Another Rough Week for Felix

George Felix Allen had another rough week--one that could have easily been a good one for him. At a debate in Tyson's Corner--an area easily accessible to the national media working in Washington--he was asked whether any of his ancestors were Jewish and, if they were, at what point his family had lost its Jewish identity. Some of the members of the audience began booing the reporter who asked the question; Allen bristled and accused her of casting aspersions on a person's ancestry by asking about religion. It looked like a bit win for Felix. Hell, even I had some mild feelings that the question was out of line, although I couldn't see any harm in answering it. Maybe with all of the unrest in the Middle East and Israel at the center of that unrest, it could influence his thinking on Middle East policy. Or not.
But life's not so simple for Felix. The next day, he released a statement that his mother, in fact, was born and raised Jewish and his grandfather had been imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II for being Jewish. He just learned about all this. And, of course, he's just as proud as he can be of his Jewish ancestors. I can just imagine his wife, Susan, racing around trying to put together a Rosh Hashanah celebration for him.
But even that wasn't quite so simple. First, a Charlottesville newspaper, in 2003, had published a statement that Felix had Jewish ancestors. It's the only statement of the thousands made about him in his public life for which he has ever demanded a correction. And Forward, a Jewish publication had run a similar statement more recently. So the question becomes one of just when Felix was lying. Was he lying when he demanded a "correction" from the Charlottesville newspaper, or was he completely in the dark about his family history? Did he try to find out any more about his heritage before the more recent statement in Forward? If not, what ever happened to curiosity? Did he know, when he castigated Jan Fox for her question, that he was, according to rabbinical law, Jewish? And if he did know, why was he so upset?
His mother, Etty Allen, is taking the fall for him. She says that she hid her Jewish background from everyone--her husband, her in-laws, her kids, her neighbors, and everybody--and told Cowboy Felix about it only when he sat her down in the privacy of her own kitchen and easnestly asked her. She hadn't wanted him to be traumatized as she was when she was a child and the Nazis were goosestepping all around her. Except that she wasn't raising her kids in Tunisia but in the nation whose armies destroyed the Nazis in Europe and Africa. And Cowboy Felix wouldn't have learned this otherwise?
I wonder what his Council of Conservative Citizens buddies, who don't much like anybody but white Protestants, like their newly Jewish buddy, Cowboy Felix. I wonder how many Virginia voters will see that he's got a serious lack of curiosity about his identity. And I certainly hope that there are many who were taught, as I was, that family is identity, and if you are honest about nothing else, you must be honest about that.

He Just Doesn't Get It

Today, Bushie held a news conference. He had nothing to say, really; he just wants to dominate news cycles for the next eight weeks. But perhaps his strategy--or Turd Blossom's, really--might backfire. For one thing, he is no longer capable of any restraint at all in front of a live audience. He has to rant and he is increasingly shrill and obnoxious. He's particularly bad with the press, even though they've been pretty kind to him. Even worse, he reveals that he just doesn't understand how the world works.
His majesty, the Archduke of Puke, warned Congress that if they didn't act, the government wouldn't be able to conduct its programs of torture and warrentless wiretaps. Duh? That's the whole point, George, you fucking moron. If Congress really wanted your immoral programs to go forward, they would have immediately given you approval to keep going with them. Unfortunately for you, there are some Republicans who have some scruples, and they've got a credibility that you don't have. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the most junior of the three, is an Air Force Reserve judge--a guy who knows military juriprudence. John McCain was a prisoner of war who was tortured in captivity in Viet Nam. John Warner is longtime chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Secretary of the Navy. These are guys who understand the realities of military service and war in ways that no deserter ever can, and they say that Bushie's bill sucks.
So one more time, Bushie, you stupid steaming puddle of sickly excrement: The credibility of any prosecution derives from the fact that it's conducted in a tight legal framework that affords the accused--who is not yet convicted--has every opportunity to demonstrate innocence. Your stupid legislation would deny human beings rights that our forefathers believed came from God--not from you, no matter how powerful you think your fucking no good criminal family is. And torture is not simply immoral and un-American. Lindsey Graham is absolutely right when he says that a bill like the one you want would simply encourage anyone who captured American servicemembers to torture them. And you don't get valuable information from torture. First, in a military situation, the half-life of intelligence is measured in hours. THAT MEANS THAT THE PEOPLE YOU ARE NOW HOLDING ILLEGALLY IN GUANTANAMO AND YOUR SECRET PRISONS HAVE NO INTELLIGENCE VALUE AT ALL, YOU ASSHOLE. And if you subject people to torture, they will either tell you absolutely nothing ("IF they're doing this to me now when I'm telling them nothing, what will they do to me if I lie?") or they'll tell you exactly what you want to hear ("Make it stop! Make it stop!"). And this has no value whatsoever. It may make you and your buddies "Dick" and "Rummy" feel like you're actually capable of erections, but it damn sure will not contribute to national security, and it will only be a further embarrassment to my country.
I sure hope Poppy and Bar are proud of you, Bushie. Anyone with a moral compass hates your guts. Impeachment will not be enough; you deserve to be impeached and then tried for treason and then turned over to the World Court to be tried as a war criminal.

