Doc Amster

It's Finally Sinking In

2007-11-04T21:47:00.000-08:00

For some months, I've felt there was something peculiar about the upcoming primaries and election. Republicans seeming to accept the fact that Hilary Clinton would be succeeding their precious leader? Gradually, bits and pieces tumbled into place like a Tetris game. Now, I'm scared shitless because I'm becoming convinced that Hilary Clinton is the Bush familia candidate for 08.
The first sign was Bill Clinton cozying up with a family that really has reason to hate him for limiting Poppy to one failed term. And the Bushes had gone after Clinton hammer and tongs. He was slick Willie who couldn't be trusted at all. Now he's a good friend.
Then Hilary, whom Republicans had been taught to hate more than Bill, announces. She's the mommy of that godawful health care plan that put a sour taste in everyone's mouth, the one that would bloat the bureaucracy and require an advanced degree to figure out just how to access care. I thought the Republicans would like their chops at the hope of a woman they hated running for the Presidency.
Now they take her matter of factly. Her positions really aren't far from theirs; you have to look to John Edwards to get sold statements of difference across the board. I think the fix is in. With the Bush familia machine behind her, Hilary becomes President for four or eight years. At that point, Jeb is ready to run, and George P is getting ready in the wings.
Welcome to dynasty, folks. The only ways out are for you to seize power and nominate someone substantial who the republicans cant stand, like John Edwards. Or let George W. seize power "as an emergency measure" and incite a revolution. Otherwise, you may be stuck with the Bush Clinton dynasty for a long, long time.

Just Forget It

2007-09-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

Here we are again, coming up on September 11. Actually, though, we no longer come up on September 11; not in the United States. Now we come up on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But I'm reminded of my childhood, when I had a bad scrape or a cut--something with a scab over it--and my mother used to tell me "Don't pick at the scab. Leave it alone and let it heal." As I got older and more self-conscious about my appearance, "The scar will be worse if you pick at it" got to be part of the package. And our annual sackcloth and ashes commemoration of the attacks of September 11 are picking at the scab.
Once a year, Osama bin Laden or one of his disciples releases a video around this time. The subtext is always the same: "We're still here and we're still relevant." There's just one problem with that. They're not relevant. For all of Bush's handwaving and new programs, the fact is that the United States is no safer than it was on September 8, 2001. The media have actually pointed out how terrorists could attack. Hell, a college kid put fake plastic explosive into the rest rooms on airplanes and no one noticed for weeks. What's to stop bin Laden's religious fanatic nutcakes from attacking the United States again? Nothing. Not one damn thing. As I wrote some time ago, suicide attacks can't be prevented because the attacker actually hopes to die in the attempt.
It occurred to me recently: One of the greatest dangers Americans face in air travel is the security gate. Just think what one of bin Laden's moronic fanatical shitheads could do in those crowds waiting to get through the enhanced security. And anywhere you put the security, you're going to have a bottleneck and crowds. I don't think bin Laden is an idiot (although I have to question the intelligence of anyone who would follow him), and I'm pretty sure that opportunities like an attack on a security gate are not lost on him. Likewise the crowded subway, and in Washington there's really no subway security that would stop someone with a bomb or concealed Uzi. I'll resist the temptation to do a few bars on the container ships sailing into U.S. harbors. Why haven't there been any attacks?
It's not George Bush. And it's probably not that al Quaeda doesn't want to. They really can't pull it together anymore. Maybe the prospective members decided that ski masks were damned uncomfortable in those desert training camps. Maybe they decided that an Islamic fundamentalist world might be where they wanted to live, but dying for it would pretty much rule that out. It might be that bin Laden can get to his assets any more. But there he goes again, this time looking all cleaned up but, underneath the Grecian Formulaed hair and the fake looking beard, he looks a lot like a sick old maniac who realizes, in his moments of clarity, that he's going to die, and he probably won't get a martyr's death, and his movement will die with him.
So I'll be opting out of the commemorations, thank you. I'll hope that those who lost loved ones in the attacks are healing, but I really think it's time for the country to stop picking at the scab. We've allowed George Bush to do that for almost six years now, and the scar is going to be ugly.

2007-07-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove, speaking of Afghanistan, says that the United States would never take action in a sovereign nation unless asked to do so. Oh yeah. Right, Karl. Like the U.S. didn't do that in Iraq? I shouldn't be surprised. It's just one more demonstration of the contempt that the Bush family and its retainers have for the rest of the world, and it's particularly disturbing that it comes as the Lord of Misrule drops to 29 percent in the approval ratings and as he approaches what should be the end of his power.
The Bushies show their contempt in more ways that I'd bother to include in one post. They have absolute contempt for democracy; they show that when they say that they don't pay attention to the will of the people as expressed in polls. They have contempt for law; they show that when they effectively get Scooter Libby off the hook with a slap on the wrist. (Okay, it's a $250,000 slap on the wrist--no jail time, no probation because he didn't do jail time, but it's a hell of a lot better than anyone not a Bush family servant could expect. And do you really think he paid the fine out of his personal funds?) They demonstrate contempt for the Constitution by violating it as often as possible. They demonstrate contempt for Congress by issuing signing statements that say, in essence, "I signed your bill, but I'll be damned if I'm going to enforce it, and you can't even override a signing statement to make me." And with statements like Rove's, they indicate contempt for the people, as if they believe that the people of the world cannot see the disconnect between words and actions.
Does that matter? Just ask yourself this: What would you do if you had no respect for anything except your own power and the power of your family? We'd better hope that they have some respect for January 20, 2009.

Coulter Redefines Vile

2007-06-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Ann Coulter's behavior toward John and Elizabeth Edwards is absolutely repulsive. It demonstrates that is a mean-spirited, ill-bred mindless body. It is unfortunate that she is permitted to earn a living in any legal way, and yes: as a teacher, I'm offended that someone as ignorant and inconsiderate as she is can earn far more money than I do by displaying how mean-spirited, ill-bred, ignorate, and inconsiderate she is. Now I also concede that conservatives love her, but they're pretty low on the food chain, too: What they like is that she is "strong" (which really means obnoxious) and "tells it like she sees it" (which means that she's out of touch with reality and therefore says things that no one with two functional brain cells could ever agree with.) And in her latest exchange with Elizabeth Edwards, she shows how low she is.
"Why isn't John Edwards making this call?" she asks at one point. If she were a woman who had any meaningful relationship with any other human being, she would probably realize that women respond quickly and sharply when anyone attacks someone they love. You know that stuff about females defending their children? After 31 years of marriage, I can tell you that my wife is equally fierce defending anyone she loves. There have been instances when I was working on setting aside an affront and she was furious. So Ann, if you actually had any relationships, you'd know that Elizabeth probably picked up the phone while John was shrugging it off with "It's Ann Coulter; she's a bitch anyhow."
Ann Coulter doesn't seem to realize that the conservative guys who like to fantasize about her and make her rich would love to keep her barefoot and pregnant if they were married to her. (Ann Coulter bearing children--there's a scary thought!) That's the conservative idea of how marriage should be, after all. But John and Elizabeth Edwards, being liberals, do not live in the eighteenth century. As far as I can tell, they've got an egalatarian marriage, and in an egalatarian marriage, the motto could easily be "Git 'er done." If there's something that needs doing and you can do it, do it.
She claims that John Edwards has a bumper sticker that says "Ask me about my dead child." Is there anything more inhuman than that? But Ann wouldn't realize that because--guess what--she has no children, perhaps because no man would want her to bear his children. I can think of only one thing that might allow a single woman to appreciate the loss of a child: gang rape.
And she equates John and Elizabeth raising money for his campaign to her selling books. Okay, Ann. Pay attention, now, because this is going to be hard for someone of limited intelligence to follow. John and Elizabeth Edwards are raising money for a presidential campaign because they honestly believe that John espouses positions that would serve the country well. For them, his victory, for which I hope and pray, would mean significant loss of income for at least four years. It would mean having to put up with people like Ann Coulter every day as well as being scheduled 24/7. For John, who faces the possibility of losing his wife to cancer in the next few years, it could mean bearing a terrible grief in public, with the world finding fault with his behavior no matter what he did.
This is not the same as selling books--a subject that I know something about having written a book and being at work on a second. There's really no downside. You write the book; you collect the royalties. Maybe you do some interviews, but it's up to you. Maybe, if you write best-seller stuff, you go on a promotional tour, but again, it's up to you, and it's over in a few weeks. And while John and Elizabeth Edwards articulate positive policies for the country, you, Ann Coulter, are unable to do anything more significant than bad mouth them, and these days it seems that you even bad mouth your own president.
Is it Ann Coulter's right to spew her idiocy? Of course it is, although I wish that her parents had raised her better. It's also her right to endure any unpleasant consequences that arise from her venom, and I hope that they will be immediate and severe. It's her right, but it isn't right. And those of you who call yourselves conservatives and Republicans? Pay attention, because she claims to be speaking for you. I hope for the day publishers and television networks return to pulling the plug on outrageous people instead of seeing them as profit leaders. And I hope for the day when conservatives can look at Ann Coulter's views, see their own views, and be sickened.

Shall We Try Fairness?

2007-06-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

If Paris Hilton actually has fans, I'm not one of them. If she hadn't been featured doing her boyfriend in a video, she might well have remained pretty much anonymous. And she has played her notoriety for all it's worth, providing that maybe all you need is a publicist and you, too, can be famous for being famous. I confess to making jokes, when she was engaged to that guy, Paris What's-his-name, about how confused she'd get trying to have a conversation with him in which she used his name.
And then she got busted, convicted, and ordered to jail. Her stay was short, but she will actually be under home confinement for longer than the twenty-three days she was to spend in jail. She got credit for time served, as happens in many cases. And she walked out of jail to alternative confinement. Some people in the press are already writing their snarky columns about what a break she's getting. Maybe they're just upset because they were looking forward to twenty-three days of snarkiness about Paris in jail.
Let's be fair, though. Ms. Hilton walked into the jail late Sunday night with every expectation that she would serve every one of the twenty-three days she was ordered to serve. She didn't make a production out of beginning her sentence, although the press did. She had, in fact, shown up in the news only rarely between her conviction and reporting to the jail. Her statement sounded as if she might have matured somewhat.
The press is scoffing at the medical reasons for her change to alternative incarceration. It is not ours to question. Let's take what I believe they regard as the worst case: She was as one reporter said, "bent out of shape at being in prison." It's said that she cried a lot and didn't eat. That really sounds a lot like depression. Having suffered from serious depression myself on a couple of occasions, I can say with certainty that depression would interfere with any effort at rehabilitation, and if it's left untreated, it can become even worse. How much do you put someone through for traffic violations?
I've had a difficult teenager who narrowly escaped incarceration on a number of occasions. I've had a nephew who ended up doing a year as a habitual offender because he drove without a license repeatedly. Both have turned a corner, and I'm proud of them. And Paris Hilton may have, too. She showed courage and responsibility that I really didn't think she had. If she's trying to turn around, good for her. I may not be a fan, but if she's trying to be a better person, I'm willing to be a cheerleader for her.

The Madness of King George

2007-05-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Message to George W. Bush: The United States is a representative democracy. That is, people elect other people to represent them in the legislative branch and to see that the laws are faithfully executed in the executive branch. I realize this is very difficult for you to understand because you were handed your office by the Supreme Court Justices your father appointed and would have lost in 2004 if your good friends at Diebold hadn't carried out their promise to get you reelected at any cost. Your family, with its dynastic aspirations, hates the idea of allowing people to control government. Nevertheless, representative democracy is the American way.

The election of 2006 was a real election. Daddy's money and connections couldn't deliver Congress, and new representatives came to town determined to do what they had been elected to do. In part, that meant ending the idiotic war that you started without provocation. They did something you couldn't stand: They sent a funding bill that had some accountability in it. They told you that they weren't going to sign any more blank checks for a moronic, cowardly traitor in the White House who has no strategy and no idea what victory would even look like. But they did vote the funding the troops needed.

And you vetoed the bill because you had to show them that you had a penis. You are a stupid, ignorant person with a tenuous grip on reality and far more money and power than you ever should have had. You are a threat to the United States. You need to understand democracy and live it. Americans expect it.

By the way, you have to leave office on January 20, 2009 unless you are impeached or forced to resign sooner. That is something that even Daddy, Mommy, and the idiots who still see some good in you cannot change.

Virginia Tech

2007-04-20T03:47:00.000-07:00

In this morning's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer "What can be said about the Virginia Tech massacre? Very little. What should be said? Even less." He goes on to complain that in the wake of the murder of 31 people by a student who had been identified as dangerous by classmates, teachers, and a psychiatrist, some are having the audacity to call for gun control and confinement of people whose mental diseases make them a threat to themselves or others. I have seldom agreed with Krauthammer; he seems to be convinced that in the course of earning degrees in both law and medicine, he learned all there is to know and he never makes any response to arguments with which he disagrees. He now reveals himself as utterly lacking in insight and compassion.
A friend of mine made a thought-provoking statement about gun control. Speaking of the Romanian faculty member who had survived the Holocaust, he pointed out that the Nazis, the embodiment of evil, could not kill the man, and the Communists, whom we were told were an evil empire, could not kill him, but Virginia's gun laws could. Gun controls are imperfect, but does Krauthammer really think that it's okay for someone who has been identified as an imminent danger by a psychiatrist to walk into a gun store and walk out with a gun?
I believe in civil liberties, but they are not absolute. When people drink and drive and are caught, they lose their licenses. If they persist, they go to jail. People are, of course, free to drink--but not if they endanger others by doing so. Shouldn't the same principle apply with the mentally ill?
And wouldn't you think that a psychiatrist familiar with the grief process would at least keep quiet if he couldn't show some compassion. Instead, he says to the families of the victims and to the survivors, "Shit happens. Get over it."
And Krauthammer, shortsighted, uncaring, egomaniac that he is, overlooks that we must talk about this tragedy. We must ask why. It seems to me that this society has become increasingly tolerant of outrageous speech. Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Bill O'Reilly spew their over-emotional, unsupported venom from the safety of the radio studio and this society says they are speaking courageously and we make them millionaires. We tolerate an administration that responds to what it takes as affronts with bluster. And it is not a long leap from speech to action. These outrageous people are valorized; they are, in effect, held up as examples. As they define the world in terms of friends and enemies and argue for the destruction of enemies, those who listen to them become less interested in getting along with other people. And when a madman defines the world as his enemy, when he is not restrained, when he is allowed to buy weapons, risk rises unnecessarily.
So Mr. Krauthammer, I will be writing to the Post and suggesting that they cancel your column. If you still appear on Inside Washington, I'll write to the producers and make the same suggestion. And frankly, I hope you'll have to make do with your savings for the rest of your life.

Who's Withholding

2007-04-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

There Bush goes again. Someone, usually Democrats, questions his so-called plans for fighting what he likes to think of as global terrorism. Instead of responding to the questions, the traitor-in-chief and his lackeys identify whoever questioned the plans as the enemy: "Why do you hate America?" "Why don't you support our troops?" It's the traitor-in-chief's ignorance at work. Like every other member of criminal family, he believes that as emperor, he does not have to answer questions. He's simply too stupid to understand democracy, which is not a terribly difficult concept to grasp.
Now he says that if the Congress doesn't give him an emergency spending bill to pursue his imperialist aims in the Middle East, they will be denying the troops in Iraq the goods they need to carry on his illegal occupation. Let's get the sequence straight. The traitor-in-chief asked Congress for new emergency appropriations, not realizing that his lackeys were no longer running the legislative branch. The legislators considered his request and came to the conclusion that it was a bad idea to give a traitor who spends like a drunken sailor money without imposing conditions. They voted to give him the funding he requested, but they demanded accountability, something that the traitor-in-chief doesn't grasp. Essentially, their message came down to this: "Here's your money, but you'd damn well better end the occupation by a specified date because we're not going to keep handing you more." The part that the traitor-in-chief missed is "Here's your money." Congress met his demands. His role, at that point, was to accept the money and the accountability and, for once is his misbegotten, wasteful, criminal, debauched existence, do his best to achieve goals instead of laughing them off.
He doesn't know how to do that. His bitch mother protected him from the consequences of his mediocrity and substance abuse. Karl Rove protected him from the consequences of his incompetence and corruption. And what hurts most is the idea that the Secret Service has already indicated that it will cost more to protect him than any other former president simply because he has aroused such hatred around the world. I've got a terrific idea: No more for him than for any other former president. Let the bastard barricade himself on his ranch in Texas so that the security costs stay low. No one is going to want him to be an elder statesman anyway, and if I were Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, I damn sure wouldn't want him and his whore wife at my funeral.

What Bush Doesn't Get

2007-04-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

Congress has passed a bill for funding of the Iraqi occupation that requires setting a date for American forces to leave there. Bush says that he will veto it. Once again, he demonstrates that his ignorance of fundamental principles of democracy make him a traitor who should be executed, not someone who should ever have set foot in the White House, even on the tour.
Vetoes were never meant to give the executive power to override the wishes of the people; they were intended as part of the balance of power among the branches--a means of curbing legislative usurpations without resorting to the courts. The real power lay with the representatives of the people in the legislature. A legislative act that passed both houses--one that had the support of the representatives of most of the people--therefore represented the will of the people unless it infringed on executive or judiciary prerogatives, in which case the executive would veto it. And if the executive didn't veto it, opponents of the act had recourse to the courts.
Bush, of course, overlooks that in a democracy or a democratic republic, the will o the people trumps the will of the executive. He can claim that he doesn't believe in polls, but that's only because he comes from a family of imperial wannabes who have sought to claim greater power for themselves through a variety of unsavory means. Most Americans say that it's time to end the war, and their representatives have heard them. It is now time for Bush to end the war, whether he likes it or not, whether he thinks that the people's wishes are prudent or not.
But he won't. The problem is not that he won't end a stupid war; it's that he claims for himself a power that no one in a democratic republic can have.

Get It Right

2007-03-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've finally figured out why conservatives are such chronic liars. No one seems to challenge their lies. This morning, I read a full-page ad in the Washington Post paid for by a former metallurgist and titanium entrepreneur named George S. Esseff, Sr. It's a classic example of conservative lies and half-truths, and I, for one, cannot let them go unchallenged. What Esseff asserts about conservatives is in italics.

