Author: jameswagner

I know Paul Krugman shows up a lot in this space, but he’s almost the only, and certainly the most visible, major media reporter we have who has both a head and the courage to display it.
Today his paper reports and editorializes on the fact that the Justice Department has turned our justice system upside down since September 11. This attention is given to the subject now only because the latest news comes from a unit of the Bush administration itself, the inspector general of the Justice Department.
But Krugman is still the only one who will write about the full scale and the broader significance of this gang’s crimes against us all, crimes of lies and deceit, and in the same edition of the NYTimes this morning he lets it fly.

It’s long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we’ve become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the “liberal” media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.
If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we’re in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent — who supported Britain’s participation in the war — writes that “the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks.”
It’s no answer to say that Saddam was a murderous tyrant. I could point out that many of the neoconservatives who fomented this war were nonchalant, or worse, about mass murders by Central American death squads in the 1980’s. But the important point is that this isn’t about Saddam: it’s about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.
But here’s the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a “khaki election”* next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.

*
The “Khaki Election”
At the turn of the century, British politics was dominated by the war in South Africa. The Conservatives (“Tories”) fought the general election of 1900 on this single issue, and won a landslide victory on a mandate to end the war in South Africa successfully.
[thanks to the British Public Record Office]

The U.S. has just passed Russia in the percent of its citizens it keeps behind bars.

“Why, in the land of the free, should 2 million men, women and children be locked up?” asks Andrew Coyle, director of the International Centre for Prison Studies at the University of London and a leading authority on incarceration.
When he discusses crime and punishment with foreign colleagues, Coyle says, the United States is such an anomaly that it must often be left out of the discussion. “People say, ‘Well, that’s the United States.’ They see the U.S. as standing entirely on its own,” he says.
. . . .
Today the United States imprisons at a far greater rate not only than other developed Western nations do, but also than impoverished and authoritarian countries do.
On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany. Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada’s population is six times greater.

To me this suggests something’s just not right. This being America however, not everyone is disturbed by these numbers, and in fact for some they’re not good enough.

“If you put someone in prison, you can be sure they’re not going to rob you,” says David B. Muhlhausen, a policy analyst at the [right-wing] Heritage Foundation. “Quality research shows that … increasing incarceration decreases crime.” Considering that there are still about 12 million serious crimes a year, Muhlhausen says, “maybe we’re not incarcerating enough people.”

The article by Scott Shane, which appears in today’s Baltimore Sun, is a good mini-primer on the subject of how America deals with those it regards as wrongdoers.

At the time I posted the May 26 item about the separation wall being built by the Israelis I was unable to locate good images. I have those now.
See these three images of the wall in the area around the Palestinian town of Qalqiliya, and for seven more, and a better sense of the size of this monster, scroll to the bottom of this page of photographs from a protest camp at the wall.
[thanks to Anees]

Joan Chittister, OSB, writes in the National Catholic Reporter, “Is There Anything Left That Matters?”
Her honest dismay means that she expects the question will be answered.

This is what I don’t understand: All of a sudden nothing seems to matter.
First, they said they wanted Bin Laden “dead or alive.” But they didn’t get him. So now they tell us that it doesn’t matter. Our mission is greater than one man.
Then they said they wanted Saddam Hussein, “dead or alive.” He’s apparently alive but we haven’t got him yet, either. However, President Bush told reporters recently, “It doesn’t matter. Our mission is greater than one man.”
Finally, they told us that we were invading Iraq to destroy their weapons of mass destruction. Now they say those weapons probably don’t exist. Maybe never existed. Apparently that doesn’t matter either.
Except that it does matter.
I know we’re not supposed to say that. I know it’s called “unpatriotic.”
But it’s also called honesty. And dishonesty matters.

And here’s the part that relates to scripture, but it doesn’t have to be considered more than a literary device to work its power:

We like to take comfort in the notion that people make a distinction between our government and ourselves. We like to say that the people of the world love Americans, they simply mistrust our government. But excoriating a distant and anonymous “government” for wreaking rubble on a nation in pretense of good requires very little of either character or intelligence.
What may count most, however, is that we may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: “Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth.” The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn’t listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
It may be time for us to realize that in a country that prides itself on being democratic, we are our government. And the rest of the world is figuring that out very quickly.
From where I stand, that matters.

One of today’s top stories on Reuters shows us that all is going according to plan (see the post below):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Thursday denied suppressing a report that projects the U.S. government faces a long-term budget deficit of more than $44 trillion.
White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels said the allegation was “probably the most absurd thing that I can imagine.”
However, he said the looming costs of Social Security and Medicare, which make up most of the forecast gap between government income and spending, were an important issue. [my italics]
“This is a very legitimate point,” he said.

The news wire article is largely about the administration’s deliberate deceit of Congress and the nation, but when we read Daniels’ statement we end up tripping over the larger agenda – the destruction of all social programs other than those which subsidize the super rich.
While the sober American Enterprise Institute study (commissioned by Bush’s then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill) which is the subject of the story describes a budget imbalance of $44.2 trillion, which according to Reuters is “astronomical even by the standards of U.S. federal government accounting,” the article ends with this shocking reference to its numerical scale:

For this fiscal year, the government’s cash shortfall is widely expected to be more than $300 billion while accumulated debt from previous budget deficits stands at around $6.4 trillion.

Remember, there was a big Congressional celebration[see photo] in the White House yesterday when the tax cut was signed. We know we can’t expect social responsibility from Republicans or now even from Democrats, but fiscal responsibility was the only thing of which Republicans could legitimately boast for most of the party’s history. That of course was before the club became just a hangout for greedy thugs.