question the sincerity and integrity of the people who made 'Crash,' and I do not question their commitment to wanting a more equal society. But I do question the film they've made. It may be true, as producer Cathy Schulman said in accepting the Oscar for best picture, that this was 'one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American history,' but 'Crash' is not an example of that.

"I don't care how much trouble 'Crash' had getting financing or getting people on board, the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.

"For 'Crash's' biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.

"So for people who were discomfited by 'Brokeback Mountain' but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, 'Crash' provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what 'Brokeback' had to offer. And that's exactly what they did.

"'Brokeback,' it is worth noting, was in some ways the tamest of the discomforting films available to Oscar voters in various categories. Steven Spielberg's 'Munich'; the Palestinian Territories' 'Paradise Now,' one ofthe best foreign language nominees; and the documentary nominee 'Darwin's Nightmare' offered scenarios that truly shook up people's normal ways of seeing the world. None of them won a thing.

"Hollywood, of course, is under no obligation to be a progressive force inthe world. It is in the business of entertainment, in the business of making the most dollars it can. Yes, on Oscar night, it likes to pat itself on the back for the good it does in the world, but as Sunday night's ceremony proved, it is easier to congratulate yourself for a job well done in the past than actually do that job in the present."

As Ennis or Jack might say...'Nuff said.

Fred's Freudian Slip

2006-03-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

I sometimes find myself watching one of Fox News' "buried" pundit programs ("buried" because stuck in one of the forgotten, unwatched slots: 5 p.m. Saturdays. The name of the show is The Beltway Boys. It features Fred Barnes. I might say that it features Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke, but Mort's presence is neglible, he is so cowed by the far right wing views of Barnes. (In fact, in case you've failed to notice -- and the documentary movie, Outfoxed certainly noticed -- Fox systematically hires unattractive, nerdy, unlikeable, or ineffectual persons to be the fall guys and stooges for its mainstream crypto-fascist commentators. Hannity and Combes has its Combes, and The Beltway Boys has its Kondracke, just to name a couple. (Of course there are major exceptions: Bill O'Reilly will brook no regularly appearing liberal dissent, no matter how mealy-mouthed, on his dictatorial, monomaniacal program, probably because no one wants to sign on knowing they will have to play the stooge, their every pronouncement subjecting themselves to being characterized as a "pinhead" -- itself an abhorrent, insensitive epithet, since actual pinheads are victims of congenital defects; in a word, a type of mongoloid.)

If I bother to examine my motives for even watching The Beltway Boys, I find it appeals to my sadistic streak; that is, I enjoy watching Kondracke -- the dummy liberal -- squirm. I like to see how far Kondracke will go to carefully, painfully, almost pathologically, avoid any direct disagreement with Barnes. This past Saturday (03-13-06), Barnes made a bizarre comment that either completely slipped Kondracke's notice, or else the latter simply let it slide, possibly (again confirmed by Outfoxed) fearing the network's retaliation. (At Fox News, you tow the line or you move on. Certainly gives falsity to their claim of fairness and impartiality!) Barnes treated the TV audience to a photo of George Bush embracing a foreign dignitary by placing his palms on the man's cheeks. Never mind that in most of the world's countries, this would go unnoticed. In fact, men in most countries feel no shame but rather closeness of friendship when touching each other -- even hugging and kissing, on the cheek at least. (For all their notorious macho, it is only apocryphal that the Mexicans invented the abrazo to prevent the other guy from drawing his six shooter.) Why should they not be as forward as women toward each other? They're secure in their self image. They know who and what they are.

Barnes took issue with the photo, blurting, "What's he DOING there? If he tried that with me, I'd knock him out!" Kondracke let it go. Strange, since he has, in the past, voiced quite tolerant attitudes toward gays. If it had been a true debate (as rare as hen's teeth on Fox), he might have pointed out that Barnes's outburst showed nothing so much as how insecure Barnes is about his own sexuality. Freud had a word for it: "projection." It's the imparting to others traits one dislikes in oneself. The incident suggests that Barnes might have repressed homosexual traits and that he acts macho-straight to ward off his (mostly imaginary) suggestions he might be a homo himself.