Who we are … are people who believe that the true measure of an individual is determined by his or her values ... not their color, ethnicity and/or political affiliations;

Values? The party of Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Tom DeLay, the Bushes, and Dick Cheney (to name just a few)? They talk the talk of values, but they cannot walk the walk. Gingrich and Giuliani (who, I suspect, laughed when Jimmy Carter said he had lusted in his heart) have proven unable to keep their penises in their pants and remain faithful to their marriages. For the sake of the argument, and only for that reason, I'm willing to drop DeLay, the Bushes, and Cheney if any conservative will come forward and explain to me what can be worse than breaking of a vow made before God. And by the way, Mr. Esseff: You claim to be a devout Catholic. Your church regards marriage as a sacrament. What's it's take on adultery?

Who we are … are fathers, husbands, mothers, sons and daughters who understand that America is at war with an enemy that will employ any and all opportunities … and exploit any perceived weaknesses … political and psychological … to kill Americans, whenever and wherever they find them… and destroy those very principles, freedoms and ideals which protect us … and upon which this great nation was founded;

Let's recognize here that to fundamentalist Muslims, we are an enemy, currently employing any and all opportunities to exploit any perceived weaknesses to kill their people whenever and wherever we find them and destroy the principles and ideals that shape their culture. But the terrorists are like rattlesnakes: most dangerous when they are provoked. The Bush doctrine has only strengthened the view throughout the world that the United States is bent on world domination.

Moreover, the terrorists are not out to destroy America. They need America desperately. It's crucial to their collective identity, recruiting, and fundraising that they stand against something, and there's no other something as big or as aggressive as the United States.

Who we are … are citizens, tired and disgusted with the political left’s, “Blame America First” crowd, who eagerly rush to judgment (and the nearest camera) to blame this country and her people for all the world’s ills, from … Global Warming to International Terrorism;

It's not a rush to judgment to consider evidence from a variety of perspectives and then draw a conclusion that based on that. People like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush make it even easier. Look, I'm a teacher and I have to point out students' mistakes to them all the time. I do that in the same spirit and hope with which I criticize my country: I know it's possible to do better. The problem here is that conservatives tend to think that we're all as harsh as they are in our judgments. All of their judgments are summative--they are final. But some of us make formative judgments--judgments meant to set a course toward improvement, based on the recognition that circumstances change all the time.

Who we are … are Americans who are grateful for a President who understands that National Security must come before Political Correctness;

Would this be the President who has allowed warrantless eavesdropping that his own Justice Department says are illegal in numerous cases, on American citizens. Would this be the President who doesn't understand the part of the Constitution that makes him responsible for seeing that laws are enforced instead of issuing signing statements that explain that he's not going to stick closely to the letter or spirit of the law? National security begins with "uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." (Italics mine) Is it now okay to flout the Constitution as long as you're shaking your fist at some external enemy?

Who we are … are parents who recognize that our children are America’s most precious asset. That’s why we are so vocal against the Media’s obsession with Hollywood’s perversities … and the morally corrupt, socially inept “Pop Culture Icons” it incessantly creates for our youth.

You certainly are vocal on that point, never quite realizing that parents have the responsibility for raising their children. I suspect that I know a lot more young people than Mr. Esseff does; after all, I'm in the classroom with them every day. And my students represent a cross-section of the United States. They know who the pop culture icons are, and they either scoff at them or express disgust with them. Mr. Esseff, did it occur to you to find out anything about young people before you wrote this one?

Who we are … are political voices, many of whom are former Liberals, who now recognize our actions must be based on realities … unlike today’s Liberals who seem content to act on “feelings” and speak only in platitudes;

It was, I must point out, the current liberals who doubted that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That wasn't a feeling. Current liberals realized that as despicable as Sadaam Hussein was, he was not even friendly with the likes of Osama bin Laden because they represent different religious doctrines. If someone strikes me and I strike back without first making a realistic assessment of the situation, that's acting on feelings. That's what Bush did after September 11. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives later, we still don't have Osama bin Laden. Sadaam Hussein is dead, and his execution didn't do anything to calm the Middle East. I wish Bush had based his responses on reality.

Who we are … are the sons and daughters of immigrants, many of whom came to America themselves to escape tyranny and discrimination in their own homeland … but they came here legally! As Conservatives, we demand our lawmakers take any and all steps necessary to immediately enforce our laws, secure our borders and protect our nation;

Let me offer myself as a case in point: My ancestors arrived between the seventeenth and early nineteen centuries. They probably had as much documentation and as much permission to be here as most of the illegal immigrants do now. It was 1887 when the Statue of Liberty, a welcome to immigrants, was dedicated. Only during the twentieth century did Congress pass tight restrictions on immigration, and the whole point of those laws was to minimize the number of non-Anglo Saxon immigrants, particularly Jews, who could immigrate here.

Who we are … are voters who demand that far-reaching governmental policies must be based on fact … not feelings … and debated on the merits of science and pragmatism … not political correctness … nor expediency;

Science and pragmatism? Is that why embryonic stem cell research is unfunded? Actually, it's not science and pragmatism; it's theocracy at its worst, and it exposes the worst of the conservatives: It's apparently more respectful to dump unimplanted embryos in the biological waste disposal than to use them in research that might help millions.

Who we are … are people of faith who believe in the sanctity of life, the blessedness of marriage and the preservation of the family. We also hold that abortion is immoral … and partial birth abortion is nothing short of legislative genocide;

The sanctity of life--and creating chaos in Iraq. The blessedness of marriage--and the denial of its benefits to many loving and committed couples even while your own leaders conduct extramarital affairs and refuse to stand up for their own gay and lesbian children. The preservation of the family--and the striking number of instances of divorce and adultery among conservative leaders. There's nothing wrong with thinking abortion is immoral; there is something wrong with trying to ban it because you believe that women cannot make moral decisions. Partial birth abortion? Doctors perform it only when it is medically necessary to the mother, and they perform it so seldom that "genocide" is an inaccurate characterization.

Who we are … are constituents disgusted by the posturing of liberal politicians who seek only to exploit the horrors of war through the debating of defeatist Resolutions. Resolutions proposed by Liberals for no purpose other than to embellish themselves with the far left, while embarrassing the country and our military … without any care nor regard as to how their actions may demoralize our troops … and encourage our enemies!

The purpose of United States servicemembers in Iraq seems to be to serve as targets for Sunni and Shia militants. If they are withdrawn from this shooting gallery, the combat deaths and wounds to Americans will stop. The Iraqi forces, which so far have been unwilling to do their jobs because it's a lot easier to have Americans die for your country than for you to do so, will have to secure their own country.

Who we are … are concerned individuals who recognize that the Left’s mantra “I support the troops but not the war” is an oxymoron perpetuated by those whose only intent is to weaken the war effort and demoralize our fighting forces. It’s impossible to separate “the warrior from the war” and if you don’t understand that fact, then re-think your position, because the fastest and most effective method of defeating an army is to destroy its morale by questioning its mission … just ask our enemies!!

If a foreign army invaded my country without provocation with the stated intent of disarming the armed forces, toppling the established government, and compelling reconstruction according to its own perceptions of how things should be, I would resist that army. That is what our troops are doing in Iraq, and what I would not support others doing to me I cannot support my country doing to others. The ultimate mission in Iraq is so unclear that the troops cannot move toward it, and thus they are suffering and dying for nothing more than George W. Bush's oedipal issues. No one should have to die for that.

A friend of mine, a National Guardsman, left last week to deploy to Iraq. He is quick to point out that this is not what he enlisted to do. Reservists and National Guardsmen and their families have suffered a great deal. You, Mr. Esseff, need to demonstrate compassion toward them instead of demanding their death.

Who we are … are Americans who sadly recognize with War comes casualties. But we also recognize day, after day, after day, that to only report the deaths of America’s bravest … while completely ignoring the successes, achievements and objectives for which they died … is a disgrace of such proportion that it makes us wonder …. On whose side is the Media?

Tell me about those successes, achievements, and objectives. One of the things that I don't understand at all about conservatives is their tendency to claim that the media do not report accurately--yet the only way they could get information to discern this would be. . . from the very media they condemn. And how do you know that your sources are credible? Are you at all familiar with the editorial process that major media use to ascertain the accuracy of their reportage?

Who we are … are people proud that under the Bush Administration, despite numerous attempts, not one single terrorist attack has occurred on our soil in over 5 ½ years; our economy has climbed to an all time high; taxes and inflation are at twenty year lows; Federal tax revenues are the highest in our nation’s history and the deficit is down by almost 50% (as predicted by the President). Yet, despite all this, the liberal leadership in Congress is threatening to “take America in a new direction”!

My great-grandchildren will be paying for the folly of the Bush administration. To credit the administration with the absence of terrorist attacks is to overlook that the terrorists make their attacks expecting to become martyrs. They simply haven't been interested in attacking. Don't believe me? Nine years passed between the bombing of the World Trade Center and the attacks of 2001. While the economic picture may look rosy, I'm seeing college graduates struggling to find work and finally accepting work that offers few or no benefits and little or no stability. Perhaps it's better for titanium entrepreneurs who are wealthy enough to buy full pages of the Washington Post, but I'm no better off than I was at the beginning of Bush's misrule. In fact, you could say that I'm worse off because my retirement is in stocks and mutual funds--managed by TIAA-CREF--and I have had few good quarters since 2001.

Who we are … are freedom loving individuals who are opposed to activist Judges who seem determined to impose upon us their failed, liberal policies through judicial edicts … rather than our legislative processes;

Another cute thing about ignorant, lying conservatives: they don't seem to realize that lifetime appointments free judges to make decisions founded on the law. And if you're going to hate activist judges, you're going to have to hate the conservative activists, too.

Who we are … are compassionate people who have always practiced what Arthur Brooks’ book “WHO REALLY CARES”, recently confirmed. Namely, when it comes to helping the poor … across the board … Conservatives, from the working poor to the wealthy … consistently give more of their money … and their time … than liberals do! Not surprising, these studies confirm what many of us have known for decades … namely, that liberals are quick to give away other people’s money but reluctant to part with any of their own!

I haven't read Brooks' book, but it appears that it may depend heavily on statistics. A statistician I work with me has instilled in me a strong belief that statistics are subject to abuse and statistical studies are frequently poorly designed. As a liberal who tries to be generous in helping others, I think Brooks may have overgeneralized.

Who we are … are historians who recognize that the Liberals’ plans for “appeasement” and “cut and run” are not new ones! Britain and France did it in 1914 and their “success” resulted in World War I; Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did it in 1939 and his “plan” ignited World War II. Because of today’s high tech weaponry, our world is a far more dangerous place; consequently, victory is our only option!

I'm a Ph.D. cultural historian, and I know something about historiography. There are far too many variables in history to draw comparisons like this. The fundamental stupidity is evident: World War I did involve appeasement, but the appeasement was of an enemy visibly striving for world domination. That is not the case in Iraq. The only ones bent on world domination are George W. Bush, his minions, and his sycophants. A world founded on peaceable principals is also an option--except to conservatives who must have an enemy to validate their existence.

Who we are … are people to whom every life is precious, but we also recognize that freedom is fragile. In a world where the Media’s “perception” becomes the public’s “reality”, it’s easy to forget that in America’s last great struggle, 407,300 of our fighting forces gave their lives … so we could have ours. Our losses averaged 298 a day … for each and every day of World War II. In comparison, our Iraqi losses have averaged fewer than 3 a day… and as tragic as that is… it’s up to each and every one of us to make sure none of them shall have died in vain.

If life is truly precious to you, then one unnecessary death is too many. My uncle died fighting Hitler and I'm grateful for that sacrifice, but we aren't fighting a Hitler. The psychopath we're fighting is a religious fanatic whom we armed in Afghanistan in the days of the Soviet invasion, and he wants Americans to leave him and the Muslim Middle East alone. Unlike Hitler, he has no designs on world domination, contrary to the conservative mythology. He doesn't have to dominate the world; he has the obsessive attention of the United States, and that's leading to the destruction of the economy through profligate government spending on wars that can't and shouldn't be fought and tax cuts for people who don't need them.

Who we are … are a population grateful to this nation’s men and women (and the families they left behind) who sacrifice their blood, sweat and tears to defend America … her people … and her way of life. To you, we say “thank you” ... and to God, we pray for your blessings … protection … and safe return.

If you were that grateful, you wouldn't want the war to continue. If one of your friends or loved ones were in Iraq, you might feel very different.

Who we are … are people firmly committed to Jefferson’s belief … “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press…” (Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786). But when the press abused the public’s trust, he also wrote, “A truth now and then, projecting into an ocean of newspaper lies, serves like headlands to correct our course” (Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1815).

Conservatives have to get over the media. They also need to get over the fact that advanced education--the education that teaches respect for evidence, research, and critical thinking--appears to correlate pretty strongly with liberalism. If you look at Jefferson's writings, you can find a quotation that appears to support or attack whatever you want to support or attack, especially if you don't worry much about context.

I have paid for this ad with my own money, in hopes that this too will serve as a “truth” to those needing a course correction.

It's good that you put quotation marks on "truth." You probably believe that I need a course correction, and I'm certainly open to one. But it will be a response to facts, not the infantile, deceitful rantings of a conservative ideologue who is unable to see the logical flaws and factual errors in his twisted arguments. It's frightening, however, to realize how many conservatives have the kind of money it takes to buy a page in a major newspaper.

George J. Esseff, Sr

Terrorism 2.0

2007-02-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

It's been over five years since terrorists brought a nation to its knees by trying to fly four aircraft into buildings and, in three cases, succeeding. Three thousand people died in those attacks. George Bush talked tough. He was going to get Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. He pretty much dared the terrorists to try again. Most people cheered for him because he talked tough.
Yesterday, a major city--Boston--was brought to its knees, not by terrorists, but by its institutionalized fear, a fear fed for political reasons by George Bush. It's easy to blame Turner Broadcasting for the total disruption caused by the light boxes placed around the city to promote a TBS Cartoon Network movie. The mayor of Boston says they were irresponsible. If you've seen a picture of one of the light boxes, you can tell that it looks like a cartoon character with a middle finger uprasied in the well known gesture that does not mean that the target is number one--the one that I made a couple of weeks ago when Bush's helicopters flew over at low level on the trip back from Camp David a couple of weeks ago. It doesn't look like an explosive device or something that could send billions of viruses into the air. It looks like a damn light box. Moreover, the boxes had been in place for a while, in Boston and in nine other cities. By the way, that would be nine other cities where no one decided they were suspicious.
I can't hold TBS responsible; they advertise. Businesses tend to do that. They also tend to try to find new and creative ways to showcase their offerings, and if you don't believe that, just watch the Super Bowl ads. And not all ads produce the desired response with everyone. Hell, I hate the GEICO gecko. The AFLAC duck is great, but not everyone likes him.
I hold Boston responsible. The city leadership has drunk the kool aid of fear served up by the Coward in Chief and his lackeys. They have reached a point at which anything out of the ordinary is suspcious, and anything suspicious is presumed to be connected to terrorism until proven otherwise. I hope the city of Boston recoups not one cent of what it spent sending cops around to blow up light boxes. I hope everyone who suffered a loss because of the intemperate response will sue the city and win.
I don't hope this because I hate Boston. I hope this because it is the fear of terrorism that now controls the United States. Americans bought the idea that we could stop terrorism by invading Afghanistan and capturing bin Laden, even though new terrorists and new leaders would have sprung up to take his place. (And by the way, George, where is bin Laden? How much have we pissed away trying to catch him. Americans bought the idea that terrorists were going to buy weapons of mass destruction because they were cozy with Sadaam Hussein. I suspect that many Americans believed that when Sadaam and Osama were tried and duly hanged, we could all relax. Well, we don't have Osama. There weren't any weapons of mass destruction. Sadaam is dead, and the level of violence has only escalated since his execution. More Americans have died in these misbegotten adventures than died in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The Coward in Chief talks about successes in the war on terrorism, but the "plots" he talks about have all been debunked.
Here's the truth: terrorists do not need to lift a finger to cause harm to the United States. They don't have to die, they don't have to spend money, they don't have to take the risk of being caught before they can carry out their plans (if, in fact, they are still making plans.) The fear of them that the powerful harbor--or pretend to harbor for their own political gain--is just as damaging, and it operates 24/7. We should be far more fearful of what those powerful men can do than of what terrorists will do.

The Psycho Presidency

2007-01-27T05:23:00.000-08:00

On January 26, the Washington Post ran a headline "Bush Defies Lawmakes to Solve Iraq." The same front page included an article by Jennifer Loven, "Bush: 'I'm the Decision-Maker on Iraq.'" There has been much speculation on the Coward in Chief's Oedipal conflicts and their relationship to the war in Iraq, but in those two headlines--in the posture that generated them--you have it: Proof that George W. Bush is one sick puppy. If there were no Dick Cheney, who is even more mental, it would be good to get Bush out of office because he's mentally incompetent.
Here's why: A good leader, seeing a serious problem, one that is costing American lives and treasure beyond what he ever expected, one that has seriously diminished confidence in the United States around the world (and, frankly, at home), one that most Americans believe cannot be ended successfully, would accept help from any source to get out of it. A good leader would realize that if his opposition's plan didn't work, he could always point out that it wasn't his plan that failed. These days, he'd get high marks for bipartisanship, win, lose, or draw. And if the plan succeeded, he could show magnanimity by graciously pointing out that only the execution of the plan was his.
But that's not our Coward in Chief. Saving American and Iraqi lives and reducing the tension caused by American presence in Iraq is not as important to him as making sure that he gets to be the hero who won the war. And unfortunately, those few who still believe in him see this stubbornness as a principled man sticking to his guns. But a lot of his support comes from the South, where following a principle to death became a good thing when it helped people to cope with defeat in the Civil War. Actually, it was that same mentality that fueled the rush to secession and war in the cotton south.
This is self-destructive behavior, and self-destructive behavior is a bad thing. One of the first questions asked in a psychological evaluation is "Do you think about doing harm to yourself or other people?" In Bush's case, the honest answer--the answer of a man of integrity--would be "Yes. I'm committing political suicide daily, and knowing that there is an alternative, I am following a policy that leads to the death and injury of dozens of Americans and Iraqis daily." But Bush is not a man of integrity. Something along the line--maybe privilege, maybe a distant father, maybe realizing that his younger brother was the favored son--has made him crazy--or as a colleague of mine puts it "dangerous crazy."

A thought. A few weeks ago, Poppy Bush teared up when talking about Jeb, the son he thought would be president--the smart one, the one ho was something more than a frat puke. Well, Poppy, you get no sympathy from me. I've done all I could to dissuade my sons from doing things that I thought were wrong for them in any way. It was not easy, but I wanted them to think about possible pitfalls in a course of action. It didn't always work for me, but you, Poppy, had enough influence in the Republican Party that you probably could have pulled a few strings to make sure that Georgie didn't get the nomination. But your commitment to dynasty kicked in, and you did nothing. So don't cry, Poppy. You're at fault. There's blood on your hands, too.

