Category: Politics

An Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes describes it conservatively as an “unrelenting stream of bad news and broken faith,” but anyone who has not lost touch with reality in recent years would describe it as an absolute disaster, but also the inevitable product of our national indulgence in denial, political stupidity and greed.

The country and all its people have lived through an extraordinary year, defined by searing events and inescapable symbols. People are haunted by the deaths of Sept. 11, the destruction of the World Trade Center and the still unsolved anthrax attack through the mail. This was followed by war in Afghanistan, and now the possibility of war with Iraq looms.
Enron came to represent a new kind of villainy, as corporate executives cashed out and employees lost their jobs and pensions. Arthur Andersen did more shredding than accounting. Ken Lay and a parade of other chief executives who had run their companies into the ground slunk across the news. The WorldCom scam was followed by a stock market crash and the shrinking of once-flush 401(k) plans.

But polls tell us that approval ratings for the silly puppet manipulated by those who have hijacked America are still in the sixty-some percentile. What will it take for us to actually come to grips with the incompetence of this regime and the threat it presents to our welfare, and indeed to our lives?
When do we march on the White House and throw the bums out?

The Washington junta just wasn’t interested in terrorism until September, 2001. They were only concerned about imaginary enemies, like those which would be the targets of their appalling star-wars-defense fantasy and their war-on-drugs fantasy.

The Bush administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities, it was reported yesterday.
….
The plan to take the counter-terrorist battle to al-Qaida was drafted after the attack on the warship the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Mr Clinton’s terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, presented it to senior officials in December, but it was decided that the decision should be taken by the new administration.
[The Clinton White House outlined the threat in briefings they provided for Condoleezza Rice, George Bush’s national security adviser, in January 2001, just before she and her team took over.]
However, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, was more interested in the national missile defence plan, and the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, was more interested in using the FBI to fight the “war on drugs” and clamping down on pornography. In August, he turned down FBI requests for $50m for the agency’s counter-terrorist programme.

The Shrub administration is creating a new public relations office and campaign to help our image abroad.
I didn’t know they cared one whit, but they still don’t care about doing anything to alter our own attitudes or policies, those which have made us look like the real “evil doers,” if not just plain laughing stocks, to those who would otherwise be our friends and admirers. No, they see the solution to the problem as just a matter of coming up with the right advertising campaign.

Graham E. Fuller, a former vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and a longtime Near East analyst for the agency, said that during years of living and traveling in the Middle East, “I have never felt such an extraordinary gap between the two worlds. . . . Clearly, in a region where we desperately need friends and supporters, their number is dwindling, and we are increasingly on the defensive.”
“How has this state of affairs come about?” House International Relations Committee Chairman [the execrable] Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) said in a speech last month to the Council on Foreign Relations. “How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has allowed such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual coin of the realm overseas?”
Hyde shares a widespread conviction that a major part of the problem has been poor salesmanship.
….
Some critics question whether expanding and improving delivery will help if there is no change in the message. “If fundamental policies are seen to be flawed, a prettied-up package will not make a difference,” Fuller told a recent meeting of the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

But I’ve saved your treat for the end! The best part of this log is the brilliant Danziger cartoon on this story. He gets it just about right.

Robert Reich’s book is not just for Boston. It should be an alarm for the entire country, and not a minute too soon. Why should we care about what a candidate for governor of Massachusetts thinks? Why should we care about his call for America to quit making the poor poorer as the rich get richer?

”Should you care? Yes,” Reich writes. ”After a point, as inequality widened, the bonds that kept our society together would snap. Every decision we tried to arrive at together — about trade, immigration, education, taxes and social insurance (health, welfare, retirement) — would be harder to make, because it would have such different consequences for the relatively rich than for the relatively poor. We could no longer draw upon a common reservoir of trust and agreed-upon norms to deal with such differences. We would begin to lose our capacity for democratic governance.”

Unfortunately, I think Reich is too conservative in his estimates. We have already lost that capacity, and the only question now is whether it can be restored.

The American Dream isn’t even a dream any more for many Americans. They now pursue only a nightmare, and it appears neither they not the rest of us will waken from it soon.

Yeah, I know, easy for me to say, since I’ve never been and am now, since November, 2000, in no hurry to go, but there’s another reason.

[Tim] McCarron and his supporters, members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, are calling for a gay and tourism boycott of the Sunshine State. Florida, they say, is in a “state of denial.” It has the third-highest rate of AIDS infection in the country, and Miami has more reported cases than the entire states of Georgia, Maryland or Massachusetts.
Despite these figures, Florida recently cut $10 million from programs including Medicaid’s Project AIDS Care Waiver Program, which supported people homebound with the disease. After the cuts, many were left without housekeepers, cooks or caregivers who used to help them to the bathroom.
At the same time, the state continues to be a mecca for gay and lesbian tourists, who account for 10 percent of the nation’s $540 billion tourist industry. Ads from Miami-Dade and Broward counties run in gay magazines. In Broward, gay and lesbian travel accounts for an estimated $570 million of the county’s $25 billion travel industry.
“The paradox is that so much money is being generated by tourism, but all this money left in the state doesn’t benefit those people who are in need,” says McCarron, who is gay. “The government says we can’t afford to take care of these people. But they can afford to appropriate $20 million for a TV ad when there’s no money in the budget.”

