James Wagner

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.

One month ago at John F. Kennedy Airport the U.S arrested and deported to Syria a Canadian citizen who was returning from a vacation with his wife and young children. He was at JFK only to switch planes on his way to Montreal. He now languishes in prison, probably somewhere in Damascus. The story has been everywhere in the non-commercial media, but the NYTimes, the putative paper of record and boastful bastion of liberalism, reports it in its entirety only today for the first time. [Why not tell us before this, and why now?]

American officials claim that Mr. Arar is a member of Al Qaeda, but the Canadians say they have no such information. The Syrians are questioning Mr. Arar closely, Western diplomats say, but officially the Syrian government has expressed outrage that he was deported to Syria instead of Canada.

Imagine the outrage had the situation been reversed, and an American deported while returning to the U.S., and imprisoned abroad in an unknown location!
No, forget that thought–for a moment I had forgotten that the deported Canadian citizen was of arab descent and birth, so of course his status as an American is at best provisional these days.
Of course we have every right to stride the earth unhindered, like a mindless, blind terrified colossus, since we have been so injured by the supposedly unique disaster of September 11. Yes, September 11 did damage us all, but the damage is of quite a different nature than that usually described. It has destroyed our courage and our wits.

But of course we already knew this.

UNITED NATIONS – Friday’s unanimous vote in the U.N. Security Council supporting the U.S. resolution on weapons inspections in Iraq was a demonstration of Washington’s ability to wield its vast political and economic power, say observers.
”Only a superpower like the United States could have pulled off a coup like this,” an Asian diplomat told IPS.
The unanimous 15-0 vote, he said, was obtained through considerable political and diplomatic pressure. The lobbying, he added, was not done at the United Nations, but in various capitals.

We can also imagine how much we promised the pesky permanent members, Russia, China and France (not discussed in this piece, but all of whom opposed the Bush war until last week), in money, silence, oil concessions, military goodies or whatever is currently dearest to their own hearts or pocketbooks.

So spake James Carville, just after the election, as we learn from Mark Morford’s scary but entiely plausible alarum.

…Congress will now have almost zero struggle or balanced counterargument when the GOP chooses to ram through more generally invidious resolutions and white-power laws.
Laws that further its famously mean-spirited schema of war, oil, corporate cronyism, CEO inbreeding, heartlessness, artlessness, cultural molestation, giddy homophobia and really awful fashion sense.
Let us not also forget anti-choice misogyny, racism, gluttony, support for Big Agribiz and Big Tobacco and a general antipathy toward anyone who makes less than six figures or who really cares about the environment or enjoys true religious freedom or alternative viewpoints or authentic orgasms or honest laughter.
….
As noted crusty and ruthless and largely unpleasant former Clinton adviser James Carville observed just after the election, “The American people just don’t have a clue as to what’s coming.”
If you are female, gay, bisexual, atheist, black, immigrant, poor, progressive, intellectual, open minded, open hearted, if you hold alternative views, dress funny, dance, enjoy sex, read seditious literature, believe in peace and funky spirituality and don’t particularly care for a sneering angry self-righteous well-armed anti-everything deity, you are about to find out. The hard way. And so is everyone else.
The gods can only shake their heads, and sigh.

A view from London, and also pretty much the view, I must admit, from this desk in New York City.

Europeans do not understand the curious civilization that the current America is becoming, and the grip that a visceral and idiosyncratic conservatism has on its national discourse. They especially do not understand the undercurrents of an increasingly self-confident and subtle racism that is its own variant of the forces that in Europe gave us Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn. George Bush Jr is a chip off the old multilateralist, transatlantic establishment, runs the European argument. He may seem hawkishly conservative but, in the end, he seeks UN resolutions like other American Presidents. Even at home, his bark is worse than his bite.
Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Anyone who thinks the Tory party is ‘nasty’ has not encountered contemporary American republicanism.

How did we end up supporting a man and a government whose interests and policies are so patently offensive and contrary to the welfare of at least ninety-five percent of the nation?
One statement keeps coming back to me as I repeatedly run through in my mind the extraordinary events of the past fourteen months. On the day after the election last week, Douglas, the sweet guy who works at the pet supply store across the street, admired my (slash war) button and was delighted I had an extra on me. When I told him how shocked I was at the number of people who supported the war and the war-mongers, he said, “They’re afraid. I think it’s a power trip.”
Is this how democracies die, in fear and chest-pounding?