Problems With Basing Anti-Same Sex Marriage Views on the Bible

2005-05-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, in our daily paper, a visitor to our fair city expressed the opinion that as all Creation was designed by God, we're all God's creatures, even if we're lesbians or homosexuals. Then, an Austin-based columnist for the paper wrote that proposed legislation banning same sex foster parents was "misguided." Having experienced first hand the homophobia that is so rampant in Nueces City, I can only conclude that the place is crawling with closet homos and dykes. (Yes, I am a Freudian at least to the extent that I believe in his theory of projection, the putting off onto others those unwanted traits one cannot acknowledge in oneself). In any case, almost all op-ed items supporting lesbian and gay rights draw the fundamentalists and Bible thumpers out of the woodwork -- in droves.

One responded to the columnist's article by saying that the "reason" she was against homosexual marriages was that Genesis 2:23 reports that Adam created Eve from a bone, and "[t]herefore, shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh." In other words, as expressed in that old bumper sticker adage, "It says Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." In the same epistle, the writer also quoted Leviticus 18-22 for the proposition that a man lying with a man is an abomination. The other letter writer made reference to exactly the same Biblical books, chapters, and verses, but he threw in his opinion that Lucifer was to blame and that the notion that nature rather than nurture produces homosexuality is "blasphemy."

Since I agree with Huxley that one should believe in nothing without evidence to support it, and that for the man of science, faith-based ideas like the existence of "God" are not only illogical but immoral, I considered writing a letter to the editor of my own, but the Nueces City Times is not in the habit of publishing the blatherings of curmudgeonly agnostics. Had I written to the paper, I would have pointed out the blatant fallacies of the two similar letters, beginning with the obvious fact that Creationism flies in the face of all geological, biological, and other scientific evidence showing that the "Miltonian" version of our origins is naive at best and nonsensical at worst. I certainly would have adumbrated the reasons why it is downright silly to cite the Old Testament book of Leviticus for much of anything.

Leviticus 18:22 is almost always pressed into service of the arguments against homosexuality by fundamentalist Christians, but it is hardly the only passage frequently cited. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is similarly employed, although more learned Biblical scholars now believe that the actual "sin" of the Sodomites was their refusal of hospitality in an age when the Hebrews were nomadic and had to rely on the graciousness of urban folk for food, shelter, and even, where local custom allowed, the companionship of one's wife or daughter. I find it strange that Fundamentalist Christians read homosexuality into this passage in Genesis almost entirely because the "men" of Sodom surrounded Lot's house and asked him to send the Angels out "so that we might know them," assuming, as the Bible thumpers do, that the word, "know" is used in its Biblical sense, perhaps a palimpsest of the concordancers.

It is risky to "read into" the O.T. anything one wishes, not only because it was written in Greek, translated, retranslated, and translated again. Not only that, but the ancient form of Greek in which it originally appeared (as Robert Anton Wilson has deftly pointed out, may Discordia praise him!) was koine Greek. Koine Greek had no punctuation. Hence, the words, "God is now here" could just as easily have been "God is nowhere." Every day the Fundamentalists make fools of themselves just as surely as do Fundamentalist Muslims, who, for example, seem to be unawares that Arabic scholars differ as to the meaning of that passage in the Qur'an promising "seventeen virgins" as attendants to martyrs who enter Paradise. It seems that the word for virgin in 7th century Syriac was the same, or greatly similar, to the word for a rare and therefore prized white grape. Can you imagine the silly get who straps bombs to his chest, goes into an infidel establishment, and blows himself (and the crowd) to smithereens in order to ascend immediately to Heaven for 17 white grapes?

But that is the least of problems giving scripture literal meaning on a claim it is the Word of God. Not only can one find support for any proposition soever by resort to holy writ, one can remove pronouncements from their context and make a selective choice of quotable passages to the disregard of all else in the same book or even chapter. Why, for example, is it wrong for the Sodomites to "know" their own sex -- if in fact that is their "sin" -- when it is perfectly all right for Lot to impregnate both of his daughters upon their flight to Zoar? Is the message thus, it is all right to commit incest but a no-no to lie with your own sex? (It should be clear by now that if homosexuality was prohibited by God, it was only out of the perceived necessity of tribal survival, as is suggested by Genesis 19:31-32.