The Republicans can’t afford to pay for their own campaign junkets. They need our [Republicans don’t pay taxes anymore] tax money.

CHARLESTON, S.C., July 29 — President Bush directed unusually harsh criticism at the Senate today for its version of a welfare bill, which he said would hurt the people it was trying to help. Almost immediately afterward, he collected more than $1 million at a Republican fund-raiser.
In an efficient and lucrative three-hour and 45-minute trip to this Republican-friendly state, Mr. Bush met in a private session with former welfare recipients, gave a speech at a suburban high school admonishing the Senate to pass his version of welfare reform, then spoke to 1,000 people at a fund-raising lunch for former Representative Mark Sanford, the Republican candidate for governor. The lunch cost $500 per plate, but the biggest contributors gave $10,000 to have their pictures taken with the president.
The visit was the usual presidential combination of political fund-raising and policy promotion, allowing the White House to charge taxpayers, not just the Republican Party, for part of the travel bill.
….
Mr. Bush spent an hour and five minutes at the fund-raiser for Mr. Sanford at the North Charleston Convention Center, where the president praised Mr. Sanford’s character.
“I appreciate having a man who understands the money he’s spending as your governor is not the government’s money [my italics],” Mr. Bush said. “It’s the people’s money. And he’s a man who set a good example.”

Have these people no shame? How do they sleep at night?
Note, in passing through this news article, that the “presidential” part of this fund-raising trip involved his attempt to sell, as more helpful to those on welfare than the alternative senate form, his callous version of a new welfare bill, one which would force people on welfare to work 40 hours a week (the senate would require 30 hours). [Black is white.]

Letters in both the NYTimes and the Daily News this morning try to draw a distinction between the morality of the recent Israeli murders in Gaza and that associated with Palestinian bombers.

There is a world of difference between the civilian deaths that occur during the Israeli assassination of the Hamas military leader and the civilian deaths that occur when buses or pizza parlors or discos or restaurants are blown up.
In one case, even if the Israeli military knew that there would be civilian casualties, the target was a killer. In the other, the purposeful target was the child holding the ice cream cone or the teenager out for a night of dancing.

and

It is outrageous and absurd that the Palestinians have the audacity to condemn Israel for its attack on Salah Shehada in Gaza. While Israel, as a rule, does everything possible to try to avoid civilian casualties, the terrorists only strike at innocents.

The Israelis occupy every inch of Palestine, have one of the most powerful military establishments on the planet, routinely employing its tools, whether tanks or F-16 jets, and have the expressed or implied support of the only superpower left in the world–which pays for almost all of this terror.
Some Palestinians have replaced stones with their own bodies as the only weapons available to them. Now if we were to force Israel out of the occupied territories and equip Palestinians with the same kind of power and weaponry, not to mention allies, that we give to the Israelis, we might be able to fairly compare the morality of what they do with such parity.
A well-directed missile intended for Sharon might end up killing civilians, including babies, but apparently it would be the thought that counts.

And just why do you think that’s a bad move at this time, Senator Lieberman?
The conservative Democratic believes his presidential running mate, Al Gore, shifted too far to the left [sic] during the 2000 campaign.

In recent weeks, Mr. Lieberman has repeatedly expressed concerns that Democratic efforts to seize on allegations of corporate abuse on Wall Street could undo efforts made by some members of the party — most of whom are affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council [formed in the 1980s to elect Republican knock-offs] and refer to themselves as New Democrats — to move the Democratic Party to the center, and rebut its image as antibusiness.
In the interview last night, Mr. Lieberman said that he had felt the same way in 2000, when Mr. Gore presented his campaign as an appeal on behalf of “the people” against “special interests.”

This is from a speech he gave yesterday, not last year! Hasn’t anyone told him what’s going on in the country these days, or is this courtesan simply too horribly compromised by his own illicit or shadowy corporate l’affair de coeuer? The party should be stepping up to its own “bully pulpit!” If not now, when? If not critical of corporate malfeasance, supportive?
At least for the fortunes of his party, but certainly for the good of the Republic, this man must be shunted aside pronto!

Orwell’s 1984, written decades before the date, projected what the year 1984 would look like. At least we made it to 2002, even as the book has been stuck in my consciousness since Dubya was voted president by the Supremes. Can we delay the full authoritarian state a bit longer, or have we already lost the battle?

As President Bush wages his war against terrorism and moves to create a huge homeland security apparatus, he appears to be borrowing heavily, if not ripping off ideas outright, from George Orwell. The work in question is “1984,” the prophetic novel about a government that controls the masses by spreading propaganda, cracking down on subversive thought and altering history to suit its needs. It was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism — not a how-to manual.

I you don’t expect to pick up the book again, at least take a look at this essay.