Clueless

2007-01-22T04:12:00.000-08:00

If you're the kind of person who is fascinated by multi-car pile-ups, I think the Virginia Republican Party would be an acceptable substitute. Former Senator and presidential dreamer George Felix Allen started it out with Macaca, but that wasn't enough. He had to make it worse by announcing, after (finally) acknowledging his Jewish ancestry, that he had eaten a ham sandwich the day before and his mother made great pork chops. Those gaffes by themselves, positions on the issues aside, could have created Jim Webb's narrow margin of victory.
The leftovers from Jim Webb's victory parties weren't all gone when it came out that the Republicans in Virginia were at odds with each other about transportation funding. The wingers in the legislature thought that the localities should pay for new transportation initiatives. The Republicans on county boards and city councils were appalled. The groups started attacking each other until someone called a meeting and told them to play pretty. It looked like the party was going cannibalistic.
Comes then Virgil Goode, congressman, to express his disgust that an American-born Congressional colleague of the Muslim faith wanted to be sworn with his hand on (gasp!) the Holy Koran. Never mind that congresspeople can be sworn with their hands on whatever they choose (or, presumably, on nothing at all). Goode said that this was bad, and we'd all better adopt his position on immigration or we'd see much more of this. While a predictable number of neanderthals jumped to stand with him--my favorite wrote that he or she would never recognize the authority of any public official who was sworn on anything but the Bible--a lot of people expressed shock and disgust.
One would have thought that would be enough, that somebody would call the Republican officials into their big tent and point out that they couldn't say anything that popped into their heads and expect to stay in office, but it didn't happen. Instead, when a bill apologizing for slavery was debated in the House of Delegates, Delegate Frank Hargrove, Sr., said that black people should just "get over it." This wasn't enough to satisfy Hargrove. In the same speech, he asked whether the next step would be to ask Jews to apologize for killing Christ.
When the Republicans got started on damage control, it became clear that despite the experience they've had with the likes of George W. Bush, they aren't very good at that. One of their leaders in the legislature said that not all Republicans thought like Hargrove (and, presumably, Goode and Allen.) State Senator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, whose extramarital affair with Representative Tom Davis got her some nice funding when he chaired Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, says that people in northern Virginia "understand the comments of those from rural areas versus those of us who represent northern Virginia and embrace its diversity."
The Republicans haven't grasped the real problem: there are some things that shouldn't be tolerated, and a political party that keeps its doors open to bigots and xenophobes gains a reputation for bigotry and xenophobia--not tolerance. It's less than a year until Virginia delegates and some state senators and local officials must run for office again. If the Republican party doesn't want to suffer the sort of crushing losses that the national party suffered last November, it's time for a purge. Senator Devolites Davis and her Republican buddies need to learn that if you don't immediately cut loose people like Virgil Goode and Frank Hargrove, Sr., people will start to wonder whether you really agree with them.

More Troops? For What?

2007-01-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

I confess: I didn't watch the Coward-in-Chief's speech on his "New Way Forward." I decided that more of his self-serving lies would only make me angry and think that it would have been really nice if all of the people who now see his war as a mistake had seen it before the '04 election. I thought that people were doing a good job of getting out the word on the weaknesses of the plan. And I think there have been some good analyses of his plan and his presentation. The Howard Fineman piece in which he gave Bush credit for showing all the assurance of a perp in a police lineup particularly resonated.
Bush can say that victory will look different, that there will be no signing ceremony on the deck of a battleship, and he's right. But he still believes that victory is possible. There can be no victory in a war where every "success" strengthens the enemy's resolve and numbers. There can be no victory for a third party in a war that deposed a tyrant but left the factions that he had repressed to kill each other. There can be no victory in a war that was fought against the phantasms of terrorists who sought world domination or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In Iraq, the only victory that was ever possible was the avoidance of defeat, and that was only possible if we didn't get into a war in the first place.
But George W. Bush and his minions, all of them cowards, wanted to prove their courage, so they started a war. That war has now claimed the lives of over three thousand Americans. God only knows how many lives, American and Iraqi alike, it has ruined. They don't seem to have noticed that the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration given by the United States armed forces, is given for valor above and beyond the call of duty--and in many, if no most cases, the recipient has given his own life to protect others.
So when Bush calls for more troops in Iraq, more people to bleed and die in the faint hope that he can claim victory, we do well to insist on an end to the insanity--and then the impeachment, trial, and conviction of all of those who led into this debacle.

Coincidence? I Think Not.

2006-12-31T16:44:00.000-08:00

The end of the year approaches and with it two events that the Bush Administration would rather we did not notice: The death toll in the Iraq War (fortunately, we've lost that silly "Operation Iraqi Freedom" euphemism) seemed likely to reach 3000 by year's end, and the execution of Sadaam Hussein would undoubtedly unleash harsh criticism and new scrutiny of the United States role in Iraq. There was nothing that could be done about the first; it was going to happen. The second could be postponed, but not for long: under Iraqi law, executions must be carried out within thirty days after the ruling on the final appeal. It looked as if there could be some bad news days ahead for the Bush Family Mafia.
Then they got a helping hand from someone who may not have wanted to help: Gerald Ford, one of the last two truly decent men to occupy the White House, died on the day after Christmas. Ford, it turns out, never really wanted to President; he was a simple man with simple tastes who didn't particularly like pomp and pageantry. His plans for his funeral were not extravagant, like Ronald Reagan's funeral a few years ago. Nevertheless, the media could be counted on to provide intensive coverage. There would be a need to rehash Ford's long career in public service. There would be a need to dissect that career, and then it would be time to bury Jerry, not to praise him. The geography of the situation would prolong the memorial activities for days, starting in Palm Desert, California, where Ford died, then progressing to Washington, then on to the University of Michigan, where Ford would be buried.
To the Bushies, Ford's death was not the death of a friend or role model; after all, Ford was an honest, caring, and decent man. Besides, it came out quickly after Ford's death was announced that he had disapproved of the invasion of Iraq--not the way it was done, not with some simpering, self-serving disclaimer like that, but with absolute disapproval. But his death was going to occupy the media. It had to be reported because Ford had held a unique position as the first president who had not been elected to executive office. And if the media had to pay attention to the memorials for Ford, they couldn't give the death count and execution of Sadaam Hussein their full attention. And I do not doubt that phone calls were made to Iraqi authorities to noify them that it would be a good idea to hold the execution sooner, rather than later. And the puppet government of Iraq, dependent as it is on the Bush administration for its power, was willing to comply.
And while it remains to be seen how the 3000th death will be reported, the execution of Sadaam shared the space above the fold with the Ford memorials. And an amoral and stupid man took advantage of the death of a good man to divert attention from the execution of a tyrant by a puppet government.

When Does It End?

2006-12-21T19:36:00.001-08:00

"In a recent letter to constituents, [Re. Virgil] Goode, a five-term [Republican] congressman from Rocky Mount [Virginia], wrote that he does "not subscribe to using the Koran in any way" and added: "The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran." Thus says the Washington Post.
Mr. Goode, you make me ashamed to be an American. You are a REPRESENTATIVE, but I don't believe the people who elected you are as stupid as you are. I certainly hope that most of your constituents understand that the Constitution of the United States of America, a document you have sworn an oath to uphold, protects religious freedom. And if an elected representative chooses, in his private swearing-in, to place his hand on his grandmother's Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, the Waste Land, or one of the Harry Potter novels, , it is no one's business but his own. And there is, to put it so simply that a mindless cretin like you can understand, no connection between immigration and a duly elected representative choosing to place his hand on the Koran when he takes the oath of office. Actually, you fucking asshole, there are far more Hispanic immigrants, most of them Roman Catholic, than Muslim immigrants.
I call on the people of your district to recall you. I call on the House of Representatives to throw your worthless ass out. I call on this country to deport you and anyone else who agrees with you. You are an abomination.; may God judge you--the sooner the better--as such.

Schism in the Episcopal Church

2006-12-18T12:06:00.000-08:00

Seven Episcopal congregations have elected to leave the Diocese of Virginia and become a mission of the Anglican Church of Nigeria over the ordination of homosexuals. This matters to me because until a few weeks ago, I was technically a part of that Diocese. I was confirmed in that Diocese. I was married in that Diocese. Our kids were baptized there. While I'm now part of the Diocese of Washington, D.C., I think the actions of the Virginia parishes--church homes to about five percent of the Diocese's communicants--are ultimately detrimental to all Episcopalians.
First, there's the simple matter of sheer folly. The parishes also voted to keep property belonging to the Diocese. Let's think about this. When I moved out of my parents' house after college, I took only those things that belonged to me and those that they gave me at the last minute because they were moving, too--and that was an amicable parting. For these congregations to believe that they decide whether to keep Diocesan property is simply silly. Bishop Peter James Lee has said that he will maintain Diocesan stewardship of that property, and I hope that this means that, probably after a long court case, the Diocese keeps all the property and the schismatic parishes get nothing.
And then, of course, there's the theology. The claim of the schismatics is that the Bible condemns homosexuality, and it does--in the Old Testament. There are a lot of laws in the Old Testament. One could get confused. From the ten laws provided by God, the number and complexity exploded as rabbis wrestled with such weighty matters as how many steps one could take without violating the Sabbath and how one could tell when the Sabbath began. Jesus, in whom the schismatics profess to believe, was asked which of the laws was most important, and he responded that there were two laws: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these principles, he said, the law depended. The schismatics claim that to argue the primacy of these principles is to accept moral relativism. In fact, it probably does mean an acceptance of situational ethics, which is somewhat different.
To understand that, we can look at Jesus's teaching that any man who looked at a woman with lust in his heart (or, presumably, any woman who looked at a man with lust in her heart) had committed adultery, even if there was no sex act involved. How could that be sinful? There were two points to be made. First of all, the definition of sin wasn't left to people but to God, and it had to do with what was in the mind and the heart. I'm pretty sure that the men in Jesus's audience were familiar with the current definition of adultery; they were sure that they knew. It seemed really simple to them: Do someone you aren't married to and it's adultery. So Jesus punctured that balloon, saying, in essence, that what people thought sin was really wasn't impotant. Second, if you're looking at someone and lusting after their bones, you can't be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Presumably, if you could figure out how to look at someone lustfully while still loving God with all of your heart, soul, and mind, you'd be okay. The looking wouldn't be a sin.
So when people look back at Old Testament law as a basis for present-day decisions, they're overlooking the historical reality. Law could not be written in such a way that all laws would apply in all times and all places, and in trying to interpret, people would only muck it up badly. Thus, God established principles instead. They would last. And God would always know the hearts and minds and souls of his creatures.
The schismatics essentially set aside Jesus and his teachings when they return to Old Testament law; after all, on at least one occasion Jesus defended his followers for breaking those laws. They transgress when they proclaim with absolute certainty that they know what God's law is; Jesus made clear to his followers that they couldn't even define one of the simplest of sins as God did, and they certainly couldn't be sure when someone else was sinning because sinfulness lay in the heart, mind, and soul. Thus, the Christian prescription was simple but challenging: rather than quibbling over the commas, love God completely and do only those things that you can do while keeping that love foremost in your heart, mind, and soul.
I know homosexuals. They love God, and they love their fellow man, and God will decide whether they are sinners. God will also decide whether I'm a sinner because I love them as my brothers and sisters.
If I had been a member of one of the schismatic congregations--and my sister-in-law is--I could never have voted to leave the Episcopal church because I believe that the church leaders make their decisions prayerfully and genuinely want to do God's will. If I were a member of one of the congregations that voted to leave the Diocese, I would leave the church. I've been in situations where I could no longer, in good conscience, receive the Eucharist is a couple of other members of the congregation were present because I was appalled by their actions with respect to our rector. I think that some of the people who voted to leave the Diocese may someday find themselves in a situation very similar. It is a terrible feeling to be cut off from the Sacrament, and I will pray for them.

Happy What?

2006-12-16T20:33:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted for a while, for which I apologize to anyone who's paying attention. It's been a busy couple of months.
Now the December holidays are upon us, and they're getting to be no fun at all. Last year, Wal-Mart instructed employees to wish customers "Happy Holidays" and some evangelical Christians said it was part of a war on Christmas and tried to boycott Wal-Mart. Normally, I have nothing against a boycott of Wal-Mart; I haven't set foot in one of their stores in a couple of years. But there's no war against Christianity or Christmas in this country, and when you aren't sure of a person's religion, "Happy Holidays" is a safe middle ground. This year, though, Wal-Mart announced that their employees would say "Merry Christmas." Maybe a few non-Christians will be offended by that, but most will probably take it as an expression of general good will.
This silliness came home last week. The principal of the school where my wife teaches had spent a considerable amount of money and a considerable amount of time to decorate the teachers' lounge. There were snowmen all over the place. Unfortunately, there was an artificial evergreen tree with icicles on it and a Santa Claus that played music and shook its butt. That was as close to religion as the decor got, but that was close enough for some of the Jewish teachers, who announced that they were offended. The decorations came down around the same time that one of the Jewish teachers was making latkes in her classroom to tell her class about Hanukkah. I wish I had some standing to talk with those Jewish teachers. Here's what I'd tell them:
"Teachers seldom get the expressions of appreciation that they deserve. Here someone had made an effort to make a drab, unappealing teachers' lounge warmer and more cheerful and you complained because of an artificial evergreen with icicles--which, unlike a Christmas tree or the Hanukkah bushes found in some Jewish homes, is a natural phenomenon--and a Santa Claus--a figure frequently attacked as a symbol of the commercialism of Christmas. Because of your complaints, the decorations were taken down. Someone who wanted to show teachers some appreciation for their work will have to make do with "I tried," and the teachers will make do without the expression of appreciation. And something surely could have been worked out if you hadn't been so thin-skinned--perhaps a menorah and a star of David could have been included.
You couldn't accept that. Even if we accept that the decorations had religious connotations, you insisted on taking away the right of your colleagues to recognize a holiday sacred to many of them. Like the Puritans, like some of the Muslims in the Middle East who'd like to wipe out Israel, you can't tolerate expression of any religion except your own. Very few Americans would think that they had any right to interfere with anyone else's religious observances, but apparently you do. If you're going to teach, you need to learn that the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." And if the government is explicitly prohibited from interfering with the free exercise of religion, you should recognize that you shouldn't do it, either. You have every right to ask for equal time or space, and if some decorations need to come down to make room so that you can have extra space, so be it. But to demand that all of the decorations come down is overstepping the limits.
That overstep becomes more reprehensible when, in effect, you bring part of the celebration of Hanukkah into the classroom. What would you have done if someone had complained about one of your number preparing latkes? I'm pretty sure you would have started screaming about anti-Semitism, but you'd be dead wrong. Latkes are closely associated with Hanukkah. In fact, some web sites specifically identify them as a Hanukkah food. And when you serve them during the day on which Hanukkah begins at sundown, you clearly intend them to be associated with a religious holiday. I would merely point out two things. First of all, Christian teachers sometimes develop lessons that feature Hanukkah motifs and, if they have the knowledge or have a friend who does, they see that someone explains the holiday to their classes--as they do with Kwanzaa. Second, to demand that the somewhat secular decorations in the lounge come down and then prepare latkes in your classroom is about as hypocritical as you can get.
So here's a challenge. Before what is now called the winter break begins, many of your students will bring you gifts. All I ask is that you demonstrate some ethical consistency. To do that, you will need to return every single gift that does not clearly indicate in some way that it is a Hanukkah present. If the card says "Merry Christmas" or even "Happy Holidays," or if the wrapping carrys any design that might be associated with either the sacred or secular side of Christmas, you must return it. After all, these things, you have said, offend you, and God knows no one wants to offend you. And it goes without saying that you will not enter a home that is decorated for Christmas or set up a decorated evergreen in your own home; if an evergreen with icicles on it says "Christmas" to you, a decorated evergreen surely does, too.
Or maybe you should just help replace the decorations and add whatever Hanukkah symbols you like."

Have You No Decency?

2006-10-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

By the standards that prevailed when Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were president, negative campaigning today is a Sunday School picnic. Those guys played rough. But Republican candidates have led the way into campaign exchanges that really go beyond the pale.
The most recent episode revolves around Michael Steele, who is very likely to use his senatorial bid in Maryland. Michael J. Fox made an ad promoting Ben Cardin as a candidate who favors stem cell research. Fox was clearly having a bad day, exhibiting tremors and other symptoms of advanced Parkinson's. Rush Limbaugh said that he thought Fox was exaggerating his symptoms for political purposes. Limbaugh has not apologized or retracted his remarks. Steele hasn't strongly disavowed Limbaugh's support, although he has rather mildly said that he doesn't approve. Actually, it's a damn shame that ignorant neanderthal windbag lizards like Limbaugh are allowed access to the airwaves; they are threats to society because some people are stupid enough to believe them.
George Felix Allen is running scared in Virginia. A race that most people thought he'd win by double digits without breaking a sweat is now too close to call. He has done what Republicans do when they're cornered. He has misrepresented. Everyone following the campaign has known for some time that Jim Webb, Felix's opponent, wrote in 1979 that women didn't belong in combat and that the Naval Academy was a horny woman's dream. Let's set aside for a moment the reality that there's a lot of sexual harrassment and misconduct at the Naval Academy, and if I had a daughter who wanted to go there, I'd do all in my power to point out that it really wasn't a safe place for a woman. Webb made his comments in 1979, twenty-seven years ago. I don't know anyone who hasn't changed his or her mind on some major issue in that time. But Allen uses those stale old comments as if they were uttered yesterday--or maybe even earlier today.
Okay, Republicans. You're going down. There's not a damn thing you can do about it. Despite Tom Foley's lust for young boys, you could salvage some character by at least being magnanimous in defeat.

Another Rough Week for Felix

2006-09-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-11T18:39:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-09-10T18:12:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-04T17:01:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

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.

