Candidate McBush and His Creepy Clerics: Worse Than Wright?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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...."

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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"

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

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.