The Danger of Independents

Today, I voted in a closed party primary for the first time in my life. A lot of people didn't, I'm sure, because they aren't registered with a party. That's a dangerous course to take.
In high school, being an independent was presented, as I recall, as a way of thinking for yourself--not letting the political parties make your selections for you. To a teenager, this sounded pretty good. What self-resepecting teenager wants anyone (except some other teenager) to do his thinking for him? And how sophisticated does it sound to say something like "I vote for the person, not the party"?
What makes that dangerous is that it's possible to stick with that sophomoric position for years and years and never really become familiar with or think about the philosophies of the two major parties. One might never see that there's a disconnect between a party's claims that it believes in the individual and its actions to limit the freedom of some individuals in significant ways. One might never recognize that there's a problem with promising increased aid for education and transportation and also pledging to reduce taxes. Without knowing something of party philosophy and history, a person has little to go on beyond the last couple of elections. The frustration that arises from this leads many people to say "All of the candidates are lying all the time anyway." Actually, a good many of them don't lie at all--not about their positions on hot-button issues. Some of them don't understand that their actions undermine their words.
Even greater danger arises from Independents who put only a little research into candidates. For example, there was a candidate near me--we'll skip the party affiliation--whose position on education was that he thought temporary classrooms were bad and he was going to get rid of them, and he wanted to ask Verizon to donate Internet capable cell phones and airtime to Hispanic students as a means of closing the achievement gap. Hell, nobody likes temporary classrooms. Nobody knows how to get rid of them either without building schools for which we may not have the land and building them much too big for needs of the foreseeable future. And what's this guy going to do when Verizon executives laugh at him, or when the students do get the cell phones and start using them to surf the Web in class--without the restrictions imposed on school networks?
Finally, there's a danger that people really will vote for the person. Until he started ranting all the time during the summer, Bush actually seemed like an affable, friendly guy. He might have been a bit too much of a back-slapper for me, but he didn't seem unpleasant until he started screaming and making swatting motions at his audiences. George Allen? I'm told he's a very friendly guy. Bob Ehrlich? He comes across as a rush chairman--terminally gregarious. But does this make them the right people for high public office? People say Warren Harding, one of the worst, was one of the friendliest presidents. Washington, almost always ranked in the top five greatest presidents, is said to have been aloof except among close friends.
So there's no virtue in claiming to be independent. It might mean that you don't let the parties do your thinking for you, but it might also mean that you don't think. And saying you vote for the man is great if you're voting for a rush chairman or social chairman, but after you leave the frat house or sorority house, you need to look for something a bit stronger.