A Bummer of a Different Kind

2006-08-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

I'm going to set politics aside and write on a subject near and dear to me--intellectual property and performing rights organizations, or PROs. Almost all songwriters and publishers who are trying to make a living with their music belong to a PRO. The PRO collects royalties for performance, usually through a licensing arrangement, and pays the songwriter. If the Dixie Chicks want to perform "Teach Your Children," which Graham Nash wrote, they pay his PRO, and his PRO pays him. Often, local pubs pay a fee to one PRO and ask that musicians playing there only perform songs licensed by that organization. Or, in many cases, the local pubs don't bother to pay anything.
Lately, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been lowering the boom on pirated recordings, in some cases chasing down teenagers who download music. That may be why the PROs have taken to cracking down on such things as open mike nights. That might not be a problem when they close down an open mike night at a local.
The problem arises that there aren't as many locals as there used to be. There are a lot of national chains, and national chains are run from national offices.
My singing partner, Rog, and I had a great gig lined up at a Caribou Cafe near my home. It was going to be great--just the right time to start promoting our CD. The problem is that the lawyers got to the corporate executives in the home office. Corporate executives are not always the sharpest knives in the drawer, and like dull knives everywhere, they didn't cut very well. They issued an edict that all musical performances in Caribou Cafes must cease until further notice (with the implicit "or else.") The performance that we were going to play was sponsored by the Songwriters Association of Washington. As a songwriter, I can assure you that when I play a Songwriters Association venue, I'm doing it to play my music. As much as I love their music, Neil Young, James Taylor, Glenn Frey, Brian Wilson, and everybody else can paddle their own damn boats. If Rog and I are playing a full evening, we'd surely work in some covers, but not when we're doing a one-hour set at a Songwriters Association venue. And who owns all of the rights to our songs? We do.
So what happens is that the organizations that are supposed to exist to protect songwriters are, in fact, harming us. Thanks a lot, guys.
The more I think of it, it's kind of like the "Better safe than sorry" mentality that so many people seem to live by these days.

"The Enemy Will Follow Us Here"

2006-08-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

The Coward-in-Chief has apparently revealed the strategy he will use in the November elections. He's going to say that if we back out in the middle east, the terrorists will follow us home. It's the same tired crap that he began with "They hate our freedom."
The Islamic radicals, whether the Coward-in-Chief wants to believe it or not, do not want anything we've got. They do not want our territory--although they want control over what they regard as their territory. They do not hate our freedom. They only hate our habit of trying to export every aspect of our culture, which they regard as thoroughly decadent. They simply want to be left alone. The western world has not, thus far, respected that desire. We've assisted repressive monarchies. We've failed to respect their religious sensibilities. We've permitted our businesses to move aggressively into the middle east.
These are things that Americans don't understand. No one does these things to the United States. If anyone did, Americans would hate it. Take our most egregious wrongs--the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not going to argue that Saddam Hussein, the Baathists, and the Taliban were great people. They weren't. But they were operating in sovereign states, and whether we liked it or not, they were holding power within the cultural frameworks of those state. The United States stepped in. Now imagine this: some other nation with sufficient military force looks that the United States and concludes that it is headed by a corrupt regime that is bent on destabilizing the middle east. The leaders of this other power decide to attack the United States. Even those of us who hate the current United States regime would undoubtedly resist this insult to our national soverignty, and well we should.
All of this is part of the Coward-in-Chief's dumbed down, black and white view of reality. It led us into costly wars that have made us less safe than we were when he took office. We had better reject his party and any other candidates who think that United States policy in the middle east is going to succeed and promote a safer world.

Time to Go Back to Work

2006-08-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

It must be time for me to go back to work; I watched the news conference that the Occupant of the White House held today.
I can remember White House news conferences back to the time of President Kennedy. The best presidents kept their responses brief and focused. While they were willing to use humor, it was usually tied to a response somehow, and they didn't get into chatty banter with the press corps. After all, they were presidents. A few, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton, had definitely grown up in the middle class, but they understood that they held high office and had to show their affinity for the masses in other ways. Even Bush 41 tried to act presidential.
Other presidents exercised restraint. This one rants, basically repeating over and over that he's right and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, louder and with more gesticulation as the conference goes on. He reminds me of a preacher at a revival who keeps on and on, hoping that if he just keeps going long enough, some poor sinner will come forward at the altar call. Bush just doesn't understand that he's not going to convert the press corps. They're paid to be skeptical of any president.
It makes me wonder why his minions let him speak to anyone without handlers being present.

Missing Virginia

2006-08-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

I've been living in Maryland for two years now, but I still sometimes miss Virginia. I miss it right now because I'm pretty sure that Maryland will show good sense and elect Democrats (although I'm hoping that Al Wynn will lose to Donna Edwards), and I'd love to be in Virginia where I could vote for Jim Moran, whom I respect and like, and vote against George Felix Allen.
Allen has made a fool of himself. He saw one of Jim Webb's volunteers shooting a videotape of one of his speeches. The young man was of Indian descent, born and raised in Fairfax, educated at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and now a senior at the University of Virginia. His skin was dark. Felix called him "Macaca," a term that he might have learned at the knee of his French-Tunisian mother, who would have known it as a rough equivalent "the n-word." He also welcomed the young man to America and to Virginia.
Republicans have been jumping to Allen's defense, saying that the young man got a lot of attention in the media as a result of the event and besides, it's just political correctness run amok, and Allen apologized. I agree that the young man got attention, which was not what he was after. I also acknowledge that Allen apologized. I'll even go so far as to say that it's a good idea to have a thick skin because life is full of insulting people. Democrats have been pointing out that this is the same George Felix Allen who used to keep a Confederate flag and a noose on display in his office and has always displayed affection for the Confederacy and its symbols. That's true, too. I think that California-born Allen probably doesn't really know very much about the Confederacy, and like many other non-southerners, he thinks that the Civil War and slavery are extent of southern history and culture. That may or may not make him a racist. Don't say I'm not fair to Republicans: I have no idea of whether he's a racist or not, although he doesn't seem to mind draping himself in what many people regard as racist symbols.
Here's what's incontrovertible: For a political candidate to make a public statement that has nothing to do with the issues and fairly begs to be used against him is stupid. It demonstrates a clear lack of judgment, and politicians really have nothing to offer except judgment. Allen could have made disparaging comments about anyone in the privacy and comfort of his campaign office or his Senate office if no one were around but trusted aides. He could have made disparaging comments about anyone at home, although there's a chance that his wife might have questioned what kind of example he was setting for their children. Maybe he could have made it while surrounded by colleagues in the locker room of the Senate gym. Then the comments might have been reprehensible, but the tree-falling-in-the-forest-with-no-one-around principle would apply. Saying it in the context of a public campaign appearance with God and everybody watching is something else again. It makes clear that George Felix Allen doesn't have the judgment and self-control to be entrusted with public office. He certainly hasn't got the judgment and control to be a senator, and he absolutely hasn't got the judgment and control to consider running for president.

Cheney's Mouth

2006-08-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

Last week, in the aftermath of Joe Lieberman's well earned defeat in the Democratic primary in Connecticut, "Dick" Cheney said, in a telephone conference call to reporters, essentially that it was sad that the Democrats were rejecting an aggressive stance against al Quaeda and giving in to the terrorists.
"Dick" Cheney likes to talk tough and shoot at people. Why he dodged the draft in his youth I cannot explain because he certainly seems to like war now. But "Dick" has gone far over the line on this one. The administration's alleged war on terrorism has violated the rights of law-abiding Americans. (And don't let anyone kid you: There's no need to keep legal eavesdropping programs a secret. The Coward in Chief and "Dick" and their minions were worried that even the special court empowered to authorize secret eavesdropping wouldn't go along with their program.) It has directly and indirectly led to the deaths of innocent people and the warrantless incarceration and torture of others. It has strengthened the argument of every anti-American group in the world, and it has led uncounted people in the Middle East to believe that they need to defend themselves against American aggression by joining al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, or some other terrorist group. But all of this aside, it is not the only approach to ending terrorism. In a democracy, people of good will are permitted to engage in reasoned disagreement--a fact that "Dick" and the Coward in Chief have never wanted to acknowledge.
I realize I don't cut "Dick" or the Coward in Chief much slack. If they demonstrated good will and reasoning, I would treat them very differently in what I say and write. But they are evil men who seek only their own power and believe that they will somehow enhance it by promoting conflict instead of seeking to promote peace. So much for an administration that was supposed to be led by uniter, not a divider. What "Dick" expresses, presumably with the approval of the Coward in Chief, is a position that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein expressed toward disagreement. They and their minions have become what they claim to hate, and they present an unflattering representation of American freedom.

More from Fantasy Land

2006-08-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

According to a news broadcast last night, there may have been a problem with the alleged terrorists the Brits busted last week. Apparently, none of them had passports. None of them had airline tickets or reservations. And none of them had bomb-making materials. When I went to England in '98, you had to have both a ticket and a passport in order to get on the airplane. A ticket you could buy in minutes, but the passport was a different matter. It took a couple of months unless you had a lot of cash and a lot of documentation to go through the State Department's fast track process. And if you're going to blow something up, you need bomb-making materials.
I've also heard that the liquid, paste, and gel materials used to make bombs can be pretty volatile in and of themselves. The shoe bomber played with them and set a couple of apartments on fire. Maybe the "conspirators" made their martyrdom tapes because they wanted to cover themselves while they were playing around with dangerous chemicals. Or maybe somebody got a new camcorder and wanted to play with it the way that a couple of the characters do int "The Big Chill."
The Coward in Chief and his minions are total cowards. You can see it in their insistence that even a one percent risk is too great. The problem is that they play well to soccer mommies, those suburban matrons who gave up adulthood and careers when they had children and harbor a belief that men exist to take care of them and keep them safe. They like that handsome Mr. Bush, and they think it's wonderful that he's so much more fit than the louts they're married to, and he just looks and talks like somebody who could keep their little ones safe. And Bush's Head Minion, Karl Rove, knows just how to work that.
If we need to be afraid of anything, we need to be afraid of that.

They're At It Again

2006-08-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Anybody miss me? I've been on vacation. We were having a great time in Florida until we heard about the heightened security status affeting the aviation sector on the day before we had to fly back.
Do you believe there was really a plot to explode airliners over the Atlantic? First, it sounds a lot like a "plot" that was discovered a few years back to explode airliners over the Pacific. I can't recall any trials in that case; probably the people who were supposed to plotting are incommunicado in Guantanamo. Or maybe there was no plot at all. That's the nice thing about being the President who cried "Wolf": You can bust some Arabic looking people, park them in Guantanamo, and never have the truth come out at a trial.
But these threats work well for the President who cried "Wolf." Most people are willing to say, as a shuttle driver said to me yesterday, "It's better to be safe than sorry." The alleged existence of the plot makes a threat seem real, whether it is or not. And that can make security an issue in elections, especially for soccer mommies. Doing something about the alleged threat makes the person doing it--or directing it--seem strong and manly, and that gets soccer mommies to vote. In fact, the very pandemonium at airports actually contributes to the success of the President who cried "Wolf." It's clear that he is taking immedate, strong action. And when people are having to discard bottled water, perfume, and Blistex, that just shows how serious the government is about keeping people safe. And people conclude that they are, in fact, safer because of the President who cried "Wolf."
First of all, there's no reason in the world to believe anything that George W. Bush says. About a third of the time, it seems unlikely that he even knows what he's saying. And he has a history of lying to the American people. Over 2500 Americans have died as a direct result of his lies. To argue that he will lie about one thing but not another is a bit of a stretch, and the fact that he hasn't admitted to lying doesn't mean that he hasn't done it. The facts prove that he is either a liar or a gullible fool, and trusting either is not a good idea.
Second, this safety is a sham. The fact that these plots are uncovered doesn't mean that all plots are uncovered, and we may, in fact, be lulled into a false sinse of security. Consider this: You once scored with an attack using commercial aviation, and security has been tightened on that sector. How likely are you to try anything remotely similar? Aren't there numerous other acts that you can imagine that would be equally effective and much more likely to escape detection? And if you really had a plot going, wouldn't you have an alternative--some contingency plan to make a similar splash if the primary plan was uncovered?
So I'm not convinced that there really was a plot at all. If calculations by Karl Rove, the Minion in Chief, and the President who Cried "Wolf" are incorrect and there's no political bounce, they'll just blame the Brits and go on asking Americans to vote for Republicans who have really done nothing to enhance national security.

If This Isn't Political. . . .

2006-08-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Federal Emergency Mismanagement Administration, the folks who brought you the Katrina debacle last year, are at it again. They've denied federal aid to people in areas of Fairfax, Alexandria, and Arlington, Virginia, who were flooded last month.
I used to live close to the area that flooded. I'm familiar with the parts of Alexandria and Fairfax County that flooded. I'm also familiar with what happened. We got about a foot of rain in one day, and then more heavy rains. I was glad to be on high ground, and a buddy of mine wrote that he had started work on an ark. And on the news, we saw people who had been in their homes one morning, evacuated to escape flooding in the afternoon or evening, and returned the next day to find that their homes were condemned. FEMA says the areas are affluent. I'd be the last to question that there are affluent areas in all three jurisdictions, but the areas that flooded are pretty solidly middle class. There are a fair number of young professionals who buy in those areas because the homes are older and less expensive than in many other areas. I would be very surprised if anyone living there had any flood insurance; I would be surprised if the areas were eligible for flood insurance. It's very likely that some of the people who lived there have been totally wiped out. At best, they face huge expenses to get rid of the lingering effects of having sewage filled water in their homes.
"Affluent" sounds really good to people who aren't familiar with the areas. I've got relatives in South Carolina who believe that everyone who lives in the Washington metropolitan area is right, and saying that these areas are affluent helps to reinforce that at the same time that it seems to justify what is, after all, a rotten decision. But the problem isn't that the areas are affluent. The problem is really that the people in those areas are pretty solidly Democratic. The candidates I knew who represented those areas put a lot of effort into getting out the vote because they could expect those precincts to turn in solid Democratic margins. In some cases, Republicans didn't campaign very hard there. In Arlington, Fairfax, and Alexandria, there was usually one Republican on the county council and one Republican on the School Board. While there are Republican state and federal legislators who represent parts of Northern Virginia, they have carefully gerrymandered these precincts into Democratic districts.
This is how the Bush family and its Rovian minions practice government. The directions, if any are needed, go to the inner circle of sycophants who run agencies. They pass the word to their deputy and assistant sycophants. The career civil servants who want to do the right thing are hemmed in by the political appointees. Solidly Democratic areas have to hope that they won't get hit with any kind of disaster. If those prayers go unanswered, FEMA does nothing to help them. This would not happen to districts that supported the Bush family. The devastation in Virginia is not on the scale of New Orleans, but for the people involved, it's just as serious. It's too bad the country is run by and for the Bush Mafia.

Cuba

2006-08-02T03:41:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm on a thing about disproportionately powerful voting blocs and lobbies these days. First, I was complaining about the pro-Israel bloc; now there's the Cuban-Americans. Not all of them, I'm sure, but the ones who were celebrating in the streets of Miami at the news that Castro had given up some of his authority to his brother and probable successor.
Let's not forget that Fidel Castro, at the time of the revolution he led, was supported by the United States. There was a reason why the United States would support Castro: Fulgencio Batista, the despotic ruler he overthrew, was not a nice man. Batista had seized power, and his regime had pursued repressive policies. He was another one of those banana republic dictators Americans loved to hate, and the United States government was glad to see him go. In fact, if Castro hadn't announced that he was a Communist, he might have become the poster child for American support of revolutions in Latin America and the Carribean. But Castro was a Communist, and he quickly made Cuba a client state of the Soviet Union.
At that point, the United States, unwilling to have a Communist nation ninety miles from our shores--at least our southern shores--severed connections, broke off diplomatic relations, and set up an embargo. The intent, apparently, was to starve the Cuban people into overthrowing Castro. The catch was that Cuban people were pretty much used to starving, and the embargo didn't materially change their way of living. Castro, of course, became as repressive of opposition as Batista--and most dictators--become, and many Cubans bolted to Florida. But there's one thing to remember about dictators: they can fall. It takes one determined person willing to give his or her life to do the job. And Castro is pushing eighty after almost fifty years in power.
The Cubans in America have hated Castro for almost all of that time. But there's a Cuban restaurant a few miles from my home where the names of prominent Cuban-Americans are displayed on the walls. Most of them, regardless of their fields of endeavor, are huge economic successes. Granted, Cuba has not been, since 1959, a free market economy, but it's still fair to ask whether any of the millionaires and billionaires would have enjoyed so much success in Cuba. But the success that many enjoyed in the United States didn't stop them from detesting Castro and behaving as if they would happily leave for Cuba in a heartbeat. And they put pressure on politicians.
An online chat on the Post website made the point that in other countries that went Communist, the United States pursued a policy of maintaining relations. Gradually, the Communist regimes in those countries crumbled and they became more democratic and more capitalistic. In Cuba, the embargo was supposed to bring about the overthrow of Castro and the return of democracy. It has failed miserably. Why has the government stuck with a policy that has never shown any signs of success? Because the wealthy, vocal Cuban American voting bloc, filled with hatred of Castro, supports it. Meanwhile, Castro keeps on ticking. In fact, he's set up a program to train United States citizens to be doctors provided that they promise to work in impoverished areas. This hardly makes him a saint, but it shows how much he is moved by the embargo.
Lifting the embargo would actually improve the lives of the Cuban people, and it probably wouldn't make life much more pleasant for Castro. Given some time, it might well bring democracy and economic prosperity to Cuba, and the United States is these days in the business of exporting democracy. The Russians aren't going to put missiles in Cuba again as they did in 1962; burying the United States is not a priority for them. The Cuban Americans who wanted to would have the option of going back to Cuba, although it might be nice for them to leave behind the wealth they amassed in their adopted country.

Fantasy Land

2006-07-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

Here's what Dan Froomkin writes in today's White House Briefing on the Washington Post web site, washingtonpost.com:

Editor and Publisher reports: "Despite several years of official and press reports to the contrary, a new Harris poll finds that half of adult Americans still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when the United States invaded the country in 2003.

"This is actually up from 36% last year, a Harris poll finds. . . .

"In another finding wildly diverging from most expert opinion and media reports, Harris found that 64% said Saddam Hussein had 'strong links' with al-Qaeda, up from 62% in October 2004."

Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum writes: "As the prewar facts become clearer and Iraq spirals further into civil war, the American public becomes ever more withdrawn from reality. Even if complaints from us shrill liberal bloggers are dismissed, surely poll results like this should get the media pondering the question of whether they're doing a very good job of reporting what's really going on."

I'm aghast that so meany people are so gullible. It tends to support the argument that in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. It explains why someone like George W. Bush could occupy the White House. These numbers have come out at a time when other polls are indicating that the majority of people in the US believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Perhaps people are appalled, as I am, by the number of American deaths in Iraq and to justify those deaths, they have to somehow justify the war in which they occurred. It's not at all a pretty picture, though.

