Category: Politics

Remember fascism? Maybe it’s not yet in the house, but the boot is in the door, and it doesn’t look like anyone is going to slam that door shut until it has made it all the way in–invited in the name of “security.”

But this isn’t a column about the Gestapo, the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts. It’s about our new Homeland Security Department (due to be approved by the Senate today), government jobs and events in the state of Michigan.
In Michigan last week, federal agents started to use roving checkpoints to seek illegal immigrants, drug runners, weapons and terrorists.
Is this legal? Yes, according to the Detroit Free Press. “Under federal law,” the newspaper reported last week,” the Border Patrol can set up checkpoints up to 100 air miles from any international border, or from the shoreline. Within the first 25 miles, federal agents can stop drivers who seem suspicious, and they can search and conduct surveillance of private property.”
Who knew?
Think of the places within those 100-mile or 25-mile limits. To name a few: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Savannah, Jacksonville, El Paso, San Diego, Portland, Sacramento, Bangor, Buffalo, Detroit, Tucson . . .
….
Is there, uh, something basically wrong with this in the land of the free and the home of the brave? No, according to the mostly conservative voices I’ve been hearing since Sept. 11, 2001.
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care if they search you?” they ask.

Paul Reubens has been arrested again.
Once again you will be able to watch the witch-hunt from the (dis)comfort of your own home. The initial Reuters story is sketchy, but the American puritanical elements should be as alarming as they are unsurprising.

Reubens, whose career was nearly derailed in 1991 by a lewd conduct scandal, faces a misdemeanor count of possessing child pornography stemming from a search of his home by police in November 2001, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office said. [An acquaintence, actor Jeffrey Jones, was charged with hiring a teenager “to pose for sexually explicit photographs.”]
… Charges against the performers grew out of searches conducted by police at their homes in related investigations.

In 1991 Reubens was arrested for masturbating in a darkened porn movie theater, and his charge this past friday seems to have been for possessing ordinary vintage physique art photographs which often included images of males U.S. laws today consider to be children.
Putting it into perspective, none of the facts as reported eleven years ago or today would be against the law in most, if not all of Europe, nor would they have attracted much interest as a scandal.

Along with all of the other problems it presents, this is probably the biggest patronage scheme of all time!

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 — The Bush administration said today that it would place as many as 850,000 government jobs — nearly half the federal civilian work force — up for competition from private contractors in coming years.

The new policy can be enacted without Congressional approval. Just who do we think is going to get these contracts and these jobs, this money? We also know what the White House will say about anyone who opposes this plan to “save money.”

Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine and former U.N. arms inspector, hasn’t yet been silenced in his own campaign against the mendacity of this particular Oval Office. His stature and his sincerity does get him some press, even if he is not the press, which has itself totally failed to question what comes from our war leaders.

[In a Veterans Day talk at the University of Maryland] Ritter contended that it was ridiculous for an uninformed Congress to give President Bush sole power to wage war: “It’s like going to a doctor who says you have a brain tumor and that he needs to chop off your head so he can dig it out. You say, ‘Wait, that’s kind of extreme. May I see the X-rays?’ And the doctor says, ‘Don’t worry about X-rays. Just trust me on this.'”
The students laughed, but Ritter cut them off, saying: “Don’t blame Congress or Bush. You are the government. They just represent you. What they are doing is happening in your name.”

Bush Lies, Media Swallows
So reads the headline of a Nation column this week, in which Eric Alterman suggests the following question: Would you rather the press tell us the President is lying about,

a) a blow job, or
b) a story which will take us into war, perhaps a world war?

Alterman:

President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won’t. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice.

He then tries to explain, quoting Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, why the media never calls a president on his lies, even about the most absolutely critical issues affecting the entire country or the world. But all arguments from reason or even normal human frailty are blown away when he points out the incredible exception the press made for Clinton’s lies about sexual conduct.