This same selective culling of prejudices greets us when we read the condemnations of lesbianism and homosexuality based upon Leviticus. As it is a catalogue of ancient Hebraic law, chock full of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots," and as almost all of the proscriptions against this or that refer to the practices as "abominations" and mete out the penalty of death, Fundamentalist Christians should consider the multitude of other sins set out therein. Would we stone a person to death for violent opposition to slavery when Leviticus 25:44 says that it is perfectly all right to own human beings so long as we purchase them from another country. (Exodus 21:7 even allows one to sell his own child into bondage.) If we dare touch a woman during her menstrual cycle, have we committed an abomination per Lev. 15:19-24. Working on Saturday (Sunday for Christians) is an abomination; should we stone our neighbor for mowing his lawn?

There are other ludicrous proscriptions such as the eating of shellfish (certainly akin to the prohibition against pork, which in Biblical times was bound to be laced with trichina). Should we stone persons with astigmatisms or other defects of sight just because Lev. 21:20 says so? What about Lev. 19:27's condemnation of trimming one's hair, especially that around the temples (a sanction still followed by orthodox Jews). Will God smite all football players for touching the skin of a dead hog? (Lev. 11:6-8.) How about farmers who dare to grow two different crops on the same parcel of land in defiance of Jehovah in Lev. 19:19. I think you get the picture.

Nowhere in the New Testament do we find Reb Yeshua saying anything at all about homosexuality. This fact is usually subjected to Fundamentalist spin in the form of one or two passages from the epistles of Paul, but we now know enough about him to safely conclude that Saul of Tarsus was a dedicated misogynist with latent homosexual tendencies. His attitude toward women, especially, is odd when it is considered that Reb Yeshua is said to have not only taken a prostitute under wing, but his first appearance upon supposed resurrection was before a female. Many wags have also wondered what this fellow was doing roaming around the Levant with twelve males accompanying him. Was there something more to the kiss of Judas than met the eye? Why was John called "the beloved Disciple" and "the one whom God loved best," &c. Some of the Gnostic (e.g. the Cainites) even believed that the "raising" of Lazarus referred not to resurrection after death but erection after detumescence.

No, no, it just won't do to rely upon Biblical authority to condemn homosexuality and claim that it is a choice and not a birthright. To quote a latter-day sect of Magdalenic votaries who organized in San Francisco in the 60's, calling themselves C.O.Y.O.T.E., come off your old tired ethics!

How Do People Like This Get Elected?

2005-05-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

That Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia keeps appearing on the pundit talk shows surely suggests he thinks he's presidential material, but it's difficult if not impossible to believe his party put him up to it, for surely the GOP can find someone who can think logically, understands English, and doesn't argue in circles. On Meet the Press, May Day, 2005, Allen, debating Sen. Dodd of Connecticut, found himself boxed into a corner vis-a-vis King George II's refusal to back down on privatization of Social Security. Asked by moderator Tim Russert if he could support sending an S.S. reform bill to the Prez that did not contain privitization, thus chancing a veto, Allen deadpanned: "I support what I'm for." Duh! One would certainly hope so! Now, who does this leave for nominations? Sen. Fist? Puleeeeeeze!

Proof of God?

2005-04-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

A dumbass Protestant preacher in the Georgia home of a missing bride-to-be says that he and his congregation prayed to Jesus to grant their collective wish that the woman was only missing because of premarital jitters, and God "answered our prayers." Seems that Jennifer Wilbanks, the missing woman, just couldn't cope with the thought of a big wedding, where 1,200 eyes would be checking her out, so she took off via bus and ended up in Albuquerque before relenting and informing authorities of a ruse she had concocted about her "kidnapping." Peace officers and search parties "turned over probably every leaf in the city" of Duluth. Imagine how silly they felt when Ms. Wilbanks turned up unharmed, announcing that she's mislead everyone and that she was OK.

I would like to be the first to suggest that Jennifer immediately dye her hair blonde and take all of her blouses and coats to a tailor, requesting that inflatable shoulder pads be sewn into the clothing so that she would not hurt herself when bobbing her head from side to side in answer to the simplest questions, saying, "I don't know!" The only person more clueless than Jennifer is the man who was to preside over her wedding, the aforementioned Protestant pastor. Apparently, he obtained his D.D. without studying logical fallacies since, in his pronouncement about prayer for Jennifer's survival, he resorted to one of the most common, and the one most often exposing weaknesses in the arguments for the existence of God.

