Calvin Trillin in the January 27 edition of The Nation:
THE QUESTION OF NORTH KOREA
Korea has the bomb, but not to worry.
It’s not a crisis. No, we needn’t hurry
To get inspections back. Why try to spot
The weapons they already say they’ve got?
Containment’s fine, no reason for attack.
The threat, we’ve said for months, is just Iraq.
And why destroy Saddam but still contrive
To let this wicked Kim Jong Il survive?
Because one wicked tyrant must remain
To run against in Bush’s next campaign.
My quarrel is not with their sleeping habits, or even the manner in which they entertain themselves. I’m just glad I don’t have to be any part of the current regime in Washington.
“All the senior staff has no life, or has too many lives kids,” said Mary Matalin, who recently quit after two years as counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney.
What concerns me is what a self-imposed isolation says about their minds and their souls and therefore what is its impact on the rest of us.
The Washington of the Bush administration is dead, and it’s not just the social life. It starts at the top, with the senior occupant of the White House avoiding society whenever possible, preferring to visit only with their oldest, closest friends when they entertain at all.
They venture out with friends to favorite restaurants, like the Peking Gourmet Inn in suburban Arlington, Va. [also his father’s favorite, a locked-down suburban Chinese restaurants for a night out?], but like the first President Bush they prefer low-key evenings at home with longtime friends.
“It’s the social-life equivalent of comfort food,” said Mrs. Bush’s press secretary, Noelia Rodriguez, who said the Bushes held perhaps only one film screening in the White House theater in all of last year, preferring to watch movies at Camp David on the weekends. “Being with close friends and family and doing things that are more family-oriented, like T-ball. The focus there is not on th 40-somethings, but on the 5- and 6-year-olds.”
—Like little George Dubya.
Yesss!
The only way we will wean this country from its monster passenger truck obsession is to shame it. I used to think the SUV would eventually be abandoned when Americans perceived it as uncool, since so much of its popularity is all about fashion, but in such an uncool society that may take too long. Arianna has a better way.
Ratcheting up the debate over sport utility vehicles, new television commercials [the brainchild of Arianna Huffington] suggest that people who buy the vehicles are supporting terrorists. The commercials are so provocative that some television stations are refusing to run them.
Patterned after the commercials that try to discourage drug use by suggesting that profits from illegal drugs go to terrorists, the new commercials say that money for gas needed for S.U.V.’s goes to terrorists.
The ABC affiliate in New York will not be running the ads, scheduled to be broadcast on “Meet The Press,” “Face the Nation” and “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” New York must either love the SUV more inordinately than other cities or some of us are unable to take such “hot-button issues,” as the local ABC director of programming describes the subject of the ads. He also said that a lot of the statements being made were not backed up, but I’m guessing the affiliate was less concerned about textual support for the arguments made by the Bush administation’s antidrug spots.
I really love this picture, but yeah, it needs the story it accompanies, which includes the sassy quote above.
Grass-roots anti-war activists in the Northwest are reporting a very visible and audible growing swelling of support for a once-local overpass peace vigil. By their report, even a majority of the truckers who drive under the bridges where they display their signs are giving them the thumbs up and honking.
“It’s my belief that lots of people have the same feelings but they don’t know if there is someone else who agrees with them,” Bird said. “If you stand up and say what you think, that encourages all the people who say the same thing.”
There are many ways to do just that, and along with so many other initiatives of all kinds, the Blue Button Project is based on the conviction that it will work.
But do we have time?
FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) – President Bush said on Friday the United States was ready to win a potential war with Iraq and “liberate” its people as he rallied soldiers at the largest U.S. Army base amid an intensifying military buildup around the Gulf nation.
“Some crucial hours may lie ahead,” Bush, wearing a green military jacket, told about 4,000 troops at Fort Hood Army Base in his home state of Texas. “We are ready. We’re prepared.”
“If force becomes necessary to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction … to secure our country and to keep the peace, America will act deliberately, America will act decisively, and America will prevail because we’ve got the finest military in the world,” he said. His speech was punctuated with applause, whistles and the soldiers’ traditional “hoo-ah” cheers of approval.
Gosh oh gee wiz, he talks as if the most-powerful-by-far empire on the planet has a worthy (that is, equal in strength) enemy. So, does that mean that there’s a chance that this war thing could all end up in a draw? After all, isn’t it now clear we’re going to be just about helpless in combat, since our primary defense, as has become usual in these wars against “the lessor sorts,” will be to drop bombs from several miles up if anyone dares to shoot at us? Sounds like an equal contest to me.
Seriously however, will it be another war like Granada, or will it look more like Viet Nam or the Boer War?
Can’t someone tell Georgie that it isn’t a big-screen thriller, but rather the real world in which he is supposed to be working?
I’ve been seeing lead story headlines quoting this fool for two years now, and I still can’t believe this is what the man who presides over the country sounds like.
This holiday message comes from the de facto leader of the nation which dominates the world:
CRAWFORD, Texas/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – President Bush warned a world partying into the New Year that Iraq had the power to unleash economic chaos if given the chance to mount an attack on the United States.
Can he explain why Iraq would want to do that? The country has not been controlled for forty years by a nincompoop.
Which suggests the next question: Could our own leader look any more stupid? Could we look more stupid?
Just wait and see.