"The Calling of Our Generation"

Full disclosure: I did not watch Bush's speech tonight. I do not like Bush. I do not trust Bush. And there was a football game on TV.
There's a fundamental flaw in his reasoning--another fundamental flaw that derives from his insistence that we are in a war on terrorism. With the notion of war goes the idea that wars end only with victory or defeat. Historically, nations have been pretty sure what victory would look like. In this case, though, no one has any idea of what victory in the war on terrorism would look like, and Bush refuses to tell us. He only talks about defeat--if we withdraw from the middle east, the terrorists will follow us here. Actually, that's probably not true. If we were not bringing what they regard as a decadent infidel culture to their part of the world, it's unlikely that they would be much concerned with us. Perhaps they'd take over the middle east, which would then fold like a cheap suit because Islamic fundamentalist nations are too concerned with purity to survive economically. Oil wouldn't save them.
The colonists knew what victory in the Revolution would look like: Some thought it would be the restoration of royal authority, and others thought it would be establishment of independence. In the War of 1812, Americans knew that victory would be achieved when the British were forcibly ejected from the United States and stopped impressment of Americans on the high seas. You can go through every American war and see that people knew at the beginning what the objectives were. That has not been the case in this so-called war. We have sought to impose democracy in areas where people do not consider its establishment a high priority and may not want it at all. We have sought to punish nations that might have given aid and comfort to people who probably (not definitely) participated in the attacks of September 11, 2002. We have deposed the leader of a sovereign nation. We've done these things, but we still don't know where they're headed--what victory will look like.
Bush does not grasp any of this; perhaps it is a consequence of his lack of intellectual curiosity that he can, apparently, define victory as "punishing the evildoers," a non-specific phrase that ultimately tells us nothing. And if he can't tell us what victory looks like, we don't know what we're fighting for. And if we don't know what we're fighting for, we shouldn't be fighting at all.
Still, Bushie says "trust me," and some Americans are sufficiently stupid to go along with him.

Republican "Strategy"

Those strategic geniuses who brought us the "War on Terror" and got Americans "greeted as liberators" in Iraq have indicated what their campaign strategy for November is going to be. They're going to have "Dick" Cheney malign anyone who doesn't salute smartly and line up to fellate him and his so-called boss, and they're going to impugn the character of Democratic candidates. In other words, they're not going to talk about issues.
You can't really blame them for that. They've pretty well screwed up everything they've touched. They still think that the "War on Terrorism" should be fought like a conventional war, even though the differences are clear. They've ruined the economy. For all their talk of recovery, the lower and middle classes are actually worse off than they were. I haven't seen numbers on job creation, but they haven't improved significantly since 2004, when the loss of jobs offshore was being balanced with creations of jobs at Wal-Mart--according to the administration. They've spent billions on security, but we're no safer. They hosed up the recovery after Hurricane Katrina, and they're hosing up the reconstruction. American automakers hare heading for belly-up bankruptcy, possibly because nobody can afford to buy gas. They've infringed on individual rights whenever they saw fit, from the right of Kathy Schiaivo to be left alone to die to the right of Americans to be secure from warrantless searches and seizures. They've permitted torture and secret prisons, holding people incommunicado without trial for years. They have made the United States the most hated nation in the world. So of course they don't want to talk about issues.
But look where their strategy has gotten us in the "War on Terror," in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and everywhere else.