Reporters were positively eager to call Clinton a liar, although his lies were about private matters about which many of us, including many reporters, lie all the time. “I’d like to be able to tell my children, ‘You should tell the truth,'” Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal said on Meet the Press. “I’d like to be able to tell them, ‘You should respect the President.’ And I’d like to be able to tell them both things at the same time.” David Gergen, who had worked for both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon as well as Clinton and therefore could not claim to be a stranger to official dishonesty, decried what he termed “the deep and searing violation [that] took place when he not only lied to the country, but co-opted his friends and lied to them.” Chris Matthews kvetched, “Clinton lies knowing that you know he’s lying. It’s brutal and it subjugates the person who’s being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to.” George Will, a frequent apologist for the lies of Reagan and now Bush, went so far as to insist that Clinton’s “calculated, sustained lying has involved an extraordinarily corrupting assault on language, which is the uniquely human capacity that makes persuasion, and hence popular government, possible.”
George W. Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose–merely about war and peace. Most particularly he has consistently lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities. Take a look at Milbank’s gingerly worded page-one October 22 Post story if you doubt me. To cite just two particularly egregious examples, Bush tried to frighten Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” Previously he insisted that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the Iraqis to be “six months away from developing a weapon.” Both of these statements are false, but they are working. Nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping Al Qaeda; 71 percent think it is likely he was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
What I want to know is why this kind of lying is apparently OK. Isn’t it worse to refer “repeatedly to intelligence…that remains largely unverified”–as the Wall Street Journal puts it–in order to trick the nation into war, as Bush and other top US officials have done, than to lie about a blowjob? Isn’t it worse to put “pressure…on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates,” as USA Today worded its report? Isn’t it more damaging to offer “cooked information,” in the words of the CIA’s former chief of counterterrorism, when you are asking young men and women to die for your lies? Don’t we revile Lyndon Johnson for having done just that with his dishonest Gulf of Tonkin resolution?
Here’s Bradlee again: “Just think for a minute how history might have changed if Americans had known then that their leaders felt the war was going to hell in a handbasket. In the next seven years, thousands of American lives and more thousands of Asian lives would have been saved. The country might never have lost faith in its leaders.”
Reporters and editors who “protect” their readers and viewers from the truth about Bush’s lies are doing the nation–and ultimately George W. Bush–no favors. Take a look at the names at that long black wall on the Mall. Consider the tragic legacy of LBJ’s failed presidency. Ask yourself just who is being served when the media allow Bush to lie, repeatedly, with impunity, in order to take the nation into war.

The “homeland security” bill accepted by Republican-Democrats yesterday does not include a provision for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the circumstances leading up to Sept. 11, although in September the Senate had actually overwhelmingly agreed to add such a commission to the bill.
Some people had this strange idea that it would be useful to know how the terrorists could have been so successful, but others must have a very good reason to ensure that we never know what happened.

Yesterday the Republican-Democratic Party won again!

Democrats who had held up the [bill creating a monstrous Homeland Security Department] before Republicans regained control of Congress in the midterm elections gave in to relaxed Civil Service rules demanded by the White House.
The agreement gives the Bush administration a free hand to jettison Civil Service rules in promoting and firing workers in the new agency and allows the president to exempt unionized workers from collective-bargaining agreements in the name of national security.

Unions, civil service rules protecting the worker and collective bargaining are not threats to our security, in spite of what this regime tell us.
The Democratic Party is accused of losing the recent congressional election because it believed in the rights of the worker, even the “Homeland Security” worker. Now that the election is over and lost the Party abandons what might have been an extremely rare example of its former integrity. Are they absolutely insane, completely incompetent or just totally corrupt?
Congress is simply an extra-large board room, blind, like all of its kind, to both reality and morality.

They’re back, and they’re still pretty queer, puckish and annoying as hell, and I mean all of that in the very best way!
ACT UP
Actually, like AIDS, they never went away, even if some of us did, but lately the videos have been few and far between. This month, in his latest documentary, “Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP on Video,” James Wentzy, Dakota’s answer to Leni Riefenstahl, assembles an extraordinary visual and noisy record of years of AIDS activism. The new work will be shown at the NY Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival.

Over the span of its 15-year history, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) has helped to transform the nation’s consciousness about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and made activism a vital part of the LGBT political landscape. Comprehensively documented by media activists and video collectives (Testing the Limits, GMHC Audio Visual Dept., and DIVA TV), the bold strategies, media savvy, and decidedly queer wit of ACT UP remains a fresh source of inspiration to today’s artists and activists through the invaluable trove of images sampled in this dynamic program of AIDS activist video.

Thursday, November 21st, 2002
75 minute film begins at 7pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave (at Second Street)
New York City
The place should be swarming with the people who made activism sexy.

White House officials said Mr. Bush, whose service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War meant that he was not sent to fight in Southeast Asia, had never before visited the monument as president.

But we’ve known for several years that there is no record that Bushie had any effective participation in the military at any time. How is it that the media can deliver this puff piece with a straight face, and with absolutely no clarification, while they mouth the White House press release?
There is apparently no account, official or unofficial, of where Bush was during most of the entire term of the Texas Air National Guard duty his family was able to secure for him in lieu of service in Vietnam. He apparently failed to report for duty and skipped off to Alabama to work on a political campaign. He was ultimately suspended from flight duty and didn’t show up during the last two years of his service. This is not “service during the Vietnam War.” Ask a real veteran. No, ask the NYTimes and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Over a period of years they have somehow been able to fool enough voters (and nonvoters!) to get into the position where they can finally acomplish their fundamental but hidden, goals.

There is a method to the G.O.P.’s tax cut madness, beyond the obvious benefits to the very rich. Conservatives have long reasoned that the only way to destroy popular programs that actually help ordinary Americans (Social Security, Medicare and so on) is to starve the government of the money needed to pay for them.

A plan exquisite in its simplicity, and we bought it.