We’ve been aware for a long time that ours is not a secular society, and in fact that ours is not a secular government, in spite of the purpose of its founders and the Constitution’s intended guarantees of freedom of and from religion, but the current, legitimacy-challenged administration, along with some of its religious allies, goes too far in this as so many other of its impulses for mischief.
The NYTimes has it pretty much together on this subject in a lead editorial this morning. It begins:
President Bush punched a dangerous hole in the wall between church and state earlier this month by signing an executive order that eases the way for religious groups to receive federal funds to run social services programs. The president’s unilateral order, which wrongly cut Congress out of the loop, lets faith-based organizations use tax dollars to win converts and gives them a green light to discriminate in employment. It should be struck down by the courts
The editorial includes a timely warning about the danger of governments with confessional associations, even if it describes a somewhat imaginary American history of independent church and state relations.
It is ironic that President Bush is working to tear down the separation of church and state at home, given the battles he is waging abroad. It is clearer today than ever that one of America’s greatest strengths is that we are a nation in which people are free to practice any faith or no faith, and the government keeps out of the religious realm.
If we survive as a republic, it won’t be because we ignored the people who want to destroy it. Columbia save the activists!
DENVER, Dec. 14 The Denver police have gathered information on unsuspecting local activists since the 1950’s, secretly storing what they learned on simple index cards in a huge cabinet at police headquarters.
When the cabinet filled up recently, the police thought they had an easy solution. For $45,000, they bought a powerful computer program from a company called Orion Scientific Systems. Information on 3,400 people and groups was transferred to software that stores, searches and categorizes the data.
Then the trouble began.
After the police decided to share the fruits of their surveillance with another local department, someone leaked a printout to an activist for social justice, who made the documents public. The mayor started an investigation. People lined up to obtain their files. Among those the police spied on were nuns, advocates for American Indians and church organizations.
As citizens, we do not have a right to just ignore what’s going on.
I had the privilege of watching New York City Councilmember Christine Quinn in action this afternoon.
Well, actually I admit she was only idling, compared to what she can do when warmed up and ready to open the throttle all the way. Today she was just in perfect tune with both her case and the venue. While she still blew away her colleagues and the witnesses before the committees with her intelligence and her focus, the real battle will be engaged in January.
The occasion this afternoon was a City Council joint meeting, in Council Chambers, of the Committees on Economic Development; Transportation; Waterfronts. The subject was, officially, “What the Olympic Games would mean for waterfront development, waterborne transportation, and waterfront habitats in New York City,” but until an hour and a half into the session, when Chris began to speak, it was basically a polite reception for a show-and-tell, or dog-and-pony show, by Daniel Doctoroff, a Deputy Mayor in the Giuliani administation and now founder and president of NYC2012, the committee charged with bringing the Olympics to New York City ten years from now.
The merits of a plan to bring the Olympics to New York City were not the subject of discussion today, but I was not made more comfortable with the idea by listening to Doctoroff start out by raving about his first soccer game experience during the recent World Cup games sited within our own borders, and especially when he exclaimed about how fantastic it was to be able to watch the teams “inject national fervor into the sport.” Um, I don’t think I’m the only one who doesn’t believe nationalism is or should be a standard for the sports experience, and it definitely was neither part of the ancient Olympic ideal nor that of those who resurrected it over a hundred years ago. I don’t have to even mention the horrors of soccer riots past and present around the world, all of which are the consequence of “national (or regional) fervor” and not of the spirit of the melting pot or of the Doctoroff’s organization’s description of New York, “The World’s Second Home.”
Anyway, the Doctoroff group’s plan includes covering over extensive railroad yard areas, a massive increase in the area of the Javits Convention Center and a giant new sports stadium, all of which would be located at the top of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and to the west and south of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, both densely residential. Not incidently, that part of our Olympic bid will require a $2 Billion bond issue from the City of New York. Chris, who represents both districts, is opposed to the construction of a mammoth commercial sports stadium in the midst of a vulnerable residential community which hopes to escape the congestion and the junk which stadium areas attract. She was definitely the first speaker of the day to ask any probing questions of the well-rehearsed visiting Olympics boosters. On this the first of a number of hearing days however she was clearly holding back from a real confrontation with a plan so badly misconceived, if not just cynical.
She pointed out that the plan for what was clearly an invasive stadium in the midst of these neighborhoods was essentially driven by professional sports team interests and she corrected Doctoroff by pointing out that, outside of the rail track yard itself, the area to be affected is definitely a populous community and not a wasteland. She reminded us all that there are in fact already several community-based development plans, that were painstakingly developed over a period of many years, for the areas which would be affected and they do not include a commercial stadium, and finally she reached into her own experience of many years as an advocate in that part of the borough to assert that without a shadow of a doubt the community’s public transport problems definitely have never included the lack of a No. 7 subway line extension. Such a major extension constitutes the much balleyhooed key to the Olympic stadium plan, and the only part of the plan which would have to almost immediately if it is to be completed by the 2012 Olympics (which are still not a sure thing for the City).
In the end she asked what was in the plan for the West Side community; could it be reconciled with what that community really needs?
Doctoroff could basically only answer that his proposal sought to “change the neighborhood,” an answer which would only sound stupid, if not totally chilling, to those who already were a part of a real neighborhood.
There will be more hearings, and I intend to be there for the real sparks. The next one is scheduled for January 30 (time not yet announced), and anyone is free to speak. This one should be a blast.