Is the problem with the media? Maybe. The conservative media has never had any qualms about presenting commentary in the guise of fact. The Washington Times and Fox News have been doing it for years. The problem, though, is that most journalists, I think, are like a friend of mine who works for National Public Radio. I won't embarrass him by mentioning his name, but we've known each other since we were in third grade. We don't see each other often, so I'm not current on his political leanings, but when last I knew, he was an advocate of the midwestern Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. He's worked in print and broadcasting, and he's been thrown out of the offices of elected officials from both parties. He does not claim to be unbiased, but he claims to be balanced in his presentation. To the extent that his sources on both sides cooperate, he makes good on that claim. I've listened to some of his work and wondered why the hell he didn't just stick it to the corrupt son of a bitch he was reporting on. But that's not his style. If he unloads on, say, the so-called governor of Maryland, a Republican, other Republicans will refuse to cooperate with him. If he unloads on a corrupt Democrat, Democrats will stop taking his calls. He doesn't want to get his facts off the wire service feeds; he wants to be able to get them for himself, so he works hard to steer a middle ground. He encourages his audience to raise questions and draw conclusion, but no one can ever claim that he didn't make every effort to give both sides equal time.

Some folks would say that his work, as a result, is boring.

Compare this with Ann Coulter. She just screeches. She makes brassy assertions and, because she does so, some people say she's courageous. She has learned that it's the assertion, not the evidence, that people are after. They don't want the long strings of facts; they just want the bottom line--the assertion. And they don't want it to seem wimpy. They also like the fact that she's supposedly attractive. (No offense to my friend, but he looks like your basic middle aged guy, which is okay for a middle aged guy, but aside from his wife, few people would dream of considering him "hot." He's got a great look for radio. I'm afraid, though, that people want to listen to shrieking idiots like Ann Coulter and O'Reilly, and Hannity, and John McLaughlin and folks like that who tell them what to think rather than real journalists who lay out the facts and make clear that theirs is not the only available interpretation.

Are the media at fault? To the extent that they give these one-sided screamers who are neither unbiased nor balanced, they are. Before anybody gets the idea that I would deprive the screamers of their outlets, I wouldn't. I'd allow them to buy time on any TV station that's willing to sell it to them provided that they run a trailer saying that the broadcast was paid for by the person presenting and the station assumes no responsibility for any offensive or inaccurate content. But media executives need to leave reporting to reporters and make sure that commentary is clearly identified. And we don't need bombastic screamers. Unfortunately, people are too stupid to recognize that they're not giving the news or even responsible commentary; they're "entertainers," even when they aren't entertaining.

One on the Democrats

2006-07-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

I don't usually criticize Democrats in this blog. It's not that I think they're infallible because after all, they've lost two presidential elections that they should have won as well as numerous congressional races and gubernatorial elections. But I'll make an exception today. The Democrats are thinking of changing the order of the primary elections. They want to move Nevada and South Carolina earlier and diminish the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire.
I can get behind diminishing the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire. There's no reason why two small states should have such prodigious influence on the selection of a national candidate. But changing the order of primaries won't protect the party from another disastrous candidate like Al Gore or John Kerry. There are days when I'm afraid that sort of candidate is exactly what the party leaders want.
In 2004, we went into the primary season with an apparent steamroller candidate in Howard Dean. He was kicking everybody's butt in all of the polls, and he appeared to be getting stronger all the time. He was a strong speaker. It was easy to see the difference between his positions and Bush's. And, as I say, he was kicking butt in the polls.
Governor Dean, however, wasn't a Democratic Leadership Council Democrat. He was a "Democrat from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party," sort of like Harry Truman. After he started kicking butts in the polls and before the primaries got started, Democratic insiders started worrying about his electability. I had a couple of discussions with people at work who are generally reasonably liberal Democrats, and they were parroting the electability question. I couldn't get an answer to a question that I considered fundamental: If he's not electable, why is he polling so strongly? But apprently, enough people were taken in to vote against Dean in the early primaries and we ended up with John Kerry, who simply looked stupid trying to differentiate himself from Bush.
It's two years until the next presidential election, and I'm hoping the Democrats' decision will be simple: Give President Pelosi (who took over after Bush and Cheney were impeached) an elected term. But that's not something we can really talk about too much; people who believe that the United States is the strongest country on earth might decide that the strongest country on earth couldn't stand the impeachment of a president and vice president, no matter how corrupt they were proven to be, and they might be so fearful that they would come to the polls and vote for Republicans. But who are we talking about? Hilary Clinton.
Please spare me. Hilary can't make up her mind about the war in Iraq. She sounds a lot like John Kerry on the subject, except that she hasn't really turned against it. She says she'll support the Democratic nominee in Connecticut, but she doesn't tell Joe Lieberman that if he doesn't win the Democratic nomination, he shouldn't run against the party's nominee--and her husband is actually campaigning for Lieberman. There are plenty of people who will vote against Hilary simply because she's Hilary, and people who will vote against Hilary because she's married to Bill. I'm a Democrat, and I can't come up with any reasons to vote for her. But Hilary is apparently the choice of the Democratic insiders, perhaps the Democratic Leadership Council.
The trick is listening to people, not trying to point them in a direction. Pointing people in a direction is the kind of thing that the Bush family and other Republicans do. It's based on the assumption that the insiders know better than the people, and in most cases, it means that the candidate sounds a lot like a Republican but not as friendly. And then somebody like Bush gets elected.

Bush's Week

2006-07-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

We've had an interesting week. Mommy's Best Boy, President Chickenshit, spoke to the NAACP convention for the first time in his regime. Normally, it's not such a big deal for presidents to address the NAACP convention; most of them do it regularly, some every year. And he continued to do nothing that might actually bring an end to the fighting between Israel and Lebanon.
The point is made in this morning's Washington Post that Chickenshit really didn't do much of a job at the NAACP convention. He talked about the things that he thought he was supposed to talk about, such as slavery, segregation, integration, and racism. Note to his speechwriters: Slavery was ended with the Thirteenth Amendment. Segregation is pretty much illegal. Racism is a disgrace, and it's still with us, but the goal of ending it is not served when white presidents appear at NAACP conventions only once every six years and offer only platitudes that speak to the audience as if they were stereotypical.
There were reports that Chickenshit's approval rating among black people is only two percent. I found myself thinking that this constituted proof that black people are smarter than white people.
But we should give Chickenshit some credit; at least he finally got around to attending an NAACP convention, but it's an election year, and he needs to go for every possible vote for his party's candidates.
The same dynamic is operating, to the great discredit of the United States, in his response to the fighting between Israel and Lebanon. Note to Chickenshit, his Cabinet, and his advisors: People are dying, mostly in Lebanon. Most of the people who are dying are not Hezbollah. They are simply Lebanese civilians. Many of them, I suspect, can remember the bloodshed and devastation that occurred in their country during the Reagan years, and many, like a Lebanese-American friend of my wife, were thrilled at the reconstruction and increasing prosperity there today. And they are heartsick that people in Lebanon are dying, just as every human being should be at the willful killing of an innocent person.
Instead of joining the civilized nations of the world in calling for a cease fire, Chickenshit waited days before even making an effort to evacuate American citizens. He has not called for a cease fire because he thinks it might give Hezbollah a chance to regroup and rearm. Earth to Mommy's Best Boy, President Chickenshit, the Coward in Chief: It would also give the Israelis time to regroup and rearm. He says through Aunt Jemima Rice that no United States troops will serve in any peace-keeping force. And meanwhile, people are dying in Lebanon. Innocent people.
Here's the problem, as Chickenshit sees it: The people in Israel are Jews. Jews are a powerful group and American Jews make political contributions and vote in Israel's interest. Because the Bible claims that God gave Israel to the Jews, Christians of the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell stripe believe that the United States must defend Israel. Besides, somehow it fits into their notion that the Day of Judgment is coming soon--all this can be related to stuff in Revelations. And Chickenshit knows that the fanatical Christians are generous donors and voters; he sees to that by standing firmly against equal rights for homosexuals, stem cell research, and abortion. But to make sure that the religious fanatic voting bloc stays behind him, he thinks it best to avoid calling for a cease fire. Lebanese-Americans have not made themselves a powerful voting bloc. If they had, there might actually be some difficulty in Chickenshit's decision.
The world, to him, is like one of those photographs in which the number of shadings of color has been reduced from millions to a handful. Real people look like people in a well-drawn comic strip, but they don't look real.
But people are real. And people face real issues. And they expect real answers from real leaders. That is why it's so critical that a Democratic congress be elected in November and that that Congress move immediately in January to impeace George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Lamar Owens Walks

2006-07-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm very disappointed at the outcome of the Lamar Owens Court Martial. He's the former quarterback who was accused of rape. I'm not entirely convinced that he was guilty. The accuser was hardly the strongest witness a prosecutor could hope for. Still, Owens' account of the events did strain credibility. If the woman in this case is such a loose cannon, somebody tell me how she managed to stay in the Naval Academy without getting drummed out for academic or disciplinary reasons.
What's incontrovertible (and what the court martial decided) was that Owens was guilty of disobeying a direct order. He had been told to stay away from the accuser, and he didn't. He didn't even really contest that one. The court martial, accordingly, found him guilty. And he was also found guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer. Duh? How could a guy disobey an order and not be guilty of conduct unbecoming, especially when he compounded it by doing a female Mid in her dorm room, where such stuff is not supposed to happen, with or without consent?
These are serious charges. While I'm not a big fan of unquestioning obedience, I understand that it's what prevents a military force from becoming a mob. And I definitely understand leadership by example. The late Admiral Grace Murray Hopper made the point that people cannot be managed into combat; they must be led. In most cases where I've been in a leadership position, I've gotten good results by demonstrating that I could and would do anything that I asked of anyone else and that it would take some doing to keep up with me.
My father-in-law was an artillery officer. The men who served under him knew that he had been an enlisted man before OCS, and while I'm sure he never allowed any question to arise as to who was in charge, he surely made a point of demonstrating the behaviors he wanted from the troops. One of my uncles was an Air Force brigadier general when he retired. Stories are told of him carrying flight engineers' bags off of his aircraft because he wanted to make the point that his command was a team, and when something needed to be done, rank should never stand in the way of getting it done. With the critical importance of leadership and obedience to orders in combat, it seemed pretty reasonable to think that Lamar Owens' naval career was over: He'd be put in the brig and dismissed from the Navy. What use is an officer who doesn't obey orders and doesn't exemplify the behavior he expects from those in his command?
But that's not what Lamar got. Apparently, the jury (whatever it's called in courts martial) thought that the trauma of not graduating with his class last May and actually starting his career as an officer a couple of months behind his classmates (which will make a difference on the promotions list) was so traumatic that this fine young man had suffered enough. No punishment. They believed that he was a fine young man who had made a mistake. Here's a news bulletin to the members of the court martial: The sea is always real, and storms still can sink ships. When a naval officer makes a mistake, people can actually die needlessly. Mistakes are things like when I go to the store and buy teriyaki sauce instead of lite teriyaki sauce. Mistakes--although we have largely forgotten it in American society today, do not end up with people getting naked and doing the horizontal lambada.
I have some slight hope that the Superintendent of the Naval Academy will show some guts and dismiss Owens from the Academy without allowing him to graduate. I just wish that the members of court martial had asked themselves one simple question: "Is this behavior I would tolerate from an officer in my own command? And if not, should I tolerate it in my Navy?" If you get your bars, Lamar, I hope the stigma of the guilty verdict runs you out of the Navy. Of course, I guess you'll get a contract with the Dallas Cowboys; Parcells has proven he'll take just about anybody.

the House's Next Folly

2006-07-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives takes up a bill to "protect the Pledge of Allegiance." I don't even want to think how many of our hard-earned dollars are being pissed away in this sort of thing by the Republicans who complain that government is wasteful and then approve deficit increases.
I am not a huge fan of the Pledge of Allegiance for one simple reason: It makes a symbol of the United States more important that the historically and philosophically bases on which the nation rests--the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. I remember, as a teenager, hearing that those of my generation who opposed the Vietnam War were "letting the flag down." We thought we were supporting the Constitutional right of free discourse. The flag, though, is a powerful icon, as we see in times of military action: Display of the flag is equated with patriotism, and failure to display the flag is equated with lack of support for the troops. (Note: I have a flag sticker on my car. The sticker also says "Proud Democrat." I bet that gives some Republicans fits--especially the ones at work who know that I detest the administration and hate the war.)
This leads me to my first news flash of the day. The flag has not always been so iconic. During the early years of the republic, the design of the flag wasn't even codified. The stars could be arranged any way the person making it saw fit. The stars, for that matter, could be any color, and gold seems to have been fairly popular. It simply wasn't that important to the founders. To them, a flag was a guide or rallying point for troops in combat--a tool. Periodically, the colors were "trooped." That is, a military unit stood in open ranks and its colors were paraded in front of the troops so that they would recognize their own flag in combat. It probably would not have occurred to the founders that a flag was much more than a tool. While they understood the value of a well maintained tool, they didn't think of tools as sacred. In a ranking, they would almost surely have put the fundamental documents of the United States far ahead of the flag in importance.
There hasn't always been a pledge of allegiance. In fact, we might not have one at all had Youth's Companion magazine not launched a campaign to sell flags to schools. A Baptist mininister (and, by the way, a Socialist) named Francis Bellamy was commissioned to write it as an advertising piece. You could think of it, then, as something like those nauseating jingles that accompany some ads these days. What Bellamy wrote, ironically enough, did not contain the words "under God" that the stupid Republicans are gearing up to protect. Those words weren't added until 1954. One story holds that they were added to distinguish the United States from those "godless comminists" who were regarded as enemies in those days. Thus are born artificial traditions.
Bellamy, it is said, wanted the pledge to be said in schools to teach obedience to the state as a virtue, and for years and years, school systems played along. Most still do. Let's set aside the question of whether unquestioning obedience to the state can ever be a virtue in a democracy. Let's look instead at a couple of issues related to school kids saying the pledge. First, there are students in United States schools who really should not pledge allegiance to the flag or anything else of the United States. They are foreign nationals who presumably will never become American citizens. And no, I'm not referring to the undocumented aliens; I'm talking about the children who are here because their parents are here temporarily for study or for work. When I was in England, nobody asked me to pledge allegiance to their flag or sing "God Save the Queen." (Today, I'd gladly do both, asking only that I be granted asylum in England." The reason may be that people in many other countries travel across national boundaries more often than Americans. They aren't going to force a foreigner to do anything in their country that they're not willing to do while travelling in another country.
And there's the reality. The pledge is recited every day in most schools, even by kindergarteners. I have never met a five-year-old who had a clue what "allegiance" or "indivisible" meant or especially cared what the pledge meant. All they know is that they're supposed to stand up, put their hands over where they are told (incorrectly) their hearts are, and say the words. I'm not opposed to ritual gestures; I'm an Episcopalian. Standing, kneeling, sitting, genuflecting, and making the sign of the cross are all part of my worship. In order to do the right thing at the right time, I have to be paying attention to the worship service: If my mind is not focused on the liturgy, it's a pretty safe bet that my body won't do what it's supposed to be doing. But telling kids that they have to perform ritualistic acts that don't focus them on the meaning of the words they are saying makes the words a joke pretty quickly. Even with explanations of what the words mean, kids lose interest and simply repeat the words without any consideration of what they mean.
This is what the Republicans in Congress want to defend. Once again, it's not likely to pass. They only want to bring it to a vote so that they can lose, convince their dumber supporters that there is a culture war being waged against them, and get those dumb supporters off their fat butts to vote for those "good Republicans who are fighting for our values."
By the way, I yearn for the day when George W. Bush learns that he or someone he cares about is dying or incapacitated by a disease that might have been cured had he not been determined to preserved the dignity of unimplanted embryos--so they could be destroyed with medical waste.

Becoming What One Hates

2006-07-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

Israel authorities have explained that their plan is to destroy Hezbollah. When people think about Hezbollah in a vaccuum, that actually sounds good. Hezbollah is an organization of ruthless suicide bombers who are pretty undiscriminating about how they take with them. They're generally religious extremists. If they could be destroyed, the world might be a better place.
Here's the problem: There's no way to command compliance from a suicide bomber. He doesn't care whether he lives or dies, and in fact, he'd really like to get the seventy virgins. (An aside: Most religions--and Islam perhaps more than most--try to promote sexual restraint, but it doesn't strike the suicide bombers as a little unlikely that Allah would provide martyrs with virgins to service them.) So the only way to destroy the Hezbollah suicide bombers is to destroy all of them. There are a couple of problems here: First, it can be a little difficult to identify suicide bombers. Most of the time, they look a lot like any other young man you might meet on the street. And when you do catch them--if you can catch them before they blow themselves up, given the difficulty just mentioned--you actually create an aggrieved Arab who is, in fact, a potential recruit to the cause. This is how this so-called war on terrorism differs from every other war: The ability and will of nations to make war could be destroyed and nations can be defeated; for terrorists, what most people regard as defeat is, in fact, victory.
If an attempt to destroy terrorism by force is to work, it must somehow provide for the defeat of every terrorist and everyone who might become a terrorist. It must, in other words, become as ruthless and indiscriminant as the terrorists. And even if a nation--say, the United States or Israel--could wipe out all of the terrorists, the acts that nation had to commit in doing so would be as reprehensible as those that the terrorists committed. This raises a serious question when a nation's leader proudly proclaims himself to be a devout adherent of a religion: If terrorist acts are sins, can similar acts committed to stop terrorism be virtues? I suspect that Hell, if it exists, will be filled with leaders of this decade who were dead set on destroying each other.