War on Terrorism

It's time--it has been time for years--for George W. Bush to 'fess up--or, because he's incapable of that, for Americans to smarten up--about this "War on Terrorism." It's not a war that he wants to win. It's just a phrase that he likes to say and one that makes people think that he's doing something that they think is important. Can we handle the truth?
The first truth is that Bushie and his minions do not want to win a war against terrorism. As stupid as they are, they realize that they won the 2002 and 2004 elections because of their so-called war on terrorism. For them to give it up would be a lot like Burger King giving up the Whopper or Coca Cola giving up Coke Classic. (Remember what happened when they did that?) Then, after 2004, they declared it "The Long War." While it's one thing to express commitment to winning a war no matter how long it takes, it's quite another to give it a name that is clearly accepting of protracted conflict and its associated costs. Did FDR call for a long war? Did Wilson? Did Lincoln? None of them did.
If that doesn't raise doubts, what about the fact that in five years, none of the al Quaeda leaders who have been on ice in Girmo or the secret prisons has been brought to trial. An administration that wanted to win a war against terror would capture terrorists and then try them as quickly as possible. The captured suspects would be treated at the highest standards so that no question every arose about their imprisonment or interrogation; courts overturn convictions on such issues. And the suspects would be tried in courts that afforded them every right granted citizens so that there could never be any question about the validity of the convictions--or acquittals. All of this would take place quickly because quickness would put the world on notice that we would deal quickly and firmly with those who had acted against us.
So what have we gotten? We have gotten one somewhat moth-eaten prisoner who claimed to be al Quaeda and confessed and pleaded guilty. He got a jury trial to determine his sentence and the evidence was so shaky that he got life without parole instead of the death sentence. And it's significant, too, that after his sentencing, he declared that his faith in the American judicial system was so greatly restored that he would like to enter a new plea of not guilty. Bush has slowed the process by abrogating trial rights of the accused and claiming this was important because they were, after all, terrorists--even though the presumption of innocence must apply for the trial to have any legitimacy at all. He has held prisoners incommunicado and authorized their torture, even when members of his own party told him that this would not extract useful information.
If Bush wanted to win his so-called war against terror and if Afghanistan really was the seat of the Islamic terrorist movement, he would not have abandoned that effort until the job was done. He would have captured bin Laden. We were told repeatedly that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora and that Tora Bora was surrounded by Amierican troops. Bin Laden, as I write, is probably chuckling at the idiocy of his enemies from the safety of a cave somewhere. Meanwhile, the America effort in Afghanistan has been scaled back to accommodate Bush's vendetta against Iraq, and the Taliban is making a comeback.
Bush wants Americans to be afraid, because only fearful people and congenital cowards vote Republican. Conservativism is founded on a fear of losing something. It's time for Americans to understand that he seeks absolutely nothing but power for himself and members of his family. He wants a legislature that will not question him. We need to ask ourselves why any honest man who is convinced that he's right fears having his position questioned. I can only wonder--and, to some extent, fear--why a person who will be effectively out of office in twenty-six months would worry about it.

Alternative Interrogation Procedures

President Chickenhawk now acknowledges that the CIA has used "alternative interrogation procedures" on suspected terrorists. In other words, these alleged terrorists have been tortured. And a lot of people believe that's okay because "it keeps us safe." What we need is some serious discussion of the value of coercive interrogation.
Ponder this one for a minute. You're not a terrorist really, but somebody said you were, and Americans picked you up and threw you in Gitmo or some other garden spot. You're living a truly lousy life there. You're interrogated regularly, and you tell the truth, but telling the truth doesn't get you much. Finally, your interrogators start doing a water board on you or depriving you of sleep or doing something else as torturous. Your life just went from lousy to worse than lousy. At this point, you decide that telling the truth hasn't helped. The only solution that comes to mind is lying, so you tell your interrogators what they want to hear.
Do I know any other terrorists? Damn right I do; people who have treated me badly are terrorists, and I really don't care if they get picked up and thron in some garden spot.
Do I know of any terrorist plots? Damn right I do; I wasn't a part of the plans, mind you, but this person who has really treated me badly talked about blowing up a bridge or shopping mall or something. In other words, ask me anything and I'll tell you whatever I think you're going to believe if you'll just leave me alone.
Now. What do you think these alleged terrorists did? How many American military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel have been running around grasping at straws? How much has this contributed to the lack of successful prosecutions? How much has it contributed to the fact that Osama been Forgotten hasn't been captured and brought to justice?
You can argue the morality of torture all day long and in the end, some people are still going to say that it's justified because it keeps us safe, but the truth is that it doesn't do anything for anbody. Let's hope that people are smart enough to realize that this is just one more instance of President Chickenshit lying to the American people to cover the ineffectiveness of his regime. And I've got news for him: Princess Jenna will never ascend the throne because this is still the United States, and unlike his filthy Saudi royal friends, we don't believe in monarchies here.