It's called post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means "after this, therefore because of this." It's the error of assuming that just because Event B follows Event A, then Event B was caused by Event A. A wonderful illustration that comes to mind is that of the aboriginal tribe whose Emperor died following an eclipse of the sun. From then on, the tribe believed that when a solar eclipse occurred, their king would die, and when this prophecy failed to come through, the tribe decided to kill their king with each eclipse the better to please the gods. Same principle at work in the Duluth minister's thinking. That Jennifer turned up unharmed in Albuquerque explaining that she concocted her own kidnapping because she had cold feet over the impending wedding proves nothing so much as the gullibility of the preacher and his flock.

Interestingly, although she did not kill anyone and lie about how the victims met their unjust deserts, Ms. Wilbanks succumbed to a variation of the implied racist claims of a predecessor in stupidity, Susan Smith, who drove her two small sons into a lake, then claimed that the children were kidnapped by "a black man." Jennifer Wilbanks told authorities that one of her kidnappers was "a Hispanic male." If she wanted to invent a kidnapping, why did the perp have to be a Mexican-American? (Or Cuban-American, or Puerto Rican-American -- you get the idea.) Stupidity, blind faith, and racism have much in common.

You have to forgive me, I am reading Thomas Henry Huxley's essays on agnosticism and agreeing with them wholeheartedly. Huxley thought that religion is bunk. As the late Anton Szandor LaVey (or someone) said, "The only god there is is the one between your ears." Of course, in Jennifer's case, it could be argued that there is no god because there is obviously nothing between her ears.

Conciliatory Bush?

2005-04-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

In a rare press conference April 28, 2005, King George II gave a short (10-minute) speech about overhauling Social Security and passing energy policy legislation, then opened the forum to questions from reporters. The only time he allowed the press to ruffle his feathers was when one Fourth Estatist asked whether use of a means test to determine eligibility for Social Security benefits would mean that Cheney would be eliminated; a somewhat testy Shrub snapped, "Hey, let's not get personal here, we're on network TV." Bush seemed in a somewhat conciliatory mood. For one thing, he didn't think that refusing to support a rules change to do away with the filibuster in imbroglios over judicial consent marked the refusenick as anti-Christian, a position bound to cost him support among the religious right.

On the other hand, he surprised the pundits when he announced, in questions concerning radical reform of Social Security, that privitization was anything but off the table. Those of us who assumed that provision for private accounts was nothing more than a conservative trial balloon, and since the barnstorming Prez had encountered such heavy opposition to the idea in all his travels across the land, meant certain death to the notion were surprised to say the least. The nod to means testing was even more unlike anything we could have expected since that proverbial one percent at the top holding something like 90 percent of the wealth would be the first to see their benefits forfeited for the public good.

But, as usual with George II dealings with the media, the most important ideas concocted by the administration were never addressed. It is no secret that the G.O.P. in general, and the far right wing conservative element in particular, has long dreamed of dismantling every last vestige of New Deal liberalism so that entitlements become a thing of the past, and money and land are tied up in the hands of a select few in perpetuity. Enter right wing fundamentalist Christians and such constitutional guarantees as separation of church and state and the separation of powers doctrine become imperiled as well.

It is also no secret that these same forces have on their agenda abolition of the United Nations. Although George II professed admiration for the organization during the press conference, he showed total disregard for it during the period before the invasion of Iraq, when he took the position that the U.S. should act unilaterally when its interests were at stake -- despite the fact that Saddam posed less a problem for us than either Iran or North Korea; despite the fact that the U.N. had ongoing monitoring for WMD; despite the fact that no American blood would have been spilled had a diplomatic solution been found. Shrub is no friend of the U.N. If he were, he would not have put up the current nominee for ambassador, an ideologue and toady with a volcanic temper and penchant for belittling underlings.

When history writes its accounts of the administration of Shrub, it will note that his administration was characterized by secrecy, obfuscation, and outright lying to advance its Neo-Con agenda. Doing away with Social Security and the U.N. are at the top of the list.

(This blog was about three times as long as this, but it's my first effort and, somehow, I managed to delete a good portion of it.)