Stem Cells

2006-07-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

I don't claim to be neutral on stem cell research. My mother-in-law has Parkinson's disease. So far, her medications are controlling it, but I'd love to see a cure. There's Alzheimer's disease on both sides of my family, and I figure it's only a matter of time for me--unless. . . . No one can say for sure what advances medicine might make with stem cell research expanded. Even Bill Frist, who last winter was taking a hard line against expansion of this research, is in favor of it. Who's against it? A few religious fanatics in the Congress who couldn't be bothered to show up at their own background briefing on the subject. (I know. That doesn't exactly sound like zealotry, but maybe they're saving it for later.) Oh, and President Dumb as Dirt.
Dumb as Dirt has gone five years without vetoing anything. He's issued signing statements that he thinks have legal standing, but one of these days the Supremes (except Scalia) are going to point out to him that the Constitution makes no provision for signing statements.) Now, with most people in favor of expanded research with reasonable restrictions, he decides that he's going to drop the V bomb. I think this shows us something about his truly warped little mind.
I think he believes that the only way to show that you're a real thinker is to fly in the face of what many people believe. And let's face it: He's a prince of the blood royal. People have made fun of him, perhaps most of his life, for riding Daddy's coattails. I don't know much about his prep school record. His Yale record looks like that of a legacy from a wealthy family--somebody who really deserves to flunk, but there's no sense in making the wealthy family angry by actually failing him. How did someone with his GPA get into Harvard Business School? My undergrad record, overall, was not particularly distinguished, as his wasn't, and I had was very fortunate to get into a program at William and Mary. I was rejected by Duke (for which I now thank God) and North Carolina (almost equally thankful for that). How did Dumb as Dirt get into Harvard? I suspect that donations were made. And everybody knows that without Daddy's money and those lifelong friendships cultivated in Skull and Bones, this drug-eating alcoholic moron would be simply another drug-eating alcoholic moron.
Bush probably knows that he has accomplished nothing independently, and that probably feels pretty rotten. (Lord knows I've had struggles feeling that my father was a better person than I am.) So he's got to show that he's independent. He had to demostrate that he has strength and courage. So how does he do that? He has to go it alone as often as possible.
This is one of the problems with imperial families. They produce warped princes. I look forward to the day that we're rid of him, and I hope that it will be by impeachment so that we need not spend one more cent on his maintenance or safety.

The Pottymouth in Chief

2006-07-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to get upset about profanity and obscenity among friends. I've been known to use it and in some cases, to use it abundantly. But it seems to me that if you're the Leader of the Free World and you're in a room full of cameras, you take for granted that somebody is straining to hear what you say, whether the microphone is live or not. And if you do talk to a friend in such an environment, the best bet is to avoid statements that contradict what you've been saying in public, and you try real hard not to say anything insulting about the Secretary General of the UN.
But, of course, you aren't the Leader of the Free World. For better or worse--and my take on that is hardly a secret--the Leader of the Free World is a dumbshit. He doesn't understand the complexities of the situation in the middle east. In his simple mind, Israel is right and that's that. Israel and Lebanon are simply doing what they've seen other nations--which I think I need not name--and using force as the first response to anything they don't like. Just what we need.

Let's Get This Straight. . . . .

2006-07-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

The House of Representatives has scheduled a vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Never mind that very few people consider this issue as important as the war or the economy or integrity in government. Never mind that there are real questions about whether such an amendment would infringe on the religious liberties of those religious organizations that have chosen to bless same-sex unions, granting them God's blessing but not the state's. Never mind that this amendment, having been rejected by the Senate, isn't going anywhere. Never mind that the amendment might not get the support of the requisite two thirds of the states. The House is going to vote.
There's only one reason: The Republicans, who desperately need votes, are convinced that this issue will bring out people who would not otherwise vote to support Republican candidates. They want to at least associate Democrats with opposition to an amendment that shouldn't pass. What the Republicans do not want is a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; such an amendment would deprive them of an issue that reliably brings out ill-informed people who the rest of us wish wouldn't vote anyway.
Don't believe these voters are all that bad or sufficiently numerous? Trust me; they are. In Virginia some years ago, Jim Gilmore ran for governor on the slogan "No Car Tax," which was a promise to end the personal property tax. (It wasn't quite what it seemed because the state couldn't end a county tax; it was actually a plan to reimburse. But it got Gilmore elected, and a few weeks later, the personal property tax bills went out. They had to. Gilmore's plan hadn't been passed by the legislature. Anyhow, people got their property tax bills, and some of those who had voted on the basis of the car tax immediately went to the revenue offices to point out that they were sure that the bill was a mistake; after all, they had voted for Mr. Gilmore, so they didn't have to pay the tax anymore. And when the economy went down the toilet, it became impossible to complete the plan.
It's time for Democrats to point out that the Republicans often make proposals that history teaches them will not succeed. The Republicans do this because they sound good to people who don't understand the issues or legislative processes very well. This is how we get Republican elected officials who can't cope with real issues; they're too busy promoting issues that aren't real.

The Pride of Ownership

2006-07-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

"This land is mine;
God gave this land to me,
This brave and ancient land to me."
Those are some of the words to the theme from the movie Exodus, a movie that was a big deal when it was released but now is little noted. I quote the lyrics not because I mean to discuss the movie nor because I want to hold them up as wonderful poetry, but because they express the attitude of a great many people with respect to Israel.
To rehash some history: World War II left a great many Jews displaced. They weren't eager to go back to where they had been before the war (if it still existed) because economic and military devastation made it seem untenable. Besides, much of Europe was (and as I hear from European friends, still is) anti-Semitic. The "solution," it seemed to the United Nations, an organization that needed badly to show that it could be more functional than the old League of Nations, that the solution was to take what had been Palestinian land, rename it Israel, and give it to the displaced Jews. Since it was possible to tie this to the Old Testament passages in which God gave His chosen people some land, all of the (non-Arabic) people said "Amen." The Palestinians especially didn't say "Amen." They were the ones whose land was being taken away. Other Arab states were angry that the UN had acted against the interests of their Palestinian brothers. They argued that Israel had no right to exist.
For nearly sixty years, the Arab states have tried to reclaim what once belonged to the Palestinians, although the deed that the Palestinians got from God is not recorded. Israel had become stronger and stronger militarily. Every time Arab nations have attacked Israel, Israel has defeated them. Hamas and Hezbollah have mounted terrorist campaigns, and they've been bloody, but history shows that terrorist campaigns don't change national boundaries--or people's minds; they are bloody, painful, expensive nuisances.
Israel has, for years, followed a policy of massive retaliation. If a Hezbollah operative from Lebanon does something to harm Israel or an Israeli, Israel strikes back against Lebanon, even though the Lebanese government and people do not necessarily support what Hezbollah has done. And here in the United States, Fearless Leader pretty much shrugs it off. He can't say anything in favor of the Lebanese because that would partially invalidate his current campaign in Iraq, wherein US forces are punishing the many for the actions of the few. And he can't point out that the Israeli reaction is intemperate and disproportionate, likely to do nothing more than recruit new enemies for Israel; no American politician ever says anything even mildly critical of Israel because doing so could cost him the Jewish vote.
Among Jews I've known, some are stridently pro-Israel that it makes me think they really might be happier there--and that the only thing keeping them here is the mild American climate and cushy American life where terrorist attacks only occur about every ten years or so. But I also know Jews who really don't seem to give a damn about Israel. They figure that the Israelis can probably take care of themselves and should do so. I certainly dislike anyone who votes solely on the basis of policy towards Israel as much as I dislike anyone who votes solely on the basis of any other single issue, without considering a candidate's political philosophy and positions on issues of more immediate importance. And Israel, unfortunately, is at the core of much of the unrest in the middle east. Unfortunately, as long as there are people who believe that somewhere in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, there's a deed, signed by God, giving Israel to the Jews, the arrogant, egocentric Israelis are going to put world peace at risk by trying to prove that they're God's Chosen People and doen't have to live by the principles that apply to everyone else.
Or maybe they're just pissed off because the UN gave them the only land in the middle east that has no oil.

"The Aspirational Level"

2006-07-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

We are told that there have been terrorist plots in recent weeks, but that they have only reached "the aspirational level." I think it's fair for us to wonder just what this level is; after all, it could mean damn near anything.
For example, someone I know (I dare not use her name because, for all I know, she could be run in for consipiracy to commit a terrorist act) actually has worked out plans to blow up one of the bridges into the District of Columbia using the minimum amount of explosives. In fact, she was part of a group that developed plans to blow up all of the bridges into the District. This was some years ago, but I suspect that she and many of her fellow members of the group still remember and could quickly piece together their plans. While I don't know her current political beliefs, I'm fairly sure that at least some members of the group do not support the current administration. Okay. The group was a group of U.S. Army officers in the Engineer Officers Basic Course at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and the plans were developed as part of one of their assignments for the course. But, dammit, in a post-9/11 world, you can't be too careful. Besides, even if we accept that they were military officers and wouldn't do such a thing, their family members may have heard or may have seen papers or something.
My wife and some very good friends of mine are, in fact, terrorists. I know this because the former Secretary of Education announced it to the world. These friends all belong to the National Education Association. I don't know what nefarious plans they might be hatching, but I know that most of them have said things that I'm told indicate that they hate America. They've said stuff like "We shouldn't be in Iraq," and "I'm ashamed of Bush's foreign policy." They even refer to the administration's education reform as "No Child Left Untested." I don't know why they hate America or why they hate our freedom, but I know they are terrorists because a Cabinet member said so and they have said things that members of the administration say indicate that they hate America. What I want to know is why no one seems to be following them. If their hatred for America and our freedom is developing into a conspiracy, it calls for action and now. Nip it in the bud.
Hell, I'll come clean. I have actually thought that it wouldn't break my heart if Air Force One dropped out of the sky while Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rice, and Hastert were on board. I've thought that if bird flu pandemic is really going to happen, it should start in the Cabinet Room of the White House. I've wished that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rice, and Hastert should go to jail along with their friend Tom DeLay. Because I am receptive to these ideas, have they reached the aspirational level? If I discussed them with others, even though we've done no more than indicating that we all thought it would be a good day when the Bush family was out of American public life for the foreseeable future, are we involved in a conspiracy? Sometimes, when I've been driving on the Beltway and seen "Report suspicious activity. Call XXX-XXX-XXXX" on the electronic signs, I've been tempted--and I have told those in the car with me that I was tempted--to call the number and report that there were people in the White House trying to destroy the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Are we going to jail?
I don't know where the line is drawn between daydreams, wishes, intentions, plans, and conspiracies. I never heard of the aspirational level until the Feds busted those seven poor souls in Florida for conspiracy. Those guys thought it might be cool to blow up some buildings, and they did ask the FBI agent who posed as an al Quaeda operative to get them some boots and a camera. That was after they got back from asking for water at the nearby church. Obviously these were dangerous guys. And it looks like this "plot to destroy the tunnels into New York City" may have been wishful thinking rather than a plan. What I do know is that this stuff started leaking to the press when Bush's approval rating went down the toilet, sort of like we used to get glowing reports of progress in Afghanistan to cover the disintegration of the economy through 2002.
What I really hope is that this country can survive long enough to remove from offices of public trust George W. Bush, any and every relative of his, and anyone who thinks that he's done a marginally adequate job.

Happy Birthday, United States

2006-07-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

I won't quibble over the dates--July 2nd, July 4th, no matter. Two hundred thirty years ago, for the first time, colonies declared their independence of their mother country. Even more important, the elected representatives of those colonies ratified a statement that governmental authority came from the consent of the governed rather than from God. Further, the representatives ratified that this concept included the corollary that if government did not protect the rights of the governed--which did come from God--the governed had the right and the duty to replace it. A host of other rights followed from these fundamental concepts: the freedom to express ideas, no matter how obnoxious; the freedom to worship as one saw fit or not to worship at all; the freedom to be left alone.
Every year at this time, and every year on Memorial Day, and every year on Veterans Day, we are told that freedom is not free and we are asked to think of those who have died for freedom over the last two hundred thirty years. But the reality is that freedom lives, not because it is protected by military force, but because people use it. When Natalie Maines says that George W. Bush makes the Dixie Chicks ashamed to be from Texas, freedom becomes stronger. When John Scopes taught his students that the Creation story in the Bible wasn't the only possible explanation for the origin of the universe, freedom grew stronger. When John Kerry returned his military medals, freedom grew stronger. Had the Revolution failed, had the British Army captured and hanged the Continental Congress, the United States might not have been born, but freedom would have grown stronger.
We have an administration that fails to understand that freedom is best defended by living free. Thousands of armed troops in the middle east cannot protect freedom as effectively as can people who have the courage to question the truths they have been given. They don't have to reject what they believe necessarily. A former student of mine told me some time ago that a series of assignments I gave based on the Harry Potter novels had challenged her intellectually and spiritually because her religious background taught her that novels about witchcraft were sinful. But she was willing to question that, and in the end, she said, her faith was stronger, even if some of her beliefs had changed.
If the United States is, in reality, the land of the brave, it is a land where we value honest doubt and dissent and grow from addressing both with equal honesty. It is a land where we can grieve the loss of lives in terrorist attacks and still go forward without making terrorism the center of our national life. We can remember that the German army invaded and occupied Holland by force during World War II--but the Dutch people still cherished their freedom and defied their oppressors at every opportunity. We can remember that when Martin Luther King, Jr., began working for freedom, he was put into the Birmingham jail--by force--but he understood that freedom belongs to those who refuse to give it up and drew others to his cause with his writings from the jail. We can remember that when we teach children to think for themselves, when we don't dumb down the past or the present because we are afraid they won't figure it out or will come to conclusions different from our own, we are making freedom stronger.
On September 11, 2001, teachers across the United States received word of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In many instances, this information arrived with instructions from administrators to avoid telling the students what had happened; that was a task best left to parents. So the teachers went on, focusing on their plans for the day, until school was dismissed. And the next day that school was in session, they went back and did it again. And again. And again. Those of us who teach, unlike those at the highest levels of government, have not adopted a new world view in which 9/11 is a watershed. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the message of the Declaration of Independence that I taught in the fall semesters of 2001 through 2005 is the same one that I taught through 2000. And it will still be the same in 2006--no matter what George W. Bush and his minions and courtiers want to say about how everything has changed because of terrorism. It is still a message of freedom, the dignity of the individual, and the source of governmental authority.
Jefferson wrote that he had sworn on the altar of God eternal enmity against every form of tyranny over the human mind. He was a man who knew that freedom, on rare occasions, must be defended militarily, but that it is more important to defend it daily by using it and by teaching others to use it. I'm pretty sure that the people in the military have been stroked more than enough for one day, so I'm offering my thanks to my teaching colleagues who understand that regardless of our disciplines, regardless of what level we teach, when we teach our students that the answers to life cannot be reduced to choices on a standardized test or other knee-jerk responses, we're defending freedom every day.

Republicans and Patriotism

2006-06-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

Here they go again.
This morning's Washington Post reports that George Allen has impugned the patriotism of his opponent for the U.S. Senate, James Webb. Now I'm not going to say that a person can't be a patriot without serving in the Armed Forces. I consider myself a patriot, and I was damned glad when my draft lottery number was over three hundred because I would have been a rotten soldier. And I'm not going to argue that having served in the military automatically makes one a patriot; surely those troops currently facing charges of murder and rape for their behavior in Iraq don't deserve to be considered patriots because they were simply thugs in uniform. But Jim Webb is a highly decorated combat veteran. Since his honorable discharge, he has served his country in a number of appointed positions when he probably could have made a lot more money doing something else. If there's a reason to claim he's unpatriotic, I don't know what it is. Oh yeah. He opposes an amendment that would allow Congress to pass laws prohibiting physical desecration of the flag.
But when Republicans are in trouble, they have a history of claiming their opponents are unpatriotic. President Chickenhawk, Mommy's Best Boy, found John McCain unpatriotic--and never mind the years as as POW. Saxby Chambliss was elected to the Senate after claiming that Max Cleland, who had done nothing much for his country except sacrifice both legs and one arm and then serve as Director of the Veterans Administration, was unpatriotic. And now George Felix Allen claims that Webb is unpatriotic.
I'll make this simple because these men are obviously speaking to people who are very simple and can't understand the serious issues that face the country. If Max Cleland or Jim Webb or John McCain wants to say someone's unpatriotic, I'll listen to that. They've earned the right, and their standard is probably pretty high. But Chickenhawk, Allen, and Chambliss never put anything on the line for their country except their cushy jobs. And it should strike all of us as odd that they only throw these charges when they're in danger of losing those jobs and need to rally support among people who have a Pavlovian response to the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the national anthem.

A Constitutional Amendment Primer

2006-06-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

The proposed Constitutional anti-flag-burning amendment has gone down by one vote. Like a lot of liberals, I'm glad to see that it did. Even now, when it's not strictly prohibited, flag burning is a very rare form of protest, and passing a law against it won't make it rarer. In fact, it could make it more common. But it's important for people to keep in mind how Constitutional amendments work--especially now that the conservative "plan" to pass such unpopular measures as a ban on abortions, a ban on gay marriages, and a ban on flag burning relies on passing Constitutional amendments.
Because the Constitution is a framework rather than a set of statutes, an amendment doesn't actually make anything illegal. It merely authorizes the legislative branch or the legislatures of the several states enact laws that make something illegal. As tough as it is to get an amendment passed, it's only half the battle. Here's the entire process.
First, the House and the Senate must pass identical resolutions by a 2/3 majority. That means 67 Senators and 290 Representatives have to vote in favor of it. There's no requirement for a Presidential signature and no possibility of a Presidential veto; a President who expresses support for or opposition to an amendment really can't do anything more than you or I--unless he chooses to use his political influence to get votes in Congress. Once the resolution has passed both houses with exactly the same text, it goes to the states. Three-fourths of the state legislatures--that is, 38 of them--have to ratify the amendment, and they must ratify it within a set time limit. One legislative ratification too few and the amendment is not enacted. Because state legislators are very sensitive to local priorities--and because state and local governments are dealing with issues that affect most citizens every day, like fire and police protection, transportation, sanitation, and education, proposed amendments to the Federal Constitution don't float automatically to the top of the legislative hopper. Some legislatures may postpone consideration of an amendment in hope of a more or less sympathetic legislature after an election.
If the amendment passes and the states ratify it, the Constitution authorizes passage of laws. Now, if the Congress is authorized to act, bills have to be passed in both houses. While the bar isn't as high for a bill as it is for an amendment, the Houses still have to pass identical acts. In many instances, that takes some doing. For example, just what does "physical desecration" of the flag mean? Does it include President Chickenhawk autographing a small flag offered to him by an admirer? How is the burning of a flag that needs to be disposed of differ from desertation by burning? Assuming the Houses of Congress can agree on these details and enact a law, it now has to be signed by the President--who very probably isn't the one who was in office when the amendment made its way through Congress. If he vetos it, the veto stands unless it is overriden. And, of course, there may be challenges in the Supreme Court.
Here's the bottom line: Amendments are tough. They average out to less than one every ten years because the first ten were passed together. The odds against passage of a proposed amendment are huge. Only once--Prohibition--has a really dumb idea become an amendment. Elected officials and those who advise them know this. They understand that they can piously promise an amendment and then claim that it didn't pass because of their opponents' partisanship. Good ideas, like extending equal rights to women in the workplace, couldn't get ratified by the states. So offering to get an amendment passed is most often a great way of promising nothing. That's what the conservatives really want: a promise that they'll never be able fulfill with respect to an issue that they can bring up again and again. Their hope in this is that voters will never understand the process well enough to understand that what they regard as no-brainer amendments don't have much chance, and they're being played for fools by cynical men like Karl Rove.