Bobby Haircut

The Maryland gubernatorial election campaign is getting started, and believe it or not, the incumbent Republican, Robert "Bobby Haircut" Ehrlich, is in trouble, as is his current lieutenant governor and candidate for the U.S. Senate, Michael Steele. You've got to give these guys some credit: For Republicans, they show an uncommon grasp of reality. A couple of months ago, Steele talked to a Washington Post reporter about the perils of being associated with George W. Bush (with whom he had been photographed acting very chummy indeed and whose chief of staff was attending a for him) in the political climate of 2006. And Bobby and Mikey are now running as neither Democratic nor Republican but "middle of the road, like most of us."
If somebody asked me what Ehrlich and Steele had done to turn me against them, my answer would be "Not much. Not much at all." There's the rub, though. They haven't done much. Holding a typically Republican horror toward taxation, Bobby decided that he would fix everything that was wrong in Maryland without raising taxes. He was just bright enough to know that he probably couldn't sell the electorate on the idea that economic growth was going to pay for everything. They had seen Jim Gilmore make that argument when he was governor of Virginia, and they had seen it fall apart with the economy tanked.
Bobby got creative. He was going to pay for everything with the income from slot machines. It really bothered him that people were going to West Virginia and New Jersey to play slots that they could play in Maryland. The outcry was enormous. First of all, people raised moral objections because gambling, to them, was a sin. And then others raised objection because gambling, to them, was really another tax on the lower economic strata. And then there were the folks who had no particular objections to slots, but they damn sure wanted them or didn't want them in their back yards. People found so many reasons to hate slots that I didn't even hear anyone say that slots aren't a reliable revenue stream. People have to have some sense that they can afford to start playing, and when consumer confidence is down, that's not going to happen. And people have to be able to afford to get to the slots.
Bobby Haircut got elected on a promise not to raise taxes, buthe couldn't sell his alternative revenue. So what happened after this became apparent? He pouted. Getting slots approved mattered more to him than the things that the revenue was supposed to pay for. Ehrlich looked like a petulant child, and he did very little in the way of legislative initiatives except to push slots.
Bobby wasn't much of a steward of state revenue. Wal-Mart managers told their employees, as they do in most states, that they aren't eligible for medical benefits through their employer, but they can enroll in the state Medicaid program. Wal-Mart increases its own profits this way while getting the state to pay some of what should be its operating expenses. The Maryland legislature disapproved of this and passed a law forcing any company over a specified size to either provide health benefits or pay a tax to the state. Wal-Mart threatened to leave. Ehrlich threatened to veto. The legislature overrode the veto.
Bobby screwed up in other ways. He made a series of "tourism" commercials featuring himself as the principal actor. Democrats pointed out that this was, in effect, using state tourism money to foster name recognition for the upcoming campaign. Bobby brought in the State Comptroller, a senile Democratic ex-governor named William Donald Schafer, to appear with him and another Democratic ex-governor, convicted raceketeer Marvin Mandel. The problem was that Willie Don had gotten terrible press for himself by asking an attractive young intern who had brought him a cup of coffee and walked away to come back and then walk away again--so he could check out her ass.
I suppose we'll see whether claiming to be a moderate can trump a lousy record. If it can, maybe the Republicans can avoid getting torn apart in November.