Stay on Script

2006-06-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post. It strikes me as kind of funny that Rick Santorum (of "Santorum is Latin for asshole" fame) comes out with news this weekend that shells designed for chemical weapons had been found in Iraq. Okay. Fine. Apparently inspectors had found them before, but a shell is sort of like a pill bottle: It's just a container, and it's the stuff inside that matters. If the stuff inside is air, there's no threat. But Santorum makes a big deal of this, as if he believes that finding these empty shells proves that President Chickenheart wasn't lying and the war was justified after all--even when Chickenheart and his minions have given up on that argument. But if the shells were found and actually indicated some danger, would this be a good time to announce that General Casey has suggested that there are going to be troop reductions by the end of 2007?
Special note to Mommy's Best Boy in the White House: The Democrats proposed two troop reduction plans in the Senate last week. I realize that you wouldn't realize this, being a Yale frat legacy puke, but for Casey to post-date one of their plans and turn it in as his own is plagiarism. And for your minions in the Senate to oppose what you now seem to accept is just partisan bullshit.

A Sorry Showing

2006-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

I'm disappointed that County Executive Doug Duncan won't be able to continue his campaign for governor of Maryland because of clinical depression. He's been a terrific public servant, and I thought he would be a fine governor. For the record, I'd sooner vote for my dog than Bob Ehrlich, who has accomplished precisely nothing except pouting when the General Assembly refused to legalize slot machines. I would have been happy to vote for Duncan.
What disappoints me even more is the reaction on the Washington Post blog usually moderated by Marc Fisher. Many of those who wrote in were convinced that clinical depression was just a cover story. They were quite sure that there was some sinister reason for Duncan's withdrawal. I hate it, but I understand it: We've been through five years of President Chickenheart, constantly exposed to his La-La Land where nothing is what it seems and no statement can be taken at face value. Of course trust is at an all time low.
The other thing that's disheartening is the strong possibility that admitting that he suffers from an eminently manageable disease may end Doug Duncan's distinguished career. One of the boneheads on the Post blog wondered where he would be hospitalized, even though most depression these days is handled with outpatient therapy and medication. But the unfortunate term "mental illness" got thrown around, and that, I'm afraid, will be the kiss of death, as it was for Tom Eagleton in '72. (Of course, President Chickenheart, who doesn't admit to the paranoid schizophrenia and severe Oedipal conflicts from which he suffers, remains in office.) The blog cites a poll that indicates that most people won't vote for someone with a history of depression. Never mind that there's strong evidence that Lincoln suffered from it--undiagnosed and untreated--and led the country through the Civil War. Never mind that a lot of people who would never vote for someone with a history of depression suffer from it themselves.
I guess I think it would have been good for people to take one day off from distrust, spend a bit of time learning about this widespread condition, and trying to be kind.

Why WMDs?

2006-06-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

There's a question that President Chickenhawk and his menions aren't even considering concerning the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It falls under the same heading as "Is it right to invade a sovereign nation without provocation in order to replace its government?" and "Is it right to show pictures of the bodies of dead combatants in newspapers and on television?" If it gets asked at all, the answer "We are America: Our hearts are pure" drowns it out. The question is just why nations like Iran and Korea--and I'll even throw in Iraq--would like to have active WMD programs. The answer is that they perceive a need to have the deterrent value that these weapons carry. And why do they want that deterrent value?
The answer has nothing to do with their neighbors. Their neighbors don't pose very serious threats. Iraq isn't going to invade Iran; Iraq isn't going to invade anybody. South Korea prefers to negotiate with North Korea having found that a far more profitable course. The answer has to do with the United States. They perceive us as a serious threat, a nation with state-of-the-art armed forces and an irrational leader who cannot be restrained by the legislative or judicial branches and lives in a world where all who are not with him are against him. They believe that the possibility that they may have or be close to having WMDs may restrain him. Yes, he did invade Iraq to destroy theWMD program there, but he made plenty of other claims on that one, and the real reason was that he wanted to kill Saddam Hussein for wanting to kill George I. But attack a nuclear Iran and the United States forces in Iraq are fighting on two fronts and facing a nuclear enemy. Attack a nuclear North Korea and there's a possibility that nuclear retaliation could reach United States territory.
What's amazing here, though, is that Republicans don't seem to understand this. They're the party that supports the National Rifle Association's argument that guns really deter crime because criminals are afraid to attack anyone who might be armed, and the logic here is the same. I don't want you to attack me, and there's no way that my conventional armed forces represent a serious deterrent. But if I have weapons of mass destruction, you'll have to think twice. A first strike would have to destroy them; otherwise, I could retaliate.
So what's the solution? As with so many other problems, the answer is not immediately available: President Chickenhawk and his minions have to go. We need an administration--or maybe several administrations--that make clear that the United States will always negotiate in good faith--no exceptions. None of this "We don't negotiate with. . . . ." crap. We negotiate. And those administrations need to make sure that the United States arsenal includes no weapons of mass destruction. Once that's done, we can hope that other nations follow our moral leadership, and we can assume that those that don't are maintaining WMDs for purposes of aggression, not defense.

Ann Coulter

2006-06-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

I can't believe the unmitigated gall of that vile bitch, Ann Coulter. What kind of insensitivity does it take for her to suggest that the widows of the 9/11 attacks are somehow trying to benefit from their loss? I couldn't believe the bile that I heard from her during her Today show interview yesterday. Never in my life have I heard someone so filled with unjustified and unjustifiable rage.
Don't get me wrong. Freedom of speech is cool, and as much as I'd like to kick her up side of the head repeatedly, I don't deny that she's got the right to say any stupid thing she wants. On the other hand, the right to be published in print, on TV, or on radio is not guaranteed. What's demoralizing is that she can find publishers and broadcasters who will help her spread her rantings around--and don't kid yourself: They want her to bring in a huge audience and lots of book buyers so they can make a profit. Here's a message for those who sign contracts with her: You don't have to do it. You can support freedom of speech with people who actually know what their talking about and have some human characteristics. Charles Krauthammer comes to mind, as does George F. Will. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone is required to spread incivility.
But at the risk of being thought uncivil, I will point out here that Ann Coulter is ugly, stupid, and mean-spirited. She is humorless and ill-informed. Other than that, she's a fine person, I'm sure.

Same-Sex Marriage Amendments

2006-05-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

It's all the rage now to amend state constitutions--and maybe the federal constitution, too--to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman and no other relationship gets the same benefits. That, we are told, is the way to stay true to the country's Christian roots. What the religious fanatics promoting these amendments overlook is the serious risk to separation of church and state.
I'm (nominally) an Episcopalian. My church, through its orderly processes, has ordained gays, and I believe there's a liturgy for the blessing of same-sex unions that can be used at local option. There are other churches that have such rites. I don't want the government--any level--stepping in to tell any religious body who can receive the benefits of its blessings. A government doing so would materially infringe on the barrier between church and state. The state, as Sir Thomas More says in A Man for All Seasons, "hath not the competency to do it." That is, the state can't possibly put together a law that adequately respect the beliefs of all of the churches. If it could, it couldn't possibly enforce the law equitably.
The question for the religious fanatics, then, is this: are you so eager to deprive people in committed same sex unions of their civil rights that you are willing to open the door for government to tell your church what and whom it may and may not bless? Let's take marriage--a sacrament or a blessing administered by a religious body--out of this debate unless we acknowledge that the import of these proposed amendments is to take as much from religious bodies as it takes from homosexuals.

English as National Language Amendment

2006-05-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

The Senate, displaying what they hope voters will regard as a display of testicularity, approved an amendment to make English the national language of the United States.
These morons--the Republicans and eleven DINOs who voted with them--don't know anything about language acquisition. I once asked a friend of mine at work, a woman who came here from Persia as a child and heard Persian spoken at home while she was growing up, whether she thought in English or Persian. Mind you, this is a woman in her thirties--maybe forties--with a Master's degree. She thought about it for a minute and said that things pertaining to home and family, she thought of in Persian because she had first encountered them in Persian. That is, if she asked a student she was counseling "How's your mother?" or "Did you get a new sofa?" she was probably translating because she would think of the mother or the sofa in Persian first. She thinks of things that she learned in school in English. If you showed her an article in her professional field of counseling, she would struggle with it because all of her education took place in English-speaking schools. She might not even have the Persian words for some of the concepts that are easy for her to explain in English.
Another friend, this one an ESL teacher who came here fairly recently from the Netherlands, goes to lunch once a week with another friend from Holland. The primary purpose, she tells me, is to spend the lunch speaking Dutch. She wants to be able to talk to her nieces and nephews in the Netherlands without having to struggle with translation.
And then there are the parents of my wife's students. They're legal. They want to learn English, but their mobility is limited, and they can't find English classes at times when they are free and able to attend. The school, fortunately, has a translator. Are these women stubbornly refusing to learn English? Hell no. They are worried, they explain through the translator, that their children, who are fluent in English, will speak English to hide things from them.
And my wife, whose great-grandfathers left Holland and came to the United States, thinks with some frustration about the decision that was supposedly made by one of them as he stepped off the ship to never speak Dutch again. It may not have been quite that easy; the teaching of English wasn't as widespread as it is now in Europe. And maybe the decision not to speak Dutch made upward mobility easier, but the result is that the great grandchildren know very little about their Dutch ancestry.
So senators, not everyone who speaks a foreign language does it as a political statement. Not everyone who speaks English has banished other languages from their brains. And if you had really had any guts, you would have voted for an amendment that prohibited official translation of any United States government document into any language other than English or perhaps American Sign Language. But, of course, that would have been wrong. I hope the voters recognize you for the cowardly hypocrites you are. I wish that the Hispanics who work for you would realize how mean-spirited you are and quit tomorrow.

Krauthammer vs. Generals

2006-04-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

Charles Krauthammer usually manages to piss me off. So he's got an MD? An MD friend of mine says that an MD is easy compared to a PhD. So he's got a law degree? So do a lot of people who aren't able to apply what they learned to living inside the law. And when he goes off, as he did last Friday, on retired generals who (heaven forbid!) are saying unkind things about Rumsfeld and Bush, he really pisses me off. I'd love to hear what my father-in-law, a retired military officer and (now) a staunch Democrat, has to say on the subject.
See, Dad wrote a letter to the Washington Post about a year ago when the Swift Boat slugs crawled out from under their rocks to attack John Kerry for his opposition to the Viet Nam war. As Dad pointed out, free speech is the right of every American, but it particularly belongs to those who have fought for it. And the generals surely fall into that category. Apparently Charlie Krauthammer thinks that people in the armed forces should permanently give up some of the rights of American citizens rather than just checking them at the door and picking them up as they leave the service.
Charlie seems to think that the generals kept quiet while they were still in uniform. I'm not so sure. Some of these guys were one-stars before the war, and in the Pentagon, where anything less than a bird colonel is a go-fer, a one-star isn't going to get much of an audience. Anything they said would have had to percolate up the chain of command to Rummy, and those who told the truth--see Shinsecki--suffered the consequences. It's entirely possible that some of these guys made their thoughts known to their superiors, and their superiors (for whatever reasons) refused to carry the message forward. ("One-star, what you say makes sense to me, but my fourth star makes even more sense, so I'm not going to tell the boss.") And they were soldiers, so they didn't step outside of the Pentagon and make their cases to the first reporters they could find. That's part of being a good soldier, and being a good soldier matters a lot to officers.
The generals have every right to call it as they see it. If they didn't do so when they were in uniform, shame on them. If they did and they were ignored by those who outranked them, those who outrank them are a disgrace to their uniforms. The Republican Revolution is over. The defection of military is a clear sign.

Death for Moussaoui?

2006-04-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

Now that the prosecution has wrung the jury members' emotions in the sentencing hearing for Zacharias Moussaoui, the self-proclaimed would-be 9-11 hijacker, the defense gets a chance to save him from himself. I hope they succeed for several reasons.
First, I think Moussaoui is demented, regardless of what the court's psychiatrists said. His courtroom behavior is often bizzare, and the filings he entered when he was defending himself were incoherent. The only thing that seems to organize his perceptions is his claim that he is al Quaeda (a claim that some al Quaeda operatives have denied) and his eagerness to be executed.
Second is that he is so eager to be executed so that he can be a martyr. In the US, we overlook the seriousness with which suicide bombers approach martyrdom. Suicide is such an anathema that we don't accept any possibility that a suicide could go immediately to paradise and be surrounded by seventy virginis ready to perform whatever sexual favors or other services he wants. (Yeah, it sounds pretty far-fetched.) But the fact is that there are people in the al Quaeda world who really believe it. There's a possibility that we're wrong and the guy really does get paradise and the virgins; I'd hate to give even a terrorist wanna-be a reward like that. And why let would-be terrorists know that we're willing to help them get what they are after? Imagine for a minute that you're one of the guys who's susceptible to this stuff in the first place. Moussaoui is executed, your leaders tell you that he is a martyr and got the paradise and virgins package, and you know that you're going to get the same package, even if you don't succeed in your mission. You're more likely to take on your mission because you can only win. If you think that you might just end up rotting in a cell in a super max prison for the rest of your natural life with no hope of parole, that could give you pause.
Finally, we need to stop promoting this notion of closure through execution. It's terrible that people lost loved ones on 9-11, and I can't imagine their pain. But I doubt that executing anybody is going to relieve that pain. No one will ever see the families of victims after the execution; no one will see that the execution did nothing to diminish their sense of loss and may, thereby, have made them even angrier. Increasingly, the media presents execution as something that we do to ease the pain of survivors, and that makes it a more desirable act. I think it overlooks that loss is loss, and tragic loss is unalterably tragic.
Don't get me wrong. Moussaoui shouldn't live because he's innocent. He shouldn't live because I don't believe in capital punishment to begin with. He should live the rest of his life in prison because jerks like him shouldn't be permitted to go to their executions cheerfully, expecting that they are on the verge of something wonderful.

Bush Authorized the Leak

2006-04-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

It looks like Scooter Libby is not going to go down gently; he's going to hang onto Bush and Cheney for dear life, and if they get dragged down, so be it. Now he says that Bush authorized the leak, and some folks are saying that Bush had the authority to do that. Time out, folks. I used to work with classified information. Once something was declassified, it was declassified. Notices were given, markings were changed and any use of it by anybody was governed by the new classification. Bush could have done that; there are procedures. But that's not what he did. He authorized giving classified information to someone who had neither the requisite security clearance nor the need to know. Anyone looking to find a record of when Bush declassified the information in question is going to look in vain, because it wasn't declassified. And if the information had been properly declassified, there wouldn't be any case at this point because the laws only prohibit disclosure of classified information.
I can't remember the penalties for disclosure of classified information; I remember the steps necessary to safeguard it, and I remember that the penalties were severe. Maybe we'll reach critical mass on criminal charges and Bushie can rot in a penitentiary.

The End of the Dance

2006-04-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

George Mason is out of the NC double-A championship tournament. They had a great run, and I’m sorry that they don’t get to bring home the trophy. One of the players says that they changed the face of college basketball, and I only wish he were right. They may have made the point that five guys who play together and love to compete can beat guys who are worrying most about their highlights tapes and NBA contracts. What they didn’t touch was the governance of college basketball, the NC double-A. (By the way, the NCAA insists that broadcasters say “N-C-A-A” instead of NC double-A, and they’re the ones who insist that players be called “student-athletes,” even those who, like Chris McCray, don’t go to class.)
In Saturday’s game, there was room for complaint from George Mason fans. Early in the game, Ginger started complaining that the commentators were talking about Florida as if they were the only team on the court. That got worse. Then even the broadcasters began pointing out that there might well be questions about some of the officiating. I thought the second foul actually called on Noah was really about his fourth, and it was almost criminal that Tony Skinn got called for a blocking foul when he had clearly set up and taken a charge in a situation that might have slowed Florida down a bit. Jim Larranaga says that Mason didn’t use because of officiating, but I’d say that officiating certainly wasn’t even-handed, and that’s a problem.
At the end of the game, Ginger commented that the NC double-A had gotten the outcome they wanted. And there’s reason to believe that. After all, when the tournament brackets were announced three weeks ago today, some fairly respectable commentators, such as Billy Packer and Dick Vitale, started talking about how George Mason didn’t belong in the tournament. It was arguably good for the credibility of the tournament that George Mason beat Michigan State, and it probably didn’t hurt that they beat North Carolina. That indicated that the selection committee really hadn’t erred; a case could be made for that George Mason was the Cinderella team—the one that really belonged. The credibility of the selection committee and the selection process was preserved.
But sports in the United States in the twenty-first century have taken some hits. Too many spectacular performances have been powered by steroids. Those of us who thought that it was dirty of Ford Frick to put an asterisk after Roger Maris’ single-season home run record now wonder what present-day records should carry an indication that the recordholder was artificially enhanced. The integrity of the competition must be preserved, and that means that a near-interloper like George Mason can’t win the National Championship. There would be questions about games being fixed. There would be questions about whether the players were trained illegally. It’s much easier to make sure that the Cinderella team doesn’t win the biggest game—that the magic carpet ride ends before the last dance.
Think of the marketing problems if George Mason wins. Think of the J. J. Redick jerseys that have to be sold at a loss. Think of the Carolina and Connecticut tee-shirts that nobody wants. Think of the recruiting problems. Guys who were committed to Duke might want to rethink. The whole college basketball world might be thrown into disarray. It wouldn’t just be a case of an upstart out-of-nowhere school winning; George Mason played a totally different kind of basketball in which being a MdDonald’s High School All-American doesn’t matter and in which the superstar doesn’t matter. So George Mason was a threat, and George Mason had to go.
To their credit, the Patriots and their coaches walked off the court with their heads high, proud of what they had accomplished, and not crushed by what they had not accomplished. And maybe the NC double-A didn’t do anything to orchestrate the outcome. But now that sports is about business and entertainment and only peripherally about competition, the powers that be were surely comfortable with this outcome.

March Madness II

2006-03-20T17:51:00.000-08:00

The first weekend of March Madness is over, and who would have expected that the George Mason University Patriots would bump off North Carolina to get into the Sweet Sixteen? My best friend/singing partner, Roger, and I met when we were students at George Mason and we didn't think that our Alma Mater was going to get by Michigan State. When we checked the Mason-UNC game during a break in our practice on Sunday afternoon, we did a double-take and decided that it looked like Mason was keeping Carolina from running and gunning. And as I drove home, I heard the end of the game, with Carolina sending Mason to the foul line in double bonus and Mason contemplating fouling to burn time because they still had fouls to give. I had to go to GMU today to get myself some GMU clothing, and I was pleased to see that the statue of George Mason was wearing a basketball jersey.
Coach Jim Larranga has done one hell of a job with a bunch of kids who got overlooked by the majors, know that they aren't supposed to have gone this far in the tournament, and are under their coach's instructions to have the time of their lives. Maybe we need more coaches like that.

March Madness

2006-03-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

One of the neat parts of having five degrees from five schools between my wife and me is that the NCAA Basketball tournament doesn't have to be painful. I got my Ph.D. from Maryland, and of my three schools it's the one to which I feel most attached. My Terps didn't make it to the big dance, although I'll be watching them in the NIT. That's okay because my wife got her MA from the George Washington University, and her Colonials are playing as I write. I did my BA at George Mason, and my Patriots play tomorrow night. What I'm hoping is that GW will win tonight and then beat Duke in the second round.
I hope for better days for my Terps. The last two seasons have been tough. Last year they had John Gilchrist (aka "That damn John Gilchrist") who thought he understood the game better than Gary Williams. This year, they had Chris McCray (aka "that stupid McCray") who managed to lose his eligibility in the same academic support system that made Tom McMillen a Rhodes Scholar. Guys like the two of them and J.J. Redick make me wonder about basketball players. Of course, I don't wonder much. My kids were in high school with Sirvaliant Brown when he had "NBA" tattooed on his arm. When the high school coach told a (female) official "You don't have the balls to make that call" and got suspended for a year, Sirvaliant went to one of the basketball factory prep schools for a year. Somehow, he got into GW, where he became known as "Sir Shootsalot." He didn't have much defense, his ball handling was suspect, he was a high scorer only because he took twice as many shots as everybody else, and he wasn't that much into classes anyway. He made it as far as the development league, but he's dropped off the basketball radar. I wonder whether he got the tattoo removed.
Gary Williams says that in recruiting, you tell a kid for two years that he's incredibly good and then tell him the first day of practice that he's terrible. The problem is that the kid had his high school coach telling him not to believe anything negative that anyone said about him, so the kid is absolutely convinced that he's all that with an order of fries, a large chocolate shake, and an apple pie. College was never any more in his mind than the right place to showcase himself for the NBA scouts. The fact that his odds of making the NBA are, at best, pretty bad, and he's getting a free education aren't enough to induce him to put any effort into improving his game or his mind.
It's a hell of a gamble. If a kid gets identified as "one in a million," Nike will hand him a contract for millions before he plays a second of pro ball and his endorsements will dwarf his on-court earnings. If he makes the NBA, even if he only lasts a couple of seasons, he can be set for life. But, of course, one in a million comes about one time in a million.
But it's March, and we can all suspend disbelief. Right now, I can be really glad that GW beat UNC-Wilmington and my dreams of a school with which I have some connection beating Duke are still alive. But I can't help it I'm still a college professor and I still care what happens to the players when their college careers are over.

Don't Worry; Be Happy

2006-02-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

George F. Will's column today cites a Pew study showing that conservatives are happier than liberals. He claims that this is because liberals are waiting for government to make them happy while conservatives are going out and getting it themselves. George F. Will is a moron. This from a moderately happy liberal who has a good job, earned a Ph.D. without financial aid (paying out of state tuition) and is far more astute than George F. Will. Or any of the other conservative blowholes who tell conservatives how they're supposed to think.
Conservativism is all about fear. The taxation-is-theft crowd are fearful that someone else will get the benefit of their money through some program like Pell grants or Head Start. They don't particularly care that at some point, they benefitted, directly or indirectly, from some similar program. (And by the way, every baby boomer benefitted from the money that the government poured into education after Sputnik.) The national security crowd are terrified that someone is about to attack them. Among nations, probably only China has the wherewithal to launch a credible attack on the US, but the Chinese are too astute to attack their principal trading partner. Terrorists? Sure they're out there, and they'll almost surely strike again. But the only way they can do (have done) lasting damage is by causing Americans to reconstruct their lives around fear rather than hope. And the Bush Administration feeds the fear of the terrorists for its own gain. Social conservatives are afraid that someone who is different might be recognized as a human being and thereby diminish them. They can only be positive about themselves if they have someone to be negative about.
Surveys can give bogus results, particularly when they get into questions of happiness. It's too bad that conservativism has been so weakened by association with the dim bulbs of the Bush family that it has to sell itself by claiming that its adherents are happier than others.

I Wonder What Would Happen

2006-02-17T20:55:00.000-08:00

Okay. Let's say that I go out quail hunting with some friends of mine. I know it's a stretch because most of my friends aren't hunters, let alone quail hunters. And let's say that at lunchtime, we decide to have a beer. My friends and me drinking beer isn't a stretch; some of my friends drinking just one beer is a different story. So we finish the beer and start hunting again, and it's getting on toward seven o'clock in February. But one of us somehow leaves the group for a few minutes, and when he comes back, one of us shoots him. We all know some first aid, and we've got cell phones with us, so we start treating for shock and bleeding and wait for an ambulance, which soon arrives and hauls him off the to hospital. We go back to thehome of the person who owns the property where we were hunting. A bit later, a sheriff's deputy shows up to ask about the ambulance, but we explain that we're all cool and he leaves. Next morning, somebody decides that maybe we need to make an official report, so we call the sheriff's office, and the deputy comes back. We answer his questions, and he goes away, even though the guy who did the shooting doesn't have the right stamp to be hunting quail. Sure. That's believable, isn't it?
I think Dick Cheney should come clean with America. I might cut him some slack for not having the right stamp and for not making sure of his target the way I was taught to do when I was a kid. I might give him the benefit of the doubt for hunting at dusk, when visibility is terrible. But he needs to tell us how he got the cop to leave him alone. I want to do that if I ever get pulled over for speeding again.

Feeling Safer?

2006-02-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

The Judiciary Committee Hearings on NSA Surveillance aren’t producing much information. It seems that anything important is an operational detail or a hypothetical, and Attorney General Gonzalez doesn’t do those. But there’s an important point that Sen. Kennedy made: Bush had better hope that none of the evidence gained under this program is ever used in any way to arrest or prosecute anybody. It’s incontrovertible that there’s a question about the legality of the program, and that means that if any of the information is used in court, it provides, in and of itself, grounds for appeal.

What this means is really simple: Bush could have Osama bin Laden himself on trial for all of the acts against America in which he has participated. And bin Laden could even be convicted. And then his attorney would have a legal obligation to appeal, arguing that illegally obtained evidence was used to convict. And we could all hold our collective breath while waiting for the case to make its way to the Supreme Court and while Bushie’s appointees tried to figure out how to make the conviction stick. And let's not whine too much about people "getting off on technicalities." Those technical requirements exist because the Founding Fathers intended to protect people from the kinds of abuses they had seen under the King George who lived in London.

As much as I understand why terrorists want to act against the United States, I detest the terrorists and their actions. I’d like to see them rot in a super-max prison until they rot in hell. Unfortunately, Bush, who has made a big deal out of keeping Americans safe, may have made it harder to stop terrorism.

Time for Some Honesty

2006-01-11T13:07:00.000-08:00

I watched the Alito hearings for as long as I could stand. It seems that the purpose of the hearings is, in fact, to afford committee members an opportunity for speechmaking and the nominee an opportunity for obfuscation. Somehow, I don't think that this is what the founders had in mind, but then they didn't expect third choice hacks like Alito to be nominated, either. But what strikes me is the dishonesty of the Republicans in their repeated references to Roe v. Wade.
We've had a Republican legislature for years. For the last five years, the Republicans have controlled the White House. Let's be realistic: If they had wanted to push a Constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, they could have gotten it through Congress. If they had wanted to push an amendment to outlaw same-sex civil unions, they could have done it. It wouldn't have been all that hard. They would have needed a handful of Democratic supporters, but there are anti-choice Democrats and Democrats from anti-choice districts who might have supported these amendments.
Let's face it: If I get elected by running against abortion or gay marriage, it seems like a no-brainer for me to make sure that I at least put a proposal in the hopper. That's a lot easier than going back to my constituents and explaining why I haven't done anything. At the very minimum, I'm going to co sponsor someone else's measure. I may not care whether the measure passes, and I may not stick my neck out very far to secure its passage, but I don't want to have to face single issue voters and tell them that I didn't do anything the pet issue that brought them out to vote for me. And I'd probably try to get press coverage of my efforts.
But how many Republican bills for constitutional amendments have been proposed? If there have been any, I haven't heard anything about them, and I don't think the pro-choice groups would have let them die in silence. Anyone who wants can do the research, but my guess is that these amendments that the conservative Republicans claim to want so earnestly have never been proposed in Congress.
I suggest that there is a reason for this: The Republicans are afraid of what would happen if they lost abortion and same-sex unions as issues. They haven't had such wonderful wedge issues since the civil rights days. There are people who come out to vote only because they have these issues to be agitated about. Give them up and the religious right falls apart because the teaching of evolution simply won't galvanize them the way that "rights of the unborn" and "protection of marriage" do. So if the Democrats are smart, and I hope that they are, they'll demand that Republican incumbents for Congress this year give an account of their activities. And if voters are smart, and I hope they are, they'll draw distinctions between those who talk a good game and those who actually do something.

The Book of Daniel II

2006-01-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

I watched “The Book of Daniel” Friday night, and I can’t see what the fuss is about. I could fault the writers for having so much trouble descend on one family in the course of a two-hour introductory, but I can think of times when I felt like there was that much happening to my family.

Daniel is a well-meaning, earnest man who wants to do right by his congregation and his family, not in that order. There are a lot of pressures on him, just as there are pressures on all of us. Like many people I’ve known—especially priests—he talks to God about them. When a good friend of mine, a priest named Whit, spoke to a God he could not see or hear, he called it “prayer,” and no one had a problem with it. Why anyone has a problem with an audiovisual representation of Jesus hearing the prayer is beyond me. And Jesus shows up when Daniel reaches for the Vicodin, sometimes keeping him from using it. Is there a problem here?

I’ve known a lot of people who claimed that God spoke to them. I always wanted to ask what language he used and exactly what he said. It usually seemed that he was telling them to do something that I couldn’t support. Jesus, on “The Book of Daniel,” isn’t like that at all. He asks questions, he expresses love, and he sometimes jokes. In other words, this Jesus isn’t one who shows up only to help or judge; this is the embodiment of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” This is an omnipresent but not particularly intrusive savior. Is there a problem with that?

I glanced at the show’s message boards, and there are some very angry people there. Maybe everyone just needs to take a deep breath, count to ten, and watch a couple of episodes. It certainly doesn’t hurt anyone when television, through shows like this one, “Joan of Arcadia,” and “Touched by an Angel,” can prompt discussion of spiritual things.

The Book of Daniel

2006-01-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

As I write this, I’m planning to watch “The Book of Daniel” on NBC tonight. It got a rotten review in the Washington Post this morning, and if it’s really that bad, I might not watch the entire program, but I plan to start watching. I also plan to offer my take on it as a guy whose doctoral study included a strong dose of popular culture. And if I had any doubts about watching it, they dissipated as the outcry against it from religious groups has risen.

A few years ago—maybe more than a few—there was a series of movies in which God took the form of an elderly man. The first one, in which the Creator spoke to John Denver, was such a success that there were two sequels. If George Burns, who played God and was nearly as old as God, were alive and well today, that series could still be turning out sequels. I don’t remember such an uproar over a great comedian portraying God.

A few years after that, there was a charming TV series. God didn’t appear, but His angels did. One of them was pretty hot. They talked a lot about God, but nobody got all that upset. The series ran for years. Hollywood stars hoped (or maybe prayed) to get a guest spot on an episode.

A few years after that, there was another charming TV series. This time, God spoke to a teenaged girl, taking the form of a dogwalker, a punk, a little girl, an old lady, and others. Again, no outcry from the religious groups. I’m not sure why the series didn’t last longer than it did. It was well executed, and the problem may have been scheduling.

So now we have “The Book of Daniel,” and religious groups are upset because Jesus shows up. I grew up in the Protestant Trinitarian tradition, and I was taught that Jesus was God in a form comprehensible to humanity—God the Son. From what I can see in the publicity for the show, it offers a pleasant western European looking Jesus who looks a lot like the one in the paintings in thousands of Protestant churches. And He shows up, as I get it, at key moments to offer guidance to Daniel. Isn’t that what some of the evangelicals claim—direct guidance from God? You can say that the physical portrayal is simply a dramatic convenience—a way of representing what cannot be seen. What’s the fuss? More later.

But in keeping with my skepticism about evangelicals, it occurred to me today that something is really strange about liberal folks like me and our relationship with religion. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—particularly Pat Robertson—are Protestants. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were Protestants. Jimmy Swaggert was a Protestant. To me, at least, these people are far more objectionable than Pope Benedict.

Laws and Security

2005-12-30T12:53:00.000-08:00

As the holiday season comes to an end, it's tough for me to maintain a festive spirit. The year that's about to end brought a great many things that I didn't think I'd ever see in the United States, and I'm concerned about what the new year may bring. And I thought we had hit bottom when the United States officially became an aggressor nation with promulgation of the Bush Doctrine. But we've gone a long way down from there. Domestic espionage? George II asserts that he need not be constrained by law if, in the judgment that once made him an alcoholic coke head, he believes that national security is at risk. He thinks it's okay to torture, even though most people realize that anyone being tortured will probably be willing to say whatever it takes to stop the torture--unless they hold out until the torture kills them.
We might all do well to reflect on these lines from A Man for All Seasons:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
And what's worse, George II says that the nation's security concerns outweigh the privacy of the people involved. If that's true, he could have easily convinced a court to give him a court order and spied on Americans legally. And he wants to ferret out whoever leaked the existence of this program to the media. Once again, when caught violating the law, he says he had to do it for national security and says that the person who caught him was wrong.
So I worry about what 2006 will bring.
By the way, I'd like to send my warmest wishes for the holiday season to the people at NSA who participate in violating the privacy of their fellow citizens. I hope that in 2006 you all get your moral compasses back and stand up to your master, George II.

Keeping America Safe My Butt

2005-12-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

So George Bush authorized eavesdropping on Americans to keep us safe. 9-11,9-11, 9-11. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.
If any terrorist group wanted to strike against the United States, it wouldn't be that tough--unless they wanted to use airliners as bombs, which has been done before. But since the Bush administration has made an obsession of terrorism for over four years now, there is simply no need to run the risks of revealing methods or wasting resources. The terrorists know they're winning. They see that Bush and the minions of his administration--and realistically, a goodly number of legislators, too--are willing to trample on the rights of American citizens. They see that they have emboldened Christian fanatics to make the winter holiday season divisive. That may not be as satisfying as seeing Muslim fanatics running the show, but hey, Falwell and Robertson, in reality, agreed with Bin Laden that the 9-11 attacks were part of God's judgment against the United States. The war on terrorism (particularly if we recognize the war against Iraq as part of that war) is a huge drain on the U.S. economy; children being born today will pay higher taxes for fewer government services because they must repay the debts from this phony war. Why should the terrorists lift a finger? They've already got us.
If they chose to lift a finger, there's little that could be done to stop them. The possibility of death doesn't exactly distress a terrorist who expects to die. The possibility of incarceration might be a deterrent, but one who resists arrest strongly enough stands a good chance of being martyred. And the federal sky marshals who killed a man suffering from bipolar disorder--even though his carry-on had been checked and passed minutes before--or any other federal law enforcement types would be all to happy to enhance their hero status by blowing away a terrorist.
I never thought I'd see the day when any occupant of the White House would claim that he had the authority to violate the constitutional rights of his fellow citizens in order to protect them. I always thought that an American president would believe that Americans would give up life before they would give up their rights. So now, while people who seem very much like those I see in my classrooms are fighting and dying in Iraq "to protect our liberty,"their commander in chief chips away at liberty. It's a sorry picture.

Intelligent Design

2005-12-17T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'm one of those liberal college professors whom conservatives accuse of trying to brainwash students. What would they make of an observation made by one of my students in the reflective essay that I require as a final exam. She's a conservative Christian, being home-schooled through high school while taking some college courses, and she was in a course where I require students to read one of the Harry Potter novels, conduct research on it, and write a formal research paper on it. She said in her final that she wasn't so sure, in the beginning, that she should read Harry Potter because it dealt with witchcraft, which she regarded as a sin. In the end, though, she said that the experience had led her to think more prayerfully and pray more thoughtfully, and she had grown intellectually and spiritually. I don't know when I've been so proud of a student.
I went from grading papers to reading an editorial by a historian on intelligent design. He didn't much like what he saw as the underlying assumption that the whole universe was created for the benefit of Terran humanity--an assumption that he found in nineteenth century textbooks. The historian part of me should want to agree with him. But I think there's more to intelligent design than the idea that people are somehow the crown of creation. Surely any of us who spend time in stores or shopping malls during the holiday season realize that God could have made people a lot smarter and more thoughtful--particularly if they were going to represent the high point of creation.
But intelligent design, to me, is the acknowledgment that science doesn't have all the answers and probably never will. Even the part of the universe that we know is the product of the confluence of a number of variables far beyond human comprehension. Even processes that scientists can explain fairly well, such as photosynthesis, leave questions unanswered: Just why is it that the chemicals involved are present in the right quantities and proportions, and why do they react as they do? Those unanswered questions, to me, loom large as a reminder of the limitations and imperfections in human knowledge, even in the supposedly reliable sciences. (That would be the same sciences that taught me, when I was an undergraduate, that there was a plant kingdom and an animal kingdom. A friend of mine in the biology department tells me that today there are considered to be no fewer than five kingdoms of living things.) That recognition could be the basis for people to have some humility that seems to be largely missing from the whole debate over the origins and development of life.
Or so it seems to me.

I'm Here

2005-12-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

I'm here, having been talked into blogging by my 26-year-old son. He seems to think that everyone should blog. I'm not sure everyone's thoughts are worthy of sharing, but my wife also encouraged me. I think she hopes that I'll use a blog to rant against Bush. I probably will. But I'll see what happens, and I guess you will, too. If you're reading this, I'd love to hear your ideas on stuff to write about. Knowing nothing about a subject might or might not stop me from writing about it.
As a friend of mine signs her e-mails, "Peas."