Rumsfeld's Speech

Full disclosure: I knew three girls in high school whose mother worked for Donald Rumsfeld when we were in high school. They were friends of mine. I never met Rummy then, and I wouldn't want to meet him now. Maybe I pay a bit more attnetion to him because of his connection with friends of mine, and maybe I expect more from him. His speech at the American Legion convention shows, though, that he's become a full-fledged, dyed in the woll Bushieman (if there was any doubt.) First, he followed the Bushie pattern: Do something stupid, get caught, condemn the people who caught you, apologize. If you make the apology limp enough, people will think you're being needlessly kind. People may not notice that you really didn't apologize. The best example was Felix Allen's "apology" to S.R. Sidarth after calling him by a racial epithet. Felix said he was sorry if his words had caused any pain--or, in other words, he was sorry that Sidarth was so thin-skinned that he couldn't take what I'm sure Felix still considers a bit of locker room joking around.
Rummy screwed up to begin with when he compared the so-called War on Terror to World War II. There's no real basis for that comparison. World War II was a war among nations, some of which had imperial designs. The only nation that seems to have imperial designs in the War on Terror is the United States. In World War II, victory could be had by controlling territory or destroying the enemy's industrial system, command and control system, or government. Since terrorists don't have an industrial system or government, the only real ways to destroy them have to do with compromising their command and control systems or denying them the opportunity to spread their belief system and recruit new martyr wannabes. But the Bushiemen seem to think that we have to fight this war like World War II (The Big One), even though there are major differences that mean that we can't win it that way.
Imagine that you're an Iranian youth, 18 to 25. Things have sucked in your country for about as long as you can remember. Fun is pretty much illegal. Your government is trying to position your country to play in the big leagues by developing nuclear weapons(message to Asshole in the White House: The word is pronounced New clee er, not New cue ler. Get it right, you fucking moron. It takes about ten minutes of practice.) And the United States government is threatening your country for exercising sovereignty and developing weapons it considers necessary to its security. Look what the United States has done in Iraq. Let's see now. Blow up self and something else, preferably American, become a martyr, make Mom and Dad proud, get seventy virgins who exist to service you. It's enough to make a young guy sign up on the spot.
When Bushie took over, Arabs had only a few reasons to hate the United States. We had put our troops, including women, in the Land of the two Holy Places. We supported Israel unquestioningly. We supported repressive governments, some monarchies and some theocracies, both of which we profess to hate. It was possible, however, for a young Arab to think that there was no particular reason to hate the United States. We were pretty much leaving him and his country and his region alone. Maybe there were things that violated the beliefs of the strictest fundamentalists, but they were a little goofy anyway.
Now, we've turned Afghanistan into a battlefield. We've blown up big parts of Iraq, and what we've missed, those who hate us have taken care of in an effort to get us out. We supported Israel in destroying south Lebanon. Who should believe that if we don't fight them where they are now, we'll have to fight them in our own back yards later? Not the United States, but the Arab world.
We are not in agreement that the United States is in a war with terrorists, Rummy, you moron. You think that. I don't. While we were attacked in 2001, that attack actually accomplished a great deal. It seriously weakened the United States economy. It struck fear into those who were predisposed to be fearful or who want to eliminate every scintilla of risk from life. Some of the consequences for terrorists seemed pretty bad to westerners: Islamic countries were devastated in the American effort to "root out terrorism," but the reality is that destruction of a country doesn't matter much to Islamic terrorists. Their loyalty is to a belief system, not a country, and if one country is blown up, they move, comfortable in the knowledge that their enemies can't blanket the whole world to capture them. Bushie and his preppy wonks don't understand anything that's not white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and rich. If they ever had contact with anything else, they've long since forgotten it. And they never even listened to Dylan, "When you ain't got nothin'/You got nothin' to lose."
So Rummy, it's not a war. Victory in any sense pertaining to war is impossible. The only way to reduce the threat from terrorism is what you think of as appeasement. The only "victory" comes from deflating the attraction of the terrorists' rhetoric and ideology. That's tough to do when the ideology is rooted in religion, but it's still possible. And even religion rooted ideologies can die; look at Puritanism.